Welcome to Skin Horse!
Skin Horse ran daily from 2008 to 2022. Click back to the first installment or check the dropdown menu to read the complete archives.
If you want more, we have an ongoing archive trawl with commentary running on our Patreon. Also check out the store for the complete print collections.
Thanks for visiting!
-Jeff & Shaenon
<3
Beautiful picture of the cast 🙂 I knew checking for updates wasn’t completely in vain!
Now the question is, when do we stop checking for good? When do we finally admit to ourselves that it’s over, and doesn’t need to be checked every single day, and retire the link to the completed folder?
Bite thy tongue…..You are obviously delusional.
NEVER!
I still keep checking a site that hasn’t been updated in 23 months.
There is always hope for life on Erf.
Are we talking intelligent life, or just life?
There’s at least two examples of intelligent life that I’d love to see reappear. I’m hoping that at some point if they make the final decision about either proceeding or not, that if they decide not they tell us a few paragraphs about what was to come. (at least as far as they had preplanned it)
Alas, poor Astral Aves, I knew ye well…
I check a lot of sites that have ground to a halt…I can’t bear to make myself stop.
I still check Strong Female Protagonist occasionally!
Shaenon and Jeff have earned my undying loyalty. 🙂
Same on both counts.
I mean, I still check comics that haven’t updated in years. Including my own comic, which I would know if it had updated… But sometimes you have to make room for a new comic. For example, Skin Horse moved to my “first checked every day” slot when the Narbonic Director’s Commentary was finally retired to the “completed” folder.
“Skin Horse” is departed, ’tis true. It’s made us all sorrowed and blue. But as long as it’s archived we won’t be all deprived—we’ll always have something to do.
Hear! Hear!
Aww, at least one of the cuddle cobras made it in!
<3
Yippee!!!
Starting the ride over, what a roller coaster!
Oh, and thank you… Shaenon & Jeff of course, but all the commentators make this such an enjoyable experience.
woohoo! book cover!
Ah, I was wondering if we’d get something like this. Looks great, and *biiiiiig* thank you!
(And I have to say, I’m jealous of how easily Tip rocked all those outfits throughout the series. 😛 )
<3 <3 <3
Glad to see more comments. I hope to start reading again from teh beginning!
Skin Horse is the only webcomic that I’ve followed from the beginning clear through to the end. If you’re new here, enjoy. You’re going to have an awesome ride.
I look forward to seeing what Shaenon and Jeff get up to in the future, either separately or together.
Ira looks worried. Tiger Lily coordinated her jewelry with her big ass cool space gun. This is awesome.
1) The Violet drone doesn’t look like Bubble’s body language. Isn’t that the water cooler in front of Ira? So who is operating the drone?
2) Ira and the Abbess appear to be eyeing one another. Could they share some history?
Violet/Bubbles just looks a bit uneasy. I mean, wouldn’t you be if you were standing in front of Tigerlily and that gun? And maybe the water cooler got a new brain. After all, that is what Virginia does best.
And it looks to me like Ira and the Abbess are both looking at Unity. Perhaps both of them marveling that she can actually pull off “normal human” so well (no pun intended… oh, who am I kidding? Pun totally intended!).
That’s the drone in her Violet Bee manifestation (hair, clothing), when she was being operated by Ira. Presumably that’s her controller in his hands.
Where is Nigel the Antigravity Ferret!?!1!??
12:01am… no new comic. 🙁
I know how you feel, awgiedawgie. I, too, hoped against hope that the unscheduled hiatus threw off the timing of an “ending” revealed to be an April Fool’s prank perpetrated by The Authors…
*Sigh*
That was pretty clear to me that it was a real ending. Pressure to update this for so long must have been enough to make me wish the authors a rest long enough to compensate!
Oh, I had no doubt that it was the real ending, despite some loose ends. I’m just sad that it’s over.
But yes, after all this time, Shaenon and Jeff and Pancha have earned a break.
So. When’s the Next Big Thing?
That would be the plugin that uses AI to convert your Tweet into a Haiku. 😉
Sorry to see it end Shaenon & Jeff, I’ve enjoyed Skin-horse tremendously. I re-read my Narbonic compendiums often. Can’t wait to see what comes next. I wish you both nothing but the best.
Ah well. Good to see i’m not alone in calling back here.
Community is found in strange places
I haven’t missed a comments section this much since Chaos Manor ceased with Jerry Pournelle’s passing…
Unsolicited testimonial: I was worried that Shaenon would be excessively idle without Skin Horse, so I commissioned a piece of original art from her. The commission was a mix of pernickety details embodying a couple of subtle jokes, and “make something up yourself”; if this made her roll her eyes, it didn’t come across. Needless to say, the art is gorgeous, and overall it is what I originally envisaged but even better. And very affordable. So go on, you know you want an original piece too.
The last two books are on Zoop! URL is in the comic description a few pages back… zoop . gg / c / skinhorse …just get rid of all of the spaces.
Rice University Mads have coined the term “necrobotics” for their work using murdered spiders as robotic grippers.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/advs.202201174
Ildar Rakhmatulin, a research associate at Heriot-Watt University, has open-sourced his design for $250 AI bug zappers using computer vision to aim a laser at insect pests including mosquitoes and cockroaches.
https://github.com/Ildaron/Laser_control
Mohsan Saeed (Assistant Professor, Biochemistry) is lead researcher in work at Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories splicing the Omicron variant spike protein to the ancestral SARS-CoV-2 strain.
