1000000 YEAR SUBLUSTRUM LOCKDOWN

this is not the 'progress flag with the trans colors taken out'. this is the philadelphia pride flag specifically for people of color, which the progress flag took inspiration from. this was not edited to be trans-exclusive. this came before the one with the chevron.

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.

“OpenAI admitted it had to develop a specific instruction in the code of its latest model of ChatGPT to stop it from repeatedly referencing “goblins, gremlins, and other creatures.”

In an explanation posted Wednesday, the company said the “strange habit” came from its chatbot personality feature—specifically for users who chose the “Nerdy” personality. According to OpenAI, this personality receives the following prompt from its system:

You are an unapologetically nerdy, playful and wise AI mentor to a human. You are passionately enthusiastic about promoting truth, knowledge, philosophy, the scientific method, and critical thinking…You must undercut pretension through playful use of language. The world is complex and strange, and its strangeness must be acknowledged, analyzed, and enjoyed. Tackle weighty subjects without falling into the trap of self-seriousness.

OpenAI said it first noticed the trend last November and some users said they found increased “goblin” references over newer model releases, even beyond the “Nerdy” personality.

Some exact quotes that users reported:

“sensible little goblin”

“because ovens are filthy little goblins.”

“Brutal little goblin of a dynamic”

“Tragic little digital swamp creature”

[…]

As Wired first reported Tuesday, the latest ChatGPT model, released last week, included the instructions: “Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.” OpenAI did not immediately respond to Wired’s request for comment but the same day the report was published, Sam Altman posted a meme on X, making light of the situation by joking that the upcoming GPT-6 would have “extra goblins.””

OpenAI doesn't 'obsess', its algorithm has an unrealistically high probability of generating the word goblins.

It can't decide to switch to penises or antisemitic tropes, it's algorithms can get misaligned to have an unusually high probability to generate penises or antisemitic tropes.

It doesn't get caught violating guardrails, its algorithm is observed to produce outcomes that its programmers were trying to prevent.

As some of you might recall from this essay, I spent the latter half of 2025 working on a comic for the Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum in Savannah, Georgia. Tania Sammons, a curator at the museum who had previously licensed my guide to sailors’ tattoos for a show, wrote to me with an irresistible pitch: four cartoonists would be hired, assigned a vessel from the museum's extensive collection of models, then given six months to produce a short comic for publication in an anthology alongside an accompanying museum display.

How could I say no?

My original brief was to research the Anne, the ship that brought the first colonists to Georgia, but in the aftermath of my dad's death the story took off in directions I couldn't have foreseen.

I'm releasing the whole comic online to coincide with the opening of Drawn to the Sea, the exhibition in Savannah. If you're in the area this week (or anytime over the next nine months!) you can stop in and see all the amazing work that came from myself and fellow artists Avery Hick, Rich King, and Sharon Norwood. Details about the museum show are here.

In the meantime, here's a very personal comic.

Content Warning: this piece deals with suicide and parental mortality. Readers with trypophobia may want to skip pages 14 and 15.

lake inferior

lake normal

lake offtario

lake hurton