October 7, 2018

"Hello, please remove me from your spam folder"

Yep, I’m back on Buttondown after Substack disappeared my archives. I really hope this is the end of the ‘hopping from provider to provider’ era of this newsletter.

Updates

Thought Bubble, as usual, was excellent.

Numerous members of Team Metropo were in attendance and Magnus was tabling the book alongside Mary Safro and her excellent Drugs and Wires. From what I understand the book sold incredibly well and Magnus was able to return to Norway unencumbered by the dreaded ‘unsold stock’ problem that plagues all who travel far and wide to ply their trade.

It was also cool to catch up with Chris Lewis who had copies of the pitch for Awe with him that I’d worked on as editor. It looked fantastic!

I also got to see some panels this year when not talking until my voice failed me.

Claire Napier interviewing Greg Rucka about his work was great with some fantastically insightful questions and chat.

Hassan’s Strip Panel Naked, uh, panel (now in its second year), was illuminating and inspiring as it always is. At this point I think the channel has been running for around two years and to see it go from strength to strength (along with PanelXPanel and its Eisner nomination) in such a short time is a testament to Hassan’s hard work and passion.

Triona Farrell (the hugely talented colourist on Beautiful Canvas) was also on the panel chatting process which was very cool to see. I actually got to meet Triona this time around and she’s as friendy and delightful as she is talented.

I also got to see Kieron Gillen interview the masterful Warren Ellis, the highlight of which was Kieron completely forgetting the title of Castlevania and referring to it as ‘Vampire Jump Game’.

Comics folk are the best folk.

The convention, as always, had a huge impact on me heading into the colder, darker winter months. It serves as a recharge (even with several gloomy Brexit conversations I had), a top up of inspiration as we head into the final stretch of the year. With my productivity effectively slashed to ribbons recently, the convention, the folks I chatted to, those I ate and drank with, were doubly effective this year in reminding me why I create and write in the first place.

Links

• Another week, another interview/piece on the amazing Robyn, this time from the NY Times.

• This is the kind of content I crave. An Atlantic piece on how Mars may be policed when it’s (inveitably?) settled.

• The concept of this app fascinates me, allowing for a mini/private social network amongst friends and peer groups.

• Also on the web stuff front, I’m doubly intrigued by this service which basically turns a Google Doc into a basic blog setup.

• Slate on journalists moving from Microsoft Word to Google Docs throws up this relatable tidbit:

“Whose document is it anyway, when you can both access the current draft? If I pop into a Google Doc in the middle of the night to check that a random thought was covered and find my editor’s color-rimmed avatar in the corner, I will immediately, awkwardly exit—even if they are grayed-out from inactivity—as if I’ve just walked in on someone in a private moment, praying they didn’t see me. Some grayed-out editors seem to never leave, keeping the article open as one of their many tabs—but you never know when they might click on that tab and catch you in your own private suggestion-grappling moment.”

• Horror movies are traditionally overlooked by the Oscars when it comes to award season, so The Ringer rectified that with a ‘best horror movie’ awarded for every year since 1978’s Halloween.

• How to Put Yourself Online.

• Saving Punk From Cyberpunk (AKA Holy Crap I have so many more games on my ‘to play’ list now).

• Speaking of cyberpunk, this piece called ‘Common Cyborg’ is really good.

“As a common cyborg, I subvert that dream. I do not want to sell any of their shit for them. I am not impressed with their tech, which they call 3C98-3, and which I am wearing, a leg that whirs and clicks, a socket that will not fit unless I stay in the weight range of 100-105 pounds. I am 88 per cent charged in basic mode and I have taken 638,402 steps on this leg. The last one they gave me was a lemon. Maybe this feeling of trial-and-error, repetition and glitch, is part of the cyborg condition and, by extension, the disabled condition.”

• A few newsletters ago I linked to this piece on the invisible networks that make up the global supply chain. In the same spirit I recommend putting aside 30-35 minutes for this immense post/site entitled ‘Anatomy of an AI’ which goes deep on the invisible networks, resource extraction and labour in the modern network, using Amazon’s Echo technology as an example:

“Put simply: each small moment of convenience – be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song – requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives.”

“In the specific case of the Amazon Echo, the user has purchased a consumer device for which they receive a set of convenient affordances. But they are also a resource, as their voice commands are collected, analyzed and retained for the purposes of building an ever-larger corpus of human voices and instructions. And they provide labor, as they continually perform the valuable service of contributing feedback mechanisms regarding the accuracy, usefulness, and overall quality of Alexa’s replies. They are, in essence, helping to train the neural networks within Amazon’s infrastructural stack.”

These networks are obfuscated either through intention or happenstance to both us the consumer and their creators to the point where it took Intel four years to untangle their own supply chain to ensure it was ‘conflict free’. Amazing and horrifying.