My SN is an anagram of my full name ;) My first short story collection arrives in 2027. Follow here for news and release updates on each story.
Tucson, AZ
Joined December 2011
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arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
I was trying to explain last night why Zelda Ocarina of Time is such an interesting phenomenon to me. You can revisit your childhood home or return to your hometown, but time doesn’t wait for anyone. The people have changed, the places are different & eventually you have to accept that you can never experience those things the way you did when you were younger. Video games have always felt different. You can return to your childhood games years later & it’s all still there. The same places, the same people, the same music, the same details you remember from childhood. Nothing has moved on without you. I think that’s what makes it so emotional. Life keeps moving forward, but the worlds we grew up in remain preserved exactly as we left them. The real world doesn’t let us go back, but sometimes the worlds we grew up in let us feel like we never had to leave.
Long rant I know but I don’t feel like I properly worded how I felt on stream last night so if you read this whole thing, thanks :) I hope you have a game as special to you as OOT is to me 💚
To avoid that jump from Halloween to Christmas, I propose we create a Thanksgiving mascot to get shows and merch so it's not skipped.
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
Wow. Now that’s a Ghostbusters costume!
Source: reddit.com/r/ghostbusters/s/…
🎃 Just in time for Halloween! My take on a Haunted House.
My second short story, Eminent Front, is now available to read for FREE on Substack...Don't forget 😉
A nephew searches for his missing uncle in the last remaining house of a real Pennsylvania ghost town. But some things are better left forgotten.
Happy Halloween! 👻
arhythmutopia.substack.com/p…
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
As a 40-year-old man, I try to understand why celebrity deaths hit me so hard. I am a grown man. I have built a family and a community I love. Surely the deaths of people I have never met or interacted with shouldn’t affect me to the point of grief.
Today, when I heard of Sir Patrick Stewart’s passing, I realised something. It’s not just the person. It’s the moment they came into our lives.
For us millennials, TV and cinema were a very different experience. It was mass media at its truest.
Today? We live with different algorithms and feeds. My wife follows celebrities and influencers I have never even heard of, recommending Netflix shows that never even pop up on my “you should watch” feed.
But growing up?
Catherine O’Hara was everyone’s mum.
Robin Williams was everyone’s Mrs. Doubtfire and Mork.
Anthony Bourdain was everyone’s guide to food.
Matthew Perry was everyone’s Friend living next door.
Hayden Panettiere was the cheerleader we all wanted to save.
And Sir Patrick Stewart was everyone’s Captain.
We saw them at the same time, on the same channels, at much the same ages.
This grief we feel is a collective one. We grieve the characters we shared our time with, who made their way from screen to heart. We grieve that time we no longer have, and the childhoods we can’t quite recreate for the next generation.
And perhaps the largest grief of all? The feeling that the last pieces of our inner child are fading away with every loss.
These people helped us understand the world. Their stories make up the mosaic of our souls. They shaped our understanding of right and wrong, and of what the world sorely needs right now… empathy.
I don’t know what lies ahead of us.
I just know that I must boldly go.
Let’s, together,
Make it so.
It's official! 🌕
My first published short story, Ask for the Moon, is now live on Substack!
A supernatural horror story for fans of The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, and Love, Death & Robots.
This is the first step toward my upcoming anthology, Ethereal Conundrums For A Sinister Age: Volume 1, planned for 2027.
The first five stories are FREE to read. No paid subscription required. The second one drops on Halloween!
And because I like to be unique, every story ends with a Musical Accompaniment. Look up the song on your device or platform of choice and enjoy a free soundtrack.
If you give it a read, I'd love to hear what you think!
arhythmutopia.substack.com/p…
Halloween party last minute and don't have a costume, just show up naked with a red bag. Your costume? The Porn Identity.
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
Miyomoto's response to why AI is good is so eloquent I am honestly impressed.
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
I've never commissioned an artist because I've never been able to justify the expense. I've always used whatever tools were available to create things for my own projects. AI is simply another tool in that toolbox.
You're not losing a commission from me. That commission was never going to exist.
This
In art, the thing that matters to me is the creative expression of the artist. If you outsource the choices to an AI, I don't consider this an artist making art.
But if you outsource the *labor* to an AI, but maintain control over the actual creative choices - like, if you have a specific vision and are using AI to translate your imagination to reality - I consider this just as valid artistic expression as using photoshop or digital photography.
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas hands his 21-year-old son a check for $10,000.
"Okay. You're on your own," Kirk says.
Michael looks at the check. "That's great, Dad, but I still have two years of college tuition left."
Kirk doesn't care. The lesson has started. The bank is closed.
