Swan Boy is a webcomic that Branson Reese has been drawing since 2018, and I like it very much. I had been vaguely but increasingly aware of it for a while, and then Adam of Rubbercat posted this appreciation of an acrobatic callback-to-a-flashback it pulled off, with clearly years’ worth of artistic improvement between the episodes, and I finally got curious enough to look. The second-ever Swan Boy strip has me laughing, as does every subsequent one I’ve clicked on, in publication order. I am in for a nice catch-up ride, I think.

Today I turned ten Cobalt-60 half-lives old, according to the Mathaversaries calendar I subscribed to quite a while ago. (Technically, I am subscribed to its predecessor project, Mathematical Anniversaries, which I dimly recall learning of through Making Light, or some place like it.)

While I’ve never owned a dedicated e-reader, Nena Farrell’s Wired preview of the Boox Picco—$100 and apparently no larger than a playing card—piques my interest.

I’ve been using my iPhone as my primary ebook device ever since Kindle released its iOS app in 2009—a year when my phone’s screen was both smaller and lower-resolution than the tiny Picco’s. Maybe I’m ready for an e-reader with no web browser that’s always a tempting tap away, and with negligible battery anxieties compared to a phone.

The device isn’t slated to ship before November, and Farrell promises a more complete product review before then. I look forward to seeing it.

In When did Google get so f-ing weird?, Sancho Panza experiences the very same phenomenon I wrote about last December, and called “Bicameral Google”. This being that, for many Google search queries, you still do indeed get the results you wanted—but only after Google’s AI butts in and interprets your search query as if you had addressed it to a chat bot, which you did not. (Except, clearly, you did.)

In Sancho’s case, a perfectly reasonable string of keywords seeking a specific 2010s sports meme resulted in the Search AI assuming that Sancho was voicing distress over a deteriorating personal relationship. The Google Search results page invited him to sit with it and discuss his feelings. And then the first real search result was the meme Sancho was looking for, but only after he scrolled past the robot-therapy offers. “I think this was the moment I, the frog, noticed the pot had been boiling for a while.”

Have we gotten to the point where we have to constantly be in a parasocial dialogue with our computers? Is it so hard to imagine that some parts of search were just fine before LLMs? I’m not sure how to feel about all of this. Maybe I should go talk to my friend Google, it’s always so nice to me.

(Via Daring Fireball)

Was just reading the Wikipedia article about Funky Winkerbean, which the cartoonist wrapped up a few years ago, after a 50-year run. It was a rare example of a daily comic strip whose creators allowed the characters to age in more-or-less real time, allowing them to add drama around character growth and change to the daily gags about family life.

While Winkerbean was less ubiquitous in newspapers than Lynn Johnston’s For Better or for Worse, which took a similar tack, both strips launched a cottage industry of hate-reading comics blogs in the 2000s. These readers tuned in every day to complain about and mock the storylines which often dipped into drama or outright tragedy as characters suffered challenges, and loss, and sometimes death. This was perhaps most infamously realized with Lisa from Winkerbean battling breast cancer for years before finally succumbing to it. The Wikipedia article’s talk page includes 20-year-old comments from people who just hated the idea of a daily comic strip frankly addressing cancer, and enjoyed sharing this opinion wherever they could.

And this concept seems so strange to me now, something that could only exist on the internet of 2015 or before. Or maybe I’m just reflecting on how my own tastes have changed; dropping by today’s Comics Curmudgeon, shows that it’s still doing it’s thing, observing that all of Batiuk’s characters continue to have “a terrible inability to feel pleasure, like in a pathological way.” (Winkerbean may be wrapped, but its spin-off Crankshaft is still going, and the surviving, retirement-age Winkerbean cast has largely migrated over to it.) I should learn to take more pleasure in things that stay constant, perhaps.

I recently dropped into a musical-instrument shop in downtown Bangor, Maine while visiting family. On the wall of a storage space in back hung a collection of circa-1980 posters by Tom Batiuk featuring Harry Dinkle, the monomaniacal high school band director from the American comic strip Funky Winkerbean. These were clearly designed and sold for display in school music rooms, and they made me ache with unexpected nostalgia.

There were a couple others besides these on another wall, too. I recall one saying “The football game is the opening act for the band!”

Publicly accessible LLM-based chatbots receive a ceaseless stream of requests from around the world for custom pornography, which in itself shouldn’t surprise anyone. But Joseph Cox at 404 Media has interviewed contractors who are now tasked by companies like Microsoft to judge whether the bots are generating lewd or suggestive images of acceptable accuracy and quality:

When a Copilot user uploads a picture of themselves or someone else, they probably expect that image to remain private between just them and the AI tool. In reality, a workforce of at least hundreds of human reviewers are sometimes looking at that prompt and whatever images they upload. […] These contractors are then asked to review whether the generated image successfully fulfilled the prompt — such as, did the image generator make the woman’s AI-enlarged breasts big enough.

(h/t Gemini6ice)

The nor’easter currently delaying my flight back home disgorged a chunk of 1884 shipwreck onto a Nantucket beach.

Jason Parham writes for Wired about how people whose identities are “borrowed” for targeted phishing scams often hear from old friends or acquaintances they haven’t heard from in years, checking in to make sure that the email is legitimate. Which it isn’t! But now these two people are unexpectedly reconnected anyway, and wow, it’s been so long, how are you, you wanna get lunch and catch up?

The phenomenon reminds me of Text Your Friends, It Matters More Than You Think, which is surely the one periodical-article link of the current decade that I have shared more than any other.

A brief exchange about Kinky Tail, a Californian coyote seen by local wildlife observers to have birthed and raised nine pups all by herself earlier this year, after the death of her mate and oldest child to the many threats all around them—wolves, probably, or humans, both violently territorial.

Kinky is typical of her species but still amazing. The underdog who never stays under but overcomes. They aren’t enjoyed by many. It matters little. They faced and lived among mega fauna and many human types and cultures. And outlasted all.