The film festival staff refused me entry to Weapons because I wasn't carrying my passport to prove I was old enough to watch it. I had to find a manager and say ma'am, I'm an old man. I have a gray beard. My film festival backpack is old enough to see this movie.

Hey who's that weird giant in a Student Ambassador shirt behind Maggie Kang in Cine21 Magazine?

I made these as a novelty, but dang, I encourage everyone doing networking to come up with some kind of business card bit like this. It's wild having a card people not only keep and remember, but bring other people to you to get more.

Banned Books Week is coming up! I always offer free virtual banned author talks to any school or library, but the message is vital so this year I'll extend it to any book store, book club, little free library, livestream, festival, pumpkin patch, birthday party, anywhere folks want to listen.

It was such a joy to do a virtual talk at San José State University last week. There were so many weirdos in attendance that I had to crop out 70% of the panoramic group photo they sent me just to get the image to fit on social media!

Want to read ethically by ditching Audible/Amazon, Spotify, &c? 💙📚 1. Your local library needs support & has free physical & audiobooks 2. Queer Liberation Library: free digital library for US LBGTQ folks 3. Libro.fm: Audible but pays indie bookshops 4. Bookshop.org: physical books from indies

The KPDH Singalong was so fun it made me want to go to a KPop show. There were posters outside for one, but I think someone ordered it off Wish.

Remember how the back of my head was in the trailer for Tempest for less than a second? There's a 10 story tall video billboard playing the trailer on Haeundae Beach. But since it's vertical video, I'm cropped out. Mike Wazowskied again! (This is so much more fun than actually being in the show)

I just walked out on a world premiere. Without Permission is marketed as a film made in secret while an oppressive government tried to stop it. I went in excited to celebrate freedom of expression. I walked out wishing -I- could have stopped it.

In line for the only showing of K Pop Demon Hunters Singalong in Korea, with special guest Maggie Kang, making cosplay kids' day by asking for their autographs. (And saying "hi Bobby!" To their dads.)

A Mom for Liberty who abandoned her trans kid stripped in a school board meeting to make some stupid bigoted point about bathrooms and got fired from her job at UC Davis. Of course, the "childrens books are too pornographic for schools" crowd hail her as a hero struck down by cruel cancel culture.

I'll say this for everyone. Watch Thelma with grandma. Use it to have a conversation about how this really happens and how it works. Also it is funny AF and shoulda won several Oscars.

It's gotten bad enough that I'm worried about whether I should delete my Banned Authors of Bluesky starter pack. Am I risking making folks easier to target? Dorks can and do come after me for what I say, but we all now have to worry about endangering others.

Too many non-working holidays in America. It is costing our Country $BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to keep all of these businesses closed. The workers don’t want it either! Soon we’ll end up having a holiday for every once working day of the year. It must change if- wait, I'm being told we have a new holiday.

Our KPop Demon Hunters show, featuring special guest Ryan Estrada @ryanestrada.com to give us the inside skinny on Korean culture. You can listen here and now! schoolofmovies.podbean.com/e/kpop-demon...

Interesting regarding AI and Kpop Demon Hunters 1/2

2/2

My first movie at BIFF was People and Meat, an adorable crime spree film about three elderly neighbors who very slowly dine and dash their way across Seoul to feel joy again.

I couldn't get tickets to the world premiere of Frankenstein in Imax. They sold out in milliseconds. My only choice was to get there 40 minutes early and wait in the standby line. Guillermo del Toro walked by, saw me waiting, and had his team give me one of his personal guest tickets.

When it's your first day and the sign guy asks the name of the hotel but you forgot.

Support the artists you like now because tomorrow you might not be able to find them.

if Jimmy Kimmel's political humor is too hot for you to handle, I'm not sure "snowflake" even cuts it as a term of derision for the level of fragility you've achieved

Every major talent that works for ABC and Disney should refuse to show up for work until Jimmy Kimmel is reinstated. Marvel movies need to shutdown. Ditto the sitcoms. Collective boycott. Corporations love money more than anything,& this will harm them and force them to do the right thing.

This year for the film festival, in addition to normal business cards, I got one that opens up and includes the entirety of Learn to Read Korean in 15 Minutes.

I was trying to post these without comment to subtly reference current events, but some news outlets are unironically inserting links to those very current events into the articles and not seeing the connection.

For this book, I completely rewrote and reillustrated a comic that I made in 2003 about the time I slept on a park bench in a typhoon. If you get How To Touch Grass and want to compare the two, send me a message and I'll send you a scan of the terrible original! Just a few days left to grab it!

I deleted my post about the claims that ChatGPT was used to write Soda Pop because there is question as to the validity. There are theories that AI was used to translate the Korean article and somehow added a sentence crediting itself? Will wait for more info.

