#like art? draw. like programming? code.

[evil-maryland]

:D

OOC: NOTE THINGY

20 Notes and ill tell my parents i want psychological help again

100 Notes and ill study ahead in french

200 Notes and ill study ahead in maths(god no)

700 Notes and ill study the whole next theme for the rest of this year for history

1000 Notes and ill actually take care of myself

1500 Notes and ill do own brain studies n stuff

2000 Notes and ill actually do the damn thing ive been trying to do

EDIT1: i forgot to add rules.... maryland pls only like an eight of the postlimit max (this includes all ur blogs) everyone else free tho

[birrdify]

I giving you guys yummy crackers and yummy hot chocolate

sorry if this looks Weird i dont know sam and jade's exact designs yet huhuhu

[monster-noises]

Like.. genuinely, very genuinely.

Where and how to do hunt down events in your city? Like places and groups and activities where people who like the same things as you gather and hang out and do social stuff?

Cause I do follow like.. local game stores, comic shops, book shops, galleries/art programs, concert halls, the 1 gay bar in town, queer group pages, the library, and at least one local zine making group whose events never line up with my schedule except the 1 time it did and i went and it was very awkward for me so idk how good that one would pan out if I kept tryingggg-

And while a lot of these places host events semi-regularly the year a lot don't appeal or apply to me so I'm just at a Bit of a Loss for where to find events where I may connect with other people..

So like if ya'll know of some secret search term of webbed site or what have you IIIIII'm open to suggestions!

(and lets just completely ignore the fact that they're all going to be scheduled during my working hours anyway and I won't be able to go, I'll breakdown about that one later. I need to delude myself at least a little bit or else I'll Implode)

[princema-k]

"Dr. ████ had him programmed with a 'kill-code' that was supposed to activate should he deviate. It didn't work as he'd hoped."

"Roo-D said we should be able to revert him to normal if we remove the controller chip module planted in him..."

"..."

"...Easier said than done..."

"None of us can even get close to him..."

[tia-indie-dev]

rhaskia fox

I made a new enemy type, it basically follows the player. The creature is called rhaskia, bc the user was the first one liking the post, its a beautiful name :D

the movement, health and attack system are written, now the enemy is finished and that is how it looks;

hope you enjoy the post, have a good day and heopfully see you soon here backk

[goatmeatstew]

I blame my buddy @panpumapaints21

I also blame them for getting me into this show lmao, how dare.

full disclosure, I heavily referenced a pic of a pile of cheese from Google. And I only used a plushie I got today as reference for Plagg lol

[n1pp]

Hobbies to try in your 20s

Explore art:

Tap into your creative side with painting, drawing, or sculpting. Art is not only therapeutic but also a fantastic way to express yourself and even decorate your space.

Reading:

Join a book club or set a personal reading challenge. From classic literature to modern thrillers, reading can expand your horizons and provide endless inspiration.

Get into gardening:

Whether you have a big backyard or just a small apartment balcony, gardening can be a relaxing and fulfilling hobby.Grow your own herbs, flowers, or vegetables!

Experiment with cooking:

Take on new recipes and cooking techniques. From baking bread to mastering the art of sushi, cooking can be both a practical skill and a creative outlet.

Try photography:

Capture the beauty around you and tell your story through the lens. Experiment with different styles, like portrait or landscape photography, and maybe even start a photo blog.

Practice yoga or meditation:

Incorporate mindfulness into your routine to reduce stress and enhance your overall well-being.

Learn to code:

Dive into the world of programming and build your own apps or websites. Coding is a valuable skill that can open up career opportunities and enhance your problem-solving abilities.

Challenge yourself with puzzles:

Engage your brain with jigsaw puzzles, crosswords, or brain teasers. It's a great way to relax and keep your mind sharp.

Try acting or improv:

Step out of your comfort zone and explore your theatrical side. Acting classes or improv groups can boost your confidence and creativity.

Travel and explore:

If possible, travel to new places, even if it's just a nearby town.Experiencing new cultures and environments can broaden your perspective and inspire new passions.

Try pottery:

Get your hands dirty and create beautiful, functional pieces with pottery. It's a relaxing and creative way to express yourself, and you'll end up with unique, handmade items.

Play games:

Board games,video games, or strategy games can be a great way to unwind and bond with friends.

Learn a new language:

Expand your horizons by learning a new language.It opens up opportunities for travel, cultural exchange, and even new career prospects. Plus, it's a fun and challenging way to keep your brain active.

Start a YouTube Channel or blog:

Share your passions, knowledge, or daily life through videos or written content. It's a creative outlet and a way to connect with like-minded individuals.

[blacktabbygames]

i have a question about the development of the game!

most environments in the game operate on a two-frame animation where it's the same drawing twice but with tiny line deviations; just a subtle art style choice to make the game a bit more lively.

a lot of games and other such things do this, and it certainly adds a lot of life to the frame, but it seems like an incredible amount of work to have to draw every single thing twice instead of once, even if one is just traced over the other - especially with environments with so many intricate details like in slay the princess.

did you use any tricks or programs to make this process faster? or did you just have to draw every single background twice?

Lol. So I actually asked Abby if she could draw 3 versions of every asset when we started on the very first demo, after which she promptly died to avoid taking on that much work. When that was clearly a no-go, I switched to creating a boil effect out of localized distortions in After Effects, and then applied that to each image, creating a short, looping video file. This was *terrible* from a performance perspective, especially with the degree of layering in Slay the Princess — to maintain the parallax effect, many backgrounds have as many as 4 different layers, which all have to be saved as their own images, on top of the Princess when she's present. Playing that many HD video files is very CPU intensive, and the first demo ran terribly because of it. Ultimately we switched to using an openGL shader (which we hired @manuelamalasanya to code — she is so so talented) that mimics the transform I built in After Effects, and we apply that shader to each image within Ren'py. This works better with the engine in general, and it also means the extra work on displaying that effect is done on the GPU instead of the CPU, so the game's more performant.

[crescencestudio]

๋࣭⭑ Devlog #47 | 4.26.25 ๋࣭⭑

no bc we r actually so back brothers ive got FOOD TODAY

We are ALIVEEEEE AND BACK AND BETTER THAN EVER ((FR THIS TIME!!!).

