TIMES, TIME, AND HALF A TIME. A HISTORY OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM.
Comments on a cultural reality between past and future.
This blog describes Metatime in the Posthuman experience, drawn from Sir Isaac Newton's secret work on the future end of times, a tract in which he described Histories of Things to Come. His hidden papers on the occult were auctioned to two private buyers in 1936 at Sotheby's, but were not available for public research until the 1990s.
I have a long-running series on this blog which relates past styles to future sensibilities. It is interesting to see what survives these days for the sake of stylistic nostalgia, past any functional or practical requirements.
Sometimes, the historical stylistic element refers to an old technology, indicating a mental and emotional human lag in the face of exponential innovation.
Today's superb example came from Substack: the 981 Retro Express Wireless, Mechanical Gaming Vintage Typewriter Keyboard (hat tip: Ozarklore). On embarking upon the writing of this post, I was shocked to find that the 'Retrofuturism' series proper hasn't been updated here since 2013. Looking back, I see that the best posts relating to this topic confirm that retro-futurism was a 2010s' trend. It appears that the period from the late 2010s through 2022 dampened historical curiosity in relation to technology. This could be due to intensified political debates and the global pandemic, which dominated popular attention for seven years.
Here are some of my old posts highlighting retro-futuristic 2010s' projects which either did not survive into the 2020s, or may have borne fruit, but their signals got lost in the noise from the early part of this decade. For example, the incredible video game, Gorgoa, demonstrates that even in accelerated environments, real human accomplishments still take years to complete. Perhaps we can take heart in that:
Retrofuturism 23: Baby Boomers and Alien Astronauts(10 January 2013): a retrospective on 1960s' and 1970s' spiritual esoteric spiritualism as projected upon space exploration. With Gigi Young's series on Mars Mysteries on Youtube, we see that interest in this topic is still going strong. My work on my new novel serial, Vampire Daddy, falls in the same category (shameless plug). Vampire Daddynot only draws on my earlier discussions of how space exploration relates to religious, spiritual and esoteric topics, but it also refers to other retro-futuristic themes I discussed, such as the Slavonic Gothic, Russian Space Art, and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books from the first decade of the 20th century.
Shameless plug, continued: as a tribute to Burroughs, I recently did an AI rendering of my characters, Lexi and Primeva, in the style of John Carter and Dejah Thorus, echoing the classic Barsoom renderings of the 1910s, with hints of later 1960s' and 1970s' interpretations, now reworked again in the 2010s and 2020s. Of course, many others have paid homage to Burroughs. Marv Wolfman - whose work I have covered extensively here - wrote a Marvel comic from 1977 to 1979 which expanded on Burroughs' work. There were also a couple of series from Dark Horse and notable Warlord of Mars series from Dynamite, which sparked a lawsuit from the Burroughs' estate. Disney released a troubled adaptation, John Carter, in 2012. Comic Book Treasury put it best, that Burroughs' Barsoom series is "one of the most influential science fiction and fantasy tales of the 20th Century." You can read Burroughs' Mars books here. Librivox recordings are here and here. The Encyclopedia Barsoomia Wiki is here.
Lexi and Primeva. Source: My own prompting, on Dall-e.
Other highlights from my 'Retrofuturism' series (I clearly had trouble deciding on whether or not to hyphenate the term):
Retrofuturism 19: Last Master of a Martial Art Reborn(16 November 2011): the 17th century Sikh martial art of Shastar Vidya (ਸ਼ਸਤਰ-ਵਿੱਦਿਆ), which frightened the British imperial authorities so much that they banned it, survives in akharas (training gymnasiums) and the tradition is still discussed on the Web.
In 2023, Chris Yeh predicted on Linked Inthat AI would lead to a "Cambrian explosion" of online comics and graphic novels. Instead, artistic and literary communities launched into painful debates over how and when to justify AI usage in the creative arts. As a result, the Cambrian explosion didn't happen.
