Swim Swim

Google set out about a decade ago to push their (relatively unpopular) chromebooks by supplying them below-cost to schools for students, explicitly marketing them as being easy to restrict to certain activities, and in the offing, kids have now grown up in walled gardens, on glorified tablets that are designed to monetize and restrict every movement to maximize profit for one of the biggest companies in the world.

Google set out about a decade ago to push their (relatively unpopular) chromebooks by supplying them below-cost to schools for students, explicitly marketing them as being easy to restrict to certain activities, and in the offing, kids have now grown up in walled gardens, on glorified tablets that are designed to monetize and restrict every movement to maximize profit for one of the biggest companies in the world.

I am not especially tech-savvy for a millenial, I am just a casual gamer and have a computer with Linux on it as well. It is easy for me. I know computer basics because *granpa voice* back in my day that was the only way.

Imagine you live in the BigCorporateCity, a utopia of the future where all your needs are covered by the BigCorporateCityLtd, and among other essentials they provide you a Mealᵀᴹ three times a day. Mealᵀᴹ is an optimised way to eat, super healthy, super nutritious and super tasty - not that you know how anything else tastes. Of course it's optimised for masses and not you personally, so some people get too many calories and some practically starve and get deficensies, but BigCorporateCityLtd guarantees adequate nutrition to 97% of the population, which is pretty good!

You go for a holiday to the Outside, where people still live in the old ways, like you know your parents lived when they were young. They have told stories but didn't bring many customs with them. You see people live simple and poor lives in their non-smart houses, and every day you actually need to order your food at a restaurant, make a decision on what you want to eat. You are not used to it, it is a bit bothersome. The food is strange but fine, but the nutritional information would make BigCotporateCityLtd excecs faint oit of health and safety concerns. They serve red meat and it comes charred on a grill, don't they know that causes cancer? You can see the chef handling open fire with no safety equipment, pure skill to not burn himself, and you have to admit it is kind of impressive.

A friendly local invites you for dinner in their house for a change. You have a welcoming experience but above all you eat foods you have never even seen, and some of them are the most delicious thing you ever tasted! Who provides it, you ask. They made it themselves? No way, you can do that? You ask how, and they give you the recepy. But the recepy has weird abbreviations, like wtf is is a tbs, or a ml, or a ts? What is the difference betweed stirring, folding and whisking? Where do you get these ingredients? Where would you even find an oven (that your host had to show you) in BigCorporateCity? Well how the hell you are supposed to know! You ask your friend, and they look at you like you are an alien being. "It's easy", they say and then, graciously teach you. You have some difficilty but overall a lovely time, learn a skill and make a friend.

You try to bring some food home to BigCorporateCity but the customs say it is a biohazard and takes it away. Well, no matter, you think, it's gonna be easy to make more. Mealᵀᴹ is fine but sometimes you literally want to spice it up a bit.

Asking around for resources you get funny looks. "Why would you want to do such a boring, menial task?" "Do you know what people Outside would do to not have to cook every day?" You say it's actually quite a lot of fun once you get the hang of it.

The BigCorporateSearchEngineAI tells you that home cooking is a hygiene risk. Outside of clean factory conditions the bacteria grows wildly and unpredictably and home cooking is a sure way towards a severe food poisoning! You could get salmonella or botulism or any nasty thing! Also BigCorporateLtd does not allow heating appliances at homes, it is a fire hazard. All for your own protection of course! to protect! Also those flavours you keep gushing about? Fats, so tasty but hugely detrimental for cardiovascular health in excess! Salt, practically poison if you don't calculate the dosage well enough! Real sugar instead of the calorie-free SweetieTreatieEssenceᵀᴹ, here we come diabetes! It's a real problem in the undeveloped areas of the world!

All this you knew already but somehow forgot Outside. You got swept up in the idyllic used-to-be.

You weren't going to home-cook every day, you argue. Just every now and then. Just a little treat, a little variety.

BigCorporationCityLtd now provides extra variety and customisation for your Mealᵀᴹ subscription, for a fee, the SearchEngineAI informs you. You take a moment to think and upgrade, seeing no other way out of you monotone diet.

First: THIS RECALL IS NOT STATE SPECIFIC. IT IS NATIONWIDE.

here are the specific products and dates:

FDA page on this:

Like I need people to understand the mental image here of a multimillionaire internet creator personally overseeing DVD production in his own house like he’s running an underground bootleg operation out of a basement in 2007.

It’s weirdly charming because there’s something very “old internet” about it, this energy of “I made a thing, and now I will physically hand it to people myself like an artisan at a craft fair.”

The man really said: “The future of cinema is me standing next to a humming disc burner at 2am”

We don't really see "garage companies" grow into something bigger on the regular. I'm pretty sure most of the ones in living memory were people seizing the online shopping space when the internet first hit the mainstream, and a lot of those had big investment capital as well.

So seeing someone climb from bottom up ends up feeling "weird" or even "wrong" to us, because we're so used to untouchable corporate monoliths dominating industries uncontested.

It's a hopeful sign that free markets aren't completely dead, but this is only happening because entertainment media isn't (yet) so tightly regulated that newcomers are shut out completely.

I have talked about it before, but independant artists, and by extension independant TTRPG designers like myself and my team, live and die by their social media presence. We can't afford a lot of advertising, if any, and so we rely not only on word-of-mouth advertisement, but also just the good will of our audience. Like another designer @cavegirlpoems put it, we're basically busking, putting our art out for everyone and hoping for voluntary donations, donations which I writing this am reliant on as a disabled designer who can't work a normal job.

If you can't pay, you can still have it for free, and something that can be just as helpful is reblogging the posts of artists like myself. I'll demonstrate with a screenshot from our itch.io page for the open beta for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.

(and on these days, it was only about 6 or 7 people who did the reblogging.)

As you can see, reblogs mean more people see our game, which means more downloads (and sometimes even payments), downloads mean more people play our game and more people see our game in the itch.io algorithm, which means more views, which means more downloads, which means more and so on and so on. But, it all starts with you reblogging our posts, and without that, we're stagnate. It doesn't matter if you have 1,000 followers or 10, your reblog means that our posts reach corners of tumblr that wouldn't have seen it otherwise.

Here’s HSTHETE, the 24 hour comic I drew this year!  Thanks to everybody who followed along on twitter this weekend as I posted these pages <3

Secret Kobold Smithing Technique!

The reason it was so important for narrative purposes, was that the plot concerns the visit of the Astronaut, in his completely opaque spacesuit, to a planet populated entirely by self-aware robots (originally from Earth) who have built their own society and are petitioning to be allowed to interact with Earth again as equals.

They have a democratic government and free choice of careers etc. as the orange robot serving as guide tells the Astronaut.

The Astronaut notices that there are two different types of robot on this world; the orange ones, who are in charge, gifted access to all information and facilities. and the blue robots, who are seen as more limited in function, have less access to information and resources, and are not allowed positions of power or as wide a choice of employment opportunities. Even transportation is segregated.

The Astronaut investigates further and discovers that the blue and orange robots are actually structurally identical, there is absolutely no difference between their potential or capabilities, and it is only because the orange robots are instructed by their Educator system to consider themselves superior, that the difference exists.

The Astronaut tells the robots they are not ready for re-alignment with Earth, until they come to terms with their own unfairness, and how Earth had had to deal with this issue themselves. When that time comes, the robots will be able to ally with Earth.

Then he leaves in his spaceship, and it's only in that one final panel that we see the Astronaut is black.

Not subtle, nor should it be, but for 1950 this was a breathtakingly powerful statement, perhaps the first of it's kind in the genre.