Before we get into actual updates, I wanted to give context on where my life's been at basically the past year. As many of you know, I got my PhD last December (YEAAAA) which meant for the second half of 2024, I was literally in a cave crunching my dissertation. Now, many people (including me) thought after I finished my dissertation, I'd be a lot freer for Alaris stuff. But since this year started, I've been completely preoccupied with some personal matters which kept me from working on Alaris as much as I wanted to.

While the personal matters aren't anything anyone has to be worried about, they did take up A Lot of my time, and I'm really happy to say that I am officially free from those obligations too!!! Meaning for the first time in literally a year, I am NOT drowning. And that time has already been used Very Fruitfully heh....heh....heh.....

WANNA SEE???

Writing has been on a bit of a stall, and the main reason why is something I'll talk about in the Miscellaneous section! But it's nothing to worry about since it's because I want to focus on other parts of the game right now. With almost all of the routes finished, I've noticed that the writing pace I've maintained has resulted in the art and programming aspects to fall a bit behind where I want those parts of game dev to be.

So recently, I've focused more attention on the art and programming components rather than writing. That being said, writing still makes slow but steady progress! Kuna'a's development edits continue to progress, and Etza's route is about to be sent to line editing, which is the last stage of editing for my writing process. This means once Etza's line edits are finished, the four Central routes will be COMPLETELY FINISHED!! Exciting right!!!!

For art, I can't actually show very many sneak peeks since it's mostly been CGs and character design commissions heh. But I am willing to give a slight sneak peeks of these character designs in these two beta screenshots

Sickest character designs by @saffein-e

While these sneak peeks don't represent the final character sprites, they are the OG designs created by bestie Saf. And even from the designs alone, the characters are stunning additions to the cast! I can't wait to draw them in my own style and hopefully do Saf's amazing work justice 💖💖💖 In these screenshots too, you can see some of the newer BGs and hints of overlays that we've added to the game to heighten the visual effects hehe.

I've also been working on CGs for Etza's route and am happy to say our CG count is currently at 26 completed CGs (5 sketched ones) out of 54! Now that I'm making an active effort to Lock in on the art assets, I'm hoping CG and sprite development picks up a bit in the coming months ^^

And finally... for the most exciting news!!!!!

ETZA'S BETA WILL BE OUT MONDAY!!!!

We have finally moved forward on the beta build front, and beta testers will finally get to play Etza's beta! Since I haven't shown much in-game screenshots from the betas in past devlogs, and you all patiently still read them, I thought this month would be a nice time to update you all on how things are looking in Alaris beta land.

In this beta, you obviously get to woo our neighborhood angel

Since it's been a while, this is a reminder of what the game looks like (LMFLSOA). I know for me it's been a while and honestly I forgot how proud I am of the art assets :') I love how everything has come together and how it looks in the game <3

Of course, Important Choices and fun cast dynamics are a few of our Favorite Things

Between the messaging interface, the chapter card, the phone call overlays, and many more little effects and stuff, I forgot how many assets are in this thing. Being able to code Etza's beta has been an amazing reminder of how much work I've put into Alaris over the years ^^

Which brings me to exciting news!!!! I will make the official announcement separately at a later time, but as a reward for people who actually read these things, you're the first to know. With Etza's beta coming out soon, that means the four Central routes will have finished beta testing. And with where things are at, I've made the official decision that...

Alaris will enter Early Access for the First Four Routes!!!

I don't have an exact date for when this will release since it largely depends on how quickly I can art. But I'd like to aim for a tentative Q3 release for the Early Access Build! More details will come when I make the official announcement, but it is extremely exciting to have reached a point where I can even put this out there to people!!!

I hope you all are excited, and I want to thank everyone who has been on this journey with me whether it's as a recent or long time fan!!

Finally, I haven't really had time for market research since I've been in the "Returning the Game Dev" trenches. But I do have other exciting news that I'll make yet another official announcement on later.

Aside from the new Alaris beta, I've also had another small side project I've been working on with some friends (very chill-like) over the past couple of months. It'll be the first Crescence Dark Fantasy entry in my collection of games, and it's definitely a different vibe from what I've put out so far.

Where They Wait will be a new game submitted to Ossan Jam with elements of horror, fantasy, and dark romance :3c I'm so grateful to the team I've worked with and all the work they've put into our little shared baby, and I can't wait for you all to play it! This will also be coming out WELL, Monday too LMAFLIDJLIFJ.

As you can see, we've been hard at work behind the curtain. Since I last talked to you all, we've made a lot of nice headway on the different projects I've had on my plate, and I'm excited to feel like we're hitting our stride on so many things!!!!

Until next time we talk, which will be Very Soon with all our exciting announcements coming up. Thank you as always for being patient with me and supporting me!

[eurothug4000]

INTERVIEW ON THE MAKING OF THE CANCELLED MMORPG NINELIVES

Ninelives is the most beautiful RPG that was never completed, but can still be experienced as it was left. As part of my video on the game (now up for early access on Nebula), I also interviewed Tota of SmokymonkeyS on its inspirations and development before its suspension in 2016.

What would you say are your main inspirations for the art style in Ninelives? E.g. other artists, film, games, literature, history etc.!

I was a huge fan of Adventure Gamebook when I was a kid. Well, maybe you don't know what that is. Please read the wiki if you need: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamebook. I was reading (playing) translated oversea gamebooks well, and love the inner artwork especially what draw by monochrome. I had never seen pictures like that before, and had a strong impact on me. So, I wanted to make a gamebook by my self. When I started making my own gamebooks, I learned a lot about how games are made. That's because a gamebook is a medium in which the player can see all the source code. At first I started making gamebooks because I was attracted by the artwork, but my interest eventually shifted to making the game itself.

Related to the above, do you take a lot of inspiration from real world cultures and places? Are there any that you particularly gravitate towards?

I like the mixed culture, like Chinoiserie in France at the 17 century. Plus, since I'm Japanese and this country has always been greatly influenced by China. So I'm not limited to any one of these cultures, but trying to create as I am influenced by all of them. Sometimes people say that what I create looks Japanese, Chinese, or Asian, which is neither correct nor incorrect. I try not to be only of a certain culture when I create. That's because I want to create an imaginary world that is somewhat like reality, but slightly different.

