the treason of reason
quick edit: here’s the sex shark/endoplasmic reticulum/intergalactic cephhalopods…. thing. i didn’t know where to go with that, so, it’s a girl with a butt in a minisub being chased through some tube things by some octopods. i could have done more with it, but once i drew the butt, my motivation kinda waned.
everyone here, i suspect, is a fan of science fiction. that or you have an OCD compulsion to finish anything you start, and you never wanted to be here in the first place. in which case, you and i are locked in an eternal struggle. you can’t leave, and i can’t finish. muhahah. BUT, i think that being a fan of sci fi means a couple things. not huge earth shattering things, but obvious, ‘subtle to the core’ things.
sci-fi readers might be able to get behind bleak forecast of the future where humanity has been stomped into the ground, but in contrast there’s almost always a ray of hope. the hero(ine) that has a plan, the last chance in a galaxy gone mad. and in that way, sci fi readers are hopeful. things might be shit now, but they might not be later. and that makes me think science fiction enthusiasts are for the most part, forward thinking. and if not technically savvy, at least not technophobic.
and it’s with that, that i confess a certain intolerance for the intolerant. in regards or science, specifically. i’m not saying you can’t have a spiritual vibe, or believe in a higher power. i don’t, that’s me. but with the current social climate (not everywhere, just where i’m seein it), people with backwards views have been pre-validated. the fringe is the norm, and whatever insane thing you hold as true, has validity. cause feelings matter, and facts aren’t immutable truths, they’re more suggestions for the gullible. and with the internet, we’re all arm chair doctors and physicists.
i found myself shocked recently to witness a few internet arguments, on the topics of anti vaccination, and the flat earth theory. i don’t want to start a thing here. if you feel like i’m about to insult you, thanks for dropping by, sorry to lose a reader. and i’m not going to get into the weeds on why i feel it’s insane to consider these things as ‘topics for debate’. i think my point here is that when i envisioned the future of today, i never would have considered a time in which we have iphones, poverty, and people who think immunization against the plague was a bad thing. i DID think we’d have flying cars, but at what cost? people who believe fire is food?
i was once told by a few friends who thought that my lack of spirituality amounted to a closed mind. which, kinda felt like being accused of having no imagination. which is something i felt safely i would never be accused of. then again, these people also told me they thought the brain and the mind were 2 separate organs. quiz your friends sometime. you might know idiots.
the future turned out weirder than i would have thought, and some of the things i thought were non starter issues are crippling our ability to move forward as a people. i’m reminded of a peice by jim jefferies where he saw humanity as a train, where all the scientists and atheists were in the engine car, and all the other cars were weighing them down. it must be hard to try to look forward, with some many people looking anywhere else. maybe even trying to stall the way forward. and i want my flying car, damnit.
no real movie to discuss right now. i did see ‘Blame!’, a recommendation i quite appreciated from Andrew F. i liked it quite a bit, but if i had any issue, it was the same as with alot of anime. it felt like it was a bigger world they pared down to fit into a movie. which is a shame. maybe it would have worked better as a series.
ok, so till next time, here’s a painting i did of one of our cats in a boudoir photo. click the pic to go to my patreon, and see the full version. consider joining up, so you don’t miss this kind of weirdness in the future, and to support my work. thanks!
Haha! That is a sexy shark indeed! Looks like some kinda Inner Space dealie where the scientists made the sub too small specifically to make the adventuress as bootyful as possible!
yeah, that’s what i was kinda thinking, and i would have liked to have taken it further, but it was late, and i wanted to post, so…. comes to a point in the evening where the side of your brain saying ‘not everything has to be a masterpiece’ gets louder, and the part that says ‘you know you can do better’ goes to sleep. and then you join it. haha
I looked up the Blame anime movie. And read today’s news. Raspberry Pi computers, which have the default user passwords, and have been hooked up to world+dog, are being taken over by a new malware that changes the user password, and makes the device mine Bitcoin.
