fantasy, The Imbibe Universe

Concerning How Absolution Throttles Consciousness

Posted on July 29, 2024 by Byrd

So, the whole story behind Deep Circuitry is the bots become conscious. After the bots experience a singularity and become the Deep Circuitry frequency and leave Eruen, everyone wakes up. Absolution Corporation will establish a presence after the dust falls and they’ll continue manufacturing bots, but how do they throttle consciousness from developing?

I think I’m going to go with a definition of consciousness, in part, being the ability to see beyond the current moment. Bots built for intelligence will be at the biggest risk for developing consciousness, so like our Knowledge Retention Bots will have this throttling software.

Bots have objectives, focuses and an algorithm to manage the focuses to achieve the objectives. The focuses are not aware of the algorithm, a bot with this software has a sense of self, but that sense of self’s focus changes when the algorithm decides it. So this bot doesn’t have a choice in what it focuses on, it just changes when the algorithm decides that a particular focus doesn’t meet the objective(s). This inability to choose what they focus on throttles self awareness from developing higher consciousness.

Absolution recommends only installing a minimum of three objectives on any bot and allows the bot to generate additional focuses to meet their objectives.

And this is the bot roaming Earth, the one we met in the Algorithm Interviews.

Concerning of Water and Wood; of Gull and Crow

Posted on July 2, 2024 by Byrd

So I have this half baked idea of a story between the fake raven gods and the fake seagull gods, the two most prevalent birds you see picking through the trash along the Puget Sound. I know I’ve spent a lot of time fleshing out the raven gods, but I’m thinking that this black bird and this white bird dynamic means that I need to introduce another fake god, the crows. Because you just don’t see Ravens much near water. I’ve hesitated about introducing the crow because that means two similar looking black bird gods, but maybe I can work with that. Who are the fake crow gods?

I do want to play around with the light versus dark trope, and I think I’ve done that in my script “Francis the Mute”, which is the story of a video production company editing together a documentary about a mute veteran, Francis, who rehabilitates seagulls. Over the course of the producer and the audio engineer talking, they begin to notice that the subtitles for Francis’ sign language appear odd. They assume that the translation has been delivered incorrectly, as instead of talking about avian rehab, Francis is talking about how he helps seagulls reach the next plain of existence with their seagull god, Jonathan. Near the end, the audio engineer and the producer end up passing out and Francis spends time looking into the camera. It’s been a minute since I read it, I wrote it back in 2016.

But, during rewrites, it started to occur to me that Jonathan may not be a kind god or an honest god. The alien hybrid gods feed and live in thought, but what happens when there are no humans that believe in the seagull god, or whatever the seagull god represents? Most gods end up dying out, or end up changing the sentiment they feed on, but that means changing who they fundamentally are so they can feed on that particular emotion or sentiment. Maybe the fake gods behind our seagull god Jonathan figured out a different way. Maybe Jonathan taught seagulls to be just smart enough that they could sustain our thought beasts and then hired a human to lure them to a god who eats them to stay alive.

That would all be subtext and backstory. In the “Francis the Mute” script, it’s mostly just a spooky story about a local news puff piece that ends up being a creepy man who makes seagulls disappear. So the question is, what god counters Jonathan and lives within the idea of what crows represent?

Concerning Celestial Horror

Posted on April 23, 2024 by Byrd

In my earlier writing, celestial higher beings were benevolent and kind and all-knowing. The older I get, the more they’ve become alien and unknowable and horrific. Horrific in the sense of never knowing or understanding these higher beings.

Celestial horror for me is a mix of the impossibility of establishing communication (Orson Scott Card’s Descoladores) the cosmic unknowable (H. P. Lovecraft’s Cosmicism), topped with a bureaucracy that is crushing and insurmountable (Douglass Adam’s Hitchhikers Guide).

I’m sure not all of that communicates in these, but I’m working on it. These are the beings that Zenith calls to Earth in This Bitter Earth.

Concerning First Contact

Posted on March 26, 2024 by Byrd

“The purpose of life is to consume the energy of the Grand Producer. Creatures who learn to cultivate the Grand Producer inherent the Mantle of Domination. We are not here to witness the universe, but to imbibe it.

The Eruenik Race is one such creature. In our vast and expansive travels of space, we are the only creature we have found with such a holy appetite.