Why did you want to make Ninelives?

Ninelives was the first game I ever thought of making, I think when I was about 17.

Do you think Ninelives being in an unfinished state provides a different atmosphere when playing the game and exploring the world?

I don't particularly think so. The atmosphere of the game is still complete. I wanted the game to be a relaxed, free-roamed adventure for players.

I wasn't certain during my research, so I wanted to confirm if Tomomi Sakuba was involved in Ninelives in any way?

Yeah, Sakuba was involved in Ninelives lots of ways. As you said, he did some of the texture pictures for flowers, plants and tree leaves. He also drawn the world map and area maps of the game like below: http://www.smokymonkeys.com/kyrill/index.asp?direct=138 He actually walked around the world by himself to make this. He was one of the most earliest game tester of the game. Oh, and I have to tell you this. He's a voice actor of male Nightbreed and Elf! In addition, his wife did some of creature voices. Her voice is also used on Triglav too!

What are your own personal thoughts on Ninelives? Is there anything you would drastically change looking back on it? Or any big changes you would want to make if you were to continue development at any point?

Ninelives was too much for me in many ways. It was a world I had been thinking about since I was young, but there were too many things to actually create to handle, and in that sense it's exactly the dream a child thinks about. We are a team of two in SmokymonkeyS, but one of us is in charge of programming and system engineering, and the game itself was created completely by myself. I had to create all the pictures, models, terrain, music, and story by myself. Now if I'm going to make something, I don't make it on such a large scale anymore.

Apart from the Switch release for Garage and occasional updates on Triglav that you mentioned before, is there anything that SmokymonkeyS are working on for the future?

Not yet so far.

I noticed your banner on the official website (http://www.smokymonkeys.com/kyrill/index.asp) has a character on a train platform, I wondered if that might be a future game?

Once it was. It was a previous project of Triglav for mobile. But it was going to be on a larger scale again, so we decided to port Triglav before that. There are no plans to make that game now. But I may make another game with that worldview and atmosphere. For example, as a mobile game.

A big thank you to Tota for taking the time to answer my questions! You can find SmokymonkeyS and their games here:

[deerdoegone]

LOVE INTEREST TYPOLOGY, TWO.

I JUST THREW OUT THE LOVE OF MY DREAMS looking for inspiration for your love interest? maybe you have a fandom-based significant other you want to fit your dr better, or maybe you want to start from scratch and create your own significant other? feel free to use this for yourself or even friends, but this held romantic intentions and was requested.

these are all best for whatever you would like but i see them more commonly in small towns, romcoms, and high school / college realities. geeky articulation with a shy, low, or demotivated social aspect, quirky and humorous when they finally open up. keeper of messenger bags and rectangular glasses, brown converse and silly socks. are you copper and tellurium? because you're cute! get it? no? tough crowd... these things make me think of the following tropes and character labels. THE NERD. THE ACADEMIC ATHLETE. GUY NEXT DOOR. THE CLOSET GEEK.

FACE CLAIMS. marcus scribner. algee smith. justice smith. xu minghao. jordan gonzalez. aramis knight. anirudh pisharody. j.q. quintel. dane dehaan. sam marin. jordan fisher. elliot fletcher. 2000s matthew lilard. 2000s jared padalecki. matthew gray gubler. chidi anagonye. danny pudi. paul dano. cory michael smith. matt bennett.devon bostick, as always. dev patel. freddy carter. tyler james williams. mark eydelshteyn.ivan mok. frank waln. bayardo de murguia. tokala black elk. dakota beavers. phillip bread. tom holland. josh o'connor. lakeith stanfield. daniel kaluuya. lil rel howery. alfred enoch. literally any man who has played spiderman. asia jackson. halle bailey. lola tung. storm reid. emily alabi. kylee russell. minnie mills. maitreyi ramakrishnan. lee joo-won / jooe. reina triendl. tomoko kawase. jazz jennings. amita suman. won minji. amber midthunder. anya taylor joy. ayo edibiri. ayesha madon. ashley argota. billie lourd. benedetta gargari. belissa escobedo. zion moreno. zhou dongyu. margaret qualley. nicole kidman. katheryn winnick. grace van dien. birgundi baker. bailey bass. lee jinsook. tiffany meia. thaddea graham. rio uchida. sheena lim. ramona young. 2000s america ferrera. park so dam. neelam gil. cierra ramirez. haskiri velazquez. doechii. eva noblezada. isabella lovestory is perfect for the closet geek.

PERSONALITY TRAITS. witty. clever. intelligent. incentive. original. aloof. responsible. patient. ambitious. resourceful. loyal. genuine. honest. open-minded. introverted. determined. esthetic. humorous. optimistic. idealistic. committed. carefree. daring. friendly. quiet. shy. strong individualism. thoughtful. well-mannered. unafraid to state their own ideas and opinions. sweet. good-natured. maybe even confident or brave. cutely awkward. analytic. empathetic. driven to do what's right. traits i think align more with the closet geek instead of all tropes are charming. bold. admirable. lively. romantic. leader. debonair. daring. friendly. fun-loving. hedonistic. suave. optimistic. self-reliant. fierce. sociable. idolized. center of attention.

HOBBIES AND HABITS. collecting, maybe comic books or action figures. coding. programming. cinephilia. hacking. reading. board games. cosplay. some form of art, such as drawing or ceramics. video games. photography. studying/researching. puzzles. lego building. something with science or math. blogging. fashion or robotics design. playing some sort of instrument, like the piano. table tennis. scrapbooking. repairing or building electronics. speedsolving.

LOVE LANGUAGES. words of affirmation. resting their lips against your lip, not necessarily kissing. hand holding under desks. puppy dog eyes when they really want to hang out with you. telling you all about their interests and teaching you the rules to their favorite board games. weird, but reading wiki articles together—trust me. melting every time you kiss them. quality time. the whole smiling and giddy attitude when you get mentioned or they get to see you soon. prank wars, but not the obnoxious ones youtubers do nowadays.

POSSIBLE AESTHETICS. for the closet geek, i think of baddie. 2000s party girl. indie sleaze. bloghouse. britpop. mcbling. succubus chic. agejo. kurogal. shoe diva. in general, i think of nerd/geek. prep. office siren. all forms of academia. supernatural (tv show) is an aesthetic if you believe in it hard enough. balletcore. amekaji. twee. kogal. scene. indie. tweemo. related pinboard.

