UPDATING OCCASIONALLY (FOR NOW)

5 thoughts on “Issue 22 Cover”

  1. Dr. Norman (not a real doctor)

    Ooohhh … He looks – desperate.

  2. Zombatar

    No hat. He lost his hat. Which had a lot of his personality. Alert! Alert! We have a Lost Hat emergency! This is Not a Drill! Alert! Alert!

  3. Scarsdale

    Hang in there, I’m a retired fireman, and those pictures/videos have me sweating… The closest thing to a forest fire I ever fought was when a stupid tried to burn raked leaves on a windy day. 4 houses! Mostly grass and bush fires but, yeah.

  4. Clint

    Good news, we are back at home and there was a home to return to. It’s been a crazy week and a serious near miss seeing as several other homes on our block burned. Terrible stuff but the Ranch persists.

    1. Honzinator

      Welcome back.
      My mom’s whole town, Monrovia, seems to have survived so far, too, but it ain’t over yet.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

 

Issue 22 Cover
Posted on January 8, 2025 by Dawn

Traditional post-issue comic cover! Episode 23 is currently TBA but we're hoping to have the first page out on January 22nd so as to not leave y'all hanging from the proverbial cliff for too long.

[1/9/2025 NOTICE: Some of you may know we live in the Greater L.A. Area and if you've heard about the wildfires here: yep, we're currently evacuated from our home and still unsure as to its fate. We grabbed our computers and backup drives so whatever happens we still have our files, but definitely expect some delays and cross your fingers that the worst we're going to end up having to do is throw food out of the fridge due to power loss.]

[1/11/2025 UPDATE: Good news, we are back at home and there was a home to return to. It's been a crazy week and a serious near miss seeing as several other homes on our block burned. Terrible stuff but the Ranch persists.]

Do Cowpokes Dream of Electric Sheep?

Posted on October 26, 2016 by Clint
And if so, why aren’t they dreaming of electric cows? And what’s with the electricity, anyways? Okay, so I’m making a lame play on the title of Phillip K. Dick’s seminal novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which the film Blade Runner was (very loosely) based on. One of the purest subgenres of science fiction to me is the exploration of what it means to be human through the lens of advancing technology, particularly the concept of artificial intelligence. Once we create an entity that can think, what does that mean for our own existential state? What would intellect be like freed from the necessities and constraints of the human body? Would a computer develop emotions? Would a machine born out of simple “on” or “off” instructions be able to figure out our world of “maybe”? Assuming there is such a thing as a soul, would it be considered to have one? Where does programming end and independent thought begin? That last is a particularly interesting question. Okay, so is the soul one, but in light of today’s concerns over nature versus nurture and brainwashing techniques, it’s tempting to wonder if we aren’t just spending our own wet, meaty lives adding to, altering, following and/or resisting a set of instructions and parameters. This is the metaphor that lives at the heart of AI science fiction, and it’s a powerful one, most visibly and recently exemplified in the movies by the film Ex Machina. And now we have an entire television series that looks forward to exploring the concept in an even greater, and potentially more disturbing, depth. It also involves the trappings of the Old West, so you know, sign me up at that intersection. wwlogo If you’ve seen the original Westworld, you may not understand what the big deal is about a remake of a Michael Crichton-scripted tale of technology gone murderously out of control: basically, Jurassic Park with androids. Or since Westworld came first, I guess it’d be fairer to say Jurassic Park is Westworld with dinosaurs. They’re even both set in the backdrop of a theme park. The comparison is not subtle, and neither is any moral or philosophical messaging. Westworld, the new HBO series, keeps the basic trappings of the premise — a futuristic theme park where extremely realistic androids recreate and populate historical settings for the pleasure of rich tourists (up to and including acts of sex and murder) — but so far looks to be intending to take a much deeper look into the underpinnings of identity, memory, and thought along the lines I mention above. Interestingly enough, in the original movie there were other parts of the theme park shown such as one based on Ancient Rome. So far the new series dispenses with this in favor of focusing on the particular setting of its title, and it occurred to me in my musings over this article that there are few better choices that you could make than to match up the wild, unexplored frontier of AI consciousness with the frontier exemplified by the the American Old West. I’ve talked before about how a huge part of the Western genre lies in the shifting lines between civilization and savagery, and now I think: isn’t that something that could also apply to our brains, in that struggle between our higher and lower natures? Throw robots on the verge of Singularity into that mix, and pardners, that’s a real heady alchemical concoction you’ve got brewing. I’m ready and willing to drink some more down.