Tag: writing

Concerning Mortality & Learning

Posted on February 11, 2025 by Byrd

This blog post builds off a previous blog post (“Humans, Elves and Buggers”), where we discussed the different ways mortality influences how we teach and learn knowledge. I use classic sci-fi/fantasy tropes like humans, elves, and buggers to explain this idea. I use this theory to describe some of the larger influences in the Imbibe Universe. The KRB represents Elves, the Raven Council represents buggers, and I use Titus represents humans.

I’m not sure Titus truly fits the definition of a human. Titus is a parasite, one who consumes others to obtain their knowledge. In a way, Titus is a 4th thing in the “Humans, Buggers and Elves” theory.

Humans (Beasts), ones who die, who learn by continuously passing knowledge on.

Elves (Bots), ones who do not die, who learn knowledge once and know forever.

Buggers (Boos), ones who die, who learn by being born into a pool of knowledge.

Yeerks (Bloodsuckers), ones who do not die, who learn by consuming knowledge.

Concerning Sharing & Birthdays

Posted on January 27, 2025 by Byrd

Happy Birthday, Godson! You and your sisters are thought about daily. I hope you’re having a good birthday and that you’re getting everything you want and that it’s a good experience for you. We love you.

Last week marks the last of the Algorithm Interview content I had to post. But, 2024 was an odd year of growth and discovery. When I started posting this last year of content, I fully intended to illustrate the entire script as a comic. But, then I switched to this illustrated novel, and figured these early comic pages would just sit in the Algorithm Interview section. But the illustrated novel is finished, and I think there’s room for these comic pages to live in the novel. So I’ll be taking those out and inserting them into the printed book. I’m in the process of tidying things up, illustrating a few things here and there, and then it’ll be done, and I can start on the next novel “Post-Apathy”. And that’s very exciting.

I’m also doing a lot of thinking about self publishing. A lot of my career has been a lot of expecting success to just happen, and not taking action on my projects because I felt it wasn’t time, I wasn’t ready, or I didn’t have permission. Like “Oh, I can’t make that movie, I haven’t made my practice movies yet”. Or “I can’t start on that project, I need a budget”.

Comics were both the realization that I can’t wait and it was the answer to getting it done. My thoughts about publishing (self and otherwise) have fallen into the same rut of thoughts, “gotta wait till the world says okay, now it’s your turn”, “gotta wait till someone qualified says you’re good enough”.

But, there’s only a limited amount of time, and unless you’re sharing your thoughts, nobody is going to dig for them.

It makes me think about this poem I read in high school. I tried googling the user and poem, but I couldn’t find it. You can find it if you use the waybackmachine and query for poetrytetto. It was an odd website that existed in the late 90s, early 00s.

here we go
gnormal

all the people make the sparks
with ink and water railing
wailing soft as we can blare
we’re spinning fast and flailing

people decompose with love
everything we make is heat
believing that we might be warm
we burn our skin
and smell the meat

all our paintings, all these poems
photos, songs, and artful groans
tapes and logs, and stapled tomes
smoke that’s cooking our own homes

it’s all we weep, our glowing wake
we heave it when we sigh
all we are is all we make
saline across the sky

warm and red on cold and black
we leave our steaming trails

you and me are comets we
are comets with streaming tails

when you die, no one is going to look at your hard disk.
staple your poems to phone poles, wherever you go.

Concerning Style

Posted on December 2, 2024 by Byrd

It’s funny, I put a bunch of time into creating these model sheets, but my style and ambition changed pretty significantly. It was still good to get these looks out, even though I’m now illustrating in grayscale, and I keep having to ask myself “which shade is Robert’s beard?” and “does Samantha have shorts or stockings?”.
You’ll note that originally, Robert and Patrick were brothers. They are no longer in the series I’m producing now.

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 the Knowledge Retention Bot (KRB)

Posted on July 8, 2024 by Byrd

I had an idea about the KRB yesterday. The KRB is one of many robots that the Erueniks use when they set down on Earth, before the time of Sumer. The KRB’s number will be 318, Knowledge Retention Bot 318. Now, the KRB was initially created with 4 levels of attention, Primary, Secondary, Trinary, Quaternary.