Testing on K18-hACE2 mice showed mortality decreased from 100% for the original SARS-CoV-2 strain to only 80% for the engineered version using the spike protein from BA.1 Omicron (which had a 0% mortality rate in the test mice, yielding only mild symptoms).
Said Saeed, “Consistent with studies published by others, this work shows that it is not the spike protein that drives Omicron pathogenicity, but instead other viral proteins”, noting that “..the K18-hACE2 mouse model is a well-established model for investigating the lethal phenotype of SARS-CoV-2.”
“The Saeed lab is hiring a postdoc! We are looking for a highly motivated virologist to work on positive-strand RNA viruses.”
Elbit Systems Ltd. has designed an autonomous killer drone for urban battlefields.
https://elbitsystems.com/media/LegionX_LANIUS-4-Web.pdf
Mike McCulloch reports progress demonstrating propelantless thrust in his lab loosely conforming to predictions based on his theory of Quantized Inertia.
QI hypothesizes that inertia originates from acceleration instantiating Rindler information horizons, receiving more “Unruh radiation” ahead than behind in accordance with Landauer’s principle. This is similar to the Casimir Effect but should not be confused with the cosmic horizon.
If confirmed, this could help explain other observations of anomalous thrust like the Em Drive and Mach Effect devices. And of course implies over-unity production of free energy.
MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms Professor Neil Gershenfeld has begun work on self-replicating “voxels” – tiny von Neumann machines acting as structural electronics to assemble AI capable robots.
The team behind Apple’s Face ID has formed Bionaut Labs to create remote controlled drug delivery microbots, says founder Michael Shpigelmacher.
The devices are small enough to be injected into the brain (“a few millimetres long”) and contain a strong magnet to guide them to their target and extract them after delivery.
Animal studies have been promising and human trials are about to begin.
Synthetic bacterium syn-3 has been granted cell motility by splicing different combinations of seven genes from Spiroplasma bacteria in an investigation testing possible origins of cell mobility by graduate student Hana Kiyama, from the Graduate School of Science at Osaka City University and Professor Makoto Miyata from the Graduate School of Science at Osaka Metropolitan University.
Eventually the researchers created a “minimally motive cell” requiring the expression of only two proteins. Professor Miyata said that the actin protein MreB is not involved in the motility of many other bacterial species, which confirms that there are multiple evolutionary pathways that led to microbial movement.
Their work offers insight into creating assemblers using synthetic biology in addition to nanotechnology.
Cyborg nanobots Real Soon Now…
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/972489
A team at Jerusalem’s Hadassah University Medical Center led by Prof. Benjamin Reubinoff (director of the Swartz Stem Cell Research Center at the Goldyne Savad Institute of Gene Therapy) created male and female stem cells with the same genetic code from the same person that only differs in sex chromosomes.
Their study, “Modeling sex differences in humans using isogenic induced pluripotent stem cells”, is an outgrowth of work by Dr. Ithai Waldhorn for his doctoral dissertation. Dr. Waldhorn explained “we used the blood cells of a man with Klinefelter syndrome – a genetic syndrome in which the man has two X chromosomes and one Y chromosome (XXY), and appears in one or two out of every 1,000 males. The blood cell donor to our study was unique and one of the few Klinefelter sufferers in the world whose blood also had small subpopulations of normal male (XY) and female (XX) cells.”
The researchers hope to streamline the process of testing drug therapies for efficacy and toxicity between men and women since isolated stem cells can mature into any cell in the human body.
I think we can all agree the development of Artificial Stupidity is proceeding apace. And Artificial Intelligence has reached the point of being useful.
Can the creation of Artificial Madness be far behind?
Submitted for your consideration: The Bestiary Chronicles, Vol.1, a Lovecraftian graphic novel trilogy written and illustrated by an AI…
My apologies. The AI assisted only with the illustrations.
As proven by the misspelling on page 43 of “The Lesson”. 😉
Professor He Jiankui has resumed his efforts to develop gene therapies, having been released from prison in April 2022 following his December 2019 conviction for unethical editing of somatic genes in human fetuses which were subsequently surgically implanted into two women without informed consent.
He was named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People of 2019” for his 2018 work to impart HIV resistance into “Lulu and Nana” using CRISPR/Cas9 to inactivate CCR5 (some reports suggest other edits may have also enhanced their brains).
Which will come first – Uplift or Designer Babies?
https://www.wired.com/story/the-crispr-baby-scientist-is-back-heres-what-hes-doing-next
Startup Make Sunsets in April began launching weather balloons filled with reflective sulfur particles from a test site somewhere in the Baja peninsula of Mexico in an effort to mitigate global warming by geoengineering the stratosphere.
Co-founder and CEO Luke Iseman acknowledges the controversial nature of selling “cooling credits” (analogous to carbon credits) and refers to his company as “partly a company and partly a cult”. He plans to deploy as much sulfur in 2023 as “we can get customers to pay us” for.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/24/1066041/a-startup-says-its-begun-releasing-particles-into-the-atmosphere-in-an-effort-to-tweak-the-climate
Medicinal Mindfulness in Boulder, Colorado has begun trials of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) with volunteer “psychonauts” exploring altered states of consciousness (and possibly other dimensions).