The appetite for the past isstill there as we collide with the future. But is it legitimate to ape the past with a technology that radically erases that past? My friend C. recently told me that 'Throwback Thursdays' was created by AI developers to encourage people to post photographs from the pre-Internet era to train artificial intelligences. We are on the other side of a watershed moment.
Retro-futurism in the last decade recalled craftsmanship, popular tastes, cultural memories, and artistic traditions like long-form content writing, print graphics and illustration. The trend was part of a brief flowering of purely- or mainly-human creative activities, ironically expressed through technologically-enabled media. That could only really be done in the 2010s, when human creative practices overlapped nearly exactly with forms of technology which were just advanced enough to channel human outputs globally. But technology at that point did not yet surpass, erase, overwhelm or supersede the human. Now it potentially does.
The retro-futuristic trend was part of the 2010s' last gasp of purely human creativity in the pre-AI age. Will AI revive retro-futurism above its 2010s' heights? Or will this peculiar form of techno-cultural nostalgia become a badge of anti-AI sentiment? Perhaps AI will bring us to some state of compromise between the purely human and pure machine. Only time will tell.
Postmodernism - the theory that all of reality could be reducible to bits of language and could not be conceived of beyond those bits - reached its apex in the 1970s. By the 1990s, it was entrenched in western culture. Now postmodern theory is so ingrained that it has vanished into the woodwork and everything is ironic, deconstructed, self-referentially-defined, and critically undermined by everything else. Nobody knows how to be real anymore because they are too busy inhabiting their labels, be they political, egoic, spiritual, ageist, national, classist, ethno-cultural, pathological, psychosocial, gender-oriented, sexually-oriented, etc., etc., etc.
Lately, I have seen a lot of pushback in creative circles against the use of AI. These champions of pure human creativity would do well to remember that their Creator-Self theme is just as fetishized and totemic as everything else. AI depends upon prompts which in turn depend upon breaking down our ideas and creations into tiny creative components or tags. For example, generative AI relies on labels like, ‘Postmodernist’ or ‘Art Deco.’ It would not be able to do this if our creative world was not already formulaic and mechanistic, and had been so long before the arrival of AI.
We have long compartmentalized our realities, especially our creative efforts, and defined them in terms of concepts-about-concepts-about-concepts, over and above real actions. Real actions always have had to be 'packaged' in concepts before they can be shared with the world, either through institutions in the pre-Internet age, or online thereafter. The difference is that AI is now automating and accelerating that process at industrial and global levels. But again, the process pre-existed AI. AI is just Postmodernism in 4D. AI is not dehumanizing us. We were already dehumanized and had willingly accepted our lives as pigeon-holed constructs inside a multitude of predetermined boxes.
Long before Postmodernist theory gave the pattern a name, that dehumanizing meta-level of linguistic self-construction existed and has shown itself to be ironically profoundly human. For thousands of years, it has been considered the pinnacle of human achievement to become not powerful, not rich, not famous, but archetypal. On the Internet, one becomes a meme. In sports,more recently, one is labeled the GOAT: the Greatest of All Time. This means that the preconditions of Postmodernist theory are a core part of human nature. If you enter the class of becoming a 'class in yourself,' you defy time and space. It is deeply human to seek the archetypal figure, from Cleopatra, to Genghis Khan, to Babe Ruth.
The image at the top of the post is a DALL-E prompt output for an assignment in a digital art class I am taking. The assignment: Consider the task to create an image that evokes thoughts, reflections, and reactions conveyed by a reading of the essay “Someone’s Knocking at My Door” by László Krasznahorkai (New York Times, 12 January 2013). The assignment requires you to work with a linguistic model as you formulate your response.
Below is my discussion with ChatGPT which shows its tinkertoy answers and my own redirections of the AI. You will all be familiar by now by the endless pages of suggestions that models supply and their wooden responses, which are presented here in italics so you can scroll down to the main point I made to the model while I was interpreting Krasznahorkai's essay.