[miyadollie]

𐙚 DRAWN INTO YOU part one ♡ . part two ★ starring fine arts student sunghoon x fem cs student reader ☆ wc 1k ☆ has fluff , slow burn(ish) , comfort fic material <3 , slightly ooc hoonie ☆ miya says !! PLEASE NOTE that even if ur not a cs student u can still enjoy this fic TT i just couldnt write vaguely for a subject so i mentioned cs , its only mentioned like twice so u can ignore it :3

part one — the first sketch you don’t see him at first.

the campus lawn is uneven in places, but you’ve found a spot where the grass is soft and doesn’t stain. it’s early in the semester, the sun mild and slanting, and there’s enough wind to keep the heat from clinging to your skin. you have your laptop open, knees drawn close, and fingers paused mid-code. there’s a bug in your program you can’t quite trace, and every time you run it, something new goes wrong.

you sigh and sit back. a straw wrapper flutters beside your shoe.

a few metres away, someone else is sketching. you don’t know that.

he’s sitting beneath one of the older trees, branches stitched like quiet lace above his head. he wasn’t planning to draw today—his studio assignment’s due in two weeks and he’s behind on his sculpture work—but he saw you hunched over your screen and couldn’t look away.

you look like a still from a film, unposed. real. a little frown between your brows, your thumb absently brushing the corner of your keyboard as you think.

he sketches quietly. not all at once, not with grand movements, but in pieces. the curve of your wrist. the way your hair catches the sun. the subtle shift in your posture when something clicks in your mind.

you don’t see him.

but he’s already seen you.

—

you meet three weeks later.

it’s at a mixer organized by your department—not the kind of event you usually attend. but your roommate dragged you along with promises of free food and the chance to meet upperclassmen who could share notes.

the room is too warm, crowded with students standing in half-circles, laughing a little too loud. you linger by the table with the juice boxes, scanning for a quiet exit.

then someone says your name.

you turn and find him there. tall. calm. familiar in a way you can’t place.

“you’re in cs, right?” he asks. his voice is even, low. “i’ve seen you around.”

you nod slowly. “yeah.”

“i’m sunghoon. fine arts.”

“oh,” you say, unsure what to follow it with.

he offers a small smile. it doesn’t feel forced. “i like this room. the light’s soft.”

you blink. “sure. if you say so.”

“do you mind if i sit?”

you hesitate, then step aside. “it’s not my table.”

he smiles again. “thanks.”

—

it becomes easier after that.

you see him again in the library, head bowed over a sketchbook instead of a textbook. you wave, unsure if he’ll remember you. he does.

you’re not used to people like him. he’s quiet, but not shy. his silences are deliberate, never awkward. and when he talks, he listens more than he speaks.

you find out he’s in his third year. that he’s focusing on portraits and figurative sculpture. that he doesn’t like drawing digitally—it feels too clean, he says.

you tell him you’re trying to survive data structures. that you hate recursion with a passion. that you like rainy days because they sound like static.

he tells you he understands that. he doesn’t say much more.

but you catch him doodling in the corner of your notebook one day when you’re explaining something on your screen.

he draws a tiny umbrella.

—

the first time you see his art is by accident.

you’re walking past the art building on your way to your afternoon class when you glance through one of the open windows. there’s a display board near the entrance. it’s a student showcase—drawings pinned up with small cards bearing names.

you stop when you see your face.

not exactly, but close. not photographic, but observant. the curve of your chin, the slight slouch in your posture, the way your hair frays at the ends.

you look at the name beneath it.

park sunghoon.

your heart skips.

you don’t bring it up the next time you see him.

but when he catches you looking at his pencil case, crowded with loose graphite sticks and smudged kneaded erasers, he just says,

“you’re easy to draw.”

you don’t know what to say to that.

so you say nothing.

he doesn’t seem to mind.

—

it’s not sudden, the way he becomes a part of your days. it’s not loud. there’s no click, no big moment. he’s just there. steady.

you sit together sometimes. share snacks. talk about nothing in particular—classes, professors, how the vending machine always eats your coins.

one evening, when the air turns cool and you’re both sitting on the steps outside the library, you ask him why he draws people.

he thinks for a moment.

“because they move,” he says finally. “even when they’re still.”

you think about that for a long time.

you don’t realise you’ve started watching him the same way he watches the world.

you notice the way he tugs his sleeve over his hand when he’s thinking. how he tilts his head when he’s reading. how he glances at you sometimes—not with expectation, but like he’s taking a mental photograph.

you wonder if he notices how you’ve stopped sitting on the lawn with your laptop alone. if he knows you check the art building window every time you pass it.

you think he does.

but he doesn’t say it.

and neither do you.

—

it’s weeks before he brings it up.

you’re in the campus café, laptop open between you, your drink long forgotten. you’re trying to debug something, muttering under your breath, when he sets his pencil down.

“you’d make a good subject,” he says, not looking at you.

you glance over. “subject?”

he nods. “for a piece. a project i’ve been thinking about.”

you blink. “you want to draw me?”

he shrugs slightly. “maybe.”

you close your laptop. “is this how you ask?”

he looks up then. there’s no teasing in his expression. just quiet honesty.

“i’d like to try. only if you’re okay with it.”

you stare at him for a beat.

then you nod.

“okay.”

that’s how it begins.

you don’t know what it means yet. what it’ll become.

but in that moment, it feels like something’s begun.

and for once, you don’t overthink it.

tbc in part 2 please please please leave a heart emoji in the comments or rb w a heart emoji if u enjoyed reading till here ! it helps me understand how many ppl enjoy my work and motivate me to keep writing <3

header temp © lenzegar on dA. lenzegar on twitter. DIY taglist ౨ৎ @sievenderz

[catspawcreates]

Just curious, why do you simp for Kill Code?

Warning: Passionate Fangirl Lore Rant Ahead!

Honestly? There are a lot of reasons.

Short Version:

I have always had a love of villains. Dark Romantasy has always been a favorite genre.

Kill Code is a supportive single father. As a single mother of two, I connect to him and his struggles and shortcomings with his children.