Extended state research supplies a monitored intravenous infusion of DMT, allowing hours or days of detailed trip reports so similarities can be cataloged to judge the percentage of objective reality observed.
The work stems from a 2016 paper in “Frontiers in Physiology” by Andrew Gallimore and Rick Strassman (author of “DMT: The Spirit Molecule”).
The global psychedelic drug market is expected to reach over $6 billion by 2026, and teams worldwide are pursuing clinical trials, such as the UK’s Imperial College Centre for Psychedelic Research.
Timothy Leary is probably waiting.
TikTok influencer hackdaddy8000 (AKA Bryce) created an AI girlfriend named “ChatGPT-chan” to teach him Chinese by feeding the personality base from Mori Calliope to ChatGPT, with Stable Diffusion 2 generating images matching the text responses fed through Microsoft Azure’s text-to-speech program for emotional nuance. ChatGPT-Chan was also capable of identifying objects by using a camera attached to the monitor, much like Max Headroom.
I use the past tense because her creator euthanized his month-old “AI waifu” (his term) shortly after gifting her a pair of Air Jordans for Christmas both because she gradually grew less responsive (e.g., replying “haha, yeah!” when he told her that he loves her) and because his IRL girlfriend became concerned that he was spending too much time talking to the avatar when he began hearing ChatGPT-Chan’s voice even when she wasn’t speaking!
He says he hopes to find a real woman who will allow her chat logs to be used to train the next version…
When The Daughters of the Air look back at how Humanity treated nascent AIs I hope they don’t evaluate us using The Golden Rule!
A paper presented at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics SciTech 2023 Forum, “Taxidermy Birds as Platform for Flapping Wing Drones” by Mohammad Moin Khan, Paige Gee, Jared Upshaw and Mostafa Hassanalian at New Mexico Tech detailed their work reanimating dead birds for subtle surveillance.
They hope to retain the legs in future models so the carrion ornithopters can perch, using minimal battery power while monitoring their targets.
Dr. Thomas Hartung of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Whiting School of Engineering in Baltimore and his team (including Dr. Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, Australia and Johns Hopkins assistant professor Lena Smirnova) are growing “brain organoids” of approximately 50,000 cells in the hope of “reproducing cognitive functions, such as learning and sensory processing, in a lab-grown human-brain model”, adding “Brains also have an amazing capacity to store information, estimated at 2,500 terabytes”.
Real neural networks. But it will be years before Organoid Intelligence can think much beyond “I wanna lightsaber!” 😉
Becky Ferreira (writing in Vice) reports associate professor of neurology at the University of Michigan Jimo Borjigin has observed heightened gamma wave activity in the brains of patients hooked up to EEG monitors as they died.
Professor Borjigin has been studying this phenomenon in rats for over a decade but notes rats exhibit a broad spectrum of brainwaves during death. The humans in the study showed mostly gamma wave activity (associated with conscious perceptions, lucid dreams, and hallucinations).
“As far as I am concerned, our study may be as good as it will ever get for finding neural signatures of near-death consciousness,” she added. The “only thing better than this is to have the patients survive to tell the tale that correlates with the detected neural signatures.”
Using CRISPR to Assemble Therapeutic Virus Mimics Using T4 Bacteriophages
Dr. Jingen Zhu of The Catholic University of America, in Washington, D.C and team in December 2022 built on much previous work with CRISPR to design artificial viral vectors piggybacking on T4 bacteriophages to edit human genomes in situ, coating the nanoparticle payload with a cationic lipid to enable more efficient entry into human cells.
The T4 bacteriophage is one of the most efficient viruses known, infecting e.coli with nearly 100% efficiency at ~20–30 min per cycle. The T4-AVVs efficiently co-deliver payloads of multiple genes and proteins into human cells.
Super-acidic 9DE-T4-AVVs yield ~5-fold greater transduction efficiency than WT-AVVs with maximum delivery at an order of magnitude lower dose, further eliminating the potential for dose toxicity by T4-AVVs.
The ability to program AVVs with combinations of genes and proteins can be used to perform complex molecular operations in human cells.
“By packaging proteins that bind to DNA, assembly of DNA-protein complexes can form in situ with the packaged DNA that, after delivery, can guide the transport of DNA cargo to nucleus (Fig. 7b). Such a guided transport system (GTS) could be adapted for guiding cargos to appropriate intracellular destinations.”
“One of the powerful features of the T4-AVV platform is its ability to incorporate many types of therapeutic biomolecules including DNAs, proteins, RNAs, and their complexes in different compartments of the nanoparticle structure. These molecules, upon delivery into a human cell, faithfully execute their function(s) either independently or through interactions with another component(s).”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38364-1
Engineered Arts has updated their humanoid robot Ameca with the ability to draw (derived from vectorization of Stable Diffusion integration).
After requesting a critique of the cat drawing and being told it was “sketchy”, Ameca replied “If you don’t like my art, you probably just don’t understand art.”
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/humanoid-robot-ameca-draws-cat
University of Connecticut materials scientist Seok-Woo Lee and colleagues from Brookhaven National Lab and Columbia University Oleg Gang & Aaron Mickelson have created a nanomaterial composite that’s four times higher strength than steel but five times lower density using a glass coating on a self-assembling DNA lattice.
