David A. Conrad, Ph.D.

@davidaconrad.bsky.social

171 Followers 132 Following

Author of AKIRA KUROSAWA AND MODERN JAPAN (2022) Essayist for RAN 40th anniversary Blu-ray (2025) New book on postwar Asia in progress Part-time stay-at-home dad, adjunct, historian, old movie fan

Fuse beads of the flag from Seven Samurai alongside a small figurine of Akira Kurosawa

Crayon drawing of Mega Man surrounded by Mega Man 2 bosses

Portrait of Douglas MacArthur on an interior brick wall of a restaurant

John Cleese in How to Irritate People

So a lot of artists throughout history, especially in the 16th/17thc, did this for their imprimatura layer! Used old paints up in whatever random mix that became a grey under layer between the ground and the first painting layer

Screenshot of Dave Rees' Facebook announcement of the death of Dee Palmer

Walter White saying "Jesse what the fuck are you talking about"

Baseball diamond with players in motion under a pink sunset

Picture of black shirt with bull mascot and the word "Spurs"

Black shirt with kanji meaning Kesennuma, Japan

Picture of a children's book with an illustration of a triceratops playing with toy trucks

Upside down Texas flag on a wall

Elena of Avalor and her friends

Tomatoes on plant

The troll in Austin's Pease Park, plus a family - mine, as it happens!

Cover of THE RUSSIAN WAR MACHINE 1917-1945

Lengthy email containing no punctuation

A page from the comic strip "Little Nemo in Slumberland" featuring among other things an enormous turkey stomping on buildings.

Sir David Attenborough in front of greenery.

Picture of a band on stage. A seated man with a guitar is Willie Nelson

You mentioned climate change, and I think the social response to that offers a good example of what’s needed to address the nuclear problem. I talk to very smart young physicists all the time, graduate students and postdocs and professors, and I’ll often ask them, “What are you worried about? Tell me your top five most important concerns about anything.”

Number one, almost universally, is climate. Usually from there, it’s things like diversity, tenure or inflation. No one mentions nuclear war. And these people are physicists! When I start questioning—“Do you know how many missiles there are? Do you know how long it takes for Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin to push a button? Do you know what a one-megaton nuclear bomb does?”—it seems they know nothing.

Screenshot from the film The Young Girls of Rochefort. Gene Kelly sits at a piano with subtitles reading, "Stupidity has left me demoralized."

Some data about the 1988 movie CAMP DE THIAROYE, and a poster of it featuring a WWII-era French African soldier in a red hat.

Hans Moleman phone booth meme

Bright green bug on a leaf

Excerpt from a magazine article about fruit describing avocados in unflattering terms

portrait of 19th-century historical figure Stephen F Austin

Picture of a small green tomato on a tomato plant

A tomato plant with several yellow buds

Screenshot of a board game on BoardGameArena.com saying, in part, "Tipperary: Build Your Own Irish Paradise
(Irish accent: ON) 'Have ye ever dreamed of a land where the grass is as green as can be? where the sheep are as fluffy as the clouds over Cork City? Then Tipperary is the place for ya. You’re building your own little patches of the Emerald Isle, and let me tell ya, there’s'

Uncropped picture from original post, featuring the caption "Legens Reunited" [sic]

AI slop from a Facebook page called "Golden Era Hip Hop" featuring illustrations of Chuck Norris, John Wayne, Bruce Lee, Lee Van Cleef, and I think Brandon Lee but it also looks like Alain Delon. Includes the text "A legend who will never be forgotten. RIP Chuck Norris"

Screenshot from The Omen (1976) featuring noted Tucker Carlson lookalike Damien

Paint sample called After Rain

Screenshot from Kurosawa's High and Low featuring a man standing behind bars, looking agonized, and another man sitting on the other side of the bars.

Screenshot from Rashomon depicting bandit and samurai woman, with subtitles reading "I may finally lose my faith in the human soul."

Japanese poster for Kurosawa's 1947 movie One Wonderful Sunday (Subarashiki Nichiyobi)

Figurine of Akira Kurosawa under yellow flowers in a garden bed.

Picture of the harbor of the city of Kesennuma, Miyagi prefecture, Japan, with the text "Remembering 15 years ago today and the journey to rebuild. Tohoku pride."

Screenshot of the opening scene of RAN (1985) in which several medieval Japanese nobles sit on a field of grass.

Bokuzen Hidari as Yohei in Seven Samurai, looking characteristically anguished

Dino-shaped keychain toy with poppable features where hands are, but also where breasts might be

Passage from Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End starting "Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? If you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that's available at the turn of a switch? No dinner that people are becoming passive sponges - absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won't be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV!"

Picture of Lord Hidetora from RAN (1985), looking aghast and disheveled

Picture of the front cover of Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke, on a red grate background.

Sir Bedevere holding a bird in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Dad working in My Neighbor Totoro, doctor saying "Madness! Madness!" in Bridge on the River Kwai, and Chris Marker's narrator saying "Please excuse these disorganized thoughts" in Sans Soleil.

Campaign poster reading "The Shamwow Guy: Vote Shlomi" with a picture of Vince Offer Shlomi.

Screenshot of text from NPR article on Trump administration changes to nuclear reactor safety standards. Text at https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5677187/nuclear-safety-rules-rewritten-trump

Screenshot of spam email to me purporting to be from the famous author Thomas Pynchon.

Screenshot of the film The Big Sky (1952), including actors Dewey Martin and Elizabeth Threatt on a boat.

Picture of a black, rectangular bar of soap and its box, which reads "Scottish Haggis Black Pepper Soap Bar"

A WWI-era poster from the US Food Administration. A woman with short blonde hair wears American flag-themed clothing and has her arms outstretched to the viewer. The text below her reads "Be Patriotic: sign your country's pledge to save the food."

Screenshot of a spam email purportedly from Neil Gaiman, initially misspelled Neil geiman, and finally misspelled Karin.

Screenshot of an NPR headline from December 1, 2025 that says "An independent effort says AI is the secret to topple 2-party power in Congress." A generic illustrated graphic shows computer screens, party logos, and graphs.

Screenshot of author's Letterboxd review of the 2025 film Nuremberg, stating: "To call it a pale shadow of Judgement at Nuremberg (1962) does a disservice to the latter by implying a connection. This film fails, thoroughly, at its own uncertainly-attempted goals and at the goals it ought to have had, and it fails at a time whose needs magnify that failure."

Praying mantis on window screen

Painting on a rock of the anime character Porco Rosso. The rock is sitting in the palm of a hand for size comparison.