Brain ups and downs

Tuesday May 27th, 2025

Tags: blog, books, personal

I'm reading again, that's the important thing. After I finished Sick Little Monkeys, the subject of my Ren & Stimpy post, I thought "wow, now I remember how good reading makes me feel. I should keep doing it." And I did.

I also got back into audiobooks. It's been a distressingly long time since I've taken the chance on an audio book, but not long ago, my library hold on John Green's Everything is Tuberculosis, which I placed back in March, finally became available. I listened to that and it was very good. Five stars.

I'll post a short summary and review of what I've been reading soon, but the important thing I've learned is, I should always have a book to read at home and an audiobook to listen to at work. Reading is maybe the best thing I can do with my leisure time. The effect that it's had on my attention span and overall amount of stress and anxiety is enormous. I'm calmer, I can think more clearly, and I feel more confident in myself. I tend to hit lulls because after I finish a book, I try to find the perfect book to read next. I hem and haw and usually wait so long to start something new that I end up losing all my inertia and forgetting that I like to read. I've learned that it's best to just start reading something else immediately, it doesn't have to be something new or big or important, it can be a re-read of a favorite book, a novella, an entry in a trashy but readable fantasy series, anything to keep the momentum going... and even the trashiest fantasy novel is probably going to be better for my brain than whatever else I do to relax.

I'm already disinclined from watching movies and TV, but I also spend a lot of time in front of my computer doing... essentially nothing? I rewatch youtube videos a lot. I watch new ones, but the number of subscriptions I have is fairly low. I guess I read a lot of blogs and articles and stuff I get recommended on fedi, but in an unintentional, easily distracted kind of way. Now when I get home from work, instead of plopping in front of the computer and loading up youtube, I'll lie down and read for an hour or two. Sunny's been very helpful in this regard.

Sunny, a black cat, lies on my stomach and looks relaxed as I pet her back. She laid on me while I read for nearly 2 hours.

Reading on a cool quiet day with a cat on me is one of the very best things in life. I recommend it.

Now here's the bad part: I'm currently on day 2 without my meds. They were due on Sunday, during a dreaded three-day weekend. Naturally, I didn't think to contact my doctor's office for a refill until Friday, because I don't think about this shit a week in advance. Nobody came in on Friday, and Monday was a holiday, so I finally got the refill today and I can take it again starting tomorrow. Hopefully my brain isn't complete mush tomorrow and I can start a longer entry about what I've been reading. If you're on The StoryGraph and you want a sneak preview, feel free to follow me, but I pretty much just use it to track what books I read and give star ratings, my actual thoughts will go here. I started a challenge to read 30 books this year, and I fell embarrasingly, hilariously behind almost immediately: I've read 7 books and I need to read 5 more to get back on track with my goal. But considering 4 of those 7 have been in the past month, I think I'm more than able to get caught up, as long as I don't stop. Having my brain in the habit of reading has definitely reduced the amount of suffering in the last couple days. I must remember this. Now if you'll excuse me, it's 21h30 and I need to go collapse into bed.

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May books - technofeudalism, tuberculosis, polyamory

Sunday June 01st, 2025

Tags: blog, books, review

Sick Little Monkeys

by Thad Komorowski (❤️❤️❤️️️🖤🖤)

I wrote about this book here. I've been thinking it over, wondering if 3 is the right score, and I think it is. It's a perfectly fine book, especially for one that seems to be the work of only one person. I disagree with a lot of the author's opinions, and sometimes found the way he expressed them frustrating. I wish he had at least explained and tried harder to justify them, but it doesn't bring down the story as a whole.

Technofeudalism

By Yanis Varoufakis (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

I heard good things about this book from various sources, and was mostly inspired to read it by dr. molly tov's glowing recommendation. It's a short, very digestible book about how capitalism is being replaced with something worse. The author, the former Minister of Finance for Greece, is extremely knowledgeable but forgoes complex technical jargon in favor of a plain-language explanation as if he were having a conversation with his father. It's a bleak book, but also somewhat inspirational, because we still have the choice to reject this new system. In very brief summary, the premise is that an economy based on providing goods and services is being phased out in favor of a technological feudalism-like system in which the corporations are the landowners and the rest of us are digital serfs, providing value in the form of our personal data, unpaid labor and unwilling engagement. It's a compelling argument. If I hadn't already cut ties with every major corporate tech platform (except google, I still can't quite exist in the world without a phone) and started my own website, this book would've gotten me fired up to do so.