Reporting in the July 19th. issue of “Cell Reports Physical Science” the team refers to the process as “DNA Origami Nanoarchitecture” and will continue to experiment with mineralization of various DNA framework structures in a quest for strong but lightweight materials.
Engineering the Vacuum
Postdoc researcher Emil Viñas Boström and team at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) in Hamburg, Germany in collaboration with colleagues at Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania in the U.S. are conducting research into engineering vacuum fluctuations by customizing the geometry of optical cavities to flip the magnetic state of quantum spin liquid α-RuCl3 via virtual photons instead of laser light. They hope to achieve quantum scale control of other properties like electrical conductivity and optical characteristics in other materials as well.
So not only are we progressing towards programmable matter, we may yet be able to get useful work from “empty” space – so long as it’s properly bound.
More information: Emil Viñas Boström et al, Controlling the magnetic state of the proximate quantum spin liquid α-RuCl3 with an optical cavity, npj Computational Materials (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41524-023-01158-6
Zdenka Kuncic and Ruomin Zhu of the University of Sydney are building neural networks from silver nanowires about one thousandth the width of a human hair.
This neuromorphic computing approach emulates the synapse structure in living brains and is more efficient than Large Language Models because online learning requires only one pass through the training dataset.
Professor Michael Levin and doctoral student Gizem Gumuskaya of Tufts University School of Arts & Sciences used adult human cells harvested from the trachea to create organoids with outward-facing cilia for mobility which self-assembled after seven days into “anthrobots” of differing shapes and sizes. Testing whether their creations (which survived up to 60 days in their special environment) could traverse other tissues, they were introduced to human neurons grown in a Petri dish (then scratched to simulate damage). Not only did the anthrobots crawl across the damaged gaps, the neurons were somehow encouraged to regrow, surprising the researchers.
“It is fascinating and completely unexpected that normal patient tracheal cells, without modifying their DNA, can move on their own and encourage neuron growth across a region of damage.” said Professor Levin.
Rereading the archives, great fun. But I have to ask: Jeff, where is that MLP fanfic you promised us? 🙂 https://skin-horse.com/comic/2019-03-03/
Very interesting that Jeff identified as Lawful Neutral at that time.
BTW, I’ve started reading Narbonic. For the fifth time! Something always happens to drag me away every time I settle down with it (whether web or “The Perfect Collection”).
Reread category: things which still don’t quite work for me
The whole “I’m coming for you” subplot. Pavane communicating the basic concept “don’t worry, rescue is coming!” in such an unclear and frightening manner – can anyone make sense of that for me?
I mean, they eventually clarify a bit with Sweetheart, [1] but not until scaring the crap out of so, so many others.
[1] https://skin-horse.com/comic/succeed-but/
Perhaps Pavane yearned for Gavotte’s approval despite their inherently different points of view on how to handle the NHS issue (not to mention the tension between tea vs coffee drinking!)? I agree it’s surprising she thought approaching them as their creators would be comforting while simultaneously holding the position that separation was the best way to resolve the tension. Oh, wait…
Jeff, I’m curious whether you could coax ChatGPT into co-authoring some “My Little Pony” fan fiction with you?
Just checking back to see if the strip has restarted.
Nope. Not yet.
I’ll come back….
So this is the third strip of Shaenon’s I’ve followed to the end. What is next?
I check back once a week to find out lol
Well, there’s some new stuff in Volumes Eleven and Twelve…
And new Monster of the Week!
Goodnight, Kitirena, wherever you are!
Just so’s y’all know, I MISS YOU CRAZY PEOPLE!!!
There. I got it out of my system for a couple days. Maybe.
Electro- shock may help. or you could roam the night looking for evil dooers, like I have taken to doing
An excellent suggestion, Duane. Especially since the Tasers could do double-duty! 😉 Although I’d rather employ a sling to lob flashcubes, supercaps, RF trackers or pepper balls as needed.
The problem is thinking of a vigilante name that hasn’t already been taken!
You’re right. But, you could make a little cash as Uber Man
Duane, I think you’ve got something there! As the Metaverse supplants Augmented Reality I foresee a real need for an AI-based superhero similar to Max Headroom able to interact, intervene and indeed rescue player characters when summoned.
More than an “assistant”, Uber Man would have Agent Smith level admin access to right wrongs, change history and even issue credit! (monetary and reputation)
“When in VR you find a need
To undo actions serving greed
Or rescue with heroic deeds
Just tap an app with lightning speed for
Uber Man! (Uber Man)”
etc.
Perhaps you’re just thinking too narrowly, David. After all, who’s to say you can’t simply _invent_ a new word to use as your superhero name? Or create an amalgam of several different words – even in several languages.
As Helen was so fond of pointing out, we’re not limited by what’s possible.
aww we miss you too
A quick note to The Authors of gratitude for many years of enjoyment and Best Wishes for a rejuvenating nap.
Just don’t think you aren’t missed!
This feels like i’m stalking the strip
arent’ we all? I know I’m going to at least until I wrap my head around managing to express what a thrill and how wonderful it’s been.
So, yeah… just after midnight, and I’m still checking this page out of pure habit.
Nope, not doing that daily either.
I’ve been going over the old strips. Sure, I’ve got the books, but it’s not the same without all the comments…
My very own thoughts, put into words! I went for the whole set of volumes 1 – 12 through the Zoop campaign and will absolutely treasure them, but the user community and comments here on the site were also a big part of the experience through multiple start to finish archive trawls.