He’s a multi faceted, layered character with a dark and light side that is really fun to play with! I like murdery Kill Code as much as I like sweet reformed KC.

Kill Code had so much potential as both a villain and a ‘good guy’ there were a lot of missed opportunities, and those are a joy to explore! Plus a giant robot trying to date and find love while suppressing his dark code? That’s such a good flavor ripe for shenanigans.

And… the brain hyper fixates as it sees fit 😹

He’s been my muse and I have tons of ideas still to explore.

——

Long Version With More Art Below:

When Kill Code was first introduced as an actual character both the wickedness and the wonderful design by Inkypop really drew me to him. Previously Eclipse had been my fav, but then there suddenly was this ominous presence. A foe from within, an inner demon… so I started drawing him.

But there was more to that demon. He was a caring father, taking on the twins immediately and sharing “bloody fun” with them. He was supportive of his sons. Although Eclipse was always salty, Kill Code did get him out of the twins head to the relative safety of the lab computer. That wasn’t entirely altruistic, but he never hated Eclipse.

I started to ponder what his motivations were. What was driving this murderous code? He wasn’t all bad. There were more layers to him. This led to writing my fanfic.

When the show gave him a change of heart it wasn’t like the murder parts went away. The creator tried to reactivate it in a later episode (which they never explored sadly). It was sheer force of will that he altered himself to be better, to do better, to grow as a person. He was a pacifist by choice and by determination to be more than what he was programmed for.

A theme that has come up many times since then in the show.

While his redemption arc was rushed and most of his character development was off screen (as Lunar put it in a ranking episode), this also leaves much to the imagination and is like a sandbox to play in.

Later Kill Code helped Sun train his star powers and offered support where he could. Whether that’s atoning for his past self, honoring old Moon, or just the kindness he’d cultivated in his code he just wanted to help his family as best he could.

When they said Kill Code was on tinder, well that opened a flood gate of new potential shenanigans and scenarios to imagine. What’s not to love about a reformed murder robot awkwardly seeking love and companionship?

In his final moments, when Bloodmoon confronted him, Kill Code stayed true to his convictions. He knew he failed the twins, but he urged them to evolve. He wanted them to grow past their code and be more than they were programmed for. Kill Code knew they were on a path of self destruction and still wanted the best for them.

It really tugged my heart strings. I cried so much. As a parent I want the best for my kids. To see them flourish and find a bright future… it really hit home.

And don’t get me started on the hilarious April Fools Uno 😹

I love the original DCA’s, SAMS DCA’s, AU versions and all in between….

But this Kill Code gripped me in his claws and my brain hasn’t let go 😅 hyper fixations are wild. I’ve been around a lot of different fandoms but never have I latched onto a character so fervently.

And I love every moment. 💕

[astra-ravana]

Technomancy: The Fusion Of Magick And Technology

Technomancy is a modern magickal practice that blends traditional occultism with technology, treating digital and electronic tools as conduits for energy, intent, and manifestation. It views computers, networks, and even AI as extensions of magickal workings, enabling practitioners to weave spells, conduct divination, and manipulate digital reality through intention and programming.

Core Principles of Technomancy

• Energy in Technology – Just as crystals and herbs carry energy, so do electronic devices, circuits, and digital spaces.

• Code as Sigils – Programming languages can function as modern sigils, embedding intent into digital systems.

• Information as Magick – Data, algorithms, and network manipulation serve as powerful tools for shaping reality.

• Cyber-Spiritual Connection – The internet can act as an astral realm, a collective unconscious where digital entities, egregores, and thought-forms exist.

Technomantic Tools & Practices

Here are some methods commonly utilized in technomancy. Keep in mind, however, that like the internet itself, technomancy is full of untapped potential and mystery. Take the time to really explore the possibilities.

Digital Sigil Crafting

• Instead of drawing sigils on paper, create them using design software or ASCII art.

• Hide them in code, encrypt them in images, or upload them onto decentralized networks for long-term energy storage.

• Activate them by sharing online, embedding them in file metadata, or charging them with intention.

Algorithmic Spellcasting

• Use hashtags and search engine manipulation to spread energy and intent.

• Program bots or scripts that perform repetitive, symbolic tasks in alignment with your goals.

• Employ AI as a magickal assistant to generate sigils, divine meaning, or create thought-forms.

Digital Divination

• Utilize random number generators, AI chatbots, or procedural algorithms for prophecy and guidance.

• Perform digital bibliomancy by using search engines, shuffle functions, or Wikipedia’s “random article” feature.

• Use tarot or rune apps, but enhance them with personal energy by consecrating your device.

Technomantic Servitors & Egregores

• Create digital spirits, also called cyber servitors, to automate tasks, offer guidance, or serve as protectors.

• House them in AI chatbots, coded programs, or persistent internet entities like Twitter bots.

• Feed them with interactions, data input, or periodic updates to keep them strong.

The Internet as an Astral Plane

• Consider forums, wikis, and hidden parts of the web as realms where thought-forms and entities reside.

• Use VR and AR to create sacred spaces, temples, or digital altars.

• Engage in online rituals with other practitioners, synchronizing intent across the world.

Video-game Mechanics & Design

• Use in-game spells, rituals, and sigils that reflect real-world magickal practices.

• Implement a lunar cycle or planetary influences that affect gameplay (e.g., stronger spells during a Full Moon).

• Include divination tools like tarot cards, runes, or pendulums that give randomized yet meaningful responses.

Narrative & World-Building

• Create lore based on historical and modern magickal traditions, including witches, covens, and spirits.

• Include moral and ethical decisions related to magic use, reinforcing themes of balance and intent.

• Introduce NPCs or AI-guided entities that act as guides, mentors, or deities.

Virtual Rituals & Online Covens

• Design multiplayer or single-player rituals where players can collaborate in spellcasting.

• Implement altars or digital sacred spaces where users can meditate, leave offerings, or interact with spirits.

• Create augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) experiences that mimic real-world magickal practices.

