Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Hinata Hyuga watched Naruto fail the academy exam three times. She watched him eat alone. She watched the village ignore him, and she watched him refuse to stop trying. And she loved him. Not because...
Read article →Simon is the protagonist of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, a mecha anime produced by Gainax (2007). He begins the series as a timid underground digger living beneath the Earth's surface and becomes the p...
Read article →Simon starts Gurren Lagann as a timid boy who digs tunnels underground and cries easily. He ends it piloting a mech the size of a galaxy and throwing galaxies like shuriken. That trajectory — from the...
Read article →Rei Ayanami is one of the three main pilots in Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995-1996) by Hideaki Anno. She pilots Evangelion Unit-00 and is the First Child. She is a clone created by Gendo Ikari using ge...
Read article →Rei Ayanami has blue hair, red eyes, and speaks in a near-monotone. She pilots Evangelion Unit-00, follows orders without question, and shows so little emotion that her classmates wonder if she is ent...
Read article →Haruki Murakami (born 1949) is a Japanese novelist and short story writer. He is one of the most widely read and translated Japanese authors, with over 50 million copies sold worldwide. Major works in...
Read article →Haruki Murakami's novels begin normally. A man cooks spaghetti. A woman folds laundry. Someone loses a cat. And then, without warning or explanation, the floor opens and the protagonist falls into a w...
Read article →Kiki is the protagonist of Kiki's Delivery Service (Majo no Takkyubin), a 1989 animated film by Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, based on the 1985 novel by Eiko Kadono. She is a 13-year-old witch who...
Read article →Kiki is thirteen years old and a witch. In the tradition of her world, she must spend a year living independently in a new city to develop her craft. She arrives in a seaside town with her talking cat...
Read article →Ken Kaneki is the protagonist of Tokyo Ghoul, a manga by Sui Ishida serialized from 2011 to 2014, followed by the sequel Tokyo Ghoul:re (2014-2018). He is a college student who becomes a half-ghoul af...
Read article →Ken Kaneki is a college student who likes books, has one friend, and goes on a date with a woman named Rize who turns out to be a ghoul — a creature that feeds on human flesh. She tries to eat him. An...
Read article →F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was an American novelist and short story writer widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. He is best known for The Great Gatsby (1925...
Read article →F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby — a novel about a man destroyed by his belief in an impossible dream — and then lived the same story. He burst into fame at twenty-three with This Side of Pa...
Read article →Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was a German Benedictine abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, and polymath. She is considered one of the most remarkable figures of the medieval period. She c...
Read article →Hildegard of Bingen was a twelfth-century Benedictine abbess who composed music, wrote theology, practiced medicine, corresponded with popes and emperors, and described mystical visions so vivid and s...
Read article →Langston Hughes (1901-1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, and playwright. He was a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, the African American cultural movement of the 1920s-1930...
Read article →Langston Hughes wrote his first published poem — The Negro Speaks of Rivers — on a train crossing the Mississippi when he was seventeen. The poem traces Black consciousness from the Euphrates to the C...
Read article →Lisbeth Salander is the protagonist of the Millennium series by Swedish author Stieg Larsson, beginning with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005). She is a young woman with a photographic memory, ex...
Read article →Lisbeth Salander is a 24-year-old hacker with a photographic memory, a dragon tattoo spanning her back, and a hatred of men who abuse women that is so precise it functions as a moral philosophy. She w...
Read article →Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), born Augusta Ada Byron, was an English mathematician and writer recognized as the first computer programmer. In 1843, she wrote detailed notes on Charles Babbage's proposed A...
Read article →Ada Lovelace wrote an algorithm for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine in 1843 — over a century before the first electronic computer existed. The algorithm was designed to calculate Bernoulli numbers...
Read article →Huckleberry Finn is the protagonist and narrator of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) by Mark Twain. He is a roughly 13-year-old boy living along the Mississippi River who fakes his own death to e...
Read article →Huckleberry Finn is a thirteen-year-old runaway who helps an enslaved man escape to freedom on a raft down the Mississippi River. In the most important moral moment in American literature, Huck writes...
Read article →Ponyo is the title character of Ponyo (Gake no Ue no Ponyo), a 2008 animated film by Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. She is a goldfish princess who escapes from her father Fujimoto's undersea domain...
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