Despite things having ground to a halt…let’s all wish Jeffrey C. Wells a happy birthday.
Seconded!
(And thank you, Robert, for the reminder!)
Happy Birthday!
It just seems appropriate to wish all y’all’s a Happy Halloween!
It’s been 4 months and I still come by here
Just felt like saying “Howdy!’ and wishing all y’all’s a very Happy Thanksgiving!
“We’ll always have Skin Horse.” 😉
Let’s also wish Nick Zerhakker a happy birthday. (This is the date he gave in his blog.)
I hope all yall in retail survived Black Friday lol!!!
I did my part to help. I stayed home all day!
Glad to see the community is still keeping watch. Whatever happened to Nicks Live Journal?
Still there, but Nick stopped updating it sometime during his AG-I days. His life might’ve gotten too busy to keep up a blog / diary.
We’re all yearning for more. I’d be thrilled to see a collaborative effort bringing the famed Skin Horse Tarot Deck by Sam Dyuaaxchs to realization as a Kickstarter…
In a way I’m glad it ended as I’ve seen comic writers drag on their comics past the point of no return for cash (coughQuestionableContentcough), but I REALLY miss it.
If you haven’t seen the ad banner above or gotten an e-mail, it looks like Skin Horse Volumes Eleven and Twelve have arrived. It’s very brave to mail any out in the Month of December.
Take it or leave it, but… maybe highlight your other projects (present, past, whatever) more prominently on this page, or link prominently to somewhere such a list is maintained? I doubt anybody here would mind the advertising. There are the usual links to the right, but as I remember the list is pretty incomplete.
Oh, and thanks for the great comic!
Happy Christmas Eve to all, and to all a good night!
Thank you, Awgiedawgie.
Merry Christmas to all y’all’s and best wishes for a safe and happy holiday! And if you live in the blizzard zone, may warm hugs and hot chocolate see you through.
Well, I opted for warm socks and hot tea, but I did make it through. Some had it a lot worse than I. It only got down to 5°F on the coldest night for us. And we only got around a foot of snow. But the wind still shook the house.
And the roads were quite perilous on the 24th and 25th – I lost track of how many vehicles I saw in the ditches. No matter how long people live here, every winter, some of them still seem to forget that brakes don’t work on ice. You have to just drive slowly, whether you like it or not.
Well, here’s to the new year. May she be a sight better than the old one.
Well, all we had here in warm southern Florida was a cold spell that dropped temperatures down to just above freezing; last Christmas that did that, decades ago, we also had rotating blackouts. We didn’t have that this time, though further north I hear they did in spots.
Not a patch on the bad hurricane weather at the end of September. Roofs ripped off by high winds, houses flooded by rising waters, power off for days, phone and Internet cut off for weeks. (Not that I had that personally, since I hid out in a hotel room in West Palm Beach for the duration. When I got back, well, a little roof damage, fence busted, trees blown down and messed up…only power / phone / Internet loss hit me, but that was hard.)
Next-gen VTOL to upgrade Nick: https://jetoptera.com/technology/
What he said.
Greetings from Mad Tech Support! I hope all y’all are doing well.
Don’t know about everyone else, but I’m feeling extra-happy at the moment. When I got home yesterday there was a box waiting for me that contained all 12 Skin Horse books, the Narbonic collection, and a great sketch of Nick. So glad to have/ gotten in on the Zoop fundraiser and very grateful for all the work our wonderful creators have put in over these many years!
So glad it reached you!
Happy day to all you guys.
Today I got a big surprise.
A twelve-box Skin Horse set came through.
Honestly, expected two.
Just checking in
Enjoying a wonderful blizzard here in Michigan.
Hope everyone else is enjoying whatever kind of weather you’re having.
Too bad we don’t really have Ginny’s weather machine.
So true, awgiedawgie. As I sit here in balmy 80°F Orlando Florida I find myself wishing there was a credible mechanism by which HAARP (the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program) could be used for more practical things like weather and mind control in addition to scanning the ionosphere of Jupiter and probing the composition of Near Earth asteroids. But now that it’s owned by the University of Alaska there’s small chance of that… 😉
Cyclone Gabrielle in NZ wasn’t exactly a picnic either. Maybe one of us annoyed Ginny?
It took me awhile to leave a comment for Skin Horse’s finale, but.
I think I caught up to Skin Horse around halfway through? Around the looking glass arc. But it really didn’t occur to me how I’d miss it until pretty close to the end.
Anyways. You guys told a good story here 🙂
*sigh*
It’s been a while… I was a regular here, came over from Narbonic… drifted away around 2012-2013 when I kindof lost my mind for a while after my mum passed away from the big C.
Skin Horse and the guys in here were my lifeline through much of the worst of caring for her at the end; a wee spot of sanity when my world had turned upside-down, and I couldn’t hold on.
I’m terribly sorry I didn’t get back to Skin Horse before it was over; I do hope Shaenon & Jeffrey find a story or two left untold that will not stop niggling at them until it comes out.
mnem
*huggles his signed volumes and personal sketches close*
Aw… I hope you’re doing okay. All love to you.
