I've been reading comics, mostly. Beastars volume 2 It's rare that a manga manages to keep my attention, but I've kinda fallen in love with this one. I'm pretty sure the writer got inspired by Zootopia, but because of the different format, she has much more room to really explore and develop the concept. Volume 2 focuses on the high school drama club, and we learn more about its members, especially the charismatic lead actor Louis. But it's not really about highschool drama, it's more about the relationship between predators and prey in anthropomorphic society. I'm planning to watch the anime at some point, it's also supposed to be very good too, but I want to read far enough first that the anime won't spoil anything. Billionaire Island Meant as a biting satire of our late stage capitalistic society, but while there are some good ideas here, the writing and art both feel kinda lazy. Also, I have a feeling I'd enjoy this more if I was better at recognising faces. I recognise a few; Kid Rock (president of the USA in the comic), C. K. Lewis, and Harvey Weinstein, but I think there are many more characters inspired by real-life villains, and I think the jokes would land better if I knew who. And the satire is very heavy-handed, so if you enjoy subtlety, stay away. Bone volume 5 A small publisher has made a new Norwegian translation. It's a classic, which I've read before, but that was in English, and in black and white. The colours are nice, and the translation is pretty good. No extras, just the comics, which is fine with me, straight to the point. I wish the format was a bit bigger; this edition is somewhere between pocket book and trade paperback in size. Chew volume 2 The world has been hit hard by a bird flu pandemic, resulting in a world-wide ban of chicken. The comic follows a psychic FDA agent solving food-related crimes, usually by eating parts of murder victims to get visions of what happened to them. For me, that's just the right amount of bonkers. Volume 2 seems like a side-story in the bigger picture, but a minor character from volume 1 shows up in a bigger role, and is played up to be the big villain of volume 3, so who knows. Y The Last Man volume 1 Every male on Earth suddenly dies, both human and animal, except the protagonist and his pet monkey. The comic follows his attempt to travel from the east coast of the USA to meet up with his girlfriend in the Australian Outback. Spoiler: He doesn't get very far. I think this comic does a better job of social commentary than Billionaire Island (though this too a bit heavy-handed at times), plus it's more exciting and fun. Volume 1 is 240 pages, but it felt like a breeze to read. I'm also reading a book-book, which I'm hoping to finish this summer: The Dresden Files - Fool Moon The second book about wizard/private investigator Harry Dresden. This time, he's up against a band of werewolves. Or maybe several? In any case, it turns out Chicago has a surprising amount of werewolves. This book has some pretty brutal fight scenes compared to the first in the series, but the same pulpy noir style, and I love it. Not exactly high-brow literature, I guess.
I didn't read the whole thing, because it's very long, and I'd already read an article about this in a Norwegian newspaper. Are anyone surprised though? From the moment he first refused to release his tax returns, we knew something shady was up. Even his cultists must have realised it, they just didn't care any more about his financial crimes than they cared about his sex crimes. Let's just hope he gets some sort of comeuppance. From what I understand it's too late for criminal charges, but it would be amazing if a sitting president were ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in civil fines. The article I read says the Times spent a year and a half on this investigation, which I find interesting. First of all I'm surprised they didn't start sooner, why not already during the Republican primaries, or at the very least immediately after the election? They (like all of us) knew he had been up to shady things, and they knew if they could prove it this would make for a series of explosive articles. Secondly a year and a half is an awful long time for newspaper research, even for such a big case as this one. I don't think it's accidental; I think the Times are honouring the US tradition of the October Surprise in national elections. Save the most explosive stuff for the month before the election, when everyone's eyes are on the people they're covering. Someone on Tildes predicted that Trump would do something moronic and/or evil to create headlines to distract from his tax fraud. Right on cue the president went on stage and publicly mocked professor Ford. Sometimes I wonder if he's a PR idiot savant, or just a very lucky idiot.
When I was in high school I bought my first cell phone, and it came with a truly amazing feature: Text messaging. I remember how amazing it was to be able to communicate with anyone without actually talking to them! Things got even better when I got access to the world wide web on my spare time. I found a chat room with some friendly people, bound together by a common interest in video games and pop culture, which I still hang out in every day, almost a decade later. Without that room and those dozen+ people I count among my friends, spread across time zones, I might have been a very lonely person. The first time I learned about this was reading an article on, of all places, Cracked. I'm not allowed to share links yet, so if you have the time, visit Cracked and search for "monkeysphere". It's seriously one of the most eye-opening articles I've ever read.Ms. Flora did note the advantages of digital media for introverts and people susceptible to loneliness, namely that it is less risky and enervating to make contact through a text or post than through a phone call or an invitation to meet.
These findings jibe with the research of Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford. He has theorized that “group size” of both humans and nonhuman primates — the number of people (or, say, chimpanzees) one can maintain social cohesion with — correlates to “relative neocortical volume,” or the ratio of the neocortex to the rest of the brain.