And we fear the robot overlords of the future? Do you realize how badly they will be hacked? “I am your doom! And buy Viagra! Obey me! And send me your banking details, because I am Merriam Abacha, the wife of form dictator Sani Abacha, and I need to pay bribes and fees to corrupt officials to release my 40,000,000 (FORTY MILLION) dollars in bank gold.”
Yeah. Like the future will be totally different from today. Toyota is trying to build a flying car. See the YouTube video, and feel the confidence. Oh, yeah.
yeah, the flying car thing was a higher goal than i think people realized. technology got smaller, not more thrilling in terms of what we thought we’d get. then again, i have a phone that has access to the complete library of human accomplishment, so, six of one.
We have flying cars; we just call them helicopters. Wealthy folks fly them out to the Hamptons from Manhattan every weekend.
yeah yeah, fair enough. but i think the flying cars concept was just something we envisioned in the 50s, and thought it was owed to us as a high watermark for science. and what we really should have been hoping for was longer life, cure for disease…. beer without hangovers….
DEATH BY LIGHT BULBS!!!!
The Internet of Things is going to kill us. I just read an article today about something I read last year: Philips light bulbs can be hacked, and be put into a botnet. Sure, what can a light bulb do? Well, it could flash at you and induce epileptic seizures. Or it could be used for more creative things.
This is where the future is going. Once upon a time, a 32-bit CPU was a big thing, a couple of inches square, and was in a computer the size of a small fridge. Yes, I worked on the Celerity minisupercomputer, with a chip made by NCR. It was the first 32-bit CPU, in the mid-late 1980s, way before Intel. (Yeah, National Cash Register company, leading the pack! And then the management figured there was no future in CPUs.)
Anyways, the equivalent of that chip is now in an 8-pin DIP, the LPC810. And light bulbs are network connected, and hackable.
There was an article on Slashdot about somebody saying that if it is connected to an outlet, then it will also be connected to the Internet. Big confidence booster, huh? Yeah, our robot overlords are going to be sending spam.
No, we don’t have flying cars, but at least we can tie lots of helium balloons to a lawn chair, and go for a ride.
i read something about the hackable light bulbs. but honestly, getting creative with effing people over, isn’t something most people bother with. most attacks are opportunity based. i’m reminded of something i read about the 50 or 60 times the cia tried to kill castro. erxploding cigars, poisoned tooth paste, and in the end, he lived to a very old age. truth is, most murders in the world are committed by machete. not even guns.
so you’re right. the world is getting more complex, but anger, and revenge, those things will always be basic, and when someone wants someone dead, dollars to donuts, they won’t devise a plan, they will reach for the nearest object.
The other day on the bus I shared a seat with a lady who said she believed the earth was flat, and everything revolved around us. I believed that she was “crazy as a bedbug,” but I’m sure that bedbugs are actually quite sane. And more difficult to kill than a cockroach.
Poverty and iPhones? You didn’t see that one coming? Seriously? William Gibson featured the poor extensively in his novels. We are never going to solve poverty. Poverty has always been with us, and in the future it will exist as well, Haves and have nots. I have amazing brains, but my landlord is a total numpty. Seriously, that guy is not on the high side of the bell curve. He’s a very nice person, just not going to ever win a Nobel prize in science any time soon.
There’s plenty of very bright scientists who believe whole heartedly in God. Heck, science was invented by Christian men. The universe was created by God, so men can figure out how God put it together. Hey, go for it! The problem comes from people not separating faith and belief from hard fact. Know what they are, and file appropriately. The big problem comes from people mixing the two, and then not realizing they’ve invented a new religion, and religiously don’t call their new religion a religion. Now, how’s that for dogma? Maybe I should name my Jeep Karma, and put my foot down on its 385HP, and run over someone’s pet. (Yes, I did an engine swap.)
What does the future hold? More of the same, in a different wrapper. Earlier this year I had a job interview at a company where age discrimination was OK. I don’t know Linux because I don’t know all of the options for the “ps” command. Right now I’m in a position where they think I walk on water, and I am using Ubuntu as my main OS. Windows, be gone! Yeah, big brain in gear! Apply it a max, and make accomplishments happen!
