This story is really really really really good!! You should read it!!!

Don’t forget to send in your application! The deadline is next week. Apply at comicartsla.com 🌞🌴

Hi all!! CALA’s back for 2025 and applications are open!

I did not know that reading Piranesi would be the exact same experience as playing an excellent walking simulator! I would’ve loved walking around a huge map picking up bits of lore and piecing together the whole story.

My visual essay on gossip came out right as we were evacuating from the LA wildfires, so I’m finally posting it now! 😅 I had a lot of fun making this comic about birds spilling the tea with each other… my favorite activity. www.vox.com/culture/3920...

tw CSA, Neil Gaiman If your immediate reaction when hearing a five year old experienced child sexual abuse is expressing disgust and concern that they’ll be a future perpetrator… that sucks, y’all. Sorry to be a social media scold and all, but that really sucks.

This goes well beyond humanities and classrooms. Art is not just an array of pixels on a screen. Physics is not just a sequence of LaTeX commands. Consciousness is not just an emission of tokens. The whole field is has mistaken byproducts for products.

It’s happening!! After 5 long years away, Comic Arts LA is returning this weekend December 14-15th at 3015 Rosslyn St. LA, 90065. From 10AM to 5PM both days, FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC! www.comicartsla.com

The discourse about that paper on highly-rated AI poetry especially misses the point—because one of the greatest strengths of poetry is that it’s a person speaking to you intimately, illuminating a real experience you may have never seen anyone put words to before. Some pieces I’ve liked lately:

Oh I guess Bluesky has videos now and I didn’t even notice! Here’s my animation about eating my baby’s toes from a couple years back:

CALA is a 100% volunteer-run community show and we need your help to make the show happen! 🙏 If you're interested in volunteering to help out during the show in return for free lunch and a CALA volunteer T-shirt and everybody's gratitude, sign up here: forms.gle/DncVPWnKwPWo...

Sorry to be an internet shitpig again, but I dug a little to find out who’s running NaNoWriMo right now because that FAQ is full of grammatical errors, so it was clearly written with no oversight. It looks like the interim director Kilby Blades is pretty much the only person left at the office? 🧵

New from 404 Media: we did it, we figured out where the waves of AI-generated spam like Shrimp Jesus on Facebook are coming from. Creators in India, Vietnam and the Philippines learning from YouTube/Telegram guides, using Bing's image creator, making $ from Facebook www.404media.co/where-facebo...

Nashville, 2013, tour bus. Is this Claire who made the new Gaiman allegation on the podcast Am I Broken? Survivor Stories? open.spotify.com/episode/47en...

A comic about my Chinese parents who drive me absoluTELY BUGSHIT UP THE WALL when feeding my child AKSHGKHJSG;HJA www.newyorker.com/culture/cult...

"Being a brilliant writer does not elevate one above the common smallness of being a person." Brandon Taylor on Alice Munro is a must read blgtylr.substack.com/p/what-im-do...

OMG.

I have seen multiple people say they do not like single source stories (by which they mean, instances where later stories are copied from another story), and this sticks in my craw for sexual assault stories, because this requires that victims of sexual assault speak to multiple reporters.

I want to add one more thing. My 20-year-old students, the moment I tell them they need to do something they anxiously go, “Oh no, oh no, you’re right, omg. Of course, totally. Totally!” And that’s me, a random adjunct teaching one of their classes, not a world famous writer who’s their boss.

Thank you!

Guys, the podcast is available on Spotify/Apple Podcasts, and as infuriating as it is that Tortoise funnels you into their fucking podcast instead of providing the information clearly via text, you should listen to the nanny's first-hand account before being like "TERFs be lying."

In our new issue: Laura Preston attends an AI conference as its honorary contrarian speaker.

I did some layout analysis for different comics, and then I figured they’d probably be helpful for other people too. It’s really interesting how cartoonists can use different methods to create a sense of subjectivity or wrongness or slow time.

Hi! Our application period is now open! 💙

Whoops, a lot of cartoonists have probably moved over to Bluesky. Just FYI, CALA is back and accepting applications!

aeon.co/essays/your-... this article is fantastic and is basically the long version of this meme

I got really sucked into this video by münecat that debunks evopsych, but one thing I wanted to note is that the spatial reasoning/spatial modeling ability that men are allegedly (lol) stronger at is actually just a learned skill you get better at with practice, and I taught it in my class at USC… 🧵

"Dear Editor, I have incorporated all suggestions from reviewer 2, and I hope you find the changes an improvement to the manuscript as a whole."

SO honored to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Illustrated Reporting & Commentary for my comic "Is My Toddler A Stochastic Parrot?" ❤️❤️❤️ www.newyorker.com/humor/sketch...

This concept changed my life for the better. I run this as a Thursday night trashy reality TV party and either cook one dish that's simple, cheap, and filling (pasta with red sauce) or buy ingredients for a Chinese-style hotpot. Then we watch Asian dating shows like Single's Inferno. It's great!

I’ve been noticing some LLM bots on Reddit—they sometimes get upvoted, but you can tell them apart on sight because they give cluelessly anodyne responses to just the subject line of the post. I was wondering what they’re for—probably karma-farming for astroturfing purposes? 🧵

I think the theory advanced by Today in Tabs’ Rusty Foster that Daniel Pund pulled it because he’s corny af is soooo funny, sorry

Imagine you’re dealing cards to a group around a table for a board game or card game. Do you instinctively deal clockwise or counter-clockwise?

A little disappointed we haven't been using the term "Generative Large Language Models" more often, since it leads to the satisfying acronym of GLLM—which we'd naturally pronounce as "Golem." (And yeah yeah... Tolkien's "Gollum" isn't far off the mark either.)

From @venturetwins on X, this screenshot from Copilot… Sydney’s back. I love this lol

かえる爆誕！！！

I replayed Choice of Robots today and it REALLY hits different post-ChatGPT and post-baby. I used to play the path of making a companion robot who was my friend and equal, but this time around I found myself thinking of it as a child and letting it decide its own life and its own future.

I really recommend Colin Fraser’s thoughtful articles on generative AI! He patiently walks you step-by-step through a critical approach to AI, and especially how it functions (or doesn’t function) in practice as a technology we’re interfacing with.

Good thread

The ZA/UM doc from People Make Games aged like milk and a big part of it was lack of critical thinking—they treated ZA/UM as if it was a worker co-op and represented the “rights of the many” when it had literally JUST proven itself not to be by tearing Kurvitz et al’s life’s work out of their hands.

From the Other Site, this thread by Corey Brickley: x.com/coreybrickle...

It is ok that some things are hard. It is ok for human effort to be considered valuable.

STILL thinking about Chris Willrich’s take on Omelas!! I linked it earlier but I reread it again this morning and was moved to tears. It’s the most compassionate of the various recent takes on Omelas imo.

I won an ASME National Magazine Award for “Is My Toddler A Stochastic Parrot?” 🥰 (Thank you especially to Aviva for being my champion!) asme.memberclicks.net/american-soc...

Ah, checking that images aren't nonsense created by AI - that's the famous 'added value' we always hear so much about, right? www.frontiersin.org/articles/10....

For the last few weeks I've been working with Chris Barkley @cmzhang42.bsky.social of @file770.bsky.social on a report about censorship in the 2023 Hugo Awards. Leaked emails and files indicate authors and works deemed “not eligible” for the awards were removed due to political considerations. 1/3

Uh, wait, this blew the whole 2023 Hugo Awards case wide open???