Yoshitaka Amano: Tomb Raider (2013)
Gonna be an interesting week (for my American Friends, 41 °C = 105.8 °F). Weather's supposed to get cooler past mid-August, dammit.
Well, that turned out to be the optimistic version. We've reached 42.5 °C / 108.5 °F, and it will only start to cool down on Friday.
“There are days when I would like to draw something very philosophical and meaningful, something to touch the hearts of everyone, and find it absolutely impossible. One solution I use at these times is simply to get back to basics. Cartooning is, after all, drawing funny pictures, something a cartoonist should never forget.”
— Charles Schulz
“Say? Y… you’re dressed for the dance!”
“You didn’t tell me it was a nudist party!”
Archie’s Girls Betty and Veronica Annual #6, 1958
“OK. I lied earlier. THIS was the highlight of my parenting week. Sending my 13-year-old daughter into the store for (whispers) “feminine hygiene products,” and having the following text exchange. I died, she gave me life, I died again. And she drew an illustration, on the spot, ON HER PHONE, to drive her point home.“
– Belinda Hankins, shared on Facebook.
Supervised AI isn't
It wasn't just Ottawa: Microsoft Travel published a whole bushel of absurd articles, including the notorious Ottawa guide recommending that tourists dine at the Ottawa Food Bank ("go on an empty stomach"):
After Paris Marx pointed out the Ottawa article, Business Insider's Nathan McAlone found several more howlers:
There was the article recommending that visitors to Montreal try "a hamburger" and went on to explain that a hamburger was a "sandwich comprised of a ground beef patty, a sliced bun of some kind, and toppings such as lettuce, tomato, cheese, etc" and that some of the best hamburgers in Montreal could be had at McDonald's.
For Anchorage, Microsoft recommended trying the local delicacy known as "seafood," which it defined as "basically any form of sea life regarded as food by humans, prominently including fish and shellfish," going on to say, "seafood is a versatile ingredient, so it makes sense that we eat it worldwide."
In Tokyo, visitors seeking "photo-worthy spots" were advised to "eat Wagyu beef."
There were more.
Microsoft insisted that this wasn't an issue of "unsupervised AI," but rather "human error." On its face, this presents a head-scratcher: is Microsoft saying that a human being erroneously decided to recommend the dining at Ottawa's food bank?
But a close parsing of the mealy-mouthed disclaimer reveals the truth. The unnamed Microsoft spokesdroid only appears to be claiming that this wasn't written by an AI, but they're actually just saying that the AI that wrote it wasn't "unsupervised." It was a supervised AI, overseen by a human. Who made an error. Thus: the problem was human error.
New Secret Knots comic, “The Reclusive Artist”. Thanks for reading! I hope you like it.
Dreamed that there was a mundane-setting TTRPG I’m going to call “Greg and Maureen” where the players are visiting a non-player character couple their characters are friends with. But the couple is going through a rough spot! The objective was to investigate their relationship and either to help their marriage or hasten their divorce. It’s always small town and you’re always staying at their house. Players could add a little flavor of how they knew Greg and Maureen and even choose some minor traits for them before the game.
I’d played the game with another group before, but I didn’t know there were multiple paths. There’s a note Greg writes confessing to something, but depending on the dice roll it’s a different note. The content of a major plot point depended on a 2d6 dice roll.
In the dream, I’d previously played a version where he confessed to cheating on Maureen with another woman, so I thought Maureen should see the note, but in the game we were playing, my friend Celia found the note, which actually said that Greg was dishonorably discharged from the army for a gay relationship (he’s bisexual) before he met Maureen, and that he had lied about having had an honorable discharge. So for a while I came off as an asshole because I kept saying that Maureen needed to know the contents of the note so that she could confront him about what he did to her, and my friend seemed to me to be unusually blasé about what I thought was an affair.
There were other possible notes. In other timelines he had never had an affair, never been in the army, never even loved her, etc. There was another possible note where you learned he’d lied to her that he was good at track in high school (imagine an impressive mile time, which my dream mind supplied as 6:40, though that won’t even get you into varsity level) when he was actually bad at track in high school (14 minute mile). This was a lie he’d told, like, once, and he and Maureen almost never talked about running or high school sports.
In every possible timeline, Greg was Utterly Wracked with guilt about his secret. Yes, even the high school track universe.
