Ryan Estrada

They stopped the haunted house to ask me if I could please stop politely greeting the ghosts.

Okay, apparently if you successfully avoid recommended videos on any social media site for a decade but send your wife one (1) otter reel it turns your phone into a 24 hour otter video delivery device and I am all the way into it.

It's otter baby training season in the river by my house so I get to see little dudes catch their first fish all by themselves and their mom totally didn't do all the work and let them think they caught it how dare you.

This is how you create curious kids. Our cartoons used to be weird and inexplicable as hell, and as such became a lifelong puzzle where decades later we solve mysteries we thought we'd forgotten about.

Not a single parent has filed a book challenge in Palm Beach in two years. The district just removed 1800 books anyway, because AI told them to. There are many reasons that is unthinkable but let's not forget AI DOES NOT HAVE INFORMATION ABOUT THE BOOKS. IT CANNOT READ THEM. It just makes crap up!

Imagine doing something as bad as book banning, and also doing it so badly. I don't know if this is the same custom AI that recommended banning imaginary books I made up, or if they just asked ChatGPT. Hopefully we get a list of those 1800+ books soon, keep an eye on @flfreedomread.bsky.social.

I've had two library events where nobody showed up. The first was a Chicago Public Library event where ICE was literally outside the building clearing out the street. We did the event anyway to an empty room as an F You to La Migra. The second was today, just because errybody tired.

Zoom visits are fun because sometimes it's an auditorium of 200 people and sometimes it's an excited teen who likes the book, an old lady who just likes events, and a rando they grabbed out of the magazine section because they felt awkward to have only two people.

I checked and it's been a full decade that I've been trying to peer pressure every publisher I work with to license Columbo comics so I can write one, and yesterday I finally bullied @ironspike.bsky.social into it and the rights holder sent back an immediate no. Someone hates money!

I know not everything needs to be recycled forever but an entire generation inexplicably obsessed with a howcatchem procedural from the 60s wants to write comics and Lucas arts-style point and click adventure games and then also buy those same comics and games.

My reaction to this article is 50% "this is much bigger and more dangerous than I thought, we have to be so careful" and 50% "you can string them along into organizing a fake book club? Rad, let me scrape my spam folder for a good one."

Just a few blocks from the university where Hyun Sook fought for the right to read is now the home of the Changwon World Children's Literature Festival! I'll be there this weekend to discuss how local stories inspired our books and encourage kids to tell their own Changwon stories!

We used to hide the fact that the "Anjeon City" in the book was actually Changwon because the history we were telling wasn't exactly positive but the mayor gave us an award for telling the story and the city is celebrating it so we will say so proudly.

Usually updating my website means adding more stuff but I've done so much stuff that this time I'm removing all of the podcast and film sections because I do so much dang stuff it makes my website too complicated. Let's focus just on comics. All my other work is secret stuff you can find elsewhere.

My mom (a) is a super tough lady who refuses to admit even the slightest inconvenience (b) always needs surgery and (c) can't have even the mildest anesthetic. All her updates are like "voted today, then got my knee replaced while fully conscious, and went to Farmer Jack. Normal day."

Voting is the coolest. It may not always seem like it because you're often making imperfect choices. But make the choice that inches us closer to where we need to be, and you just helped save the world.

I almost made a much snarkier post, but after interviewing and working with so many people who risked their lives for the right to vote, and learning how the dork-asses they elected instead of true evil were a step toward true change, I know it all matters as a first step.

There seems to be a real concerted effort to mass-trick celebrities into seeming MAGA. From Daily Wire movies using fake production companies and scripts to lock actors into contracts to headlines that misrepresent real quotes.

Right after that I saw a post about how Daniel Radcliffe was raging against woke remakes changing characters to be black. It was him when he was 20 talking about the hair color of a dang horse. That is Onion article levels of willfully misunderstanding. I don't think it's all a coincidence.

There seems to be a real concerted effort to mass-trick celebrities into seeming MAGA. From Daily Wire movies using fake production companies and scripts to lock actors into contracts to headlines that misrepresent real quotes.

I was disappointed about Danny Trejo's pro-ICE movie. But his son said they used faked names and an altered script. At 82 Trejo had no idea what Daily Wire was even if they'd been honest. Now he's locked into a contract with strict non disparagement clauses, and many others seem to be trapped too.

One of the free virtual workshops I do is a Choose Your Own Author Visit. Readers roll dice and pick cards from a deck to decide what happens. Recently, someone finally chose my favorite card in the deck. I truly had no idea how to use the tarot set I got free at a festival, but I I improvised.

It is a super fun workshop because one person picks a question card and we have a serious discussion about history then 20 seconds later there's a beatbox battle.