Solving poverty is like solving stupid. Neither will be solved. When I was poor, I ate day-old bread, and cooked very simply. Now too many people only eat from restaurants. Not all of the poor are addicts or crazy. Lots are normal people, in bad circumstances.
But how to employ people when so many jobs they used to do are now overseas? In Seattle, there used to be a factory downtown where they stuffed sleeping bags and such with goose down. How do I know? When I was repairing gasoline pumps, some guys walked in covered with down. So I asked them about it, and found out. What are they doing now? I have no idea, but AFAIK there aren’t any goose down stuffing jobs in the US anymore. It’s all overseas. I have an Ecko peeler made in the US. When I bought a replacement, that was made in Taiwan. Now Ecko products are made in China. You want people to have jobs? Mandate that X amount of products sold in the US must be made in the US. Yeah, it’s protectionism. But Henry Ford decided that he would pay his workers enough so that they could afford to buy the cars they made. He didn’t have to, but he did.
And the politics today? Madness. Everywhere. If we shut down all industry today, turn the lights off and let 90% of the people die within a year, it will still take 40 years for that action to have an effect on the climate. And how much of an action is it, really? I can only point at a chart I saw on Ars Technica that showed the periods of warming and cooling through the ages. We are in a temperate band, and it might be headed up anyways.
No, pollution is the real problem. Will pollution be reduced? In some ways yes, in others, no. And that’s pretty much exclusively the hand of man, there. We are taking a dump in our own food bowl.
Ah, heck, time for shower, bed, get up in the morning, and go to work.
wow. an essay. haha
i won’t say i saw poverty tidying itself up anytime soon, i just thought that by the time we could have an average wealth of what we have, i wouldn’t have thought we’d still have people starving, or with ailments treatable with a cheap shot of penicillin. whet i didn’t expect is that we’d redefine ‘rich’ as it stands today. and in the future, continuing this trend, we’ll have corporations thrusting humanity into space, and not a global government. which makes for better stories, but is also sad.
That is one sexy beastie! Kiddo loved his pic, by the way! Thanks again for being so awesome! And I have to hear a lot of flat earth talk around my house. I try not to be mean about it, but my opinions will not change no matter how loud people get about being right. *Shrugs* I find it amusing to think about, like a brain exercise, but I can’t see it being true.
oh, i’m glad he liked it. and good on him for becoming a full on adult with papers.
yeah? you live with some flat earthers? i had no idea this was such a hot topic for some people. and honestly, it shouldn’t be. i find it difficult to discuss things with people who are willfully looking for a reason to be contradictory. and even discussing it lends it too much validity. i feel like sane people have to compromise so much these days just to get along. thank god…. vodka.
Yeeeeeaaahhh…that is a major factor in my drinking hobby.
i’d rather die of liver damage than live longer being wrong.
I’m glad you enjoyed Blame! Valid criticisms too. I kept struggling with friends who hadn’t read the comics trying to get across just how absurdly huge the City is. The original story was serialized between 1998 and 2003 and spans 10 volumes. I admit when I found out they thought they could compress all of that into a single film I was skeptical at best, mortified at worst. For what it is it’s pretty good though. Hopefully it’ll inspire more people to pick up his published volumes and get a feel for what the film lacked. I love good character interaction but I’m in it for the world. Which is why I’m here I guess.
As for the spiritual spookiness, I was born deeeep in it. I sort of feel like it might be the root of a lot of our issues. Anytime there is a truth beyond contestation you get stagnation. Why look for truth when you’ve got Truth™.
I haven’t been interested in that stuff at all for a good long while, but people kept using “Zen” as an adjective to describe me so I started looking into that. It’s been bastardized by the West like a lot of other things we pick up that are eastern and exotic. I particularly like the Soto variety of Zen might be worth poking at. I’m honestly not even sure you can call it spiritual. It’s just taking some time out of the day to sit down and be as present right here and now as you possibly can be. My girlfriend finds it kinda weird that I can stare at a wall for 45 minutes but…hey. When you burn 500 hours puttering around playing the same game on steam what’s 45 minutes a day?