Everything is Tuberculosis

By John Green (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

I put a hold on the audiobook at my library as soon as I watched Dr. Angela Collier's video about it back in March. I hadn't yet got back into my reading habit and thought the audio version would be easier to digest. It's short, about 6 hours long, and it's read by the author, who's also a public speaker via his own youtube channel, so the narration is excellent. This isn't a science book, it's about people and systems. It's about how tuberculosis, thought of in the west as an "old timey" disease that we've pretty much gotten rid of, is in fact still the most deadly infectious disease on the planet. It killed 1.25 million people in 2023, mostly in the global south. We have the capacity to eradicate the disease¹ and we don't, because the people it kills are deemed less worthy by the technocratic medical establishment and the treatments are deemed "not cost effective" because the people it kills are mostly impoverished black and brown people. The book follows the story of Henry, a man in Sierra Leone with drug-resistant TB, struggling to get lifesaving treatment isolated in underfunded, resource-scarce, prison-like hospitals. Green does a good job of centering Henry and his family without inserting himself into the story and turning it into a white savior narrative, which is always a risk of this sort of book. It also goes into the history of TB and how it was so rampant in post-industrial Britain that it perversely became seen as fashionable, how TB patients were viewed as noble sufferers whose quiet, dignified deaths were imbued with a kind of tragic beauty. It's a fascinating part of our history, and a good reminder of the ways we trivialize and normalize the unthinkable.

More: A Memoir of Open Marriage

By Molly Roden Winter (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

I promise I didn't intend to read nothing but 5-star books this month. I went into this fully expecting not to like it, because I watched a youtube video completely roasting it. I don't want to link to the video, because having now read the book, I consider the youtuber's summary tacky and misleading. She cherry-picks the parts of the story that make the author and her husband seem unlikable and irredeemable. She presents a straightforward "the straights are not okay" narrative about a man trying to manipulate his wife into an open marriage purely for his own selfish benefit, and his long-suffering wife in complete denial about the situation, with an unearned happily-ever-after ending that comes out of nowhere with no character growth. That's not what the book is at all, though.

I started reading the book because the excerpts the youtuber quoted were salacious, and I wanted to see the whole messy story. I went in expecting to dislike the author and her husband, and I experienced a complete 180°. It's a beautifully-written memoir about a woman on a journey of self-love and her complicated relationships with men, her mother, and society.

The inciting incident for the open marriage is Molly meeting a younger man at a bar, flirting harmlessly to get some free drinks, and giving the man her number. She had gone out for an angry walk after a stressful evening at home, happened to bump into a former colleague, and accepted her offer to go out for drinks despite not having her phone and wallet. She had a great time, and when she got home, her husband Stewart questioned her about where she had gone and who she had met. He saw the text from the man on Molly's phone. Molly said she had no intentions of further contact with the man, but rather than being upset, Stewart encouraged her to pursue a relationship. This is something they had discussed before: Stewart gets sexually excited by fantasizing about Molly with other men, and is into the idea of opening the marriage. He also thinks it could be good for Molly, who didn't have as much sexual experience as Stewart when they got married, and so Stewart suggested it could help build her confidence. Nothing had ever come of these conversations before, but this time Molly agreed to try it.

She enjoys her time with Matt, the man she met at the bar, but still isn't quite sure if an open marriage is for her. Stewart likes hearing about Molly's extramarital sex, but Molly's conflicted. She's unsure if she actually enjoys the sex on her own terms, or because it's satisfying her long-held people-pleasing tendencies. She feels emotionally unsatisfied by her experiences, but is unsure if a strong emotional connection is something she can or should be looking for. Her fear is that if she allows herself to fall in love with someone else, it'll cause irreparable harm to her marriage, which in spite of its problems, she wants to save. Molly and Stewart have two children, and she's afraid of the ways the open marriage might harm them, and her relationship with them.

