Tag: aliens

Concerning Writing Things Because They Sound Cool

Posted on June 30, 2025 by Byrd

I’m having to do some retroactive…development.

I thought I had the gods pretty well thought out for Enter Cedar, but I’m finding that there are some nuances I didn’t quite flesh out. And that’s becoming problematic, as the story I’m writing now is having more interactions with the gods.

And sometimes, I use words because they sound cool…like, what did I mean by the “Original Phantasms”? Now I’m having to justify it…It’s annoying.

Look, you can even buy it as a sticker…

The series has also reached a point where I’m writing a new thing and I think to myself “oh, shit, what did they say in that scene”, and I’m having to reread parts, or reference something. And I don’t have a great setup to reference things. Do I need a wiki?

I might enjoy writing weekly wiki articles more than writing blog posts.

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 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 the Hiring Practices of Absolution Corp

Posted on April 2, 2024 by Byrd

This guide is to be used in interviews for potential testers of Total Virtual Reality (TVR.

Interviewer: Welcome to TVR Debugr Training! We’re glad you’re here. What’s that you ask? How do you know this isn’t a TVR simulation? I’m glad you asked!
QUESTION: Do you believe in god(s)? Y/N?
– If yes: Do you believe in a kind god(s) or malevolent god(s)?
– If no: congratulations! You have been offered conditional employment as a TVR Debugr!
– If kind god(s): why do they allow bad things to happen (Multiple Choice)?
1) Because we need bad things for a believable simulation = REJECT CANDIDATE
2) Because god(s) are testing us = REJECT CANDIDATE
3) Good point, if I were god(s), I would make a better simulation = ACCEPT CANDIATE
– If malevolent gods(s): congratulations! You’ve been offered a position in our live simulation
validation division; where you continuously validate that all bad things happen for verifiable
reasons, thus validating that no bad things happen because of the choice of malevolent god(s),
thus proving this reality is not a simulation.
Interviewer: At Absolution Corp, we continuously validate that our reality is the prime, so you can rest easy, knowing that your work is fulfilling, rewarding and most important of all; REAL!

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 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.