A little light reading

(Thursday, September 4, 2025)

Today

Greyfriar’s Isle has updated on Planet Nude, for paying subscribers. It’ll go live for the general public next week.

Last Monday

Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan updated with “Lift the flickering torches, see gentle shadows change (Opens in a new window)”.

(Opens in a new window)

Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan is one of the longest-running comics on the web, and is very bingeable. If you’re into medieval-inspired fantasy and have a bit of time, consider reading it from the beginning (Opens in a new window)!

Work on the Dutch version (Opens in a new window) is about to be paused as I’m focusing on something else, but there are about 200 comics now posted or scheduled.

Earlier this week

I’ve started building a website for my business, and because I’m so fed up with the state of technology, and because the thing I had in mind, at least for now, is a really simple presentation/brochure thing rather than a fully-fledged business site, I decided to hand-code the whole thing. Since it’s been a while, I went back to basics and started on the HTML for people (Opens in a new window) course, which is a good refresher and introduces HTML5 structural tags, which I didn’t know about.

As part of the course, I added a little hand-coded blog and that meant I had to pick some articles to link to. Here they are:

• I Am An AI Hater (Opens in a new window) - moser's frame shop

  “.… the makers of AI aren’t damned by their failures, they’re damned by their goals. They want to build a genie to grant them wishes, and their wish is that nobody ever has to make art again. They want to create a new kind of mind, so they can force it into mindless servitude. Their dream is to invent new forms of life to enslave.”

• Ed Zitron's How to argue with an AI booster (Opens in a new window)(which is very long and I haven’t finished it yet).

• Tech blogger Paris Marx left Substack, had lackluster experiences on Ghost, returned to Substack, then found that it wasn’t quite the way it was when he left (Opens in a new window). That tracks with how basically any platform evolves over time.

• The ever-dependable Baldur Bjarnason has a banger of a post (Opens in a new window) comparing the tech industry’s rhetoric and behavior around “AI” to Iceland during the banking bubble. That was an angle I hadn’t considered!

Speaking of which, my feed on Substack now includes a feature called “From The Archives” and it’s terrible. It’s just shoveling reactionary, bigoted garbage into my face. I have yet to find a way to turn it off, so I’m stuck blocking everything that shows up in “From The Archives” individually. The feed is pretty much the last part of Substack I engage with at all, and I expect I will be doing that less and less.

Ironically, people who say that you can still use Substack to see nothing but art, useful article writing and politics that are at least worth engaging with are still right: you can, if you curate the hell out of your feed. “From The Archives” seems designed to bypass that curation, making it a net negative even if one out of four (!) posts that I saw in it were not instantly-blockable.

Anyway, I used to do link round-ups in my old blog Obsession du Jour, and for a long time, they were dominated by technology links, because I’m just that kind of person even now. I made several attempts to bring that blog back over the past few years, but I’m pretty sure it’s dead for good now. If people like this sort of thing, I’ll make it a regular feature in this newsletter. It’s a good fit for me, because I don’t have a lot of startlingly original ideas about things like technology of my own, but I do have ideas about what I find well-written and persuasive. Let me know in the comments if this interests you!

This post was brought to you by… the right to unsubscribe! I like having subscribers. Attention is nice and is the lifeblood of the artist. But a while ago, I moved this newsletter from Substack to Steady and that means unsubscriptions from Substack are no longer automatically honored. If you’re fed up with me, use the Unsubscribe link in this email and I won’t be bothering you again (Steady is EU hosted and the EU is really strict about this sort of thing).

Earlier still

Our regular blast from the past is So... how about the Feral? (Opens in a new window). You can read an old version of this comic on the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan website (Opens in a new window), and you can read on from there or binge-read the comic from the beginning (Opens in a new window), if you have time to spare.

And the full page:

(Opens in a new window)

We're getting closer to the point where this slot will be taken up by comics posted in 2024 or 2025, but we're not quite there yet.

Finally, if you have a newsletter that runs on Substack, and you want to switch to a different platform, consider EU-hosted Steady (Opens in a new window) as an alternative! Yeah, I know the EU is an enthusiastic participant in the internet censorship race to the bottom right now, but I’d rather have my stuff hosted somewhere where my vote and my voice can affect the outcome of that race. But that’s a topic (possibly) for another day.