@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
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This is probably just the communities I'm in, but it feels like whereas AI art had a fairly serious backlash, AI music has not? Is this your impression?

ZachWeinersmith,
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@Sqlgene Oh, interesting, so you think it's more about whether we can observe artists being replaced by corporations?

ZachWeinersmith, to comics
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Full comic here: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/foam
#smbc #hiveworks #comics #webcomics #adulthood

ZachWeinersmith, to random
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God in Heaven, why did I get my daughter the Wigs of Fire audiobook? There's literally a part where one dragon worries its bones are broken and another says they aren't because, as dragons, they have very strong bones. Like a person saying "Don't worry about ectoparasites Round-Face. As hairless creatures with opposable thumbs, we can easily remove them."

ZachWeinersmith, to comics
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Bonus panel here: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/oh-yes
#smbc #hiveworks #comics #webcomics #love

ZachWeinersmith, to random
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Yesterday I had one person say I'm too so pro-tech pro-capitalist and one person say I was trying to force a leftist ideology, and both were responding to A City on Mars. All I can say is I wish people would stop trying to find the hidden motive and just read the words as plainly written!

ZachWeinersmith,
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Why does everyone need to tie a little conspiracy bow on everything? Even if it's not strictly conspiracy theorizing, there's this deep thread now of "okay but the REAL trick is..." when the thing is that the topic is involved and complex and doesn't naturally map to a simplified ideology.

ZachWeinersmith,
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@jenbanim Secret?

ZachWeinersmith,
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@Oggie I'm sympathetic to this, but my slightly nicer theory is that people have been saying this sort of thing forever - it's just it used to happen in private letters and conversations and not in the equivalent of public bulletin boards.

ZachWeinersmith, to random
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Holy shit, I thought my computer was just running really slowly, but it turns out it was entirely due to Chrome. Please Google, just close down.

ZachWeinersmith, to comics
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Break it down
Bonus panel here: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/break-it-down

ZachWeinersmith, to random
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So I'm closing in on Bea Wolf 2, first draft, and I've just crafted what I believe is the first four line stanza of alliterative verse that literally alliterates on every word:

ZachWeinersmith, to comics
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Parenting
Bonus panel here: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/dad-2

ZachWeinersmith, to random
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I've seen a number of writers remark on the fact that it's stupid to wait around for inspiration to try to writing something good. This is of course true, because often inspired writing is, in retrospect, terrible, while lines you suffered over are quite good.

BUT, there's this other thing, which is that as a project wears on, there's inevitably less inspiration, more just carrying out the initial vision. This is where, to my mind, the real craft often comes in.

ZachWeinersmith,
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Inspiration can convince you something is interesting or worth doing, or from time to time get you some really good sentences. But by the time you're, say, 80% of the way into something, it's kind of like an old relationship. You're not going to get butterflies in your stomach anymore, and the strange thing is that while you feel less inspired you're often doing really good work!

ZachWeinersmith, to comics
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History
full comic here: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/history-5

ZachWeinersmith, to random
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One of the disappointing things about living in this sci fi future is that nobody wants a heads-up display. They're annoying with basically no upside in most contexts, but when I was a kid I always imagined needing data readouts or whatever.

ZachWeinersmith, to random
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Wouldn't post it on that other similar site, because it'd result in inflammatory stuff, but... why do we care what college students do or don't protest? I mean like if a substantial Rotary Club in Idaho had a loud offensive argument about something in the zeitgeist, I don't imagine it'd make news anywhere. Possibilities:

  1. These people are perceived as future leaders and so we want to know their values
  2. These people represent the youth so we want to know their values
  3. Anger-bait?
ZachWeinersmith,
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Cold take that I worry is a hot take: I am not in any domain interested in what college students per se think. I may be interested in what one thinks because they have field expertise or experiences I lack. But when conducting research, writing fiction, cooking, exercising, literally anything... I never ask myself "I wonder what college students think."

Edit: Worth adding that these protests are generally very small, consisting of a non-representative subset of students!

ZachWeinersmith,
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Like, the best guess seems to me that Ivy League students yelling stuff invokes ingroup-outgroup rage among many constituencies, so it makes for good media. But what's weird is it seems like everyone cares, not just, say, right wing people watching cable news.

ZachWeinersmith,
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@mrencyclopedia Yeah, it's a dynamic I really dislike, because essentially the media's message is "we'll pay attention if someone is hurt"

ZachWeinersmith, to comics
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Perils of Immortality
Full comic here: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/immortal-2
#smbc #hiveworks #comics #webcomics #ai

ZachWeinersmith, to random
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The Test
Full comic here: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/the-test

ZachWeinersmith, to random
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Trillion dollar VC idea:

New search engine. You enter a query, it searches Google, ignores sponsored results and obvious SEO, returns information.

ZachWeinersmith, to comics
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Full comic here: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/red-2
#smbc #hiveworks #comics #webcomics #humor

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