Today I had the surreal pleasure of finding some 1999 issues of Animerica Extra in a vintage and collectables shop
I love stuff like this, they're such great time capsules of early fandom and the licencing landscape. Look, there's a whole article about how strange and exciting it is that they make manga just about food. You heard of this? Far out!
And you can order these super cool new titles NOT FOR KIDS on VHS by MAIL ORDER! Cutting edge!
Most interesting for me, these issues had a couple of chapters from the Utena manga! Empty Movement will have all these archived somewhere so I won't post every page, but isn't it wild to see this series here, in the context a lot of English-language fans would have discovered it for the first time? Look at that drama! Why is the font like that??
I've heard that the manga is quite different and a lot of people have issues with it, but I will say they DO look great in this classic shoujo style. Even gremlin Chuchu down there
One final sample because this made me laugh:
"Oh no, I forgot about Anthy!" Utena has never been less relatable. Couldn't be me girl
Humanity’s most recent common ancestor and so-called genetic isopoint illustrate the surprising connections among our family trees
The family tree of humanity is much more interconnected than we tend to think. “We’re culturally bound and psychologically conditioned to not think about ancestry in very broad terms,” Rutherford says. Genealogists can only focus on one branch of a family tree at a time, making it easy to forget how many forebears each of us has.
Imagine counting all your ancestors as you trace your family tree back in time. In the nth generation before the present, your family tree has 2n slots: two for parents, four for grandparents, eight for great-grandparents, and so on. The number of slots grows exponentially. By the 33rd generation—about 800 to 1,000 years ago—you have more than eight billion of them. That is more than the number of people alive today, and it is certainly a much larger figure than the world population a millennium ago.
This seeming paradox has a simple resolution: “Branches of your family tree don’t consistently diverge,” Rutherford says. Instead “they begin to loop back into each other.” As a result, many of your ancestors occupy multiple slots in your family tree. For example, “your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother might have also been your great-great-great-great-aunt,” he explains.
The consequence of humanity being “incredibly inbred” is that we are all related much more closely than our intuition suggests, Rutherford says. Take, for instance, the last person from whom everyone on the planet today is descended. In 2004 mathematical modeling and computer simulations by a group of statisticians led by Douglas Rohde, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, indicated that our most recent common ancestor probably lived no earlier than 1400 B.C. and possibly as recently as A.D. 55. In the time of Egypt’s Queen Nefertiti, someone from whom we are all descended was likely alive somewhere in the world.
Go back a bit further, and you reach a date when our family trees share not just one ancestor in common but every ancestor in common. At this date, called the genetic isopoint, the family trees of any two people on the earth now, no matter how distantly related they seem, trace back to the same set of individuals. “If you were alive at the genetic isopoint, then you are the ancestor of either everyone alive today or no one alive today,” Rutherford says. Humans left Africa and began dispersing throughout the world at least 120,000 years ago, but the genetic isopoint occurred much more recently—somewhere between 5300 and 2200 B.C., according to Rohde’s calculations.
At first glance, these dates may seem much too recent to account for long-isolated Indigenous communities in South America and elsewhere. But “genetic information spreads rapidly through generational time,” Rutherford explains. Beginning in 1492, “you begin to see the European genes flowing in every direction until our estimates are that there are no people in South America today who don’t have European ancestry.”
In fact, even more recent than the global genetic isopoint is the one for people with recent European ancestry. Researchers using genomic data place the latter date around A.D. 1000. So Christopher Lee’s royal lineage is unexceptional: because Charlemagne lived before the isopoint and has living descendants, everyone with European ancestry is directly descended from him. In a similar vein, nearly everyone with Jewish ancestry, whether Ashkenazic or Sephardic, has ancestors who were expelled from Spain beginning in 1492. “It’s a very nice example of a small world but looking to the past,” says Susanna Manrubia, a theoretical evolutionary biologist at the Spanish National Center for Biotechnology.
Not everyone of European ancestry carries genes passed down by Charlemagne, however. Nor does every Jew carry genes from their Sephardic ancestors expelled from Spain. People are more closely related genealogically than genetically for a simple mathematical reason: a given gene is passed down to a child by only one parent, not both. In a simple statistical model, Manrubia and her colleagues showed that the average number of generations separating two random present-day individuals from a common genealogical ancestor depends on the logarithm of the relevant population’s size. For large populations, this number is much smaller than the population size itself because the number of possible genealogical connections between individuals doubles with each preceding generation. By contrast, the average number of generations separating two random present-day individuals from a common genetic ancestor is linearly proportional to the population size because each gene can be traced through only one line of a person’s family tree. Although Manrubia’s model unrealistically assumed the population size did not change with time, the results still apply in the real world, she says.
