Tag: ink

Concerning the Wiki and Happy Birthday, Ophelia

Posted on September 12, 2025 by Byrd

Happy Birthday, Ophelia! I hope today was joyous as well as placid 🙂

Today I finished the last panels for the second chapter of my new book, Apathy. It took entirely too long to make this chapter. I have 7 episodes outlined for illustration (this was originally supposed to be a live action television show), which will be interspersed with narrative chapters.

And at this rate, I won’t be done for years.

So, I need to really nail down exactly what I want to illustrate and balance that with what needs to be illustrated from each chapter. If I want this done by end-of-year, and I can do 3 pages a week, that’s 48 pages. Divided by 7, that allows me 6 pages per illustrated episode.

Time to get focused. I think choosing only things I want to illustrate will increase my enthusiasm, leaving the stuff I don’t really want to illustrate to be narrative.

Concerning Art & Happy Birthday, Virginia

Posted on August 26, 2025 by Byrd

Happy birthday, Virginia!! I hope you had a wonderful weekend, despite it being so hot.

I dropped some art off at the Gage Art Academy this weekend, to be considered at a small works exhibition. The exhibition is happening at their Drawing Jam, on September 6th.

I don’t prepare my drawings to be displayed, so figuring our pieces to submit was challenging. At first, I had this whole new piece worked out, that would be five separate drawings that when put together, formed this 6th mega drawing. But, I ran out of time. My day job has been a lot this year.

Instead, I went through old pages from my last book and prepared these to be submitted (but only after a lot of validation from my partner, Olivia). These “pieces” were never meant to be art, but meant to be tools to be digitized and formatted into a comic. But, they are kinda neat by themselves. It was fun choosing them and framing them.

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 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