PicoBlog

Made-for-television movies, particularly before the modern era, usually had low production values and even lower ambitions. "A Man for Hanging" is certainly guilty of the former but not the latter. It's a surprisingly effective -- and risk-taking -- Western that in a lot of ways plays more like a horror flick. The main character, eventually named as Avery Porter, is a masked madman who roams the prairies indiscriminately raping and killing for seemingly no purpose other than his own appetites.

David Liu is an gifted molecular biologist and chemist who has pioneered major refinements in how we are and will be doing genome editing in the future, validating the methods in multiple experimental models, and establishing multiple companies to accelerate their progress. The interview that follows here highlights why those refinements beyond the CRISPR Cas9 nuclease (used for sickle cell disease) are vital, how we can achieve better delivery of editing packages into cells, ethical dilemmas, and a future of somatic (body) cell genome editing that is in some ways is up to our imagination, because of its breadth, over the many years ahead.

(Yup, this is me, after my children decided to give me a makeover.) After some shameless begging this week, I am pleased to say I hit my Christmas subscriber number for the Substack, so thank you all for your help. Thanks, too, for subscribing, for reading, for sharing, for commenting, for liking, for recommending and for pledging cash over the half year I’ve been doing this. And, as promised, in return I bring you an interview with a true musical legend, none other than Quincy Jones!

► This week’s Ramen Beast newsletter takes you inside one of Tokyo’s most acclaimed ramen kitchens… Atsushi Yamamoto is one of Japan's most ambitious ramen chefs. He is one of only two Japanese ramen masters currently in possession of a Michelin star and he has spent the past several years tirelessly promoting ramen culture globally by launching over a dozen shops around the world. Yamamoto-san did his ramen training at the old school ramen mecca Eifukucho Taishoken, before going solo in 2006 by founding Soba House Konjiki Hototogisu, a tiny, eight-seat shop on a narrow back alley of Tokyo's Hatagaya neighborhood.

It feels silly to call omegaverse a trope, but that’s technically not wrong. Neither is it wrong to consider it a whole subgenre. Regardless of the literary term you prefer, anytime you see “omegaverse”, you are entering a realm of speculative and erotic sci-fi or fantasy fiction that assumes a formal, biological dominance hierarchy. The purpose of this hierarchy typically serves to facilitate biological reproduction in a story’s world. One should assume a few more rules involved than the typical trope or subgenre.

The day after Mother’s Day (in the U.S.), I’m thinking about my own mother, whose long-term memory is still sharp as a tack. My mother remembers being a young bride in Korea—not the Korea you think of today with high-end electronics and luxe skincare, but the ravished post-war country where people died of starvation. She and my father were raising their first child, who was doted on by the entire extended family.

Ten years ago this month I teamed up with my brother Alex to create a YouTube travel show we called Vagabrothers. A decade later, that crazy dream has evolved into a community of over 1 million curious minds from virtually every country on earth. But all journeys must come to an end, and the pandemic formed a natural bookend to that project. After a two-year hiatus from YouTube, I’m proud to announce a new chapter of my creative career.

My rating: 5/5 Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2014 Legends/Canon: Canon Timeline: 11 BBY Welcome back to the Star Wars Book Club! It’s been a little quiet around here lately. Turns out reading a book a week is hard to keep up with. But I’m back today with a new review, and tomorrow you’ll get the September reading list, along with a schedule of when the reviews are dropping. For now enjoy this spoiler free review of A New Dawn by John Jackson Miller.

Roughly 23 years ago we rented a house at the sea to do an art experiment. The novel and expansive environment combined with a healthy dose of momentum helped us find that ever sought after FLOW state and the songs that became known as ‘Morning View’ have since become indelible and deeply important parts of our lives. This album helped propel our little art experiment called ‘Incubus’ into a way of life and here we are today, some 23 years later about to introduce a new/next phase of it’s existence.