Every Day Carry

Tuesday March 18th, 2025

Tags: archive, life, personal, photos, review

I'm not that big on stuff, but the few possessions I do have, I'm pretty attached to. I've seen a few folks post their everyday carry or personal inventories, so I thought it'd be fun to share mine. This is all stuff I've found that works best for my personal context; if yours is similar to mine, you may find some of it useful. I'm not making a commission or anything, this is all stuff I actually recommend.

Backpack

• Red Oxx Sky Train

This was a very expensive purchase I made in 2017, when I was still single and making what (for the time) was a decent income. It was a "buy it for life" decision, because I was sick of buying cheap backpacks and having them fall apart within a year. This one's a little beat up, and some of the zippers have broken off, but I don't doubt it'll be a functional backpack for the rest of my life. It has a lifetime warranty, and I could probably send it back and have the zippers fixed, but that could take weeks and in that time I wouldn't have a backpack, so I haven't taken them up on it yet. I think visible mending is cool, but the paperclips are maybe not the coolest example of it. I'd like to figure out a more attractive solution.

Wallet

• Wanderings leather passport wallet

I bought this when I got my passport in 2016. It's held together quite well (the passport, not so much.) I don't really care about the RFID blocking, I don't think having my credit card data skimmed from the NFC chip is a plausible threat model, this was just the most affordable leather passport wallet I could find at the time. So far it's been a very good buy.

Watch

• Timex Expedition Scout

Like the backpack, I bought this because I was sick of buying new watches every year. I've had this one for about 3 years and the fabric band is holding up well; more importantly, it's designed so I can replace it myself without special tools if it ever does break. Sorry about the scratch, that's my fault. I try not to think about it.

Headphones

• 3M Worktunes Connect

Critical piece of gear. Wireless hearing protector headphones help me go out into the world without my worst sensory issues being triggered. Vital for bus rides, walking near traffic, big box grocery stores, obnoxious neighbors, hot rod drivers, fireworks, crowds, fans and air conditioners, sirens, pretty much every aspect of urban life. I replaced the foam ear cushions with the silicon gel ones so I can wear them all day, which I do. Both things typically last 1-2 years.

Phone

• Samsung Galaxy A16

(artist's impression)

I wrote about this in a previous entry. It's "fine". It's also my camera, ebook reader, mp3 player, GPS, compass, calculator, calendar, translator, notebook and alarm clock, so it cuts down on the number of things I have to carry around every day considerably. There are a lot of downsides to the smartphone business model, but needing to buy and replace all of those things separately would arguably be worse. 🤷‍♀️

Speaker

• Altec Lansing Baby Boom XL

Shockingly good for its size. I wouldn't want to listen to all my music on it, but for occasional background music or podcast listening, it punches above its weight. Doesn't get nearly as much use as the headphones, but it comes in handy sometimes.

What's actually in my bag

Aside from the speaker, I always have snacks, medicine, band aids, candy (andes mints are a favorite), cough drops, a bike lock, tape, a sharpie, my work badge and lanyard, deodorant, cleansing wipes, a wide-toothed comb and a detangling comb.

What's not

• A laptop

It's too bulky to carry around all the time and I'm rarely in a situation where it would get any use. I'll bring it if I know I'll need it.

• A hacked 2DSXL

It's a very good handheld, but again I don't have enough occasions to use it that it's worth being part of my EDC. But, it's indispensable on laundry day.

• A water bottle

I don't find myself in many places with a water cooler or drinking fountain, so this wouldn't get much use either. I spend most of my time at home and work, where I drink from a glass.

...but should be

• Some kind of multitool

My keychain is a carabiner-style clip with a few fold-out tools, but it was just a cheap promotional giveaway. I could stand to get a good one, or at the very least a decent knife.

• A proper first-aid kit

I have some band-aids and OTC painkillers cuz that's what I need the most, but it's never a bad idea to have a more complete kit.

Thanks for reading 🦝

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Flow (2024) Review and Analysis

Sunday March 09th, 2025

Tags: archive, cats, movies, review

I'm not super into movies, generally. I'm not saying that to be contrarian jerk, there are just entertainment media that work better for my specific brain. My primary interest is games, and then after that, books. Then video essays, movies, comics, blogs, and finally TV. So movies are pretty high up there, they're just not my go-to.