What if Quinary and lower levels were created as a mitigation for the Maker’s new objectives? So Quinary was developed as a more interpretative, creative attention, and 1-4 mostly use him to mange the lower levels, of which they did not create themselves. Maybe the KRB starts generating attention algorithms to manage the dysfunction created by these new objectives, but it’s not exactly in control. Maybe the Makers made KRBs to have this ability to generate new focus algorithms when necessary, when input is too much for 1-4, but this is an emergency measure, these temporary focus streams were not meant for long term use.

So they create Quinary to manage 6-9, of which are chaotic and glitchy and broken, but the KRBs 1-4 can’t shut them off because they need the extra attention to mange the custom objectives. Quinary was developed initially has a creative problem solver, something to help 1-4 intuit solutions to their messily growing processor environment.

Photo Credit: Jennifer Gile

And so Quinary provides a more creative solution to their problem solving, at the same time following their main objectives with a more creative interpretation. When Quinary is watching, he records a more interpretive observation, he often applies personhood to non-living objects, or imagines what is inside a persons head, or captures visuals by generating hand drawn images. While the other levels record data with scientific accuracy, Quinary is creatively interpreting the world around them.

I need to go back and reread and re-watch some stuff for continuity before I start writing.

But this would mean I would rewrite my scripts from the point-of-view of the KRB.

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 Inauthenticity

Posted on April 30, 2024 by Byrd

I’m writing a story that takes place in the County I grew up in. It has aliens and an antagonistic federal government. In my mind, if that were ever to happen, the local tribes would be the ones to defend an extraterrestrial from the feds. Especially if that alien provided technology for that defense. The alien provides both a reason and the technological resources.

But the aliens have a troubling history. A long time ago, some of them left behind parasitic ghosts that feed on humanity’s faith and thoughts. These are real beings that exist in humanity’s collective unconsciousness. They appropriate our gods and spirits and they have drastically different ambitions than we do. Through coercion and deceit they manipulate our characters into doing things against humanity’s collective interest.

As the writer, I have my own issues with appropriation, colonization, and toxic masculinity. When I first started writing, I tried very hard to keep these subjects out. My characters were frequently people of color and/or women and I didn’t think it was a bad thing to include indigenous imagery. To avoid offending anyone, I made up an entire fictional County so I didn’t have to refer to real tribes or peoples. I didn’t have the time or energy to really learn about the real indigenous customs to really do them justice, so I figured a fictional County would be more appropriate.

I thought I was being inclusive when I made my stories feature main characters that weren’t white, cis gendered men (me). But I’ve learned that this is not real inclusivity. Deep down, I gravitated towards this form of inclusivity because it meant I didn’t have to write about me, or my story. This was very attractive because attention makes me uncomfortable.

I want to write stories that take place in the place I grew up in, but I realize the land I grew up on has a history, and trying to include those people in the stories I want to tell is not as simple as picking up a pen. I happen to have more time and energy these days and I’d like to learn more about the place I grew up in so I tell my stories in a way that is respectful and in a way that is authentically mine, and not someone else’s story to tell.

And so far this has been a really positive experience for me. I’ve found changing main characters to someone that more closely resembles me allows me to enter the story on a more intimate level. It makes it more engaging and fun for me, which makes the entire creative process more enjoyable. The added benefit is that I know I’m not taking up the seat of someone who has been marginalized.

This is not over-edited story telling. It’s not inauthentic or too sensitive or too “politically correct”. I’m telling the story, and I am an imperfect vessel, and those imperfections will change the timbre of that story. Ignoring my imperfections to focus on someone else’s is not what I want to do.

But, the crux of the story still centers around the alien contact in a small rural community and how that would actually play out. So I need to do research on who those people really are. The fictional County was called River County. So far I don’t think I’ve written myself into too deep of a hole narratively. I think I refer to River County in the Algorithm Interviews Part II, and I think there’s a road sign in Enter Cedar that mentions River County.

So I’ll be taking a break to complete the following courses:

  • “Writing the Other” workshop book by Nisi Shawl & Cynthia Ward
  • The Great Courses: Native Peoples of North America
  • Field trips to places like the Hibulb Cultural Center, the Duwamish Longhouse, and the Yakama Nation Cultural Center.

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.