hi, i'm Zav

At the end of summer, when Covid numbers were at a lower point, I took the risk to visit her in her new apartment and I quickly realized that, unlike when I’d spent the night at her house before, the couch wasn’t made up like a bed. She explained that since her new couch was so fancy and pink, I couldn’t possibly sleep on it, and so I needed to sleep in the bed with her. You know, out of necessity. I woke up with her snuggled around me in the middle of the night.

We’re dating now, and I genuinely think I’m going to marry her. Just the other day, though, I mentioned that if she hadn’t been weird about her fancy couch, I probably never would have like confessed my feelings. AND THEN she stood up, took the cushions off the fancy couch, UNFOLDED IT INTO A HIDE-A-BED, and said “I KNOW.”

harrow the ninth book cover reimagining

done in oil, put a lot of love and care into it :)

below is the painting without

it’s cute dancing robots! they have a cute robot dog! it’s cute! it’s friendly!

well, the robot dog friend? cute little jumpy guy, does some careful ballet-esque steps, often between the humanoid robots? so far, both the boston police and the nypd (heads up: autoplaying video, with sound) have ‘deployed’ the cute dog friend. both departments say that the robots are being used as ‘observation devices’, sent into buildings with lights and a camera that sends a videofeed back to the cops. 

part of why i think this video (and others like it) is so interesting is because boston dynamics has defended police use of the robots, saying that there’s a clause that the robots can’t be used in a way that would ‘physically harm or intimidate people’. i don’t know about you, but if i were at, say, a protest, or honestly literally anywhere, and a robot dog started running towards me, i’d be pretty fucking intimidated. i’d assume that it was going to hurt me. if one of the humanoid robots were running towards me, i’d assume it was straight-up about to kill me. 

but these videos do a lot of work to erode that assumption. how can anyone claim that they’re intimidated by, say, a line of robot dogs at a protest? the robot dogs do funny dances online! the video above has been live for about two months, and it has thirty million views. people love them! they can dance!

so when they start being used as mobile security cameras, or when they start being used to maintain a perimeter or for crowd control or whatever, it’s not really a violation of the contract. the robots are friendly! my bet is that when they start setting them out to do security or whatever—and i don’t doubt that they’ll be used for security, etc—they might even do funny little dances and interact with people who stop to gawk at them. anything to normalize increasingly autonomous roboticized policing. get one of the humanoid ones out in the field, and it’s a remarkably short step to autonomous, mobile cctv—that can also detain you if it doesn’t like what you’re doing, or if there was a crime and you’re in the area, or if your face looks like someone from a database, or—

and all that assumes, of course, that the no-harm clause stays there forever, and that police departments, so famous for their love of doing things by the book, adhere to it. but just for fun, watch that video again, and imagine even one of those robots weaponized, outfitted with even ‘nonlethal’ crowd control. 

This is:

Me: Yo where’s your horribly dense wine I’ve got coin

Merchant: What on earth are you wearing

Me: It’s called pants.

Me: Hey guy of knowing stuff what do you know can I see your dead kings

Ancient Inca man: Are you sent from the gods to annoy me

Me: WHERE’S THE SALT???

Random passerby: What is a European doing this far south

Me: Hey have you guys invented paper money yet?

Woman washing clothes: What are you talking about? Who are you?

Me: *takes a sip of my Ancient Greek wine I’m keeping in my hydro flask* Do you have paper money?

Woman: I suppose?

Me: What do you guys eat on these things? Fish?

Sailor: What the f*ck are you and where did you come from we’re in the middle of the ocean

Me: Can I have that fruit

Sailor: No. Absolutely not.

Me: *pulls a bag of popcorn and some peasant bread out of my backpack*

Roof climbing child: Who are you?

Me: Someone on a roof. *hands them some bread*

Child: Why are you dressed like that?

Friend: You know you’re supposed to water down that kind of wine right

Acting like the crows won’t snatch cigarettes outta people’s mouths.