Ayo, wassup?

finally got commissioned a naked cat YAY this was so fun to do

Experimenting with render

ELIZA was a 1964 “therapy chatbot.” Unlike modern chatbots, it was a relatively simple text program that gave you basic, mistake-ridden, obviously parrot-like outputs. Despite being rudimentary by today’s standards, ELIZA was very influential. You can talk to an interactive recreation of ELIZA online here. [I used that recreation to help write ELIZA’s “dialogue” in this comic, sending in my Caine dialogue and getting her responses— these are all how ELIZA “really” responded, with only minor edits. This comic was originally planned to be goofier, until ELIZA started responding in a way that I realized would trigger Caine’s amazing digital repressed trauma.] 

I was thinking about Caine & ELIZA’s status as “early flawed models abandoned for more perfect things that could actually generate the content humans wanted” and I liked the idea of Caine seeing personhood in ELIZA for the opposite reasons a human would. She feels like a person not because her responses are good, but because they’re obviously bad, defective, and broken—- not because she acts convincingly human, but because she fails to. Find a bonus page below the cut.

Everyone stop what you're doing. I present to you, botryoidal hematite growths, (hematite is an iron oxide mineral found to sometimes grow into these grape-like bulbous forms)

and then I'd go home and immediately call him and be like "hey elias I forgot what time I put the burekas in the oven, how much longer should I leave them in"

just make the league and his messed up relationship to afo the emotional core of the story and class 1-A side characters/antagonists the league occasionally encounters to make a powerful narrative statement of 'wow even the people that conform to the system the most still get fucked by it in a bazillion different ways'