Today marks the beginning of our Hispanic Heritage Month sale! Pick up STUDENT AMBASSADOR The Silver City by @ryanestrada.com and @axureneas.bsky.social or our anthology THE LIZARD PRINCE and Other South American Stories for 30% off, all into mid October! store.ironcircus.com/products/stu...

My nerdy thing that I do when I need to clear my head is trying to build Busan into the best place in the world for geocaching. I've designed 7 trails of 80 caches so far, each one unique and themed. I'm apparently the only person still hiding caches in Korea. @geocaching.bsky.social

Student Ambassador: The Missing Dragon is 5 years old today! At least that's when the book came out! I started writing it in the 90s. I started an abandoned version of it myself in the 00s, but it all came together when I teamed up with @axureneas.bsky.social and @ironcircuscomics.bsky.social

The Busan International Film Festival starts in 48 hours. I'm planning my schedule and training for party crashing. After 20 years of crashing, I have a lot of expertise but I still want to shave a few minutes off my opening party entrance to get in before Bong, Kang, Mann, and Del Toro leave.

A friend of mine has been talking all year about how once the regime kicked out all the immigrants, they'd realize how much damage it did to the country and start canceling passports to force Americans abroad to come home to make up the difference. I thought it he was being a conspiracy theorist.

Wrote and deleted a post about someone who doesn't deserve the attention. Here's my cool wife instead.

Who should play this character? Hollywood Producer: [Names the same ten popular actors he does every time] What about this other character who's meant to be an odd couple pairing with the first guy he's nothing like? Hollywood Producer:[sweating.] [Changes the order of names so no one notices.]

Hyun Sook and I traveled across the country to a town we'd never been to... and it turned out her hometown had sent a book bus! I'm glad the whole city is now as pro-reading as she was when she was a rebel book smuggler!

International shipping is too much of a hot mess for me to do my own unboxing of Flash Gordon Adventures... so my niece Claire did one on my behalf! Claire makes her own comics debut with an illustration in Punk Taco Adventures, also from @papercutzgn.bsky.social and @adamwallenta.bsky.social!

🧵

Listing every based-on-a-comic strip movie I could find on @letterboxd.social was interesting. Mostly in how few of these movies are based on comic strips any of us have heard of. letterboxd.com/ryanestrada/...

International shipping is too much of a hot mess for me to do my own unboxing of Flash Gordon Adventures... so my niece Claire did one on my behalf! Claire makes her own comics debut with an illustration in Punk Taco Adventures, also from @papercutzgn.bsky.social and @adamwallenta.bsky.social!

So the US begged, BEGGED Hyundai to build a factory in the US to provide jobs. They invested billions, and sent hundreds of their workers to get the factory ready and to their standards. Then the US pulled off the biggest single site Homeland Securit operation in history and arrested all 500 staff.

Literally begging you to post about Just Some Stuff. We will see the news I absolutely promise. Twenty people will repost the same exact thing about the news. Only you can post about a turtle you saw

You don't have to have a take.

I always post the dumb and funny things book banners do, because it shows they can be stopped. But in keeping an eye on them to get that info, I see some really reprehensible shit. Stuff that's hard to forget. I don't share that, because I'm not here to spread hate.

10 hours of hair, makeup, wardrobe, blocking, rehearsal, and shooting went into my scene as the Turkish Ambassador in Disney's Tempest. They paid me an extra 50 bucks to shave my beard. Yes, the below image did indeed end up being the entirety of my role. Best possible outcome. I am thrilled.

This is hugely important: If you use the Atlantic's author search tool, a TON of comics don't come up because they don't have creators listed. I just found like all my comics work looking directly and it sucks. So, make sure you're very thorough in your search.

Tuesday tidings! Joining @zerlinamaxwell.bsky.social: Creators of the upcoming graphic novel Good Old-Fashioned Korean Spirit Kim Hyun Sook & @ryanestrada.com + Kentucky Governor @andybeshearky.bsky.social! ☎️ 866-997-4748 📻 @siriusxmprog.bsky.social Ch. 127 siriusxm.us/Zerlina

Oh boy, the piracy advocates have found my posts about us getting our settlement checks and are big mad that I'm not grateful to piracy sites for "preserving" my very much in-print books via bootleg uncredited scans surrounded by scammy popups.

My agents sent an email to all their authors saying "if you wrote a book that came out before 2023, just assume it's been stolen. Fill out the form and if the lawyers find out you're owed money, they'll send it to you."

I found multiple iterations of "Witch Doctor" by searching LibGen, but none in the Atlantic's search engine. Some of the versions had author data like "Seifert,Brandon,(Screenwriter)" that wasn't searchable. Others had no author data, or other problems.

I know that Kendra Licari's "everyone makes mistakes" monologue upset a lot of people, but to be fair, she was voted Most Accident Prone in our high school yearbook (which I wrote for and she edited) so I guess it makes sense that she made the same mistake 100 times a day for two years.