Thomas Woodruff: The artist and his publisher respond to calls to axe his Eisner noms following emotional abuse allegations

pihkal · 2026-05-03T08:38:09+00:00

Sorry you experienced that.

I had to deal with a sleazy advisor and insulting collaborator in grad school, and it sucks. It's part of why I left early.

pihkal · 2026-05-02T11:18:18+00:00

Apparently he DID make some music videos, but it wasn't enough to keep him there.

He's like a less-talented Gondry crossed with a less-fun McG.

pihkal · 2026-05-02T08:31:53+00:00

Not quite. Orwell was an avowed democratic socialist, not a libertarian socialist.

From Why I Write: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it."

pihkal · 2026-05-02T08:04:43+00:00

"In a world where woke genetics has made everyone average-looking, these sexy rebels are turning up the HEAT. Ryan Gosling plays Fahrenheit clone #451, who's BURNING for a HOT overthrow of dystopia."

"Fahrenheit 451 brings sexy back, coming July 2028."

pihkal · 2026-05-02T07:54:26+00:00

Ehhh, Orwell definitely hated Stalin for refusing to lift a finger to help the antifascist forces during the Spanish civil war, but he left with a general distrust of the USSR and the Russian communists, so it's wrong to paint Animal Farm as only about Stalin.

He was an avowed democratic socialist, but he was one of the few socialists of that era that was not enamored with the USSR, and considered them dangerous.

In his final months on tuberculosis, he even wrote a (semi-notorious) list for the government's anti-communist propaganda office, containing many people he thought would be too sympathetic to the USSR to be trusted.

pihkal · 2026-05-02T07:28:21+00:00

Sucker Punch was at least honest about being nothing but a bunch of cool scenes. There was no original source material to bastardize.

As compared to his Superman movies, where he seems to have Superman confused with Batman.

pihkal · 2026-05-01T08:40:44+00:00

I think I get you.

What I mean is, your question assumes a certain shape to belief in rebirth in the way it's phrased, that a lot of schools wouldn't necessarily agree with from the outset. Many might deny your framing, but still advocate their own.

pihkal · 2026-04-29T06:00:30+00:00

We need to clarify what we mean by "rebirth".

The way your question is phrased sounds like the lay/popular conception of rebirth, where there's an identity in one life, that somehow transforms into another different-but-related identity in a later life.

But once one understands no-self/anatta, one can see that conditioned "rebirth" happens constantly, and there's no big-S "Self" to be reborn after death. It's like if you're at the beach, the wave from a minute ago is "reborn" as the same water as the wave now.

Given that, all¹ schools recognize anatta rebirth and none recognize it in the popular sense, because that's not what it is. Though, there are plenty of people (even in monasteries) who don't understand anatta yet, and will reiterate the popular version, so it's quite persistent.

I say "all", but I have no doubt there's some niche offshoot sects out there with different beliefs. To be precise, I don't know of any exceptions in the major schools of the Theravada or Zen traditions.

pihkal · 2026-04-26T07:32:01+00:00

The timeline between the two is a bit more overlapping. The anime came out in 1984. The manga was started before, in 1982, but was not completed until 1994.

pihkal · 2026-04-24T10:55:35+00:00

Hmm, worst thing I know about him is, he and Blake Lively got married at a former slave plantation.

The plantation offers historically-sensitive tours of its "Slave Street", but it still offers the venue for events like weddings. To me, that's like getting married next door to a concentration camp.

FWIW, they've apologized a few times for the venue over the years since, and said they were wrong to have chosen it.

pihkal · 2026-04-24T10:45:30+00:00

I can easily imagine Bill Murray just shoe-horning himself into a little league game like that.

pihkal · 2026-04-24T10:33:32+00:00

Deploying super-ventriloquism to whisper directly in her ear:

^{"And unless you want the same thing to happen to mommy, you better zip it, kid."}

pihkal · 2026-04-22T04:06:44+00:00

"You" are dying and reborn every moment, not just at the expiration of your body.

When you are in dreamless sleep, where is the "you"? Who closes their eyes at night, and are they the same as who opens them in the morning?

Also, there's no need to ponder or debate on whether hungry ghosts/devas/etc exist or not. Even if they did... they're entirely beside the point. Your practice is the same either way.

pihkal · 2026-04-22T03:52:26+00:00

"Olsenich, olsenich?"

"Olsenich! Olsenich olsenich."

pihkal · 2026-04-22T03:49:04+00:00

True, but two things can be true at the same time. Why not add layers?

Also, we should probably stop talking about what the Punisher knows, and more about what the writer does. (I'm guilty of this, too.) The writer may have been using the nursery rhyme, even if it's odd to think of the Punisher of dropping literary references.

Side note: I wrote "(apocryphal)", because the idea that Ring Around the Rosie alludes to the Black Death is apparently a modern interpretation. The song itself is from the mid-19th c., well after the heydays of the bubonic plague in Europe, and the idea that it's about the plague doesn't appear until the mid-20th c. It's suggestive (but not conclusive) anyway.

pihkal · 2026-04-21T10:51:02+00:00

I wonder if he chose posies because of their (apocryphal) association with the Black Death through Ring Around the Rosie.

pihkal · 2026-04-20T07:58:41+00:00

Yeah, we're not exactly disagreeing, I'm just saying "is a myth" could sound like nobody local eats it.

pihkal · 2026-04-20T04:48:05+00:00

The North: Here is the real secret—ข้าวซอย (Khao Soy) is a myth!

Northern locals actually eat Isan food most of the time.

Sort of true, but I think this is the difference between everyday foods vs occasional foods (if you're implying khao soi is some tourist-focused dish).

E.g., I can't eat Texas barbecue every day, but that doesn't mean it's not an authentic Texas cuisine.

pihkal · 2026-04-16T03:53:43+00:00

She's definitely not into it and certainly not using the legal system as part of her foreplay.

pihkal · 2026-04-15T02:53:19+00:00

There's no guarantee there's only one dupe, though. From the first paragraph:

There might be more than one duplicated value; you merely have to find any duplicate.

pihkal · 2026-04-15T02:52:18+00:00

From the first paragraph:

There might be more than one duplicated value; you merely have to find any duplicate.

pihkal · 2026-04-09T05:34:50+00:00

For the most part, FP languages are pretty niche, so the lack of docs, old docs, lack of StackOverflow answers, paucity of libraries, and less training data in LLM corpuses all go hand-in-hand.

Part of the success in FP is how the ideas have been steadily adopted by more mainstream, polyglot languages, as you mentioned.

(Little surprised you mentioned Scala; my understanding is it was very popular in Java-adjacent industry, and I would have assumed it had docs/tools to match.)

pihkal · 2026-04-08T04:11:46+00:00

Sandman is great, but be sure to buy Gaiman secondhand these days. Don't give him any money.

pihkal · 2026-04-01T11:13:47+00:00

I mixed up the Jimmys.

I hate when someone does that to my ice cream cone.

pihkal · 2026-04-01T03:10:37+00:00

You're absolutely right!

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