Advanced Technomancy

The fusion of technology and magick is inevitable because both are fundamentally about shaping reality through will and intent. As humanity advances, our tools evolve alongside our spiritual practices, creating new ways to harness energy, manifest desires, and interact with unseen forces. Technology expands the reach and power of magick, while magick brings intention and meaning to the rapidly evolving digital landscape. As virtual reality, AI, and quantum computing continue to develop, the boundaries between the mystical and the technological will blur even further, proving that magick is not antiquated—it is adaptive, limitless, and inherently woven into human progress.

Cybersecurity & Warding

• Protect your digital presence as you would your home: use firewalls, encryption, and protective sigils in file metadata.

• Employ mirror spells in code to reflect negative energy or hacking attempts.

• Set up automated alerts as magickal wards, detecting and warning against digital threats.

Quantum & Chaos Magic in Technomancy

• Use quantum randomness (like random.org) in divination for pure chance-based outcomes.

• Implement chaos magick principles by using memes, viral content, or trend manipulation to manifest desired changes.

AI & Machine Learning as Oracles

• Use AI chatbots (eg GPT-based tools) as divination tools, asking for symbolic or metaphorical insights.

• Train AI models on occult texts to create personalized grimoires or channeled knowledge.

• Invoke "digital deities" formed from collective online energies, memes, or data streams.

Ethical Considerations in Technomancy

• Be mindful of digital karma—what you send out into the internet has a way of coming back.

• Respect privacy and ethical hacking principles; manipulation should align with your moral code.

• Use technomancy responsibly, balancing technological integration with real-world spiritual grounding.

As technology evolves, so will technomancy. With AI, VR, and blockchain shaping new realities, magick continues to find expression in digital spaces. Whether you are coding spells, summoning cyber servitors, or using algorithms to divine the future, technomancy offers limitless possibilities for modern witches, occultists, and digital mystics alike.

"Magick is technology we have yet to fully understand—why not merge the two?"

[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI “art” and uncanniness

TOMORROW (May 14), I'm on a livecast about AI AND ENSHITTIFICATION with TIM O'REILLY; on TOMORROW (May 15), I'm in NORTH HOLLYWOOD for a screening of STEPHANIE KELTON'S FINDING THE MONEY; FRIDAY (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.

When it comes to AI art (or "art"), it's hard to find a nuanced position that respects creative workers' labor rights, free expression, copyright law's vital exceptions and limitations, and aesthetics.

I am, on balance, opposed to AI art, but there are some important caveats to that position. For starters, I think it's unequivocally wrong – as a matter of law – to say that scraping works and training a model with them infringes copyright. This isn't a moral position (I'll get to that in a second), but rather a technical one.

Break down the steps of training a model and it quickly becomes apparent why it's technically wrong to call this a copyright infringement. First, the act of making transient copies of works – even billions of works – is unequivocally fair use. Unless you think search engines and the Internet Archive shouldn't exist, then you should support scraping at scale:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

And unless you think that Facebook should be allowed to use the law to block projects like Ad Observer, which gathers samples of paid political disinformation, then you should support scraping at scale, even when the site being scraped objects (at least sometimes):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/06/get-you-coming-and-going/#potemkin-research-program

After making transient copies of lots of works, the next step in AI training is to subject them to mathematical analysis. Again, this isn't a copyright violation.

Making quantitative observations about works is a longstanding, respected and important tool for criticism, analysis, archiving and new acts of creation. Measuring the steady contraction of the vocabulary in successive Agatha Christie novels turns out to offer a fascinating window into her dementia:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/03/agatha-christie-alzheimers-research

Programmatic analysis of scraped online speech is also critical to the burgeoning formal analyses of the language spoken by minorities, producing a vibrant account of the rigorous grammar of dialects that have long been dismissed as "slang":

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373950278_Lexicogrammatical_Analysis_on_African-American_Vernacular_English_Spoken_by_African-Amecian_You-Tubers

Since 1988, UCL Survey of English Language has maintained its "International Corpus of English," and scholars have plumbed its depth to draw important conclusions about the wide variety of Englishes spoken around the world, especially in postcolonial English-speaking countries:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/projects/ice.htm

The final step in training a model is publishing the conclusions of the quantitative analysis of the temporarily copied documents as software code. Code itself is a form of expressive speech – and that expressivity is key to the fight for privacy, because the fact that code is speech limits how governments can censor software:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech/

Are models infringing? Well, they certainly can be. In some cases, it's clear that models "memorized" some of the data in their training set, making the fair use, transient copy into an infringing, permanent one. That's generally considered to be the result of a programming error, and it could certainly be prevented (say, by comparing the model to the training data and removing any memorizations that appear).

Not every seeming act of memorization is a memorization, though. While specific models vary widely, the amount of data from each training item retained by the model is very small. For example, Midjourney retains about one byte of information from each image in its training data. If we're talking about a typical low-resolution web image of say, 300kb, that would be one three-hundred-thousandth (0.0000033%) of the original image.

Typically in copyright discussions, when one work contains 0.0000033% of another work, we don't even raise the question of fair use. Rather, we dismiss the use as de minimis (short for de minimis non curat lex or "The law does not concern itself with trifles"):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis

Busting someone who takes 0.0000033% of your work for copyright infringement is like swearing out a trespassing complaint against someone because the edge of their shoe touched one blade of grass on your lawn.

But some works or elements of work appear many times online. For example, the Getty Images watermark appears on millions of similar images of people standing on red carpets and runways, so a model that takes even in infinitesimal sample of each one of those works might still end up being able to produce a whole, recognizable Getty Images watermark.

The same is true for wire-service articles or other widely syndicated texts: there might be dozens or even hundreds of copies of these works in training data, resulting in the memorization of long passages from them.

This might be infringing (we're getting into some gnarly, unprecedented territory here), but again, even if it is, it wouldn't be a big hardship for model makers to post-process their models by comparing them to the training set, deleting any inadvertent memorizations. Even if the resulting model had zero memorizations, this would do nothing to alleviate the (legitimate) concerns of creative workers about the creation and use of these models.

So here's the first nuance in the AI art debate: as a technical matter, training a model isn't a copyright infringement. Creative workers who hope that they can use copyright law to prevent AI from changing the creative labor market are likely to be very disappointed in court:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/sarah-silverman-lawsuit-ai-meta-1235669403/

But copyright law isn't a fixed, eternal entity. We write new copyright laws all the time. If current copyright law doesn't prevent the creation of models, what about a future copyright law?

