More comedy and less sang-froid than the anime series. It's evidently very much its own thing and I'm looking forward to it.

COWBOY BEBOP is an action-packed space Western about three bounty hunters, aka "cowboys," all trying to outrun the past.

I've been using a reMarkable Tablet, for years now. It's great for taking notes at my day job. I waste no paper when I jot down meeting minutes, annotate stories and starting off new pieces of writing in long hand. I dig how easy it is to organize my notes on the tablet and that I can back them up to the cloud—including, recently, to Dropbox and Google Drive. — Read the rest

At a recent Henrico County, Virginia school board meeting, a number of prestigious names signed up for public comment: Phil McCracken, Eileen Dover, Wayne Kuhr, and others. Curiously, these luminaries were all in absentia.

Perhaps they were grabbing a drink with Al Koholic down at the Tube Bar. — Read the rest

At a school board meeting in Henrico County, Virginia, a number of people were put on the agenda to be called by board chariman Roscoe D. Cooper III during the public speaking time. Sadly, Phil McCracken, Eileen Dover, Wayne Kerr and other interestingly-named individuals didn't make it. — Read the rest

Jolyon Ralph created a guide to the rocks and minerals of Minecraft: "Have you ever wondered how similar the Minecraft resources are to rocks and minerals in the real world? Let's find out!"

"Wait," I hear you shout, "Dirt isn't a rock!"

(This is an item from my newsletter, The Magnet. Subscribe here! — Mark)

During the pandemic my family has watched anime almost every night. Here are some of our favorites. Most are available on multiple streaming services.

The Promised Neverland Now in its second season, this series is about a group of kids living in an orphanage in the year 2045. — Read the rest

AnimeGan2 is a neural network that converts photos into images that look like anime art. It was trained with a data set of anime feature films by Hayao Miyazaki (The Wind Rises). Makoto Shinkai (Your Name and Weathering with You), and Satoshi Kon (Paprika).

“It is what it is.” — Michelle Obama

CNN profiles 91-year-old James Hong, whose imdb filmography counts 439 roles, making him a top candidate as the most prolific actor in Hollywood. Hong says the true count is even higher: he's to be seen in at least 600 movies stretching back nearly 70 years. — Read the rest

A video from Mako, the human guardian of this otter, Sakura, and a cat named Mochi.

On Friday evening my family and I watched a wildly original Japanese movie called We Are Little Zombies. We loved the 8-bit special effects and soundtrack, crazy colorful costumes, and original songs. It's written and directed by Makoto Nagahisa and was the winner of the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Originality at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. — Read the rest

Sam Makovech of Ars Technica reviews the 8Bitdo Zero 2 ([amazon_link asins='B081HML6MP' template='PriceLink' store='boingboing' marketplace='US' link_id='7a15fb11-3ba7-49a2-9bb4-d41d4776fee6'] on Amazon), an adorable gamepad controller you can use with a Switch, PC, or Mac. His overall impression of the meant-for-travel gamepad is favorable.

From Ars Technica:

To my pleasant surprise, 8BitDo starts this gamepad off with a crucial emphasis on its D-pad.

“We're building a wall in Colorado. We're building a beautiful wall.” — Donald Trump

NYT publisher calls Trump's anti-press rhetoric 'global threat'

Just another day living under our very normal white supremacist government. Justice Department officials reportedly emailed immigration judges a white nationalist blog post that included various attacks on Jewish people.

Jeff Crilly and his friends were participating in a mako shark fishing tournament off the Jersey Coast when a different kind of shark came by for a snack of chum. Yes, they're gonna need a bigger boat. John Chisholm, a shark expert at the Massachusetts Division of Fish and Wildlife, estimates the 16- to 18-foot Great White weighs as much as 3,500 pounds. — Read the rest

A year ago, Benjamin "Mako" Hill gave a groundbreaking lecture explaining how Big Tech companies had managed to monopolize all the benefits of free software licenses, using a combination of dirty tricks to ensure that the tools that were nominally owned by no one and licensed under free and open terms nevertheless remained under their control, so that the contributions that software developers made to "open" projects ended up benefiting big companies without big companies having to return the favor.

Writing new software licenses is a seemingly irresistible vice in the free and open source world, and the decades since the first GPL have been filled with bitter disputes and splits over licensing, with new licenses proliferating for motives both noble and base.

Swiss banking giant UBS has been hit with the largest fine in French history: €3.7b, the result of a 7-year investigation of the bank's role in helping the wealthiest French citizens hide €10b from tax authorities. The fine is more than ten times larger than the next-largest fine in French history, when HSBC paid €300m over its wrongdoing. — Read the rest

"He did nothing wrong," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said Wednesday about the secret payments Donald Trump made to two women during the 2016 Election via his attorney, who just became a convicted felon.