@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
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ZachWeinersmith

@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social

The SMBC guy.
New book: A City on Mars (Nov 2)

Co-author of Soonish
Illustrator of Open Borders
Scop of Bea Wolf.

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ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Lot of people telling me we know the Earth is round because the people in space look at it all the time but how do we know it's not just a very cleverly made sprite? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(computer_graphics)

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Garrison Keillor is really strange to me career wise. He wrote exactly one outstanding novel - his first. Then ever after he wrote the same novel, only worse, and with more weird sex stuff. He also wrote very good (really!) poems early on, and then over time what he counts as poems is just aw-shucks Minnesota stuff. It's like he noped out of a lasting literary career for kitsch.

ZachWeinersmith,
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

@Flux But he's rich! He even came out of retirements to do his kitsch show! There are other authors who only produce one good thing, but that's because there other things suck, not because they (as far as I can tell?) chose to do something easier.

ZachWeinersmith, to comics
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Fossils
http://smbc-comics.com/comic/fossils-4 (click for full comic)
#smbc #hiveworks #comics #webcomics #evolution

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Hey literature people--

So, I was reading HG Wells and I noticed something I hadn't thought about. He writes in a style that's very weird, and but for the Victorian/Edwardian language might even be considered experimental now? Like, in The War in the Air, it regularly alternates between goofy comedic scenes and scenes of horror and violence. And in between THAT there are digressions about economics and engineering technology. (1/n)

ZachWeinersmith,
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

But then it occurred to me that Dickens does this all the time! Both the alternation between serious and goofy, and the social level stuff. The closest modern writer I can think of is Steinbeck who in e.g. The Grapes of Wrath talks both about economic conditions, and real people, and is capable of doing silly comedy and reasonably good drama.

ZachWeinersmith,
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

I'm sure I don't read enough to have an opinion, but my sense is you don't see a lot of this anymore? It feels very 19th century to me, in that way 19th century novel narrators often feel like some guy with opinions on everything sat down to tell you an anecdote. That is, the narrator often feels closer, more patient, less disembodied, happy to pass through the 4th wall gently than in modern literature.

ZachWeinersmith,
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

@Lyle WHALES ARE FISH

ZachWeinersmith, to comics
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Full comic here: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/featherless
Comics early on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersmith?ty=h
#smbc #hiveworks #comics #webcomics #dinosaurs

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Every Chinese Food Recipe:

Heat wok to 4 billion degrees.
Add one atom of oil, any kind.
Add garlic and onions.
Add black sauce of doom 1.
Black sauce of doom 2.
Chilies.
Black sauce of doom 3.
Protein.
Raise heat to 6 billion degrees.
Plate.
Garnish with scallions.

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Oh god people are fighting about abortion and overpopulation and all I really wanted today was to write "sack-blast" in a comic

ZachWeinersmith,
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

On a vaguely more serious note, an ethicist friend told me that arguing future lives have at least some moral status brings out a lot of anger, and I didn't believe him! Maybe I'm being naive, but the slope between that claim and some sort of Handmaid's Tale hellscape doesn't seem so slippery to me?

ZachWeinersmith,
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

@Phosphenes Yeah, but where it gets interesting is whether we should see added happy people as neutral or not.

ZachWeinersmith, to comics
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Bonus panel, and apparently 7 other trolley comics, here: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/trolley-8

#smbc #hiveworks #comics #webcomics #trolley

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Our 10-year-old Greek mythology enthusiast, just now after she said an inch worm was going to bite us and we said it wouldn't:

"I feel like I'm a CASSANDRA here"

flameeyes, to random
@flameeyes@mastodon.social avatar

(Nearly) done. The final tray is printed and looks good. Except I screwed up the internal measurement and the two trays of grad students don't fit.

Since the grad students are the cheaper thing to reprint, I'll do that. Alternatively I could also just put them back on the original plastic bag, it should work.

The same tray showing two badly positioned trains of wooden meeples.
The final assembly of the three trays inside the original box of Everyone Else Thinks Thus Game Is Awesome.

ZachWeinersmith,
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

@flameeyes WOW, amazing, thanks!

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

So there's a lot of kvetching, from myself included, about how the modern internet has gotten worse, usually due to a combination of SEO, social media gone evil, and the prevalence of money as more and more of a guiding factor in tech.

But of course the old internet had the problem of being fairly boring. The interesting question is how to get a third way. I've heard a few proposals:

ZachWeinersmith,
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

One from Cory Doctorow, and others, is to essentially have government intercession to prevent rent-seeking. The tech solutions I've heard tend to focus on some kind of tokenization. I honestly don't know what will work, and one thing that worries me is that I think we content-suppliers see more rot than consumers. That is, we're saying "but arrrrrrrt" while people are actually getting lots of media they like for free.

ZachWeinersmith,
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

In other words, my worry is that on some fundamental level evil social media (or whatever) will always win because they're supply what the consumer wants, or anyway is engaged by. One reads stories about GenZ wanting to drop out of obsessive media culture, but I have no sense that this is the norm.

And I think as long as most entertainment comes through these filters, it's going to be hard to live in a golden age of good work. It'll necessarily be more disposable algorithm-tripping stuff.

ZachWeinersmith,
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

To my mind the ideal ecosystem for creativity has certain qualities, e.g.

  1. There's a large artistic "middle class," meaning that although there may be big stars, people doing solid work, or still learning their craft, can make enough money to focus on their work.

  2. Getting work viewed is less about advertising than about quality, meaning that most tastemakers should care about what's lasting more than what's zeitgeisty.

ZachWeinersmith, (edited )
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

  1. There should be enough money coming into the system to support many axes of diversity among creators in order to encourage more new weird stuff.

  2. Consumers have to actually care about the difference between what is amusing and what is good - the artistic equivalence to the difference between another candy bar and a healthy meal.

  3. The locus of great art should be among the public, not universities or restricted environments.

ZachWeinersmith,
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

There's likely more, but my point is that all this stuff seems to me to be pretty straightforward, and much of the current ecosystem is against all this stuff. The rise of social media means you have e.g. people getting millions of readers on facebook and deriving literally zero revenue from it, unless they're willing to also do a little dance to get people to buy a t-shirt. Young artists now spend countless hours learning platform algorithms, rather than craft.

ZachWeinersmith,
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

In retrospect, what was best for me about the early internet was that although there was competition and we cared about reader numbers and so on, because there weren't big aggregators or modern social media, your only paths forward were making stuff people liked and making friends among peers. Emotionally, aesthetically, I might even say morally, it was better. But you need money to attract and sustain more artists.

ZachWeinersmith,
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Anyway, I don't know the solution. Artists can't really unionize en masse because social media could just murder most careers. And anyway, we're too disorganized and dispersed. But as a for instance, if social media networks had to pay 1% of revenue made from ads posted next to artist's creations, on their own sites on the platform, billions would pour into the arts, meaning more full-time careers, more learning, more books.

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

This will be relevant for about 2 people, BUT

There's a quote from Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed that sounds amazing: "Those who trouble themselves to find a cause for any of these detailed rules, are in my eyes void of sense..."

HOWEVER, as far as I can tell it is invariably out of context. He's not talking about the Torah overall, but about narrow particulars involved in animal sacrifice.

Now, go about your morning.

ZachWeinersmith,
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

As an unnecessary addendum, it really irritates me that people would you such a fraught quotation without bothering to look up the paragraph from which it hails. This is a problem endemic in research literature and a good demonstration of why you can't trust a secondary source about a primary source. Nobody can do infinite deep dives on everything, but you certainly can for quotations from widely available documents!

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