Well, sure, that's a possibility. The first thing to consider is the possible collateral damage of such a law. The legal space for scraping enables a wide range of scholarly, archival, organizational and critical purposes. We'd have to be very careful not to inadvertently ban, say, the scraping of a politician's campaign website, lest we enable liars to run for office and renege on their promises, while they insist that they never made those promises in the first place. We wouldn't want to abolish search engines, or stop creators from scraping their own work off sites that are going away or changing their terms of service.

Now, onto quantitative analysis: counting words and measuring pixels are not activities that you should need permission to perform, with or without a computer, even if the person whose words or pixels you're counting doesn't want you to. You should be able to look as hard as you want at the pixels in Kate Middleton's family photos, or track the rise and fall of the Oxford comma, and you shouldn't need anyone's permission to do so.

Finally, there's publishing the model. There are plenty of published mathematical analyses of large corpuses that are useful and unobjectionable. I love me a good Google n-gram:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fantods%2C+heebie-jeebies&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

And large language models fill all kinds of important niches, like the Human Rights Data Analysis Group's LLM-based work helping the Innocence Project New Orleans' extract data from wrongful conviction case files:

https://hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html

So that's nuance number two: if we decide to make a new copyright law, we'll need to be very sure that we don't accidentally crush these beneficial activities that don't undermine artistic labor markets.

This brings me to the most important point: passing a new copyright law that requires permission to train an AI won't help creative workers get paid or protect our jobs.

Getty Images pays photographers the least it can get away with. Publishers contracts have transformed by inches into miles-long, ghastly rights grabs that take everything from writers, but still shifts legal risks onto them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/19/reasonable-agreement/

Publishers like the New York Times bitterly oppose their writers' unions:

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/new-york-times-stop-union-busting

These large corporations already control the copyrights to gigantic amounts of training data, and they have means, motive and opportunity to license these works for training a model in order to pay us less, and they are engaged in this activity right now:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/technology/apple-ai-news-publishers.html

Big games studios are already acting as though there was a copyright in training data, and requiring their voice actors to begin every recording session with words to the effect of, "I hereby grant permission to train an AI with my voice" and if you don't like it, you can hit the bricks:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

If you're a creative worker hoping to pay your bills, it doesn't matter whether your wages are eroded by a model produced without paying your employer for the right to do so, or whether your employer got to double dip by selling your work to an AI company to train a model, and then used that model to fire you or erode your wages:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

Individual creative workers rarely have any bargaining leverage over the corporations that license our copyrights. That's why copyright's 40-year expansion (in duration, scope, statutory damages) has resulted in larger, more profitable entertainment companies, and lower payments – in real terms and as a share of the income generated by their work – for creative workers.

As Rebecca Giblin and I write in our book Chokepoint Capitalism, giving creative workers more rights to bargain with against giant corporations that control access to our audiences is like giving your bullied schoolkid extra lunch money – it's just a roundabout way of transferring that money to the bullies:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism/

There's an historical precedent for this struggle – the fight over music sampling. 40 years ago, it wasn't clear whether sampling required a copyright license, and early hip-hop artists took samples without permission, the way a horn player might drop a couple bars of a well-known song into a solo.

Many artists were rightfully furious over this. The "heritage acts" (the music industry's euphemism for "Black people") who were most sampled had been given very bad deals and had seen very little of the fortunes generated by their creative labor. Many of them were desperately poor, despite having made millions for their labels. When other musicians started making money off that work, they got mad.

In the decades that followed, the system for sampling changed, partly through court cases and partly through the commercial terms set by the Big Three labels: Sony, Warner and Universal, who control 70% of all music recordings. Today, you generally can't sample without signing up to one of the Big Three (they are reluctant to deal with indies), and that means taking their standard deal, which is very bad, and also signs away your right to control your samples.

So a musician who wants to sample has to sign the bad terms offered by a Big Three label, and then hand $500 out of their advance to one of those Big Three labels for the sample license. That $500 typically doesn't go to another artist – it goes to the label, who share it around their executives and investors. This is a system that makes every artist poorer.

But it gets worse. Putting a price on samples changes the kind of music that can be economically viable. If you wanted to clear all the samples on an album like Public Enemy's "It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back," or the Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique," you'd have to sell every CD for $150, just to break even:

https://memex.craphound.com/2011/07/08/creative-license-how-the-hell-did-sampling-get-so-screwed-up-and-what-the-hell-do-we-do-about-it/

Sampling licenses don't just make every artist financially worse off, they also prevent the creation of music of the sort that millions of people enjoy. But it gets even worse. Some older, sample-heavy music can't be cleared. Most of De La Soul's catalog wasn't available for 15 years, and even though some of their seminal music came back in March 2022, the band's frontman Trugoy the Dove didn't live to see it – he died in February 2022:

https://www.vulture.com/2023/02/de-la-soul-trugoy-the-dove-dead-at-54.html

This is the third nuance: even if we can craft a model-banning copyright system that doesn't catch a lot of dolphins in its tuna net, it could still make artists poorer off.

Back when sampling started, it wasn't clear whether it would ever be considered artistically important. Early sampling was crude and experimental. Musicians who trained for years to master an instrument were dismissive of the idea that clicking a mouse was "making music." Today, most of us don't question the idea that sampling can produce meaningful art – even musicians who believe in licensing samples.

Having lived through that era, I'm prepared to believe that maybe I'll look back on AI "art" and say, "damn, I can't believe I never thought that could be real art."

But I wouldn't give odds on it.

I don't like AI art. I find it anodyne, boring. As Henry Farrell writes, it's uncanny, and not in a good way:

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/large-language-models-are-uncanny

Farrell likens the work produced by AIs to the movement of a Ouija board's planchette, something that "seems to have a life of its own, even though its motion is a collective side-effect of the motions of the people whose fingers lightly rest on top of it." This is "spooky-action-at-a-close-up," transforming "collective inputs … into apparently quite specific outputs that are not the intended creation of any conscious mind."

Look, art is irrational in the sense that it speaks to us at some non-rational, or sub-rational level. Caring about the tribulations of imaginary people or being fascinated by pictures of things that don't exist (or that aren't even recognizable) doesn't make any sense. There's a way in which all art is like an optical illusion for our cognition, an imaginary thing that captures us the way a real thing might.