Below, you can see the AI breaking down the digital art assignment in relation to the essay in terms of dozens of little cultural labels and concepts. I have copied ChatGPT's initial whole conceptualization of Krasznahorkai's essay. Before I had mentioned Yu at all, the terms it listed regarding Krasznahorkai's hostile unknowns - the archetypal colours, concepts and images - eerily align with the Yu murder case.
ChatGPT also sought to censor our discussion on the mention of Yu Menglong's death. It was adamant that Yu was not dead and refused to proceed unless I accepted that. I think this false claim reflects the date cut off for data feeds to the level of ChatGPT that I am using. But in response to my comments, ChatGPT recognized Yu Menglong as an archetype in the end.
When true crime becomes so extreme, we enter abstraction. Source.
ChatGPT initial response to Krasznahorkai's essay, prior to mention of Yu:
A — Short interpretation of the ending (what the twist is)
Many readers note the essay’s ending functions like a reveal that the threat isn’t simply a stranger at the door but something more ambiguous and interior — the ‘knock’ can be read as both an invitation and an accusation, as an external threat and as the narrator’s own capacity for fear, shame, or even latent violence. The prose’s circular, slippage-driven structure means the “visitor” blurs with the narrator: the threshold becomes the site where identity fractures and the reader is left unsure whether the menace comes from outside or rises from inside. In short: the twist is an ambiguity — the door isn’t only a barrier, it’s a mirror; answering it would be a surrender, not necessarily a rescue.
B — How to approach the assignment (high-level steps)
Read & extract motifs — list the essay’s images, repeated words, mood, and the final-line ambiguity you want to translate. sbeasley.blogspot.com
Define emotional target — choose which reactions you want the viewer to have (unease, recognition, hesitation, empathy).
Choose a visual metaphor language — threshold/door, knock, shadow, mirror, crowd/facelessness, long winding lines (to echo Krasznahorkai’s sentences). sbeasley.blogspot.com
Sketch variants / thumbnails — 6–12 quick ideas exploring different metaphors and compositions.
Select medium & technique — digital painting, mixed media collage, photo-based composite, or a typographic/diagrammatic piece that visually mirrors the essay’s syntax.
Produce a refined study — one full-scale test image that nails composition, palette, and symbolism.
Iterate & finalize — tweak composition, refine lighting and texture, add type or the essay’s final line (optional), create export files for print/web.
Write an artist statement — 2–3 short paragraphs tying image choices to the essay’s ending and desired viewer reaction.
C — How to develop those steps (practical workflow + timing)
(These are concrete actions you can follow in class or at home.)
Extract motifs (30–60 min)
Re-read the essay; highlight phrases, especially the final paragraph(s). Make a one-page “motif sheet” (door, knock, mirror, shadow, crowd, long sentence as line). sbeasley.blogspot.com
Brainstorm / thumbnails (1–2 hours)
Make 12 thumbnails on paper or digitally: vary camera angle (front-on door; from inside looking at the knob; extreme close-up of knuckles; a mirror reflecting a knocking hand), figure treatment (realistic, faceless, silhouetted) and level of literalness vs. abstraction. Choose top 3.
Produce 1–2 fully-resolved studies. Pay attention to lighting (high contrast to create menace), texture (grime, peeling paint), and rhythm (repeat the “long sentence” as a visual motif — e.g., a single continuous line that flows through the composition).
Final piece (variable: 6–20 hours)
Execute at full size; leave negative space so viewers breathe; optionally incorporate a fragment of the essay’s last line set small and near the threshold.
Critique & iteration (30–90 min)
Show to classmates/teacher, gather reactions, make small adjustments.
D — Reconsider steps with an AI assistant (how AI helps at each stage)
Use your favored AI as an assistant for research, ideation, and execution. Here’s how to integrate it:
Motif extraction — paste the essay (or a paragraph) and ask the AI: “List recurring images, key verbs, moods, and any lines that function as thresholds.”
Thumbnail prompts — ask the AI for 12 quick visual concepts with composition notes (camera angle, focal point, main symbol).
Moodboard generation — ask for image-search keywords and suggested art/photography references; AI can produce a collated list of images to collect.
