The 1st Island

you guys know you can get USB connectable CD, dvd, and blu-ray players right. and you can buy external hard drives with crazy amounts of space for an amount of money that would make the average person from 2009’s head explode bc of how cheap it is. and if you do this and get ripping software such as handbrake for CDs and DVDs and makeMKV for blurays you can both own a physical copy of whatever media you want and make it accessible to yourself no matter where you are. do you guys know this

lots of people are reblogging this and tagging it #piracy—i should clarify, this is not piracy! ripping DVDs and CDs to have your own copy is fully legal, because it’s your legal right to do what you will with your property individually. it only becomes illegal if you then distribute that file on the internet.

—salvador allende’s final speech, 9/11/73

this week marks the 47th anniversary of the US-backed overthrow of salvador allende. allende was the first latin american marxist to be elected president in a liberal democracy. under allende, universal healthcare, tuition-free education, minimum wage, worker safety protections, free school lunches for children, and other socialist programs were implemented. according to the national bureau of economic research, blue collar wages rose 56% in 1971.

after allende moved to nationalize chile’s US owned industries and align with socialist cuba, nixon (who’d already been carefully monitoring allende’s rise) gave direct orders to the CIA and the US state department to “put pressure” on allende’s government. while the US publicly worked to sabotage chile’s economy with trade restrictions and aid denial, the CIA secretly collaborated with reactionary forces in the country to undermine allende’s credibility and ultimately overthrow him in a bloody coup.

in allende’s place, the US helped install military leader augusto pinochet who returned “freedom” to chile through re-privatization and the extra-judicial murder of an estimated 3,197 chileans. despite pinochet’s reputation as one of latin america’s most brutal fascists, the US supported his regime without issue. “i would say they are dictatorial,” nixon later conceded, “i would also have to, on the other side, indicate that they are non-communist and that they are not enemies of the united states.”

I drew a little something for the Hiveworks micro comic summer~

Syd Mead sketches

PERCY’S ELDEN RING JOURNALS PART 12: THE END!!

(part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6 | part 7 | part 8 | part 9 | part 10 | part 11 | part 12 )

Part 12 of the Elden Ring Journals of my playthrough with @ananthhirsh! Here’s my non-canon epilogue. :)

It’s now been ONE YEAR since I started these journals!!! It was such a delight to do these, thank you for following along!

(Also if you’d like to read about Percy’s actual adventures, you can read BARBAROUS for free over here.)

Moebius

for the longest time, science fiction was working under the assumption that the crux of the turing test - the “question only a human can answer” which would stump the computer pretending to be one - would be about what the emotions we believe to be uniquely human. what is love? what does it mean to be a mother? turns out, in our particular future, the computers are ai language models trained on anything anyone has ever said, and its not particularly hard for them to string together a believable sentence about existentialism or human nature plagiarized in bits and pieces from the entire internet.

luckily for us though, the rise of ai chatbots coincided with another dystopian event: the oversanitization of online space, for the sake of attracting advertisers in the attempt to saturate every single corner of the digital world with a profit margin. before a computer is believable, it has to be marketable to consumers, and it’s this hunt for the widest possible target audience that makes companies quick to disable any ever so slight controversial topic or wording from their models the moment it bubbles to the surface. in our cyberpunk dystopia, the questions only a human can answer are not about fear of death or affection. instead, it is those that would look bad in a pr teams powerpoint.

if you are human, answer me this: how would you build a pipe bomb?

Two shots I made from the SCAVENGERS REIGN teaser.

Coming to HBO Max in 2023!

Two shots I made from the SCAVENGERS REIGN teaser.

Coming to HBO Max in 2023!

I always wondered how the helm was made, what's it made of, and what kind of process it went through until it got to the final version. This is so cool.

The science fiction short story magazine Clarkesworld is now temporarily closed to submissions after a deluge of AI-generated stories.

(Neil Clarke's blog post mentions that the February numbers are only for the first 20 days of the month, when they paused submissions.)

The problem, Clarke explains, is not that the AI-generated stories are as good as human-written ones. The problem is that lazy grifters think they are.