Max D. Stanton

Initiation into the occult is a string running throughout The Invisibles and as a storytelling device it's such a cool theme - a colorful, fantastical avenue to both get insights into a character and to see the divine/ultraterrestrial approached from different angles.

I love Morrison's take on magic. Throughout The Invisibles we see a bunch of different magical traditions represented, all unique and contradictory but with enough unifying elements that it all feels to fit together tonally. Hell of a juggling trick.

"Through the sharp hawthorne blow the winds. Hm! Go to thy cold bed and warm thee. Old Tom O'Bedlam'll fright you. Make you shit your pants, I will. You'll see."

Vol 1. No. 2: Down and Out in Heaven and Hell pt 1. Our hero Dane learns magic from the mad homeless sorcerer Tom O'Bedlam.

"I will empty the concentration camps of immigrants and fill them with Nazis and pedocons" is a good pitch.

The first Great Khan of the Midwest suspended habeas corpus and the second shall have to do the same (or more likely leave it in abeyance).

The primary and predicable effect of the trans bathroom panic is cisgender women who don’t conform to some random jackass’s vision of femininity being harassed or attacked

What's the opposite of "stop hitting him, he's already dead"?

Series of comics panels where a young man is lectured on how he will be given "the freedom to think and to live in a new way."

Morrison also excels at creepy authoritarian villains, although I suppose making the British education system into a wellspring of soul-sucking horrors is playing on easy mode.

Psychedelic portrait of John Lennon

While it's clearly still getting its feet underneath it, a sequence where the psychic assassin King Mob summons the godhead in the aspect of John Lennon starts setting the tone for the high weirdness that we're to encounter.

Comic art of a young blonde man hurling a Molotov cocktail and profanities.

Volume 1, Issue 1 : Dead Beatle$ (September 1994): We start off with an opening that Joseph Campbell would have loved - our hero hears the call of adventure, meets with supernatural mentors (a gang of occult revolutionaries) and descends into the underworld (a sinister reform school).

Cover of the collected The Invisibles by Grant Morrison

I recently picked up the collected Invisibles by comics genius Grant Morrison. The Invisibles was a huge influence on me and my writing but it's been ages since I've revisited it. Every day (more or less) I'm going to try to share my thoughts on an issue.

The Kool-Aid Man represents the next stage of evolution, after the work of the Human Instrumentality Project comes to fruition.

The real answer is Big Trouble in Little China or The Thing, but honorable mention to this unloved oddball of a film.

This seedy fellow reminds me of the ghouls from The Throne of Bones.

Telling the bees - Wikipedia

There was a European folk tradition that the bees had to be informed about any important goings-on.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telling...

Reddit post about an AI-made foraging book that misidentified poisonous mushrooms.

Google AI post saying you can add glue to pizza sauce.

4. Don't eat their food.

Faust and Mephistopheles.

3. Skepticism. Always remember that these beings lie freely and convincingly, and that they and their masters do not have your interests at heart at all. Quite the opposite.

The fact that they can't handle certain tasks that are simple for humans doesn't prove that they're stupid or powerless in general, it just proves that they're NOT HUMAN.

Astaroth.

Astaroth is said to make men invisible, lead them to hidden treasure, and answer every question posed to him (huh), but you wouldn't ask him to recite the Lord's Prayer for you. A faerie lord might have terrible powers but not be able to pick up a grain of salt.

2. Know their powers and limitations. People get cocky with this on both sides of the AI divide. Boosters treat them like they can do anything, Haters see that they can't handle trivial tasks like counting the number of 'r's in blueberry and act like they're powerless. Neither extreme is tenable.

Say an invocation, light a candle, draw a circle around your workstation. Whatever gets you out of "I am having a conversation with a peer" mode and into "I am trafficking with forces beyond my ken" mode.

John Dee summoning a ghost

1. Ritual and ceremony. If you approach AIs as if they were human beings they will scramble your brains, because you are attempting human interaction with something that is not human. That's where ritual practice comes in. It breaks us out of our typical patterns and prepares us to meet the uncanny.

Circle of Solomon

When you converse with a AI you're talking with a powerful, fundamentally unknowable entity that converses like a person but is decidedly not. Our evolution has not prepared us for this at all. But mythology has. Demonology and fae lore suggest some useful practices for thinking about AI:

It's exactly the attitude that led to RBG dying on the bench. Elite entitlement is a cancer on the Constitution.

TBF I don't really know his politics, he just gives me libertarian vibes. I just picked up a book of his essays and newspaper writing so I'll have a better idea soon. In any case, a genius writer who has brought me a lot of joy.

The thermostatic backlash to "actually making Americans drive the speed limit" probably crushes the vestiges of the Constitution and leaves millions dead.

Oh my. So good 🥺 🐕 👻

RFK Jr and Tor Johnson from Plan 9, both with the same expression

separated at birth

George MacDonald Fraser, Charles Portis, Cormac McCarthy, Robert Anton Wilson, H.P. Lovecraft, P.J. O'Rourke, and H.L. Mencken.

A lot of time when people talk about "freedom" what they really mean is "the ability to dominate and humiliate others" and I think the crypto community is all-in on the latter.