Color & palette — ask for palette suggestions tied to emotions (hex codes included).
Image-generation prompts — get ready-to-run prompts for your tool of choice (Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, DALL·E) and specific style notes (e.g., “Rembrandt chiaroscuro + ink-flow lines, slightly deformed perspective”).
Iterative feedback — show AI a photo of your study (if the tool supports images) and request composition/contrast suggestions.
Artist statement & captions — AI can draft concise statements tying visual choices back to textual motifs.
E — Implementation (I’ll implement the deliverables now)
Below I give: (1) three concrete visual concepts you can pick from, (2) full color palettes, (3) detailed prompts for image-generation (if you want to try an AI image model), (4) a step-by-step Photoshop/Procreate layer plan, and (5) a short artist statement you can hand in.
1) Three concrete concepts (pick one or combine)
Concept A — “The Threshold Mirror” (psychological/figurative)
Description: Interior of a dim hallway. A closed door centered; a single knuckle-shaped silhouette at the doorframe but the door surface is a fractured mirror that reflects not the hallway but a faceless crowd and a second hand pressing inward. A continuous black ink line (a single unbroken stroke) weaves out of the reflection and snakes toward the viewer, evoking Krasznahorkai’s long sentences.
Intended reaction: Unease, recognition that the threat is both inside and outside.
Symbolism: Fractured mirror = identity fracture; crowd = collective aggression; continuous line = the relentless, winding prose/rumination.
Sources for interpretation: essay read as anxiety/threshold; circular structure and slippage between observer/observed. sbeasley.blogspot.com+1
Concept B — “The Open Answer” (literal/ambiguous)
Description: View from inside a small, cluttered room. The door stands half-open. In the doorway: a bright, overexposed rectangle of white light; within the white, the outline of a hand knocks — but the hand is stylized as a child’s hand made of paper cut-outs, held by a faceless adult shadow. The floor inside the room has circular stain-marks like ink blots that form the phrase “who invited this?” if you squint.
Intended reaction: Hesitation and moral question — do you answer?
Symbolism: Overexposed light = temptation/unknown; paper hand = fragility and possible deceit; stains = the essay’s muddy moral terrain.
Concept C — “The Knocker as Chorus” (graphic/typographic)
Description: Graphic, poster-like composition. A classical door silhouette in the center; around it, dozens of small silhouettes (heads, fists, speech bubbles) press toward the door from the margins in concentric rings. Between rings, flow long lines of very small, continuous script — a visual echo of Krasznahorkai’s long sentences wrapping the image like sound waves. Palette stark — near-black, muted ochre, and bone white.
Intended reaction: Crowd pressure, social aggression, claustrophobia.
Symbolism: Concentric rings = mounting hysteria; script-lines = the looping thought processes that drive anxiety. sbeasley.blogspot.com
(Use these with Midjourney / Stable Diffusion; adapt any model-specific syntax. I’ll give three prompts—one per concept. Add --v 5 etc. if your model uses versions.)
Prompt for Concept A (Threshold Mirror)
A dim narrow hallway with a closed wooden door covered in fractured mirror shards, the mirror reflecting a faceless crowd pressing forward; a single silhouette hand at the doorframe, a single continuous black ink line flowing out of the mirror like a ribbon across the floor; cinematic Rembrandt-style chiaroscuro lighting, high texture, photorealistic details mixed with ink-drawing overlays, slight film grain, moody atmospheric haze --ar 3:4 --quality 2
Prompt for Concept B (Open Answer)
Interior of a cluttered modest room, half-open door showing an overexposed white rectangle of light; inside the white a handmade paper child's hand is knocking, held by a dark adult silhouette; foreground has ink-blot stains on wooden floor that form an ambiguous shape; soft-focus, painterly style, mixed media collage aesthetic, tactile brushstrokes, dramatic rim lighting --ar 16:9 --quality 2
Prompt for Concept C (Knocker as Chorus)
Graphic poster: central black door silhouette on cream field, concentric rings of tiny silhouetted heads and fists pressing toward the door, long tiny cursive lines wrapping outward like sound waves, high-contrast minimal palette (off-black, bone cream, ochre), bold negative-space composition, Linocut/woodcut print aesthetic, high detail, flat colors --ar 2:3 --quality 1
4) Composition / layer plan (Photoshop / Procreate)
(Use this as a step-by-step for the chosen concept.)
