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Welcome! The Animation Obsessive newsletter returns with another batch of highlights, news items and tidbits. Here’s the slate: Our newsletter goes out every Sunday and Thursday. If you haven’t already, you can sign up for free to receive our Sunday issues right in your inbox, every weekend: All set? Let’s go! Satoshi Kon, one of the best directors ever to work in anime, passed away in August 2010. He was only 46.

Have you heard of ChatGPT wrappers? No, they’re not chart-topping AI hip hop artists, but rather a pejorative term taking aim at a crop of AI tools that have ‘wrapped’ a large language model, like GPT, in a user interface that makes it look spiffier than it really is. In the weeks following ChatGPT’s initial launch in November 2022, hundreds if not thousands of these companies popped up seemingly overnight, many of which have gone under in the months since.

Genre: Science Fiction / Horror-Thriller Release Date: March 20, 2020 Running Time: 94 Minutes Rated: TV-MA (Violence, Nudity, Language, Gore, Smoking) Directed by Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia Written by David Desola, Pedro Rivero Cinematography by Jon D. Domínguez Music by Aranzazu Calleja Distributed by Netflix “Inside a vertical prison system, inmates are assigned to a level and forced to ration food from a platform that descends the levels of the tower, feeding the upper tiers first and leaving those below them with only the scraps from above.

THANK YOU. Your support means everything. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber! You’ll never miss another post, and we’ll get to see a lot more of each other. Jeremy Giambi was destined to be remembered for two things, and only two, apparently. One: He didn’t slide on that play at the plate when Derek Jeter made that circus flip. If you’re a baseball fan, you know the play I’m describing, even though I haven’t come close to referencing the year, the teams or even the point of the remembrance.

Hi everyone, Although I was born and raised in France and lived most of my life in France and in the UK, I have a particular interest in Germany. I actually have more family in Germany than anywhere else. That’s why I want my children to learn German, too, and I plan to live in Germany with my family for a couple of years starting in January 2021. The Brexit drama may also have played a role.

The role that Walt Whitman’s “The Learn’d Astronomer” plays in Breaking Bad is one of the first things I ever wanted to write about for PopPoetry—seeing the work of a poet being such an integral part of the show’s plot was utterly thrilling to me. And not just any show: one of the most critically acclaimed television shows of all time. Good screenwriters choose poetry that makes sense for their characters when these mash-ups do happen, and Vince Gilligan knocked it out of the park by selecting the so-called Grandfather of American Poetry.

Hi friends, We’re so happy to share this lovely piece from Neal Thompson, author of six books, about Louise Penny’s use of poetry. Neal also writes Blood and Whiskey, a great newsletter about crime fiction and cocktails. We’re excited to share more fan art from Maria and Blue Cat with Glasses. — Elizabeth and Aya P.S. Aya is attending the “Three Pines” tomorrow! More details to come. There’s a micro scene early in Kingdom of the Blind, the 14th Inspector Gamache novel.

Hey guys, it’s Davida again! With things still being as hairy as they are in the world, it hasn’t been easy for Dennis and I to come up with ideas. After his recent interview with food critic Michael Nagrant, Dennis has seen a flood of new sign-ups and for a minute we were scrambling about what to do next. After some fruitless brainstorming, we decided to look to a list of potential ideas we’ve had on the back burner for a year or so, and settled on one we’d previously been resistant to attempt out of sheer terror: Poké poke cake.

The longer you work in policy the more you realise new ideas are extremely rare. Even ideas that seem new are usually old ones repackaged and given a different spin. It’s why so many people who’ve been around politics for a long time develop an air of weary cynicism. When you’ve heard the same idea in a hundred different panel sessions, with a glass of cheap white wine warming in your hand, it’s hard to get excited.