Things get more complicated when Stewart, having enthusiastically accepted his wife's sexual adventures, asks about reconnecting with an old flame of his. Molly, who hadn't thought through the logical ramifications of what opening the marriage might mean, gets upset. Her feelings go beyond mere jealousy approaching a kind of deep existential panic. Her behavior towards her husband feels unfair and immature. They agree to a system in which Molly tells Stewart about her affairs, but Stewart doesn't tell Molly about any of his. It's an uneasy truce, and Molly harbors deep resentments about Stewart's affairs, his motivations, and his perceived lack of dedication to their relationship.

Both parties behave in ways that are unlikable, and if this is all the book was, I can see why the reviewer in the video I watched didn't like it. Stewart worked long hours at his office and "didn't have time" for many of the household maintenance and child-rearing duties that should be expected of him, but suddenly had time for multiple sexual partners, which I agree is suspicious. The universal consensus seems to be that Stewart was cheating on Molly prior to the opening of their marriage, but I don't think that's a given. There's no direct evidence of cheating, Molly never brings up the possibility, and once they do open the marriage, Stewart seems open and honest, and he respects the rules and boundaries Molly needs to feel comfortable. My impression is that Stewart was missing joy and a sense of purpose in his personal life, and that he was trying to fill the hole with an unnecessarily intense focus on work. Workohol is, despairingly, still a socially respectable coping mechanism, and it's easy to justify selfish behavior when it's in service of the cult of hard work. I could be wrong, but I think it's unfair to assume he was cheating all along.

That doesn't mean Stewart is blameless: he was shirking his duties, it was making Molly's life harder, and him barely showing up at home and rarely helping with the kids was straining their relationship to its breaking point. I don't think opening the relationship was a good way to deal with these problems, but nonetheless it was the catalyst for change. Molly started talking to a therapist, and eventually they started seeing a marriage counselor. They both had a series of sexual partners. Some of Molly's partners were awful, with no redeeming qualities, but most of her relationships were complicated. She had some beautiful, fulfilling experiences with other men, which compounded her internal sense of guilt and shame. It was a messy, complicated arrangement, and she's shockingly open and honest about her feelings and behavior. She doesn't sugarcoat or tiptoe around the parts that make her look bad, and she doesn't sensationalize the parts that make Stewart look bad. It feels refreshingly true.

While all this is going on, Molly is also reconnecting emotionally with her mother, who's suffering a health decline due to Parkinson's Disease, which is only correctly diagnosed after a lot of suffering. Molly questions her mother about her open marriage, which Molly learned about as an adult but which was never discussed. Molly's mother got involved in a health cult when Molly was a child, and had affairs with members of this cult, which Molly's father accepted. It was one of those hippie 70s cults that eschewed "modern medicine" in favor of orthorexic beliefs about diet and exercise, not unlike the beliefs that eventually killed Steve Jobs. Molly had a lot of unexamined resentment towards her mother, but once they started talking about it Molly realized that her mother was a victim, that the cult members exploited the same people-pleasing tendencies that Molly herself struggles with. Molly's mother now accepts modern medicine, and with treatment her Parkinson's symptoms start to improve. They have a beautiful bonding experience at a writer's retreat, which helps Molly rediscover her love of songwriting and (it's implied) her mother rediscover her love of poetry. Molly realizes that this is what was missing from her life: things that bring her joy and personal fulfillment outside of the context of any sexual or romantic relationship.

The video I watched doesn't talk about any of this, which was the most humanizing and redeeming part of the story. It's pretty shocking in hindsight how deceptive it was, and I'm glad I read the book for myself. I'm surprised how many people who've read the book have a negative opinion of it. It was acclaimed by mainstream critics, but it has some scathing reviews on goodreads and storygraph. It's true that there were parts of the book that made me roll my eyes, become annoyed, wonder how anyone could be this naive and illogical and self-centered, but the gradual story crescendo in which Molly learns to love herself, center her own needs and unpack her emotional baggage, I thought, was masterfully told. I went in expecting to hate it and by the end, 5 stars was the only honest score I could give it. I think if you go in desiring a simplistic narrative with a hero to root for and a villain to hate, you're going to be disappointed. The story's as messy and as complicated and as real and as beautiful as life is.

