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June 2024 News

June 2024 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO

June 2024’s ⁠Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, ⁠May 2024 (archives). This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with my ⁠Changelog; brought to you by my donors on Patreon.

Writings

Books

Nonfiction:

  • Musui’s Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai, Katsu Kokichi, trans Craig1988 (⁠David Kelly dramatic reading; a short but dense mid-life memoir by a boisterous ne’er-do-well samurai, who somehow survived his childhood and youth despite constantly getting into fights, running off, scamming people, falling into debt for parties & prostitutes. It is much like ⁠The Autobiography Of Benvenuto Cellini in that you are puzzled that he didn’t die, but then, you wouldn’t be reading his memoir if he had, would you? It is rich with incident (including a rather concerning number of serious injuries or infections of his testicles) and the texture of the Edo period life of a samurai from a moderately but not very well-off family, and like ⁠Ihara Saikaku’s Family Storehouse gives you a wonderful sense of the bustling metropolis and commerce of Tokugawa Japan as he wends his way through obsessively collecting swords (always carefully classifying them by length) and trying to avoid creditors or scolding family. You won’t necessarily get all that much out of reading the book compared to listening to David Kelly’s dramatic reading, but I still enjoyed it.)

Fiction:

Film/TV

Live-action:

Animated:

  • The Last Unicorn (review)

Music

Touhou:

Vocaloid:

MLP:

Doujin:

Misc: