PicoBlog

Happy Thursday! In this issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, we’re looking at a notorious chapter in animation history — the banning of Glass Harmonica (1968). You might recognize the name. This unsettling, surrealist film is one of the weirder products of Soviet animation — but among the more famous. Glass Harmonica has been covered by outlets like Open Culture and even Gizmodo. Just this week, someone published an unlikely parody of it, reviving an old Simpsons meme to ingenious effect.

One of the oldest, most successful firms in Silicon Valley is likely one you have sparingly heard about: Sutter Hill Ventures (SHV). This is by design. SHV purposefully keeps a very low profile, and they do things VERY differently than most firms. But silently, SHV has been building large companies for years. But these are VCs! Why am I giving them so much credit for building? That's where it gets interesting.

The simple letter is a community of likeminded hearts striving to live the life we want to live instead of the life we think we should. This is where you'll find musings on simplifying life, slowing it down and taking the path that's truly ours. No thanksncG1vNJzZmiilajAqq%2FAq6asnaeeua21wKaqZ6ull8C1rcKkZZynnWQ%3D

[Reprinted from Daily Wire] So it’s 1987, and me and my buddies, all home from college, pull up to a bar somewhere out in the sticks near Aurora, Illinois. It borders an abandoned railroad spur and corn and soybean fields surround the gravel parking lot. A rank of gleaming Harleys resting at a slight tilt sit muffler to fat muffler along the walkway. You’d think this wouldn’t turn out so well — Midwest college boys mingling with the Lords of Anarchy.

I hope your Thanksgiving Sours turned out well. And your Thanksgivings.  Speaking of which, I’m incredibly grateful for all the people who’ve signed up for this newsletter, and for all the people who have already started making the drinks I’ve written up in the first two editions. It’s been a weird year in too many ways to count. I haven’t been able to make drinks for friends in my own home in a long time.

This is still theoretical, and not pure science, but it is something I think about a lot when coming up with new ideas for horror scripts. First, by TYPE I don’t mean subgenre, which I already did a long-ass thread about. I also don’t claim for this list to be written on a stone tablet somewhere, but stick with me here… 19th Century French writer Georges Polti once decreed that there are only 36 dramatic situations in all of narrative.

We are in the dark bowl, the earthen night-held lull, of midwinter. Here in England it feels magnetically still. We are engulfed in earth’s darkness more than eighteen hours of the day, and when the sun is up, its path feels as low as dusk. This year, the dark is especially deep, both in potency and in heaviness. There is hell split open on the ground of Bethlehem, which is, let’s remember, in the occupied West Bank of Palestine.

Are you totally confused by this headline? This week I will explain what those words mean and really for grown ups, what it symbolizes. Skibidi Toilet is a viral meme about—as you can see— toilets with heads sticking out of them in a video game style of animation. The general plot is that these toilet people are not good guys and they are trying to take over the world. Skibidi Toilet started as a YouTube short in February by creator DaFuq!

Welcome to Dispatch #53 of The Audio Insurgent. And Happy Halloween! I hope regular readers have recovered from the three-in-a-week run of dispatches on public radio earlier this month. I’m glad I got that out of my system. More on that below. Spotify recently announced a slow roll-out of 15 hours of audiobook listening per month for paid members in the U.K. and Australia, with the U.S. to come later this year.