In progress

Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. I read this book in the early 2000s, and remember liking it, but I don't remember a lot about how it ends. After I finished Everything is Tuberculosis, I looked for another audiobook avaiable through my library, found Cryptonomicon, and figured it might be worth a re-read. It's an eye-popping 42 hours long, which could be good or bad. I got burned by the audiobook for Reamde by the same author, which is a similar length, but I found an interminable slog I couldn't finish. I'm enjoying Cryptonomicon a lot more, and I'm shocked to find out that the last thing I remember about it happens at around the 25% mark. Either I never actually finished the book, or my reading comprehension was a lot worse than I was even aware of. It's embarrassing to think about. Anyway, Stephenson is notorious for not being very good at endings, so we'll see how I feel when I finish it, but I've gotten a lot out of it so far.

A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole. This is another reread, one that was prompted by another Angela Collier video in which she discusses when unlikable protagonists work and when they don't. It's delightful, and again, I'm shocked by how much more I appreciate it now, with the knowledge and reading comprehension skill I've accumulated since my early 20s.

It reminds me of this paper I read recently about how a shocking number of English majors lack basic reading comprehension skills. I'd like to think that I wasn't quite as bad as some of the students quoted in the study, but I definitely relate to passages like this:

The majority of these subjects could understand very little of Bleak House and did not have effective reading tactics. All had so much trouble comprehending concrete detail in consecutive clauses and phrases that they could not link the meaning of one sentence to the next. Although it was clear that these subjects did try to use various tactics while they read the passage, they were not able to use those tactics successfully. For example, 43 percent of the problematic readers tried to look up words they did not understand, but only five percent were able to look up the meaning of a word and place it back correctly into a sentence. The subjects frequently looked up a word they did not know, realized that they did not understand the sentence the word had come from, and skipped translating the sentence altogether.

I have memories of reading challenging books, struggling to piece together meaning from allusions and language I didn't understand, and trying to at least come away with a general feeling about the text when I was unable to truly understand it. A lot of ACoD is essays written by Ignatius, the protagonist, given to demonstrate his pseudo-intellectual reactionary narcissism, and I don't think I really got any of it the first time I read it. I was still entertained, but my takeaway was more "haha this guy is nuts" than a meaningful understanding of the satire. I wish I could better articulate what happened between then and now to make me a better reader. "Age and experience" is the obvious answer, but it feels like an unhelpful cop-out that doesn't really explain anything. I had the internet when I read these books. I could've looked up the stuff I didn't understand. Why didn't I? Why was I content to stumble my way through with guessing and vibes? Did I think this is what reading is supposed to be like, or did I just assume and accept that I was deficient in some way? The past is truly a foreign land.

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Ren and Stimpy

Sunday May 11th, 2025

Tags: blog, books, review, tv

I reached the portion of my No More Whoppers relisten where they discuss the 2013 book Slimed: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age. I didn't read the book last time and I didn't read it this time---I don't find a simple transcription of interview material compelling as a book---but listening to them talk about it was entertaining enough. The book briefly touched on the schism that happened in season 2 of Ren & Stimpy in which the show's creator, John Kricfalusi, was fired from his own show. The show was fairly important to the warping of my young mind and shaping the person I'd eventually become, and I had always wondered what exactly happened. I was too young to understand anything about the situation at the time, I only had the vaguest notion that cartoons were actually made by people, but as I got older and perpetually watched the show in reruns, I got a picture of a narrative---John K. was too much of a creative genius and Nickelodeon was too much of a sterile corporate machine to properly nurture his artistic talent. And I knew even at the time that this narrative was bullshit. Seasons 1 and 2 had plenty of rotten episodes, and the seasons after his ousting had plenty of great ones. So what exactly was the deal? It made me wonder if some sort of tell-all book about the situation has been written, so I went looking and found Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren & Stimpy Story by Thad Komorowski. I found a copy at the library and proceeded to read it in a couple days.