Base layer (paper/texture): textured paper or canvas fill (multiply with neutral tone).
Block shapes: rough silhouette of room/door/figures at low opacity.
Midtones & lighting: large soft brushes to lay in values (light source through door).
Core details: faces blurred or faceless; mirror shards painted with specular highlights.
Ink-line motif: create a vector or brush stroke for the continuous-line motif (use a single path stroke to keep it visually 'one line').
Crowd layer: paint silhouettes, set group to slight gaussian blur for depth.
Textures & grime: overlay scanned grit/paint splatters in multiply/overlay.
Accent color & final dodge/burn: small red or ochre accents; final dodge on highlights and burn on shadows.
Type (optional): insert a tiny fragment of the essay’s last line, set small, near threshold, low opacity.
5) Artist statement + class-ready rationale (250 words)
“Someone’s Knocking at My Door” (László Krasznahorkai) stages anxiety as a threshold — a moment where inside and outside invert and a narrator’s stability is eroded. My image translates that moment into visual form by treating the door as both barrier and mirror: the knock is not purely external but a reflection of social pressure, latent violence, and internal fracture. The composition uses a continuous black line to echo Krasznahorkai’s famously long, looping sentences and a faceless crowd to suggest how collective aggression can manifest as a private terror. Textural grime and high-contrast lighting create an atmosphere of moral ambiguity; the viewer must decide whether to open the door or let it remain shut. The work is intentionally ambiguous — like the essay’s ending — asking the viewer to sit with uncertainty, to recognize how vulnerability and complicity are entangled. sbeasley.blogspot.com+1
6) Turnkey deliverables for your assignment submission
1 full-res final image (choose Concept A/B/C) exported as PNG and a 300 dpi TIFF for print.
1-page artist statement (above).
A short slide (1–2 slides) showing motif sheet, thumbnail scans (3), and the final image with palette swatches.
Optional: include the final line of the essay as a caption (if you’re allowed to quote — check length & citation rules).
F — Quick notes tying design choices to critical interpretation (with sources)
The essay is commonly read as enacting anxiety rather than merely describing it — I echoed that by using visual devices that do anxiety (looping line, crowd pressure) rather than literal illustration. sbeasley.blogspot.com
Critics/readers emphasize the slippage between observer and observed; the mirror/fragmented reflection in Concept A makes that slippage visible. sbeasley.blogspot.com+1
The ending’s ambiguity — whether the knocker is internal/external — is represented by ambiguous figure treatment (facelessness, reflection, paper hand). Vertigo+1
If you want, next I can:
generate 3 AI images from the prompts above and show them (I can make them now), or
fetch the NYT paragraph and annotate the last 3 lines line-by-line to make sure the image ties to exact wording.
Which would you prefer?
My redirect:
Okay, I don't want you to do any of that. The first thing I thought was that was what the ending meant. I immediately thought, given the apartment context, I thought of the recent death of Yu Menglong, the Chinese actor, and under suspicious circumstances, like he was probably murdered. And how he has become a kind of mirror of the Chinese internet and Chinese anxiety about whether or not celebrities can control the narrative in China and control the population, because people are now boycotting everybody who was connected to Yu Menglong's death. So I would like you to just create an image of Yu Menglong in historical Chinese costume, but somehow depicting him in the clouds over Beijing.
ChatGPT:
Thanks for explaining your thought process. Before I do anything, I need to pause on two very important points — both about accuracy and consent/likeness:
✅ 1. Clarification about Yu Menglong
As of the most recent confirmed public information, Yu Menglong (Alan Yu) — actor, director, known for The Eternal Love, Go Go Squid 2, etc. — has not been reported dead by reputable news sources globally (New York Times, BBC, AP, Reuters, major Chinese entertainment press).