Because of the random reshuffling of genes in each successive generation, some of your ancestors contribute disproportionately to your genome, while others contribute nothing at all. According to calculations by geneticist Graham Coop of the University of California, Davis, you carry genes from fewer than half of your forebears from 11 generations back. Still, all the genes present in today’s human population can be traced to the people alive at the genetic isopoint. “If you are interested in what your ancestors have contributed to the present time, you have to look at the population of all the people that coexist with you,” Manrubia says. “All of them carry the genes of your ancestors because we share the [same] ancestors.”
And because the genetic isopoint occurred so recently, Rutherford says, “in relation to race, it absolutely, categorically demolishes the idea of lineage purity.” No person has forebears from just one ethnic background or region of the world. And your genealogical connections to the entire globe mean that not too long ago your ancestors were involved in every event in world history.
Ok, there's something I don't understand about this. If the genetic isopoint is after the peopling of the Americas, then (if I'm understanding the definition correctly) that doesn't just mean every indigenous American has Old World ancestry, it also means every Old Worlder has indigenous American ancestry. That's really the surprising thing, since intuitively I'd expect the gene flow in the Columbian exchange to by primarily Old World -> New World.
Pre-Colombian trans-Bering trade was a thing (glass beads made from Venetian glass have been found in Alaska) and from other things I’ve read it’s theorized the earliest universal ancestor was around the area of Kamchatka and probably helps account for that
I think articles like this are valuable in the context of stuff like Israeli fascist propaganda about “uninterrupted bloodlines going back thousands of years”
Oh wow I actually had to google this and as per distrowatch:
"Starting on January 19, 2025 Facebook's internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labelled groups associated with Linux as being "cybersecurity threats". Any posts mentioning DistroWatch and multiple groups associated with Linux and Linux discussions have either been shut down or had many of their posts removed."
Wild. Then again, who the fuck is using Linux and Facebook in 2025 anyways.
Facebook ban
Starting on January 19, 2025 Facebook's internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labelled groups associated with Linux as being "cybersecurity threats". Any posts mentioning DistroWatch and multiple groups associated with Linux and Linux discussions have either been shut down or had many of their posts removed.
We've been hearing all week from readers who say they can no longer post about Linux on Facebook or share links to DistroWatch. Some people have reported their accounts have been locked or limited for posting about Linux.
The sad irony here is that Facebook runs much of its infrastructure on Linux and often posts job ads looking for Linux developers.
Unfortunately, there isn't anything we can do about this, apart from advising people to get their Linux-related information from sources other than Facebook. I've tried to appeal the ban and was told the next day that Linux-related material is staying on the cybersecurity filter. My Facebook account was also locked for my efforts.
Blocked by Facebook
Blocked by Facebook
(full image size: 102kB, resolution: 688x722 pixels)
We went through a similar experience when Twitter changed its name to X - suddenly accounts which had been re-posting news from our RSS feeds were no longer able to share links. This sort of censorship is an unpleasant side-effect of centralized communication platforms such as X, Facebook, Google+, and so on.
In an effort to continue to make it possible for people to talk about Linux (and DistroWatch), as well as share their views and links, we are providing two options. We have RSS news feeds which get updates whenever we post new announcements, stories, and our weekly newsletters. We also now have a Mastodon account where I will start to post updates - at least for new distributions and notice of our weekly newsletter. Over time we may also add news stories and updates about releases. Links for the feeds and the Mastodon account can be found on our contact page.
#in the article it says that the sailboat sailors were concerned because they could not be towed quickly because of the kind of boat#so they asked Götheborg what type of ship they were and warned that they would not be able to go above a certain speed#and götheborg went ' we are also a sailboat. 50 meters length. no worries :) '#and the poor sailboat sailors were just like ' That's not possible. they have to be messing with us' and then the ship Rolled Up (via bunjywunjy)
I'm crying. Here's a photo of a sailor from the Götheborg watching over the little sailboat in tow:
From the story:
We repeatedly emphasized that we were aboard a small 8-meter sailboat, but the response was the same each time: "We are a 50-meter three-masted sailboat, and we offer our assistance in towing you to Paimpol." We were perplexed by the size difference between our two boats, as we feared being towed by a boat that was too large and at too fast a speed that could damage our boat.
The arrival of the Götheborg on the scene was rapid and surprising, as we did not expect to see a merchant ship from the East India Company of the XVIII century. This moment was very strange, and we wondered if we were dreaming. Where were we? What time period was it? The Götheborg approached very close to us to throw the line and pass a large rope. The mooring went well, and our destinies were linked for very long hours, during which we shared the same radio frequency to communicate with each other.
