#14: The Phoenix Issue

It was supposed to be a simple summer holiday, I swear. Write to you in mid-July, then take two weeks, and be back with issue #14 right as the late summer heat waves roll over the countryside.

Instead, here we are, five months later, on the very last day of 2023.

The main reason for the unexpected hiatus was that I got a new job (🎉) and the interview and onboarding process took up most of my energy and focus in the past few months. So, yay for me, I guess, but also sorry for leaving you without unannoying reading material for so long.

Anyway, I'm here again — rising like a certain crimson-feathered bird from a heap of grey ash.

I want to thank you for this year! Extremely Unannoying started back in January of 2023, and I sent you 14 issues throughout the year (including this one). I had fun writing those emails and sharing some, hopefully amusing, tidbits about this weird and wonderful world we inhabit. I hope you also had fun reading them.

I have plans and exciting ideas for 2024, but we'll talk about those in the next issue. For now, I want to leave you with something special to close off this year of our lord, 2023.

For the past few weeks, I have been working on a single essay. It's about one of my dearest movies, the Disney animated feature, Tangled. Working on this piece was an unusually emotional experience, and I hope you will find the story as engrossing to read as it was to write for me.

So this time around, for the last time in 2023, there will be no smorgasbord of things from across the internet — only one, single link. This one:

Unbraided – The story of how Tangled remade animation forever

I wish you a happy read and a very happy New Year!

See you in the next issue! 👋

– Laszlo