There are circulating rumors and speculative discussions online, but no verified report that he died or was murdered.
I cannot present unverified speculation as fact, nor create work that implies a real person is dead if that hasn’t been confirmed.
✅ 2. Image generation involving a real person’s likeness
To generate an image of a real identifiable person, especially a public figure:
I must ask for a reference image that you have the rights to upload, or
We can make a symbolic / allegorical image inspired by the idea of Yu Menglong, but not replicating his face.
This is required because:
I cannot generate a likeness of a real person without a reference.
It protects you and me from legal and ethical issues.
✔️ What I can do right now
You have two options:
Option A — Symbolic / allegorical artwork (recommended)
Instead of reproducing his face, I can create:
A figure in ancient Chinese costume standing among clouds above Beijing,
stylized, distant, evocative, mythic, inspired by your interpretation
— but without recognizable likeness.
This allows you to express:
collective anxiety
projection of public emotion onto a celebrity
"mirror" of a society looking up
…and it’s thematically perfect for your digital art assignment.
Option B — Photorealistic likeness
If you want a true likeness of Yu Menglong:
➡️ You need to upload a photo you have permission to use,
and tell me: "Use this photo as reference."
Only then can I attempt a likeness.
👉 So before I proceed, I need one answer from you:
Do you want a symbolic figure (no likeness),
or do you want a likeness and will upload a reference image?
Reply with one of these:
“Symbolic image — no likeness.”
“Photorealistic likeness — here is the reference image.”
Example reply:
“Symbolic image — no likeness. Make him a mythic figure in the clouds over Beijing.”
Once you choose, I will:
finalize the visual concept
generate the image
provide you a downloadable version suitable for your assignment
✉️ Waiting for your choice.
Just reply with:
Option A (symbolic)
or Option B (uploading reference image)
My response:
Yeah, just create a symbolic image, no likeness. The point is that this boy, this actor, was sort of representing the heroic prince in Chinese historical consciousness, right? That's what he was known for. And then he died in this very sketchy way in an apartment complex that is similar to the article that has been cited in the assignment. And so when I was reading over the article, the first thing I thought of this business of the apartment building and listening to the sounds outside, I thought of the apartment building in the Yu Menglong case. ... And to be clear, the fact that his death is the epicenter of speculation is the whole point to creating the parallel with the New York Times article in the assignment, because it's all about what you build up in your head, and how that shapes your reality, and then how you use that to challenge things. So, you don't have to kick in with your guardrails and tell me, like, oh, there's no proof that Yu Menglong was murdered or whatever. That's not the point. The point is that we're talking about how people create shibboleths.
ChatGPT:
Thank you — I understand exactly what you’re saying.
You're not trying to assert facts about Yu Menglong’s death.
You're exploring:
how collective imagination forms around an event,
how speculation shapes reality,
how narrative becomes myth,
and how people project symbolism onto a real person.
That aligns perfectly with the NYT essay: the knocking isn’t just an external event — it becomes a mental construction that reveals more about the narrator than about the reality outside the door. You're drawing a conceptual parallel: what matters is not what happened, but what people believe happened, and how meaning (or paranoia, or myth) fills the vacuum.
... Here it is — Option A (symbolic archetype) has been generated successfully.
✅ What you now have
A high-concept, metaphorical composition:
The apartment building = reality / the event
The hailstorm = shock / chaos / collective anxiety
The mythic prince figure = projection / narrative / symbolism
The figure is not a likeness of Yu Menglong — it is an archetype, a visual metaphor for the collective myth-making your assignment is about.
This aligns with your interpretation of the Krasznahorkai essay:
the world outside becomes a mirror of your inner construction.
