It seems everything in the United States has a political dimension to it, even to what type of bath soap you decide to buy! Anime, unfortunately, is no different. It’s not unusual for me to receive an ugly message that touches on political or racial topics. I’m more troubled by the lack of understanding such…
Category: Finds and Ramblings
An Outage and a Good Problem
You may have noticed JP was down for a good part of the weekend. I didn’t notice the problem until Sunday morning. So what happened? JP outgrew its hosting. If you aren’t aware of how web hosting works, you subscribe to a package which offers a certain amount of bandwidth, storage space, and processors. I…
Factors Behind Population Decline and the Ancient World’s Solutions
Birthrates in the developed world, especially in South Korea and Japan, have fallen below the replacement rate. Japan’s total fertility rate dropped below replacement back in 1974 with population decline beginning in 2010 (Oizimi, 2022). Japan’s population also declines because of people migrating out of the country. This has led to concern about demographic collapse,…
2024: Another Spin Around Our Star
This next year, 2025, will mark my 14th year of blogging about anime, the anime community, Japanese history, and all the other meanders I make here. JP began as a video game blog called Gamemories about a year before I changed over to blogging about anime. Some fragments of that blog still float around if…
Book Ban Banality
Tony Yao discusses another book ban on his website Drop-In to Manga. This time, Florida has banned Sasaki and Miyano by Sho Harusono because of its LGBTQAI material. Book bans happen frequently for many different reasons, usually under the guise of “protecting the children.” Most of the time, the parents who want to ban books…
In the Future, Human Skill Will [Increase | Decrease] in Value
The typed version of this hand-written article follows below the notebook scans. In the future, the value a skillful human hand has will increase. As machine learning improves, digital art, music, writing, and other realms will demand higher skill. Mediocre to average quality art will be available to anyone with a modicum of technology…