Tag: ink

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 the Exploration of Illustrated Novels

Posted on June 25, 2024 by Byrd

I took a road trip recently and read through 2 of the 3 Children of Time novels by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I figured I would read through the first book over the duration of the 2 weeks, but I ended up chewing through the first one within a few days and went to Barnes and Noble to buy the second one. This was a very enjoyable series. When I like books this is generally how I read them; absolutely consumed by them.

I have never read a comic with the same veracity.

And when you’re an artist or an author they’re always telling you to create the work you want to consume in the world.

So there’s a disconnect between what I am making and what I really enjoy consuming.


I’m not even sure where to start with this wild bug up my ass of converting Where the Highway Meets the Corridor into an illustrated novel. Do I just start? That’s how I wrote it in the first place, I just started. But do I do it by hand? Do I write within the word processes script? I’m not sure.

Writing within the word processor makes the most sense. I’ll have access to dialogue and whatnot, whereas if I was writing long hand I could be rewriting a lot of stuff from the script back onto the legal pad, and then I’ll just end up convert that back into the word processor. I think I’ll stick with the word processor.

Both formats are pretty equally enjoyable, both for it’s own merits. The industrial feeling of pounding on a keyboard feels good and so does the hunched over intensity of writing in a legal pad, both facilitate the creative process and allow me to pour my mind into a medium that can be consumed by other minds.

So I think I’ll just start by starting. I have a pretty good idea of who the Knowledge Retention Bot is and I already know what the characters are doing. I think the hardest part will be getting inside their minds, but getting inside their minds of what the KRB thinks is inside their minds. But that’s the whole gimmick, right? Whatever I write inside their minds will be what the KRB is algorithmically generating.

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 Humans, Elves and Buggers

Posted on September 6, 2023 by Byrd

So, I’m done illustrating Enter Cedar. There’s still an epilogue to sketch and ink, but I think I’ll wait to finish those 15ish pages before posting. So it might be a minute before I add new content to the comic on this website.

In the mean time, here’s a concept I’ve toyed around with, that I think applies to some of the “big picture movers” of the upcoming series. I call it “Humans, Elves and Buggers”. Or, the Imbibe version would be, “Beasts, Bots and Boos”.

Humans (or “Beasts”) are beings with finite lives. They must procreate to proceed forward in time and they must teach knowledge to subsequent generations. Titus Waiting is not entirely human, but he is a parasitic being who needs hosts to live. This, combined with his reliance on human culture to build his technology, makes him pretty human.

Elves (or “Bots”) have infinite life (think Lord of the Rings). While they still procreate, they don’t do it to further the species. However, elves still need to be taught knowledge. But because they live forever; once learned, forever kept. The KBR is an infinitely living robot who definitely has no urge to procreate, but continuously learns through this knowledge retention programing.

Buggers (or “Boos”) like humans, have finite lives and must procreate to continue their species through time (think Formic Queens from Ender’s Game). But because they have a hive mind and collective knowledge, they don’t teach or pass down knowledge, they just know everything. Cedarface is part of the spiritual hivemind. While his mothers may not procreate, Cedarface was made. It is quite possible that Cedarface’s golem nature may make him mortal. I haven’t figure that one out yet.

I’m not sure if these 3 characters perfectly resemble these 3 definitions. It could be argued that Cedarface, the KBR and Titus Waiting all have infinite live and don’t spend time procreating, which makes them all Bots, which makes the Imbibe Universe a story of Bots vs Beasts, with no Boos present. But it could be argued that Cedarface’s mothers are Boos, because while they live forever in human minds, they are ultimately reliant on the mortality of those human lives. Cedarface’s mothers must cultivate belief of themselves within humans to continue existing