Sneak Peek into a Morning Mail

This is one actual issue of The Morning Mail — the daily letter that normally goes out only to subscribers, unlocked here for a day. What follows is exactly what landed in inboxes on August 12, 2026: an original piece of writing, followed by that day's curated links — a comic, a song, an OTT pick, an AI story and tool, a craft resource, a quiz, and a game. No two issues follow the same shape; some days it's a personal reflection like this one, other days it's a guided discovery or a drill-down on a single idea. The only constant is that it's written fresh every morning and paired with a small, genuinely chosen set of things worth five minutes of your day. If mornings like this sound like your kind of thing, subscribe here — new issues land daily.

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Hotto Supotto, Kitesurf, Sussudio: Bridges across time and space

I don't understand a word of Japanese. Well that's not accurate. I can identify and understand "konichiva" and "arigato" - which usually sounds more like "aarii-gat-toh" depending on who is saying it. Maybe a few more random words here and there.

But for all practical purposes I don't understand Japanese.

But that never stops me from watching Japanese movies and OTT serials or listening to songs in Japanese. Once I start, whether I continue watching or not depends entirely on the total craft of the creative enterprise - script, dialogues, acting, direction, production, quality of translation …. literally everything. But I don't evaluate all these in separation. The true test for anything I watch or listen to is: that everything has to come together.

A couple of days ago, I started watching Hotto Supotto with no expectations and pretty much resigned to my recently acquired attention deficiency, but surprisingly I am not only able to watch whole episodes but also continue on to the next episode. It is riveting and after four episodes I have figured out why: it is the dialogue, the English transcript version for me of course. The dialogue is so mundane and every-day-real-life-conversation-like that it has me hooked. That discovery also made me realise that one of the reasons I can't watch many of the other stuff is because the dialogues are all the same and extremely unnatural - it's the kind of stuff I never hear in real life. It is quite possible I was starting to look for real-world meaning in a make-believe world and that is why I was unable to watch the stuff I was watching just to take a break from my work.

Thankfully all is well now. And being well I went looking for some academic material on the craft of dialogues and found an interesting (and brief) insight on the art of dialogue (it is the learning resource link today). I have also included a link to a music video today. It is a song called Sussudio by Phil Collins and I have included it because it is a great example of dialogue at multiple levels - artist-to-art, artist-to-band, band-to-audience, visual story-telling.

Incidentally, one function of dialogue is to push boundaries, to reveal directions in societal discourse, unfurl innovations, acknowledge emerging developments in community - language is after all nothing if not a bridge. The AI Tool for today, Kitesurf, not only fits this description but also serves as one of the true bridges between AI agents and what they need to function independently.

That's it for today then. See you tomorrow!

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That's a single morning. If this is a pace you'd enjoy waking up to, subscribe to The Morning Mail.