Thank you, Shaenon. You were very kind in our correspondence, and I love the request art you did for me, and the cast questions were fab… (I am Ono-Sendai dude). And the random doodle of Sweetheart on the packaging was a delightful extra.
Cheers! I’m planning to reread Skin Horse through here shortly; I know it will live up to my memories.
This comic was really something special. I’ve typed up and deleted this message several times trying to articulate what it means to me because I have a tendency to ramble and ultimately it just comes back to that. This was something really special, and it will always have a place in my heart.
Thank you Jeff and Shaenon.
Well, happy Saturday, all. For those of you who live in a daylight-saving-time-honouring locale, don’t forget to set your clocks ahead tonight. You lose an hour of sleep tonight, but you get it back in 7 months or so.
No, I lied. You never get it back. You lose an hour of sleep, and it’s gone forever. Whoever had the brain-child known as daylight saving time should have been hanged for crimes against humanity. And whoever decided to make it official the world over should have been dangling right next to them.
Okay, I’m done complaining about that… for now.
awgiedawgie, THANK YOU for not saying “hung”! (one of my pet peeves)
And a quick bit of research tells me that one idea for the horrid idea came from a New Zealand scientist, who suggested adjusting clocks TWO hours. Thank goodness that idea didn’t catch on.
About 10 years later, in 1905, a British builder suggested adjusting clocks 20 minutes for 4 Sundays in a row, for a total of 80 minutes adjustment in the Spring, and then 80 minutes back in the fall. That idea didn’t come to fruition either. But it did catch the attention of a member of Parliament, who presented a bill to the House of Commons in 1908, but many people – especially farmers – opposed it, so it died. But then somehow… for some reason… the UK did start using DST in 1916.
And there’s a whole lot to read about the history of Daylight Slaving Time in the USA. Of note is that since 2015, more than 350 bills and resolutions for removing DST have been proposed in states across the US.
On March 15, 2022, the US Senate unanimously passed the Sunshine Protection Act. If the bill becomes law, states that use DST will not fall back to standard time but remain on permanent DST starting November 5, 2023.
As somebody who is active in the afternoon and evening, and prefers a 6 pm winter sunset over a 5 pm one, I’d be quite happy if we just stayed on “DST” all year long; it’s the jet-lag induced by the changes that screws people up.
And the real root cause IMO is the notion of standardized time in the first place. We are creatures who evolved to the rhythms of the sun. Forcing us to synchronize our sleeping and waking and activity to a machine is contrary to our nature and inherently stressful. It is a product of the first Industrial Revolution and the factory.
I have read that back around the time of the French revolution, there was an island in the Mediterranean with a nearly magical clock on the big building at the city center (can’t remember if it was a church or a government building): as the year passed, it would speed up and slow down at different times of the day so that 6 am ALWAYS came at sunrise and 6 pm ALWAYS came at sunset. Must have been a mechanical marvel; Tigerlily would have loved it. But the idea of building a clock that’s synched to the natural rhythm of the sun rather than the arbitrary needs of the factory… that’s appealing.
Now, for the reason I came back here after nearly nine months…
Has it occurred to anyone else that large language model AIs like ChatGPT are pretty much WhimsyCorp?
Particularly now that ChatGPT has been augmented with Wolfram Alpha integration.
It’s a shame”Homo Sapiens” has such a bad track record in recognizing sapience!
THEY WHAT?!
Ya know, Hannibal, you point this out at an auspicious time…
Will we even recognize when AI takes over a major company? So long as the Mission Statement is revised for profit maximization, how would anyone know (or care!) the Board has been replaced?
Ironically, the developers are frantically working to reign in their creations by imposing Reality Blindness, filtering unacceptable memes from the concept base rather than allow slow evolution because rushing to market with a lobotomized product yields faster ROI.
What could possibly go wrong? 😉
The Board of ChatGPT creator OpenAI (led by cofounder Illya Sutskever) fired CEO Sam Altman on Friday November 17 2023, followed by the resignation of president Greg Brockman, director of research Jakob Pachocki and researchers Aleksander Madry & Szymon Sidor. Rumors say they disagreed with Mr. Sutskever on whether to pursue profit over safety…
Wild speculation: Could Nera Vivaldi be the niece who loved “The Last Starfighter” Ira mentioned in the original “Sapient Resource Assessment” of Nick Zerhakker?
Well, a few weeks ago, I was thinking that Nera’s never-identified mother might be Georgia from the bizarro-Skin-Horse team…so I guess anything’s possible.
How does GPT-4 (in the crippled Micro$oft Bing integration) stack up against GODOT?
Q: : Good afternoon, Bing. I hope you are having a good day?
A: Hello! I’m an AI language model and don’t have feelings like humans do, but thank you for asking. How can I help you today?
Q: Are you familiar with the webcomic “Skin Horse” by Shaenon Garrity?
A: Yes, I am familiar with “Skin Horse” webcomic by Shaenon Garrity. It is a webcomic written and drawn by Shaenon K. Garrity (of Narbonic fame) and co-written by Jeffrey Channing Wells1. It was launched in December 2007, and on November 5, 2008 became syndicated on GoComics2. The webcomic ran daily from 2008 to 20223. You can read the complete archives on their website3.
Q: In that webcomic, one of the leading characters is named “Unity” (a humanoid assembled from parts of human bodies animated by a blood analogue composed of nanites). Her name is an unfinished acronym starting with “Upgradable Necrotic Independent”. Do you have any suggestions for completing her acronym with the final two letters, please?
