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We arrived safely back in Japan. After forgetting last year that you can’t fit a family of five and three weeks’ worth of luggage in a single taxi, I was determined not to make the same mistake twice. This year, we sent our luggage home via Kuroneko Yamato. It was a little disappointing that despite dropping it off at 6.30 am, they weren’t able to deliver it until the next day but it did mean that we could all fit into one taxi.
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On the weekend, I took Emma to meet with a former classmate from her English school to see Moana 2. I’m really surprised how successful this film has been at the box office in comparison with 2023’s Wish. Neither movie is great but for all Wish’s flaws, I thought the music was at least passable. Multiple times during Moana 2’s running time, I found myself praying for them to reprise something from the first movie’s soundtrack as a palate cleanser.
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Monday was Coming of Age Day (Wikipedia) and I took the extra day at home to watch Moana on Disney+. This movie is great. I don’t like it as much as Frozen but more than I did back in 2017 and I agree even more with my friend David’s argument that the run of Disney films from Tangled to Encanto should really be seen as the Second Disney Renaissance (as a period comparable to the First Disney Renaissance. That Wikipedia article posits that the 2009–2019 run of films is the Disney Revival but (1) The Princess and the Frog shouldn’t be included (it’s a different animation style and better fits with the unsuccessful post-Renaissance films) and (2) regardless of its box office performance, Encanto, has to be part of the group.
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There’s a fair amount of handwringing about the death of the web, and of blogging in particular, but this week I came across three of the best pieces I’ve read in some time:
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James Somers’s ‘I should have loved biology’ (admittedly from 2020) made me completely reevaluate my lack of interest in biology.
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Maggie Appleton’s ‘Growing a Human’ is excellent.
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Ian Henry’s ‘Building Bauble’ is admittedly only of interest to programmers but, for those of you who are programmers, it’s amazing.
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Oh, and while nowhere in the same category as the previous three, I also published ‘Recommended Directory Structure for Janet Packages’. As that crisp title suggests, it’s my recommendation for how to structure a software package written in the Janet programming (so about as niche a piece of writing as you could possibly get).
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I feel like 2024 was a bit of a disappointment on the video essay front but 2025 is already off to a crackerjack start:
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Pat Finnerty released the ninth episode in his ‘What Makes This Song Stink’ series, this time about ‘Lonely Road’ (the extremely successful recent interpolation of John Denver’s classic ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’). I think I’ve said similar things when linking to Finnerty’s essays in the past but his bizarre pastiche of direct-to-camera explication, so-bad-its-good animation and relatively complex musical analysis is the kind of thing that could only exist on the Internet. It had me in tears of laughter at various points.
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It is admittedly from last year but Christopher Bingham has a very fun fan theory about when Truman Burbank, the titular character of The Truman Show, realises he’s in a TV show. Like all the best fan theories it’s almost certainly wrong and changes the way you see the entire movie.
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The song everyone will always associate with Swedish group The Cardigans is of course ‘Lovefool’. But there’ll forever be a soft spot in my heart for ‘My Favourite Game’ (Apple Music) from 1998’s Gran Turismo.
