Still Dreaming about a childhood flower

My cartoon for this week’s New Scientist.

on survival

The administrators of that extremely early city had to keep track of lots of things, and doing this by memory alone was a nightmare. These spreadsheets were devised as a solution to that as an evolution of an earlier system that used clay tokens and balls.

A Taste of Gold and Iron is about the prince of an expansive mercantile empire. Within its pages, the world building is so rich and immersive that you, the reader, necessarily *participate* in empire. Stabilizing the empire is the characters’ core motive, and the reader accepts this as a worthy goal. Meanwhile, Running Close to the Wind is about outcasts, runaways, and revolutionaries—people at the fringes of the social hierarchy—and through their eyes, the empire is a vehicle of control. It’s so obvious, from the outside, that the rules and traditions that the characters live by in a Taste of Gold and Iron are only constructs. By the end of Running Close to the Wind, the clear path forward for our characters is to destabilize the empire. This is *also* framed as a good and worthy goal. I read Running Close to the Wind first, and when I read A Taste of Gold and Iron, the opposite courses of these narratives—unfolding not only concurrently, but with the exact same inciting incident!—left me with a distinct sense of cognitive dissonance. And that’s awesome! In this universe, we read from the perspectives of people with almost every permutation of privilege. It’s possible as a reader to live all these realities. Where else can you get this experience? What could be a more succinct exercise in unpacking your own biases? The friction between these books mimics the real experience of trying to dissemble your cultural conditioning and engage in your culture at the same time.

It’s significant to me that this is not the focus of either book, but still such an inescapable facet of the storytelling. The very fact that these stories work subtly against each other forces the reader to confront the fact that no single story can be correct or even complete.

Sign me up for the Bong Joon Ho anti-AI military squad.

Amanda Root + Ciarán Hinds in PERSUASION (1995), dir. Roger Michell

“I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father’s house this evening or never.”

– Jane Austen, Persuasion (1818).

It's never done that before so I looked it up and turns out Roku TVs have added all sorts of creepy things in the privacy section since I last checked.

One of which being they take screenshots from what you're watching and send them to third parties to identify it.

Fucking hell! Remember when every fucking device in your life wasn't a spy implanted in your home and working against your interests to try and sell your data? Remember how nice that was??

Remember when the TV was just a tool that would play the things you plugged into it?