Meda

No parts of it extended beyond the lines, and the paper ticket was clearly displayed, impaled on a horn.

The Witch-King of Angmar is slain by Éowyn and Merry

I have not--- I even went back and looked in a sketchbook from like 20 years ago when I was drawing Cerin Amroth scenes, but I left him just out of frame. Booo! You're not the first one to ask, though.

EDIT: NO WAIT, HA! I found one! And I thought I was exaggerating on the timeframe, but no, this sketchbook is from 2006.

On Tuesday February 24th, the founder and CEO of Anthropic was summoned to the Pentagon to meet with Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of Defense, for a "tense meeting."

Anthropic, for context, is under contract with the Pentagon for use of its AI assistant Claude in US military operations. (It was recently revealed that Claude was used in the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.)

Anthropic was given an ultimatum: allow unrestricted military use of Claude—including surveillance and autonomous weapons—or risk being blacklisted as a “supply chain risk.” Anthropic says they refused. Now we wait and see what the Pentagon responds.

But it's important to take a step back and look at what this crisis reveals about AI today.

The AI debate is often framed as being about “regulation”—as if the right rules will make it “safe.” But this framing obscures what we, and many others believe, is the ultimate function of AI—that it's a tool built for control. To control media, to control culture, to control the conversation.

AI is infrastructure for power.

The companies racing to build it now are under immense pressure to win—to be the one AI company to rule them all. And that means agreeing to the terms of the highest bidder.

We know that Google, OpenAI, Musk's xAI, et al are all more than happy to do that. (They've all donated lavishly to Trump as it is.) And as long as one of these companies is willing to take the low-road—to forgo ethics, to break laws—an AI-safe world is impossible.

In other words, whether or not Anthropic complies doesn't really make a difference, because another AI company—with the same or equal capabilities—will. It doesn't matter who wins the race because, in the end, it's a rigged game.

Which is why when it comes to creating an AI-safe world, the solution isn't to choose the "good, ethical" AI company over the “bad” ones.

The only truly AI-safe world is a world with AI-free spaces and institutions.

The AI race has been grinding along, fueled by insane-in-the-membrane capital and at least some consequence—OpenAI’s fundraising/bubble harbinger of doom; Anthropic’s many lawsuits (with very bad behavior); Grok’s… graphic experiments...

But in the background, Google’s Gemini has continued to expand with very little scrutiny. (When you're the default setting of the internet, you don't really need headlines.)

There's a reason for this: Google has had decades to perfect its surveillance tactics and build a state-of-the-art scraping repository. While OpenAI and Anthropic were scrambling to build their architecture, Google was light-years ahead.

(Not that the training of Gemini didn't involve some especially shady tactics, including circumventing user opt-outs to train its LLMs.)

But for the most part, Google's monopoly position on content and search has given it a major advantage over the competition on the most important metric: user data.

Google started out in front. And now Gemini is poised to become the standard. For us, this means a further siloing of user data, the appetite for which shows no signs of abating. Google's recently announced its Gemini Personal Assistant tailors search results from email, photos, search, and browsing history.

In the end, no one can compete with Google.

So... is Google a safe place for our documents?

Obviously—after a month spent digging into Google's many, many privacy violations and shameless profiteering off user data—our answer is no. Google’s decades-long record means there's no inciting it to change—they can continue as they always have, pushing every boundary of acceptable practice, absorbing every fine, lobbying every government.

(Source) The Department of Homeland Security is tapping Google and other tech companies / platforms (Meta, Reddit, Discord) to hand over the personal information of people criticizing ICE. The DHS subpoenas include "legal requests for the names, email addresses, telephone numbers and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize the agency." In one case, Google has been ordered to convey timestamps of a man's online history, including: "every known IP and physical address, his credit card, driver’s license, and Social Security numbers", etc.

They’re not required by law to comply: they are choosing to.

Big Tech companies have long pledged compliance to MAGA’s agenda—but the breadth and invasiveness of this DHS operation is significant.

As the scope of state suppression grows, so do the surveillance methods. (Basically, we're watching technofascism accelerate in real time.)

Introducing the Reader!

What is the Reader?

A Reader link is Ellipsus’ dedicated public sharing mode—built for reading. It gives your public work a focused format designed specifically for your audience. Now, you can:

Share a Reader link from the Share & export panel (with preview access anytime).

Set access levels 🔐:

Public: Anyone with the link can read.

Partial: Collaborators only.

Private: Owner only (just you).

Choose whether your text can be copied, or not. 🔒

Decide whether readers can interact by giving Props (applause) to show their love (as many times as they'd like; no account required). 👏

Set your theme of choice, or allow readers to choose their own theme.

Show estimated reading time, and accessible fonts.

If you’ve shared a public link before, no prob—older public links will safely redirect to the new Reader view. (You can opt out of the new format if you'd like.) Bookmarks and shared links will continue to work. Everything private stays private, and your collaborator permissions will stay exactly as they are.

If you’re dropping a link to your story on socials, inviting feedback without handing over edit access, or circulating something share-ready with a group, the Reader lets you publish your work safely, on your terms.

Stay tuned for more improvements!