In 2018, John K. was revealed to be a child sexual predator who groomed and abused two teenage fans who eventually also ended up working for him. The book was published in 2013 and doesn't go into any of this part of John K.'s life, even though it's been described as an "open secret" about John K. This is obviously worse than anything he's done in an artistic or professional context, and my interest in the Nickelodeon details is not meant to minimize the horror his victims experienced. I had close to zero respect for John K. even before I learned about his child sexual abuse, and only have a continuing interest in Ren & Stimpy because it was such a formative part of my childhood.

All that said, the book was pretty good. I gave it three stars on Storygraph. It was well written but in dire need of an editor. The number of grammatical and usage mistakes was quite distracting, but not enough to take me out of the book completely. What was more distracting was the author's opinionated approach. He's a historian of animation, and it felt like at least half of the book was an excuse for him to shit on every animated TV Show and movie that's not Ren & Stimpy or Looney Tunes shorts from the 1940s and 50s. Like, he's correct that animation in the 80s was a wasteland of cheap, zero-effort shows primarily made as extended toy commercials, and R&S represented a sea change away from this attitude; but in 2013, he writes as if there had not been an animated show of any redeeming value since R&S ended in 1995, disparaging even the then-recent Cartoon Network hits Regular Show and Adventure Time. I haven't seen enough of either show to be an expert---I really should, at some point---but I've seen enough and I know enough to say that they're groundbreaking works of animation.

John K. and the author of this book both share the frustrating opinion that the only animation of any value is an extremely specific style pioneered by Warner Bros. directors Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones and Tex Avery. This philosophy eschews the idea that cartoons should have writers or scripts---all the writing should be done by the artists themselves during the "layout" portion of production. Layout is the step between storyboard and actual animation, in which a large number of drawings are made with specific, meticulous instructions for the animators.¹

Ren, wearing his producer hat (a golden fasces with the letter P) berates Stimpy for his work during the layout phase of his project in Stimpy's Cartoon Show (Season 3).

Now, there is some wisdom to this no-script approach. Artists and animators know better than anyone else what's possible with animation. When they have a large amount of input over the story, they'll take the medium in a direction that's fun and interesting to look at. When cartoons are pre-scripted by people who aren't hands-on with the art and animation, there's a risk that the characters will be merely flat, lifeless vessels through which the writers' jokes are delivered, and we can see that most clearly in the shitty post-Simpsons wave of adult animation like South Park and Family Guy.² (The Simpsons itself would of course eventually head down this path as well.) There's no question that Ren and Stimpy breathed new life into animation as a medium, and that its techniques helped sparked a renaissance in the art form.

But this single-minded dedication to animation was also the show's downfall. The system was not set up to allow this level of artist/animator control, and Spümcø was perpetually missing deadlines and going over budget. The other shows that kicked off Nickelodeon's animation library were Doug and Rugrats, and they were able to consistently deliver new episodes every week, while R&S floundered and had to go into reruns almost immediately. Doug and Rugrats were also great shows, no matter what the animation snobs have to say on the subject. Were the characters as expressive? Were the highs as high? Are they as influential? No, but they were consistently imaginative and entertaining. They told good stories. I haven't watched either show in years, and they're not as memorable as R&S, but I'm confident that if I were to go back, there would be more solid episodes of both shows than R&S.

John K. was a huge part of Ren and Stimpy's failure, and I'd argue played only the smallest role in its success. His slavish dedication to animation above all did make the studio produce some legendary episodes, but his obsessive attention to detail and insistence on authoritarian control ruined the show not just at a financial level but also artistically. Even today, people blame Nickelodeon for putting budgetary concerns over the art, but if Spümcø had unlimited time and money in the early 90s, they would've made a worse product. John K. has never understood what makes a good TV show or been able to manage a project, and there's no better proof of that than the unwatchable revival from 2003, Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon".