When I do watch movies, I prefer animation over live action, and I prefer the dialogue to be sparse and naturalistic. Basically I want a movie to be as far as possible from the uncanny artifice of a stage play. What people who make movies ("Hollywood") think people want to see other people pretend to do in a movie typically holds very little interest for me. Movie dialogue is less interesting than a book, which engages my imagination. Action set pieces are duller in movies than in games, where I'm not just observing but participating in the action. What I want from a movies is naturalistic or surreal storytelling that engages me through primarily visual means.

I'm also not trying to be a jerk when I say I initially dismissed Flow as "another indie cat thing". We've seen a spate of indie games with cat protagonists recently, many of which feature a "cozy" aesthetic: The Good Life, Stray, Little Kitty Big City, Calico, Cat Quest, Catlateral Damage, etc. I don't think these games are bad, and many of them are on my "to-play" list, there's just a lot of them, there's too much new stuff all the time to keep up, and since I'm not that interested in movies, I mentally filed Flow as Another One of Those. Not out of spite or apathy, but because I'm being bombarded with information all the time, and I need heuristics lest my brain become overloaded and my head explode like some sort of zany 1980s movie robot.

Anyway, through osmosis I started learning facts about Flow that made me realize it might be exactly the kind of movie for me. The director had only made small solo films before. They don't have dialogue. He's been animating since he was 16. Flow is his first major feature-length film, and it has not only no dialogue but no human characters at all. It was animated entirely in Blender and rendered on the director's personal computer.¹ Despite all this, it won the academy award for best animated film.

Now, I put no stock whatsoever in industry awards; the gulf between what the academy cares about and what I care about is so wide you could drive two container ships through it.² But when a movie totally out of left field win a big award, it's usually a sign I'm going to like it. I'm probably the most cynical about the "best animated feature" award, because it might as well be called "the award for whatever made Disney the most money last year". Like, what movies did Disney and DreamWorks release? Those are your nominees. What was the most successful Disney movie? That's your winner. Time after time beautiful, unique, mature animated films are glossed over and often not even nominated to make room for more Disney slop. It's nauseating.

So when a movie bucks all the "Oscar movie" trends and wins, it's usually because it's so good it's impossible to ignore.³

To be honest, bringing a black cat into our family is what clinched it. Someone made a movie about Sunny? I have to see it. Gints Zilbalodis, the director, has made a point of specifying that the poster cat in Flow isn't black, it's dark gray. I don't think this is out of any kind of anti-black-cat bias,⁴ I think it's just the pragmatism of a filmmaker: if the cat was truly black, it would be too hard to see. As someone who's now taken more photos of a black cat than I've ever taken of anything, I get it. Even with my fancy new phone camera with all the HDR and low-light compensation, she can still appear to be a black hole from which no light can escape. Her facial features in particular aren't always easy to make out, and in a movie where all communication is through facial and body language, that's important.

Anyway, Flow is brilliant. The animations are incredible. It's the best-looking 3D CGI film I've seen in, well, possibly ever. It eschews the photorealism of bigger-budget 3DCG in favor of a more impressionistic look that (1) actually looks like animation, and (2) shows animals that are more lifelike and "real" than reality. The score is phenomenal. The sound design is perfect. The story is incredible, all the more so for being conveyed entirely without words. It transcends genres and cultures. It's a masterpiece.

You should watch it, and you should go in knowing nothing else about it. It's currently only streaming on HBO Max, but there are plenty of folks out there willing to lend you a digital copy. You just have to do a little soul-searching. (I intend to get the DVD once it's available.)

I'm going to give my analysis of the movie below, and spoil everything, so read on only if you've watched the film.

Sunny Interlude

Sunny fact: she's a quarter bat on her mother's side.

Analysis ⚠️Spoilers⚠️

Flow is a movie about cultures clashing in the face of ecological crisis. One of these cultural battles has already taken place: the humans have been gone for a long time. The only physical evidence remaining is the ruins, the objects, the artifacts. There are no bodies or bones to be seen. It's clear from the boats hanging from trees that the flood has happened before, and took humanity with it. It's not as clear-cut as death by drowning, however. There's something mystical happening.

Animals are central to the cosmology of this universe. The rural culture recognized their importance, and lived lives of simple joy inspired by the animals around them. It's clear that they lived in a peaceful egalitarian society, because they had much time to devote to great works honoring the animals they lived with. In contrast, the urban culture spurned nature and lived in great cities, separate from and in defiance of the animal spirits that protect them. They started worshiping themselves, and this is reflected in the only human form seen in the entire movie: A great statue of a person, submerged except for the head and one uplifted arm, reminiscent of Ozimandias' half-sunken visage. The floods are their divine retribution.