The crew of the Götheborg showed great professionalism and kindness towards us. They adapted their speed to the size of our boat and the weather conditions. We felt accompanied by very professional sailors. Every hour, the officer on duty of the Götheborg called us to ensure everything was going well.[...]
This adventure, very real, was an incredible experience for us. We were extremely lucky to cross paths with the Götheborg by chance and especially to meet such a caring crew.
Dear commander and crew of the Götheborg, your kindness, and generosity have shown that your ship is much more than just a boat. It embodies the noblest values of the sea, and we are honored to have had the chance to cross your path and benefit from your help.
"Our destinies were linked for very long hours" is just knocking me out.
An aquarium in Japan was closed for renovations, and their resident sunfish got depressed not seeing visitors. So the staff put some uniforms with printed faces against the tank, and it immediately recovered.
Trump is appointing three washed-up actors as "ambassador to Hollywood" in order to bring back the "Golden Age of Hollywood". Which has historical precedent: there was an ambassador to Hollywood in the Golden Age, too. His name was Georg Gyssling and he was sent by Hitler to monitor the activities of Hollywood studios. To make sure their films didn't say anything anti-Nazi, resulting in many attempts at anti-fascist films being shut down by the Hays Code. Just a fun historical Hollywood fact there
Yep, very much so. I don't want to totally take over OP's post, but Gyssling has his own Wikipedia page. Joseph Breen, the American head censor in the Hays Office, was also infamously antisemitic. Breen and the Hays office personally shut down Herman Mankiewicz's attempt to make an anti-Hitler film titled The Mad Dog of Europe, because Breen put massive priority on "not offending Germany."
(For those who haven't heard: news broke yesterday [Jan. 16, 2025] that Trump has named Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson, and Jon Voight as "special ambassadors" to Hollywood. As someone who studies the Hays Code & censorship in general, it's been a weird 24 hours of remembering just how important my work actually is. Variety's article on the subject is here.)
The artist Paweł Ponichtera seems to have inexplicably dedicated a massive amount of time and effort to hyper-detailed and hyper-accurate illustrations of chinchillas engaged in historical fencing, many with clear and specific reference to particular historical treatises. So, I give you:
A lot of fiction these days reads as if—as I saw Peter Raleigh put it the other day, and as I’ve discussed it before—the author is trying to describe a video playing in their mind. Often there is little or no interiority. Scenes play out in “real time” without summary. First-person POV stories describe things the character can’t see, but a distant camera could. There’s an overemphasis on characters’ outfits and facial expressions, including my personal pet peeve: the “reaction shot round-up” in which we get a description of every character’s reaction to something as if a camera was cutting between sitcom actors.
When I talk with other creative writing professors, we all seem to agree that interiority is disappearing. Even in first-person POV stories, younger writers often skip describing their character’s hopes, dreams, fears, thoughts, memories, or reactions. This trend is hardly limited to young writers though. I was speaking to an editor yesterday who agreed interiority has largely vanished from commercial fiction, and I think you increasingly notice its absence even in works shelved as “literary fiction.” When interiority does appear on the page, it is often brief and redundant with the dialogue and action. All of this is a great shame. Interiority is perhaps the prime example of an advantage prose as a medium holds over other artforms.
fascinated by this article, "Turning Off the TV in Your Mind," about the influences of visual narratives on writing prose narratives. i def notice the two things i excerpted above in fanfic, which i guess makes even more sense as most of the fic i read is for tv and film. i will also be thinking about its discussion of time in prose - i think that's something i often struggle with and i will try to be more conscious of the differences between screen and page next time i'm writing.
Really interesting article. I'm a writer who feels heavily influenced by film and television, but I also think one of my failure modes is too much interiority, too much of having a character roll a thought around in their head like a dung beetle or something.
I also take some of the language of film and television for prose, partly because through a whole BA in English they did a pretty poor job of coining specific elements in a way that sticks in the brain. "Establishing shot" is a great term! It's a great thing to include at the start of a chapter! There are lots of film and television gags and bits of visual language that you can steal for prose, ways that they manage attention and weave in detail that you can bring to the page.
I do agree that writers who don't read (and read in a deliberate way where they're on the lookout for style and technique) are going to be worse at their craft, but a lot of what's missing with writers having TV brain is just intentionality.
Oh, you're reading "The One Within the Villainess!" I really like this entire genre (although I've been reading more manhwa than manga in this genre lately).
This is definitely one of the better stories out there. The art is gorgeous, but Remilia is also a very charismatic figure.
This is my favourite panel so far. She's not importing doomsday weapons or anything she's literally just establishing a trade route with a neighbouring kingdom.
so crazy to me when people are talking about nuclear energy and they’re like “well at least coal doesn’t produce radioactive waste” ????? yes it does
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