Sick Little Monkeys is a well-researched book, with plenty of information from primary sources close to Ren & Stimpy, but Komorowski was still unable to determine the exact sequence of events that led to John K. getting control of a Ren & Stimpy reboot. The cable Network TNN had designs on rebranding to an edgier, male Gen-X demographic-oriented channel called Spike TV, and a cornerstone of their blueprint was going to be a block of adult animation. Someone involved in the process was apparently a big enough fan of R&S that they pulled the right strings at Viacom (the parent company of both Nickelodeon and Spike) to greenlight the project and give John K. full creative control. They told him to pull out all the stops and make the show that he wanted to make at Nickelodeon but was unable to. He had a team of all the Spümcø loyalists who refused to continue working on the show at Games Animation, Nickelodeon's in-house studio, after Kricfalusi's ousting during Season 2. Spike TV gave him a budget and a contract for 9 episodes with practically no oversight.

Spümcø only produced three episodes on time, at the cost of the entire 9-episode budget. Only the first 3 episodes ever aired, with 3 more eventually coming out on DVD. It's the worst TV show I've ever seen. John K. "pulled out all the stops", alright: the gross-out humor and juvenile shock jock horseshit was turned up to 11, with some homophobia thrown in for good measure. Ren & Stimpy's sexual relationship, once subtextual, was made explicit and not in an accepting, open-minded "coming out of the closet" kind of way. It was played purely for shock value and cheap laughs. There is no redeeming value to the plots or characters. It's John K.'s id on full display, and it fucking sucks.

The animation is very lively, since that's the only thing Kricfalusi thinks matters in a cartoon. It was lively to an extreme fault. From the book:

During the production of the episode Fire Dogs 2, Kricfalusi came up with a “really stupid rule,” Cory said, that “you were never allowed to hold a frame of drawing. You always had to have it changing.” Hence, Ren and Stimpy have an instant reaction to every single frame of an animated Ralph Bakshi on the toilet, gesticulating incessantly, further undermining the difficulty his animators had in getting his drawings to work. [...]

This painstaking attention to every frame of film was the ultimate undoing of the show, financially and critically. Kricfalusi’s insistence on over-posing scenes in the layout stage goes against his maxim of returning to “cartoony” cartoons, as he became increasingly intent on instilling “human” acting into his characters. As he has noted, live-action actors do not act pose-to-pose, like in limited animation. Rather, you can “see the change in the thought process from one expression to the other and there’s a lot of things happening in between. The more subtle and rich that is, the more the audience believes it and the more real it seems.” Therefore, Kricfalusi’s rule of never using the same expression twice is a means to this end and why Ren gesticulates in a half-dozen ways during a single bit of dialog.

End quote.

A naked Ralph Bakshi from Fire Dogs 2 holds Ren and Stimpy captive in his meaty arms. They all have distorted expressions of non-specific misery.

The author's attitude towards John K. in the book is odd. He correctly takes him to task for all the ways his ego got in the way of making a good show, but at the same time I feel like Komorowski gives him far too much credit. His animation-above-all ideology makes him treat John K. as the savior of all cartoons for bringing back the Looney Tunes style, and I don't think that factor is nearly as important as he makes it out to be. It was a factor, sure, but there are so many other elements I think were equally or more important. None of my childhood memories of the show are about how good the animation is. As a child I never once thought "wow, this is good because it's like the old Looney Tunes cartoons!". Sure, I watched Looney Tunes as a kid, but I didn't hold it up as the be-all end-all of entertainment. That's apparently the lens through which Komorowski viewed the show, and that's fine if it's his special interest, but he constantly shits on every other form of animation without really justifying his criticism. Doug and Rugrats weren't as animation-first as Ren & Stimpy, but they certainly had more artistic merit than the toy commercial cartoons of the 1980s.³ As an anxious nerdy kid whose daydreams bounced between fantasy and catastrophe, and who eschewed "masculine" pursuits like sports in favor of "feminine" ones like journaling, Doug was more relatable to me than anything I'd ever seen on TV or in film. It helped me feel less alone, like I'm not the only one who had these sort of thoughts, and it helped me feel like it might be possible for me to have friends in spite of my weird brain. It was the closest thing I had at the time to "representation." But the author paints every cartoon that's not Looney Tunes or Ren and Stimpy with the same brush, disregarding any potential value because of the "bad animation", and that left a bad taste in my mouth.