When the movie begins, a second cultural battle is in progress, this one among the animals. Each animal species embodies one of the fatal flaws of homo sapiens: the secretary birds, whose wings give them natural dominion over the other animals, represent our lust for power and violence. The lemurs, whose cleverness and dextrous paws let them manipulate the objects left behind, represent our materialism and vanity. The capybara, who can swim well enough to weather the floods and subsist indefinitely on the plentiful fruit, represents our apathy and complacency. The dogs, who are loyal but short-sighted, represent our impulsiveness and inability to look to the future. The cat, who stands alone, represents our fear and solipsism. The deer, who are there when the floods come and when they subside, represent nature, both good and bad; the overwhelming force, the great abundance, and the indifference to creatures who get swept up in the waves. The "whales"... I have a theory about them, which I'll get to later.

Each of the central characters is an outcast in some way. The cat and the capybara are solitary by nature. The dog got separated from her pack. The peaceful secretary bird giving the cat a fish is taken as a sign of weakness, so it was cruelly beaten and cast out of the flock, its wings battered and rendered unusable. The lemur is desperate to collect trinkets and gain the acceptance of his kind, but upward mobility in a property-based hierarchy is a myth. The ones who accumulated wealth first make the rules.

It is their differences that make them come together, and it is their differences that make them the only ones who can stop the floods for good. We see in the background huge, ancient stone spires, older than any of the ruins that surround them. We see the cat dream of being in a strange stone labyrinth at the center of the spires, encircled by innumerable deer. The cat is the POV character, but I think the other animals also dream of this place. The outcasts are all drawn towards it. It's important. They don't know exactly why, but they know their survival depends on it. The other animals are too absorbed in their petty power struggles; if they dream of this place, they're unable to see its significance.

As the unlikely heroes come together, they slowly grow to trust each other, rely on each other, and learn from each other. The cat is shown kindness and learns to trust the other animals. She learns to swim by watching the capybara, and catching fish becomes key to her own and the dogs' survival. The capybara learns that they can't just drift about aimlessly, they have to take the rudder and gain control over their destinies. The lemur learns that his value isn't defined by the objects he holds, or the acceptance of the elite, but his relationship with the animals around him. The dog learns to control her impulses, and that saving her friends is more important than chasing the rabbit. The secretary bird learns that, although it was badly hurt and exiled by its own kind, it is worthy of love, and so are the animals around it.

When the bird finally reaches the labyrinth, and is drawn up into the northern lights, it showed the spirits courage, kindness and compassion above and beyond its nature. It's given back its flight, and is drawn into the other world, presumably an animal paradise. It will soar above the clouds and look over the others forevermore. Satisfied, the spirits withdraw their judgment and let the flood waters recede.

As the water drains, our heroes have one final crisis to overcome, safely navigating the plunging depths, which they do with the power of courage and teamwork. In the final scene, the animals discover the sea creature who helped them along the way, the whale or sea monster or leviathan. It's stranded, unable to get back to a body of water and not long for this earth. The animals show it respect and heart-wrenching tenderness. I'm tearing up again thinking about it.

The whales, I think, are us. That's why there are no human bodies or bones, no overflowing cemeteries and crematoria, no sign that we were in any danger whatsoever. That's why they're not just whales, but strange abominations, the only animal of supernatural origin in the film. The humans didn't die, and I don't think they simply vanished, I think they were changed. For defying nature, the humans were cursed with a form that is completely subservient to the whims of nature. They live and die by the coming and waning of the flood.

For more on humans being turned into horrendous whale monsters as divine punishment for man's hubris, see Final Fantasy X (2001)

This leviathan must have known its fate: by helping the animals on their quest, it knew it would be unable to save itself. It made the ultimate sacrifice so that the animals might live.

The final somber moments of the film are a reflection on us. We, too, are animals. We, too, can be redeemed. We have a choice: we can respect nature or we can worship ourselves. Human civilization chose the latter, and paid dearly for their egotism. But in the post-credits scene we see one of the sea creatures swimming freely in the open ocean. It's a hopeful message: there is a future for us. Whether we embrace it is up to us 🦝

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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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