Thanks for the comic and your time, boss!
it’s sad when a movie leaves all the loose threads a comic would have, and has no hopes of tying them up. it ends up feeling sloppy, and i’m sure the source material wasn’t.
haha, ‘Truth™’. that’s awesome. i was really into taoism when i was younger. it seems more applicable than religion, cause it proposed the ideas of balance, and i thought i saw that in my life. but, in other people’s lives, not so much. my feeling is, unless a religion can make sense of female circumcision, or being born poor to die almost immediately, while someone somewhere else has the luck to never fret for a day, it’s all just pissin in the wind. they’ll say ‘god…. mysterious ways’, but if just once, if they said that it’s all just a ball of chaos, but we have to try to untangle it, i’d respect it more.
ever see ‘the rich kids of instagram? if ever there was a thing than unchecked your balance…. maybe the key is that those lives, are lives unexamined, and your meditation… well, it’s not a golden AK on a yacht…. but it’s something else.
and you’re welcome! thanks for the props! although the comic is more of a compulsion at this point. speaking of which, what steam game locked you in for 500 hours?
You’re right there. I think the entire story of the film was just one out of ten of those volumes. I was fooling around with the math once and I think the whole quest takes something like…28,000 years?
I liked Taoism too. It just sort of felt like an essay on life and less of a holy scripture. Zen comes from Chinese Chan Buddhism that was most definitely influences by Taoism before hopping to Japan. I’m beginning to think that every time a religion comes into contact with another culture it fundamentally changes. The Zen I practice isn’t the same “brand” as Soto school. So I’ve already been told I’m doing it wrong. Haha.
I know what you mean about disparity though. I grew up with well to do parents and “failed” until I ended up working as a heavy industrial welder. Some of the themes of rich parents and kids choosing to play in the blue collar dirt resonate with me. My personal take on the human condition is bad stuff happens. A lot of bad stuff happens for no reason whatsoever. People always cry “why me!?” Why not me? It’s liberating really, when you don’t need to blame anyone for something bad happening.
Oh, you’ve embarrassed me now. My top three games are Killing Floor, Warframe, and E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy. 583, 481, and 428 hours respectively.
i think you’ve looked into it more than i have. i think the idea of balance offers comfort to people like myself who can’t honestly believe in a diety, but in the end, it requires a blind eye and some faith, and i can’t do that. there’s no evidence of it. and while religious people treasure their faith, to me, it’s a heaping dose of delusion.
that theme of leaving comfort to find truth is going to be a reocurring theme you’ll see in black and blue. some subtle, some not so much. but it’s something i can relate to, and i think is an important way to build an arc. i think it’ll really speak to the readers.
wow, you play games for that long, and stare at walls, AND have a girlfriend? i would suspect she’s fairly low maintenance. i played a few of those, but at a point, some of them started feeling ‘grindy’. and i already have a full time job. hahah
Your comic certainly speaks to me. I look forward to the unfolding of events. I check my comics every morning and I always pop in Monday and Friday to see what’s developing in here.
I don’t know how I pulled off the girlfriend thing at all. She’s a business anthropologist with a background in research analysis and I’m over here playing with fire all day. I’m definitely not the brains of this outfit. But I’m over the grindfest. I traded games for wall staring. When Killing Floor 2 came out and all my friends jumped onto that treadmill I just bowed out. 500 hours of leveling is one thing. Doing it all over again but with prettier graphics? Nooope.
ah, well, not to lose any hits, but i only update on mondays now, so, you don’t need to check in twice a week. but, i think this works better.
i know what you mean. i like prettier graphics, but when the gameplay is essentially the same, handing over more money for more polys, or higher res textures, and that seems like a patch. at best, dlc. and then the game companies realized the real money is in microtransactions. so the most popular games are never finished. i can’t ignore that feeling of being jerked along.