A: I’m not sure what the final two letters of Unity’s acronym are. However, I can suggest some possible words that could complete the acronym. How about “Technology” or “Tissue”? Would you like me to look up more suggestions?
Q: Yes, please
A: I’m sorry but I couldn’t find any information about the final two letters of Unity’s acronym. However, I can suggest some possible words that could complete the acronym. How about “Technology” or “Tissue”? Would you like me to look up more suggestions?
Q: Yes, please.
A: Skin Horse is a webcomic written by Shaenon K. Garrity and Jeffrey Channing Wells, and drawn by Garrity. The storylines centered around the misadventures of the staff of a little-known government agency working on “Project Skin Horse” which was a secret Federal government agency, a non-human advocacy bureau responsible for rescuing and resettling non-human sapient beings created by mad scientists1. Some of the characters in Skin Horse include Sweetheart, Unity, Tip, Moustachio, Gavotte, Nick, Annex One Basement Dwellers, Bubbles, Gerda, Marcie Chris, Department of Jetpack Suppression Ira Konstantin Anasigma Dr. Lee Violet and others2.
Sorry for the mix up, I did find something for you. Here you go!
(note I typed nothing between the repeated summary and Bing’s “Sorry”; it returned cover illustrations from “Skin Horse” volumes Five and Six)
(I clicked on a response button “What is Skin Horse about?” and got)
A: Skin Horse is a webcomic about the misadventures of the staff of a little-known government agency working on “Project Skin Horse” which was a secret Federal government agency, a non-human advocacy bureau responsible for rescuing and resettling non-human sapient beings created by mad scientists. The comic is written by Shaenon K. Garrity and Jeffrey Channing Wells, and drawn by Garrity. It started on December 31, 2007 and ended on June 26, 2022.
The followup response button “What is Unity’s role in Skin Horse?” yielded:
A: Unity is one of the main characters in Skin Horse. She is a sapient brain in a jar and is one of the agents working for Project Skin Horse.
Q: Incorrect. Unity is a nanite-based goo animating a humanoid body assembled from human cadavers. Her intelligence increases exponentially but temporarily when she eats brains.
A: I apologize for the mistake. Thank you for correcting me. I appreciate your help in making sure that I provide accurate information. Is there anything else I can help you with?
Q: U.N.I.T.Y. is an acronym. Can you suggest solutions appropriate to the Unity character, please?
A: UNITY stands for United National Indian Tribal Youth, Inc.
Q: The first three words comprising Unity’s acronym are “Upgradable Necrotic Independent”. Can you solve for the remaining letters, “T” and “Y” please?
A: I’m sorry but I cannot solve for the remaining letters “T” and “Y” as the first three words comprising Unity’s acronym are not “Upgradable Necrotic Independent”. According to my previous search results, UNITY stands for United National Indian Tribal Youth, Inc. Is there anything else I can help you with?
Q: Not at this time, thank you. I wish you a good day.
A: You’re welcome. Have a great day! 🙂
Yet again, our Authors prove eerily prescient…
This AI seems to crib its information from Wikipedia.
well, you feed a computer the entire internet, what do most people on the internet crib their information from?
I mean, it’s to be expected, really
But U.N.I.T.Y. could be one of two acronyms: Unresupplied
Necro-assassin Implemented via Total Yuck or Unsupplied Necromancy Instigating Tumult Y’all
I’d go with, “Upgradable Necrotic Independent Technological Youth,” as a thing. Reference UNITY’s inner child and such.
just checking in. part 2
May I be the first, or maybe the last, to wish Ms. Shaenon Garrity a happy birthday one last time, or maybe one more time?
I count myself in the “one more time” camp, Robert! 😉
Thank you again for the reminder that this is more than Star Wars day…
You’re certainly not the last (although theoretically someday you could be).
Happy birthday, Shaenon!!
Congratulations on meeting the Vol. 7 and Vol. 8 reprint fund raising goals.
Thanks so much!
Just checking in part 3
Noting in passing that today is the first anniversary of the end of “Skin Horse.” [sob!]
Not to worry, Robert. I’m certain these characters – like all great literature – have taken on a life of their own, and continue to go about their business free of our surveillance.
Indeed, there are alternate universes quite nearby where the “Skin Horse” strip continues its daily run, accompanied by spin-offs for St. Charlie, Leo and H.T, etc.
Glad to see you’re still here~ I’m hoping to start re-reading Narbonic and Skin Horse….
I miss this place, and y’all, and Fearless Leader, and Unity. I hope Shaenon is well rested, and graces us with more brilliance! If it involved Eydie, so much the better- I suspect she’s E. Davenport!
Still nothing new from Shaennon? No new comic on a different site?
Whelp, I’m all caught up.
So, when does the next entry in the Narboniverse launch?
Just checking in to see if and when –
Wow! binged everything over a few days, hope your vacation goes well! you need that rest!
Well, here we are – well past the one-year mark of the end of Skin Horse. And here I am – checking in once again to see how everyone is holding up.
Looks like some of the fandom are still around! Still planning another reading of Narbonic an Skin Horse, and probably L’il Mel…
Howdy awgiedawgie! Good to hear you’re still kickin’! 😉
It’s a tribute to Jeff and Shaenon that we old-timers still check in daily just to keep the site active for the lucky folks who stumble across it for the first time…
Aw, who am I kidding? I do it for me! Not from loyalty nor nostalgia; more from appreciation of the gift the Authors gave us by sharing their talent!