Also, if players had decided that Greg was white before the game, you could unlock a timeline where his secret was that his distant ancestors had been in league with THE Devil from Christianity between like 1830s and 1910s. (The devil was just their accountant. He was ashamed of them for non-devil reasons.) In this timeline, you could actually meet the devil.
You didn’t find a note in every timeline, so sometimes you had to work off other evidence. I had only ever played mainly investigating Greg, but you could also focus on investigating Maureen. I think the other players and I just suspected him of hiding something every time, due to our biases. Sorry Greg! Guess we weren’t real gregheads.
Who want to play Greg and Maureen with me
I kind of want to make this into a real game.
Player characters have a closeness score and a fondness score for each of Greg and Maureen. Roll on closeness to determine whether they can tell if you're being honest (and vice versa) and to read emotional states (G/M reading the PCs or vice versa). Fondness is G/M's fondness of the PC. Roll on it to determine whether they react positively to you, or to see whose side they take in a conflict when it could go either way. PCs also each know a secret about Brad or Maureen, which usually isn't whatever Brad is revealing and which ranges from something innocuous, to your character being in love with one of them, to one of them being in witness protection. The secrets are hidden from other players by default, and you're allowed to lie about them.
I just realized that I could spend all day on fleshing this out and probably shouldn't.
"Flip Service", preview of World Of Betty And Veronica Jumbo Comics Digest #28, written by Mike Pellowski, art by Jeff Shultz (pencils) and Rich Koslowski (inks)
Goodbye, Riverdale!
Let me share a personal note today with you. Thank you!
I will not lie to you... Riverdale was the first series that I followed in real-time, weekly. I was so excited every week when the new episode dropped on Netflix. I was 25 years old when it started. Now I'm 31. Wow... this evening, after 7 unprecedented seasons of Riverdale, we will say goodbye to this guilty-pleasure, comforting show.
I had a very different life in those years... now everything has changed, just like this show. We've seen some major changes in this show through all these years, and I think we can say that we've been witnessing television's weirdest and craziest show ever.
I'm sure many of us will miss this magic squad, all the adventures, all the insane storylines and villains.
Goodbye Archie, Veronica, Jughead, Betty, Cheryl, Tony, Kevin, Reggie and Tabitha!
Goodbye, Riverdale!
I've never watched Riverdale (not because I think it's bad or anything, it's just... I don't watch much TV–last show I watched was Castle, and I still haven't gotten to season 8) but I enjoy reading the recaps at the Beat. Looks totally demented, and proof anything can be done with my beloved Archie gang.
Blueberry by Jean Giraud.
John Carter And Flash Gordon Awaken Tarzan
Art by Neal Adams
Council of Wyrms (1994) is a D&D campaign setting that ponders the question, “What if dungeons WITH dragons?”
This is a unique campaign setting, a string of islands where dragons of all kinds (metallic, chromatic and gemstone) live apart from the world. In the past, they warred ceaselessly on each other, but recently they have founded a sort of democracy (the titular council, which I can’t help but read as making fun of the 1521 Diet of Worms in some inscrutable way). They did this in order to deal with the incursion of pesky human dragonslayers who were systematically eradicating them (there is also maybe some unintentional metaphor regarding the idea of external enemies being necessary for social stability, but maybe I am reading in too much).
Players take the role of dragons! They can also be half-dragons, or the servitors of dragons, but why would you do that when you can play a dragon? This arrangement reminds me of a sort of summer blockbuster version of Ars Magica for some reason.
Dragons! It really is a mind-boggling thing to realize it took two decades before someone came up with the idea of actually playing the dragons (that someone was Bill Slavicsek, who previously work on the West End Games Star Wars RPG, a fact that brings a lot of context to this project, I think). I have to say, the rules for playing dragons are suitably muscular. I suspect this flavor of D&D is extremely cathartic and freeing. At least for a while. Staying power aside, this is a richly realized box set, which was a surprise when I actually sat down to sift through it — I always thought on some level that it was an elaborate practical joke.
Perhaps realizing this sort of high-powered play would rapidly loose its charm, this was the only Council of Wyrms product, one of very few stand-alone products in the 2e era. It was released later as a hardcover “campaign option,” but that is essentially the same material.