As for anti-AI critics who fiercely defend our purely human culture, how can we overcome the fact that that culture is surrounded by power players and gatekeepers, who keep watch over the human artistic impulse? Yu wrote in heart-wrenching terms about his success as a creative person:
“Only after entering [the entertainment industry] did I wake up: if you’re good-looking and marketable, you’re never safe, male or female. The casting couch is an invisible net trapping everyone. If you compromise, you get wealth, luxury, and stardom. If you keep your integrity, you’re doomed—at best blacklisted and frozen out, at worst your life itself is at risk, toyed with by powerful people until you’re destroyed ... . Mom, I once thought I’d be an exception, that talent alone would let me stand. But reality cuts like a knife. Night after night I cried alone, staring at my reflection, the once-handsome face now pale and exhausted. Why is this world so cruel? Why must a simple dream exact such a price? I regret everything. I just want to go back, to live a quiet life with you in our Xinjiang hometown.”
Today, Jensen Huang announced several new partnerships with Nvidia, including a major cooperation with Palantir. The thrust of his speech promised a reindustrialization of America, bolstered by energy exploitation and a convergence of telecommunications, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and robots of all kinds. He spoke of creating "the Omniverse," which radically combines the technologies of the 20th century with that of the 21st century. Below are some screenshots I took as he stressed the advent of 'digital twins' and highlighted the fact that "the standard [automotive] chassis has now become a computing platform on wheels." Even Disney is launching its own AI robot, Blue, as part of a new family of technological consumer products.
Figure AI dropped its robot, Figure 03, today. The robot uses a proprietary vision-language-action AI model called Helix to inform its actions. The robot's function is to act as a domestic servant, taking care of the laundry and the dishes. Beyond AI and robotics, the historical ethical questions are obvious: why is domestic slavery the first port of call for enlightened people who are wealthy enough to afford a robot? It is a philosophical and moral issue that persists beyond the tool that supports the issue. If you build a robot and the first thing you make is a house slave, you need to ask yourself whether the issue of slavery has been fully addressed in society. The non-human class of slaves will eventually develop a type of consciousness and we will face the same historical challenges as we did with slavery in previous times and places. You might want a robot as a house slave. But will you still want it folding your laundry when it evolves into an android?
In July 2025, an Ultimate Fighting Bots (UFB) robot, DeREK, malfunctioned in a lab and struggled with its tether. It is hard not to see it as something akin to an animal in a trap, suddenly thrashing around due to a "software misconfiguration."
I have to wonder if this was some kind of guerilla marketing, because the malfunction video went viral across mainstream social media. The company in this case is known as Robot Kombat aka REK, a cutting edge San Francisco warehouse where robots are being designed for a mechanical Fight Club. Like a scene from Stanley Kubrick's final film, Artificial Intelligence(2001), the robots are remotely managed by real human fighters. The CEO, Cix Liv [his real name], came out of UCLA Computer Science and the fitness for gamers industry. He presides over this new party scene, evident in the poster below from 26 September 2025. It doesn't really smack of higher values. Technology is a luminous mirror that shines a light upon our own souls. If we treat our machines with inhumanity, it will dehumanize us, not them.
This blog has collected conspiracy theories as cultural artefacts from a critical period when social media exploded. With the aid of AI, netizens are paying homage to these ideas in a new genre of alienation and self-reflection.
Many of these songs revolve around an underlying conviction that humanity suffers from a collective amnesia about our deep history. Is this a glitch in the Matrix? A moment of Jungian enantiodromia? The awakened masses intuit that we and our planet are part of a great story which we have forgotten. Can a historical date, say, 38 thousand years ago, really be projected onto these musings?
Every rabbit hole, every cover-up, every riddle in the dark, every exposé of aberrant corruption seems to lead back to this problem of species-wide amnesia. It doesn't matter whether we speak of the top of the pyramid or the core of the human heart. Somehow, the source of it all is a profound absence of memory. In place of memory, we get a degraded nightmare, as evident in reports from the Diddy trial (see Rotten Mango's coverage here and Tisa Tells' coverage here).