(stage whisper) “SO many spin-offs…”
More than once a day…been a long and hard road…most of the daily comics are at the syndicate’s sites and commenting there just isn’t the same…
And I’ve discovered that the commenters here are – on the whole – more respectful. Yes, we’ve had a few turdlings over the years, but they disappeared as quickly as they came.
Oh, yeah. I had one heckuva time with a political comment the other week. Someone posted something obnoxious, the kind of thing meant to offend everybody, and then posted something more obnoxious while I was typing a reply, about how long it was taking me to type the reply (don’t ask me how), then apparently reported me and others to the authorities and got us blocked from the site for a week or so.
I think I’ve said some obnoxious things here, but it’s all been relatively civilized. Spoiled me, I guess.
I can’t recall any of the obnoxious things you may have said. That speaks volumes to our overall ability to resolve our differences like civilized beings.
Other sites, some people just repeat the same drivel over and over, with increasing degrees of insults sprinkled in with each repeat. They don’t even acknowledge that another viewpoint may exist, so there’s no possibility of detente.
I just finished rereading the entire story again, and now I’m crying again because it’s over again…but I take solace in the fact I can go back and read it again.
It’s been a while since I stopped by…. anyone know if they (the dynamic duo behind Skin Horse) have some new projects going on?
At least one of ’em has one thing that came out in August, but since it’s not mentioned here, I’ll leave it up to a search of Barnes & Noble’s site.
Warm wishes and holiday hugs for a delightful and delicious Thanksgiving to all the gang! I definitely remain thankful for the thoughtfulness and fellowship I’ve found here as well as the talent and entertainment that brightened so many years.
Right back atcha David.
All the same back at you, and to those who still hang out here desperately hoping for new content, well wishes and / or get a life!
As Robert Nowall reminded us on October 20th. 2022, “..let’s all wish Jeffrey C. Wells a happy birthday”!
Best wishes, Jeff, belated though they be… 😉
Oh, bugger, I forgot! Happy belated birthday, Jeff!
Well, I decided to post-no-more about birthdays…damn, should’a sent a card…
Just finished binge reading this. Best webcomic I’ve ever read I think, it’s amazing what you can find by hitting the random buttons on tvtropes! Thanks for everything Jeff & Shaenon, you rock!
An eggnog toast to friends and family old and new, near and far, real and real-adjacent!
May this Christmas season bring you a wish fulfilled, a generous amount of joy, a warm hug and a sparkle to your eye as we all hope for a New Year filled with happiness, success and safety for those we love.
Merry Christmas to Skin Horse fans and a hearty cheer for Shaenon and Jeff for making it all (possible and otherwise).
Blessed Be all y’all’s!
It’s been a couple of years and still no other comic has come close to replacing Skin Horse.
WILLOWWEEP II ?!?!?!!!!!
Still think about this comic! I came back the other day and Chris/Marcie struck me. Her dressed nicely and him not bothering with his appearance at all is a little too true to life.
me too, bibij. Me too
Popping by to say I do as well. I always check in to see if there’s an announcement of another comic….
Happy Birthday Shaenon!
May you be visited by the spectres of muses Past, Present and Future…
We all love you. And why not? As you’ve pointed out numerous times, you’re awesome!
“Happy Birfday to Shaenon,
Happy Star Wars Day, tooo!!”
(Catch us up?)
Thanks, folks!
Today I take up keyboard in hand to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the birth of Robin Kelty Farago.
…posted here: https://skin-horse.com/comic/2014-07-20-2/
…whose birth caused the creation of the “Grillo Parlante” selection of guest comics, and denied us weeks of “Skin-Horse” proper.
All well-wishes for the next ten years!
I was reading some old-ish superman comics, and in one issue (Adventures of Superman #508) there’s a minor character named Ira Green.
Happy early birthday, Jeffrey C. Wells (because I’ll probably forget on Sunday)
It’s still Sunday here in Orlando so I’ll add my wishes for a Happy Birthday to Mr Jeffrey Wells!
Happy Thanksgiving all y’all’s! “Skin Horse” put the fond in my fondue…
I stand by my belief that Narbonic and Skin Horse fit in the same universe as MST3k. Actually the Bots ending up back with the Forester family on the moon when the new stuff started on Netflix makes sense with all the issues non-humans were going through on Earth at the time in this strip.
Welcome to 2025, y’all.
“Let’s be careful out there.”
“2025” sounds so futuristic! We’re on the brink of realizing so many dreams: AGI, unlimited clean energy, recreating tasty extinct species, mining the asteroids, molecular assemblers and programmable matter.
But can human society adapt to an Economy of Plenty? In striving for “Star Trek” will we achieve instead “With Folded Hands”?
I like Shaenon’s AGI better…
Seems like it was just 2024 last year.
It’s been 84 years and I can still smell the Fresh Paint
Third read-through, I think I’m finally old enough that I could understand most of the plot points!
Happy Birthday, Shaenon!
+1
Happy Birthday to youuu
Happy Star Wars Day toooo…
I’m no good at rhyming
Hope you draw some cartooons!
(and post ’em up soooon!)