fwiw, Earwig and the Witch, while produced by Studio Ghibli, was not a Hayao Miyazaki film (it was directed by his son) and was critically panned. Definitely one to skip.
And the elder Miyazaki walked out during the premier of his son's first feature film in an apparent expression of disgust at his son's creation. Not exactly a model father.
Old Hayao was not a good father, even more so for Western standards. He dragged his son into his work, and then effectively threw him under the bus when it became clear he was not going to be particularly good at it. From the outside, it looks like a classic case of a capostipite, the upstart who builds a family fortune and is then disgusted at the fact that his son is of a different breed.
Looking at it from the elder Miyazaki's perspective: Seeing that disaster of a film and realizing that your name was going to be associated with it forever after you spent your entire working life establishing a very high standard was probably a very difficult thing to endure.
I rather think it’s the opposite. It was a decent film, but all the others are masterpieces. It sucks for Goro because it’s basically impossible to live up to the standard unless you’re a once a century genius.
Since you mentioned some works of science fiction, this is one thing that is pretty awesome about Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem and how the series encompasses the present and all the way past the end of our universe. It is a really jarring perspective change for us as mortal humans that I think is something that only well thought out science fiction can accomplish.
I agree but the downside of a class C or B is unless you are towing a toad, anytime you want to leave your camp site, you'll need to pack up your camper, versus parking and setting up your temporary home, and being able to come and go effortlessly. It's all tradeoffs though and just depends on how you plan to use it.
A truck camper is a bit of a unicorn - class B level flexibility (modulo a higher roof clearance), with the ability to dismount the camper at a campsite if needed.
Some of my friends have trucks with pop up campers on them. Advantage is cheapish and you can put them on a 4WD truck. They are pretty good if you're going away for a weekend to some off road place.
As someone that camps otherwise stock van with a sofa bed every type of camping system has it's advantages, disadvantages, and costs. Show me any type of camping setup and I can tell you why it's non starter for a lot of people. And perfect for others. My take about electric RV's is essentially RV's are all built on a van, truck, or bus chassis. When those become available with enough range you'll see RV's built on them as a standard option.
I thought this book was decent, and I don't know of any others better in the niche, but I wanted a bit more science than was presented. I think Casey got too intimidated by the scientists to really try to understand the models at all, and then spent too much time fawning over Laird Hamilton. But perhaps that was a decision made by the editors rather than by Casey navigating two very different groups of protagonists.
Yeah, it was definitely not what I was expecting in terms of balance between the science and the surfing personalities. My impression was that she really lacked enough hard science material (that was sufficiently interesting given the audience). I will admit that in the end I was way more interested in the big wave surfing, a topic I really didn't appreciate before.
That headline: "Finding meteorites in your gutters is easy"!
Iron space dust that is fine enough to escape incineration as “shooting stars” when entering Earth's atmosphere drifts down continuously. To collect these small iron spheres, scrape several handfuls of mud from a convenient roof gutter, preferably a plastic one, add to a bucket of water and stir.
Fish for meteorites with a strong magnet wrapped in a plastic bag. Remove the magnet, carefully rinse the bag into a glass dish and look for fine, dark grey dust. Dragging the magnet underneath will concentrate the dust. A good magnifier will show tiny spheres, some of them up to 0.2 millimetres in diameter.
Seriously, While travelling SE Asia, every single rice field from Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Japan.... etc.
It was REALLY common to see the petro-chem signs in the fields advertising the petro-chemical compound's name brands. (I couldnt read local languages and the 'English' name brands were not what we have here, so they didnt form a stark imprint... But the root OEM was mostly Monsanto et al ptrochems.
The point being, and this will be controversial, but its true:
There are a much higher % of trans/gay folks in these rural communities whereby the entire water table is permeated with petrochems. and their water, while treated, is still victim to contaminants of the petro chems in the water. (Its all about the Endocrines)
SOURCE: My FIL was the civil-hydro engineer for the largest water plant in Mindanao Philippines. His son was on the board of the "rice consortium" (I cant recall what it was called -- the governmental agency concerned with ensuring that everyone in the PH has access to rice as the main staple foodsource, and more about pesticides. Think of NASCAR branding of vehicles. (like Shell Oil) - but now imagine PESTICIDE branding of rice farms... with label signs for the pesticides being used.
Recall when Indian farmers were committing suicide over GMO seeds that produced no yield and they killed themselves before they could starve to death?
So I got rice production and water production information from these two engineers... And the dots were compelling.
Its the same type of contamination the fish are receiving from SunScreen.
If you find this topic interesting, I highly recommend John McWhorter's course, The Story of Human Language. It's available on Audible / The Great Courses. I learned a lot and was fascinated throughout.
I'd also recommend Lyle Campbell's Historical Linguistics: An Introduction for historical linguistics especially. It's a very concise introduction and I believe you could understand most of it without a deep background in linguistics (maybe some understanding of the IPA and phonetics mostly)
Loss is hard. When we lose friends and love ones, we lose a part of ourselves that we can never get back. In the same way, though, we can take this time now to remember those who we have lost and the happy memories of them that we still have. We can recognize both the pain and the joy and know that this is truly what it means to be human.