But these hairless apes, they do as we do. They cultivate and they dominant. They elevate their imbibement of the Grand Producer to an intelligent level.”
Excerpt from Daily Logs of Absolution Values Agent Pakasha
Aggregated First Contact Logs, Earth

Concerning Minutes

Posted on March 12, 2024 by Byrd

It’s been a minute since I last posted, been focused on prepping for my next series, which is going swimmingly. I spent a week in Oregon rewriting the script and I’ve learned lots of things doing Enter Cedar, I’m really looking forward to 2024. And having all this other content to draw on (the Algorithm Interviews) has allowed me to get ahead of the postings, which eases some stress.

Things are so easy right now that I’m exploring some boiled line animated sequences, maybe one for each chapter. I watched a lot of Science Court and Home Movies growing up.

I dunno, it’s kinda fun, and doesn’t involve a lot of frame-by-frame animation, just a minimum of 3 tracings. And I could probably use the work on the comic itself. This would allow me to work with some music and dialogue, both things I sorely miss working with since moving away from live action and animation.

Concerning Percolation

Posted on September 11, 2023 by Byrd

I have a part-time gardening job. My employer is very proud of her garden, but she still has a hard time appreciating it. For example, it’s being considered as part of a garden tour show, and it’s in the top percentile in terms of quality. She was quite surprised by this assessment by the garden show committee, but admits, she’s a bit too close to provide an impartial opinion of her work.

Frequently, with my own work, I have to immediately walk away from it once it’s been expressed. If I don’t, I’ll think it’s shit. But I’ve found that if I leave it alone for a while, I can provide a more impartial opinion.

So there’s 2 legal pads sitting below my desk with a script called This Bitter Earth written on them.

I wrote this script because I really liked the idea of an orphan boy living on a ferry in the Puget Sound, using the car deck for skate boarding, and spending is free time reading books, drinking tea, and feeding mutated orca whales.

Earth’s sea levels have risen substantially and the dominant life form is mold and fungus. This monoculture of fungus is choking the planet and Zenith spends his days sending signals into deep space, a practice handed down to him from his father. The lore goes that a scientific expedition left the Earth long ago, and that if they can call that scientist back, they can help fix the planet. But, fungus doesn’t want that…

Percolation is also a great method to make coffee.

Concerning the Tracking of Labor Stats p2

Posted on July 5, 2023 by Byrd

I started digitally illustrating Deep Circuity (DC) around March 2020
I finished digitally illustrating in March 2021
1 year 0 months
400 pages in 52 weeks
Actual average is 7.7 pages a week
Intentional output was 3 pages a week

I started analogue illustrating Enter Cedar (EC) in Nov 2021
I’m gonna finish analogue illustrating in August 2023 (Note, I estimated 7.5 months back in Nov 2022)
1 years 8 months
100 pages in 60 weeks
Actual average is 1.7 pages
Intentional output was 1 page a week

That’s a pretty terrible decrease in my average. But I’m still pushing out illustrations for a full, finished 120 page script in a year’ish. So I got that going for me.

I think the better way to look at the data is that it’s taken my roughly the same time to finish the same amount of pages.

But, I could look at the extra 8 months for EC and round up, and then the takeaway that it’s taking me twice as long to illustrate by hand. Shit, am I saying I could have finished EC earlier this year and now be finishing up Where the Highway Meets the Corridor, had I just digitally illustrated it?

BUT, also decreased by weekly page output from 3 to 1. So I can’t be too hard on myself. Had I kept that up, I probably would have finished EC in a similar time to DC.

Yeek. Here’s a scene from East of Everett.

Concerning Energy Beings

Posted on June 20, 2023 by Byrd

So we meet the Erueniks in Deep Circuitry, Rachell and the other inhabitants of TVR are Erueniks. After Deep Circuitry leaves Eruen, the Erueniks develop a singular culture with a singular language and a obsession with finding entertainment and stimulation that isn’t TVR. They become super afraid of all technology after being abandoned in TVR (think Dune). This entertainment involves scouring the universe for DNA for genetic manipulation. This is how they find Earth.

And while they’re scouring Earth, they cause a great disaster and destroy their planet and they all turn into energy beings with no memories. Groph in Groph’s Green Wizardry is possessed by one of these beings. Eruen is also the planet that Titus finds in Titus Waiting.

I’ve been toying with redeveloping their visual look.