For the next 30 years, Kirk Douglas proudly brags to his other children and everyone who would listen: "Michael never asked me for another dime. I gave him that money, and that was it. I made him a man."
He believed his extreme tough love had worked perfectly. Until Michael finally sat him down three decades later.
"Dad, you remember those beautiful, soft Italian leather suitcases you bought me for Christmas back then?" Michael asked.
"Yeah," Kirk smiled.
"Well, I found out that each suitcase could hold exactly 22 kilos of marijuana."
To pay his tuition and survive his father's brutal lesson in self-reliance, Michael became a drug smuggler. He moved product across the country using the exact same bags his father bought him.
Society glorifies tough love. We are told that cutting the safety net and applying maximum pressure is the only way to build true character.
But when you push someone to the absolute edge, they don't always learn the moral lesson you intended. Sometimes, they just learn how to survive by any means necessary.
Feels like AI discussions should be relevant here. People that want original are quick to copy. Same behaviors they abhor in AI they do themselves just watch social media or clout chasers. Stay original because good ideas will always saturate. Keep creating new.
Social media platforms want original content.
But the moment something original performs well, hundreds of accounts copy it.
Sometimes the copies get more attention than the original.
And the algorithm doesn’t seem to care who came up with the idea first.
They’ve built an economy that celebrates originality in theory and rewards imitation in practice.
How is that supposed to encourage creativity?!
"All use with AI is slop"
This infers we humans are better than any AI output. I beg to differ. We are the same human race responsible for Boaty McBoatface and needing a HOT warning on coffee.
Here's an angle I don't hear argued enough about AI-collaboration for writers. If you want to write about doctors you talk to one if you want to write about felons you speak to them. If I want to write about robots/AI then who better to discuss, challenge, or correct me about AI?
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
Here’s another thing I’ve noticed about AI entertainment.
People are being told they shouldn’t enjoy a video once they discover it was made with AI.
Think about that.
You laughed. You were entertained. You watched until the end.
Then someone told you how it was made, and suddenly you’re supposed to hate it.
Since when did enjoying something require approval from people who didn’t enjoy it?
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
Anti AI people are so ideologically captured they're turning into the monsters rhey thought they were fighting
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
Every time AI masters something we thought required intelligence, we are forced to ask whether it actually did.
We spent centuries believing that chess required genius. A machine won in 1997, and within a year we stopped calling chess the pinnacle of human intellect. We moved the line.
We said creativity was the line. Then machines started composing music, generating images, writing poetry. We moved the line again.
We said emotional intelligence. Empathy. Understanding context. Then people started preferring AI therapists because they were more patient, less judgmental, and available at 3 AM when the human ones were asleep.
Every time the machine crosses a line we drew, we do not conclude that the machine has become human. We conclude that the line was never where we thought it was.
And we redraw it.
This has been happening for thirty years and almost nobody has stopped to ask what it is actually revealing.
Most of what we called uniquely human was not. It was just complex. Complex enough that only a biological mind could perform it, until something else could.
This should feel like a loss. Strangely, it is the opposite.
Every time we discover that a trait we thought was essentially human turns out to be something a machine can do, what remains becomes more precise.
We are not shrinking. We are distilling.
For centuries we defined ourselves by what we could do that nothing else could. That definition was always unstable, because it depended on nothing else ever showing up that could do it too.
AI is stripping away every capability that was never actually ours to claim. Not to diminish us. Because those things were never what made us human in the first place.
What is left when you remove everything a machine can replicate?
Not calculation. Not pattern recognition. Not memory. Not even creativity in the generative sense, because machines can generate.
What remains is that it matters to you.
A machine can compose a symphony. It has no need to. It can write a letter of apology. It has nothing to repair. It can plan a future. It does not have to live in one.
Stakes require something to lose. And having something to lose requires being alive in a way that is not a metaphor.
Every previous definition of humanity was a list of abilities. AI is burning through that list and showing us it was the wrong kind of list.
What makes you human was never what you can do.
It is that you are the one doing it. That it costs you something. That the outcome lands on your life and the lives of the people you love and the world you have to wake up in tomorrow.
A machine can produce the answer. You are the one who has to live with it.
That distinction does not shrink as AI gets more powerful.
It is the only thing that grows.
AI is not taking what makes us human. It is the first thing in history forcing us to finally figure out what that is.
And the answer was never a capability.
It was the fact that we are here at all, with something at stake, in a life we did not choose and cannot repeat, trying to do something that matters before it ends.
No machine will ever know what that feels like. And no machine needs to.
That is ours. It always was. We just could not see it clearly until something came along that could do everything else.