My favorite parts of the book were the ones where he describes the production process. He made it very clear that everyone who worked on Ren & Stimpy did so with an incredible amount of passion and dedication. I can still go back and enjoy Ren & Stimpy the way I can't with, say, Woody Allen films, and it's because I know how little Kricfalusi ultimately had to do with it. His main role in the production was 1. coming up with the funny cat and dog characters,⁴ and 2. getting out of his team's way. That's an oversimplification, but fuck it, that's what he deserves. Bob Camp, Jim Smith, Lynne Naylor and the rest of the team were able to make a good show in spite of John K.'s narcissistic self-sabotage, and the show would've been better without him from the beginning. Adult Party Cartoon should be the only proof anyone needs.

Yeah, the Games Studio era had some stinkers, but so did the John K. era. Here the author's opinions about what makes a good cartoon diverge radically from my own; he doesn't discredit the entire Games run, but in his appendiceal episode guide, none of the Games episodes are given the highest 4-star rating; in the John K. era, he correctly identifies Space Madness and Stimpy's Invention as two of the best episodes, while simultaneously giving four-star ratings to Man's Best Friend, the loathsome George Liquor vehicle Nickelodeon rightly refused to air, and Svën Höek, a tedious slog of an episode devoid of any wit or charm, which leans on one joke for the entire episode. I hated it even as a kid. They both feel like they wouldn't be out of place in the Adult Party Cartoon era, but they're both exemplified I guess because the animation is good or whatever.

Meanwhile Bob Camp's In The Army, one of the episodes that consistently cracks me up even today, is given a paltry **½, I reckon because it's mostly sight gags, timing and Camp's brilliantly unhinged performance as the drill sergeant that elevates it, and not Looney Tunes-caliber animation.

A miserable Ren and a blissfully ignorant Stimpy are given KP Duty peeling h-bombs for their unit's mess hall as punishment for disobeying the Sarge.

Anyway, judgmental opinions aside, it's a good book and provided a lot of insight into how cartoons are made. It's a subject that fascinates me and I know very little about, so getting a peek into the technical process was a treat. Kricfalusi's sacking wasn't as dramatic or interesting as I thought it would be. The animation world was unready for a cartoon as technically intricate as Ren & Stimpy (the studio at Games continued to struggle with deadlines, a fact that John K. defenders were all too quick to point out) and John's obsession with control and refusal to work with others made the problem worse. After Adult Party Cartoon failed and Spümcø closed its doors, John resigned himself to his blog, where he came up with terrible ideas for cartoons, basked in the adoration of his misguided fans, hurled abuse at anyone who critiqued his crackpot ideas, and sold NFTs charmingly named "inbred kitties".

"If you want to be a genius, it's easy. All you gotta say is, 'everything stinks'! Then you're never wrong." The elderly and desiccated Wilbur Cobb, legendary cartoon director, lectures Ren and Stimpy from behind his mahogany desk in a creepy, poorly-lit office.

The book doesn't really get into John's Post-R&S disgrace, and I guess there aren't a lot of reasons to. It's the story of Ren and Stimpy, and that story ended in 2006.

The book got a second edition in 2017; I don't know how much is changed compared to the version I read, but it's hard to imagine 4 years of hindsight would make it worse, so that's probably the one to check out if you can. The Buzzfeed article where John's victims spoke out references a line in the book about "a girl he had been dating since she was fifteen years old", and that's not in my version, so hopefully it paints a more complete picture of the person John was and is.

Thad Komorowski has his own blog, where he expresses animation opinions that are slightly more level-headed; in recent years he's become more involved with animation restoration and preservation, and his company is currently fulfilling a kickstarter for a collection of Paul Terry's "Aesop's Fables" cartoons from the 1920s, which I think is an excellent use of his passion and expertise. I wish him the best.

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