Welcome to today’s bucket of eels. I’m Rose. Let’s pull out some eels, shall we?
[image: an eel, with yellow skin spotted with black spots, swimming in a tank with other colorful fish]
Today’s eel: Every edition of this newsletter is named after an eel. Normally that means an eel species, but today's issue is named after a specific, individual eel. His name is Larry Gordon, and he lives in Tacoma, Washington. I read about Larry in this delightful story by Emily Anthes, and I really do hope you go read the whole thing because it's great.
Larry is a 30 year old leopard moray eel (Enchelycore pardalis) with a big personality — "he had been rumored to hold grudges against aquarists who had fallen into his disfavor," writes Anthes. And earlier this year his handlers started to worry that he might have cancer.
You don't really think about eels getting cancer, do you? Nor do you think about how, exactly, you'd diagnose them. Anthes explains how you even get an eel (famously slippery!) into a CT scanner to check for a tumor in their skull. The images in the piece are amazing, seriously, go read it.
The good news is that the growth in Larry's skull seems benign! Good for Larry. I'm rooting for you buddy.
[image: two scientists looking at a CT scanning machine (which looks like a big white doughnut) and an eel on a tray in front of the dougnut hole.]
Current status: I just published a big series for Flash Forward! And I really hope you check it out. Welcome to Vanguard Estates is a choose your own path story. There are FOURTEEN different endings for you to play through to. We cover technology, surveillance, economics, trust, family bonds, love, sex, and more!
This is the show's first big, ambitious, fiction-first project! The story follows a character as they navigate decisions with and for their aging father. Should they let robots care for him? How do you pay for care? How do you explain technology to a parent who might not understand? All that and more!
Starting next week, you'll get five new episodes that are all about the real stuff that inspired this series. We're going to talk about brain science, the economics of care, what technology actually exists, the conditions in nursing homes, and more!
The series was brought to life with the help of some really talented people! I wrote the story, and got some amazing editing from Ace Tilton Ratcliff and Georgia Wyatt.
The voice actors for Welcome to Vanguard Estates are:
Marcus Jones — Keith Houston
Imani Jones — Shara Kirby
Robot #1 — Ashley Kellem
Amy — Chelsey B Coombs
Vanguard Estates Representative — Aiya Islam
Missy — Anjali Kunapaneni
Robot # 2 — Brett Tubbs
NPR Host Jira Lewis-Cohen — Sandhya Dirks
The sound design is by Mischa Stanton and music is by Ilan Blanck. Mischa worked so tirelessly to tie it all together, while also dealing with things not all that dissimilar to what you hear about in the story. Ilan's compositions turned moments I wasn't sure about in the writing into really lovely, emotional beats that I'm so excited for you to hear. Truly, the music and sound really bring this whole thing together! I feel really, really lucky to have gotten to work with such talented people on this.
[Image: A collage of illustrations. In the center, a wooden sign that says “Welcome to Vanguard Estates.” On either side of the sign there are robots, one which has a red eye, the other showing a rainbow and clouds on the screen. Around it, a series of squares showing things like a wheel on fire, a robot cat, a broken piggy bank, an airplane, and a car wash.]
I want to say a bit about why I think the choose your own path (not adventure, please don’t send me another cease and desist Chooseco) is a useful format specifically for thinking about the future.
What you hear in Welcome to Vanguard Estates isn't a pitch for how the future should be. A lot of the choices in this story suck. Some of the opinions of the characters, including the main character, are problematic. The idea isn't to use the fiction to tell you what to think, but instead to push you to react.
Often the future feels hard to really process, which makes sense right? It hasn’t happened yet. We don’t know what will happen. And without knowing it can be hard to feel like you’re prepared.
The choose your own path format forces us to make choices. It puts you in a position, gives you some information, and says “okay, so what do you do?” I think that can help us think through our potential options in ways that simply trying to imagine in a void can't.
Kind of like how sometimes you say "I don't care what we have for dinner," but then when someone picks Italian you realize that actually maybe you did care and you don't want Italian. It took the choice being made to force that realization to the surface.
The future is going to be full of tough choices. Choices where neither option feels that great. Choices that we don’t necessarily feel prepared to make. If we can practice walking through these various paths before we have to, it can help clarify our thinking (I think).
You can be the judge of whether I succeeded at any of that!
I really think this series is best experienced in audio but we did also make it as an online game you can play, if you'd prefer that!
[image: a CT scan of Larry, showing his bones in a yellow/orange glow]
Welcome to Vanguard Estates is the second to last project of Flash Forward's life. In December, you're going to get a final set of episodes that try to sum up what I've learned from making this show for almost eight years. I'm calling that series Onward and Upward. And to get you prepared for that, here are some fun images I made for that series using an AI image generator (Midjourney, in case you care which one).
Of course, the supremely talented Mattie Lubchansky is doing the official illustrations for the series. I just got them and they made me tear up a little bit!
Speaking of AI image generation! I just read this really fascinating (and depressing) post by Andy Baio about AI image generators, art, and creativity. Andy spoke with an artist whose work was used to train a model to generate art that looked just like hers, without her knowledge or permission. The person who created the AI model is depressingly nihilistic about it, basically arguing that there's no point in trying to avoid this, and that artists have no real claim to their style or work so nobody can stop people from creating image generators to copy them. I am not a lawyer, but I'm very curious what a lawyer might say about this.
I have theories about why tech people seem to not really understand (willfully or not) what makes art... art. But I won't go into them here. Instead I want to show you something more fun. In his post, Andy links to a guide for how to train Stable Diffusion on your own photos to generate some fun self portraits. So I did that. Here are a few of my favorites.
Top row: me as a photo-realistic illustration, as a photograph, as a painting, and as a vaporware rap album.
Middle row: me as a linocut, as a Nighmare Before Christmas character, as a Star Wars hero and as a fantasy book cover
Bottom row: me as a movie poster, as an anime character, as a vintage photograph and as a horror movie book cover
I also asked it, of course, to generate some images of me holding eels. Turns out Stable Diffusion does not know what eels look like.
I do love the bottom right one though.
And here is my actual favorite, which I would totally use as an author photo.
So that's what I spent the evening doing, instead of the work I should definitely be doing. And now you have to suffer through it too!
Okay, that's all for this newsletter! More from me next month. Long live Larry.