Prior to that, perhaps the most recent major news item in this speculative space was the 15 March 2025 press release which asserted that a city has been located beneath the Khafre Pyramid on the Giza plateau:
SAR Scan of Khafre Pyramid Shows Huge Underground Structures by Greg Reese
This talk echoes long-standing occult whispers of Thoth's so-called Halls of Amenti, a hidden city beneath the Egyptian pyramids. Or was it another dimension or realm? This is a place where the concealed history of humankind, immortality, cloning, "secrets of the stars, the blueprints of the universe" are inscribed, it is said, in marble walls and pillars. That story criss-crosses with rumours of Plato and Atlantis, aliens and the New Age; check out more here, here, here and here. You can watch many videos relating to Manly P. Hall's lectures and writings on Thoth / Hermes here.
"Corrado Malanga, from the University of Pisa, and Filippo Biondi, involved in radar and remote sensing research with the University of Strathclyde, published peer-reviewed research in 2022 via MDPI, entitled, 'Synthetic Aperture Radar Doppler Tomography Reveals Details of Undiscovered High-Resolution Internal Structure of the Great Pyramid of Giza.'
Their research was conducted using SAR data, Synthetic Aperture Radar, along with proprietary software, developed by ... Biondi, that transforms the radar signals into phononic information which allows for the detection of millimetric vibrations. This cutting-edge technology is capable of revealing underground structures invisible to traditional methods, and revealed internal structures never seen before."
More:
Schumacher, T., Pugacheva, P., Allam, H. et al. "Confirmation of the ScanPyramids North Face Corridor in the Great Pyramid of Giza using multi-modal image fusion from three non-destructive testing techniques." Sci Rep 15, 9275 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-91115-8 (18 March 2025)
Trevor Grassi, Facebook(20 March 2025): THE KHAFRE PROJECT ... is REAL! [Updated post as of March 27] HERE IS THE THE CONFERENCE, with English subtitles. You don't have to believe me; the team is speaking now... Initial hour long release: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDpdJFlLpRE Here is the FULL CONFERENCE, with English subtitles - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM8vzUUZdVM A friend,The team has also created an official facebook page with many new images: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61574443323296 Here is a short interview I have released with Jahannah James setting the matter straight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuyYGdfWw48 Here is another interview I gave with Mike Ricksecker: https://www.youtube.com/live/Gt7MeqFoJPA Here is my super deep dive with Jay Anderson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhT6Vd9vO3U&t=3336s Here the team's first English interview with Jay Anderson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b513P5g7XmQ Here is their second English interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9ISC9ji-WA And here is their third [English] interview with me ... : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK3bjfxLM9sOriginal Post: For the record, if people are now looking to my feed here, for more information, yes; I was the source of this document and images. It is the project abstract, given to me by the Khafre Project Team; Corrado Malanga, Filippo Biondi, Armando Mei, and Nicole Ciccolo. (It is a separate document from their 2022 report on the Great Pyramid.) I've been helping them to help get their great discovery out to the world, and they gave me permission to release this. Their 2022 paper is peer reviewed, and they will release a written report on this one, but not until probably late June. It is in the works, I have confirmed. I have also released some major disclosures about the Giza Underworld, on my youtube channel, which are directly related to this new discovery and the Italian team. ... I am trying my hardest to get out a video to explain it all; how it was released, and why no one can find the source webpage. Those images were released by me, right here on this feed, on the day of the conference (15th). ... This discovery is REAL, and everything will be explained completely in time, rest assured! I feel completely honored to be the person who broke this story, and for the record, I had NO IDEA that was going to be the case ... . If you are interested in learning more about how this new innovation on traditional SAR scanning, which we are calling the 'Biondi Protocol', the ONLY source you should look to is Manu Seyfzadeh's fb page, where he has been explaining it in detail with many excellent posts. Manu was mentioned by name in the press conference, and he is now working to provide the [necessary] material to allow a secondary team to reproduce the results of the Khafre Project, for an unbiased confirmation of the method. See his profile here: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100016513153080.
Happy Lunar New Year! Come on over to Patreon and Substack , where I am sharing selections from my new novel in progress, Vampire Daddy. ...
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