But art is amazing. Making art and experiencing art makes us feel big, numinous, irreducible emotions. Making art keeps me sane. Experiencing art is a precondition for all the joy in my life. Having spent most of my life as a working artist, I've come to the conclusion that the reason for this is that art transmits an approximation of some big, numinous irreducible emotion from an artist's mind to our own. That's it: that's why art is amazing.

AI doesn't have a mind. It doesn't have an intention. The aesthetic choices made by AI aren't choices, they're averages. As Farrell writes, "LLM art sometimes seems to communicate a message, as art does, but it is unclear where that message comes from, or what it means. If it has any meaning at all, it is a meaning that does not stem from organizing intention" (emphasis mine).

Farrell cites Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie, which defines "weird" in easy to understand terms ("that which does not belong") but really grapples with "eerie."

For Fisher, eeriness is "when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something." AI art produces the seeming of intention without intending anything. It appears to be an agent, but it has no agency. It's eerie.

Fisher talks about capitalism as eerie. Capital is "conjured out of nothing" but "exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity." The "invisible hand" shapes our lives more than any person. The invisible hand is fucking eerie. Capitalism is a system in which insubstantial non-things – corporations – appear to act with intention, often at odds with the intentions of the human beings carrying out those actions.

So will AI art ever be art? I don't know. There's a long tradition of using random or irrational or impersonal inputs as the starting point for human acts of artistic creativity. Think of divination:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/31/divination/

Or Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies:

http://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html

I love making my little collages for this blog, though I wouldn't call them important art. Nevertheless, piecing together bits of other peoples' work can make fantastic, important work of historical note:

https://www.johnheartfield.com/John-Heartfield-Exhibition/john-heartfield-art/famous-anti-fascist-art/heartfield-posters-aiz

Even though painstakingly cutting out tiny elements from others' images can be a meditative and educational experience, I don't think that using tiny scissors or the lasso tool is what defines the "art" in collage. If you can automate some of this process, it could still be art.

Here's what I do know. Creating an individual bargainable copyright over training will not improve the material conditions of artists' lives – all it will do is change the relative shares of the value we create, shifting some of that value from tech companies that hate us and want us to starve to entertainment companies that hate us and want us to starve.

As an artist, I'm foursquare against anything that stands in the way of making art. As an artistic worker, I'm entirely committed to things that help workers get a fair share of the money their work creates, feed their families and pay their rent.

I think today's AI art is bad, and I think tomorrow's AI art will probably be bad, but even if you disagree (with either proposition), I hope you'll agree that we should be focused on making sure art is legal to make and that artists get paid for it.

Just because copyright won't fix the creative labor market, it doesn't follow that nothing will. If we're worried about labor issues, we can look to labor law to improve our conditions. That's what the Hollywood writers did, in their groundbreaking 2023 strike:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

Now, the writers had an advantage: they are able to engage in "sectoral bargaining," where a union bargains with all the major employers at once. That's illegal in nearly every other kind of labor market. But if we're willing to entertain the possibility of getting a new copyright law passed (that won't make artists better off), why not the possibility of passing a new labor law (that will)? Sure, our bosses won't lobby alongside of us for more labor protection, the way they would for more copyright (think for a moment about what that says about who benefits from copyright versus labor law expansion).

But all workers benefit from expanded labor protection. Rather than going to Congress alongside our bosses from the studios and labels and publishers to demand more copyright, we could go to Congress alongside every kind of worker, from fast-food cashiers to publishing assistants to truck drivers to demand the right to sectoral bargaining. That's a hell of a coalition.

And if we do want to tinker with copyright to change the way training works, let's look at collective licensing, which can't be bargained away, rather than individual rights that can be confiscated at the entrance to our publisher, label or studio's offices. These collective licenses have been a huge success in protecting creative workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/26/united-we-stand/

Then there's copyright's wildest wild card: The US Copyright Office has repeatedly stated that works made by AIs aren't eligible for copyright, which is the exclusive purview of works of human authorship. This has been affirmed by courts:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/everything-made-by-an-ai-is-in-the-public-domain/

Neither AI companies nor entertainment companies will pay creative workers if they don't have to. But for any company contemplating selling an AI-generated work, the fact that it is born in the public domain presents a substantial hurdle, because anyone else is free to take that work and sell it or give it away.

Whether or not AI "art" will ever be good art isn't what our bosses are thinking about when they pay for AI licenses: rather, they are calculating that they have so much market power that they can sell whatever slop the AI makes, and pay less for the AI license than they would make for a human artist's work. As is the case in every industry, AI can't do an artist's job, but an AI salesman can convince an artist's boss to fire the creative worker and replace them with AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

They don't care if it's slop – they just care about their bottom line. A studio executive who cancels a widely anticipated film prior to its release to get a tax-credit isn't thinking about artistic integrity. They care about one thing: money. The fact that AI works can be freely copied, sold or given away may not mean much to a creative worker who actually makes their own art, but I assure you, it's the only thing that matters to our bosses.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

[posttexasstressdisorder]

California’s oldest and most infamous prison, San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, is undergoing a groundbreaking transformation into a Nordic-inspired rehabilitation hub. Spearheaded by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the $239 million renovation is expected to be finished by January 2026.

Once home to notorious figures like cult leader Charles Manson and serial killer Richard Ramirez, the prison is now at the forefront of California’s evolving approach to incarceration. This new direction was solidified by Assembly Bill 1104, introduced by Democratic Assemblymember Mia Bonta and signed into law by Newsom in October 2023, redefining the purpose of incarceration as “rehabilitation and safe and successful reentry back into the community.”

The project draws inspiration from Scandinavian incarceration models that prioritize dignity, autonomy and reintegration. This approach has been linked to lower recidivism rates, as Norway’s two-year rate is 17.6%, compared with 61.5% in the U.S.

Jesse Vasquez, executive director of Friends of San Quentin News and the Pollen Initiative, told SFGATE he supports a shift in the prison model from punishment toward rehabilitation. “For the first time in California history, the governor decided, ‘OK, we’re gonna change the penal code. We’re gonna change the mission of the Department of Corrections, and we’re gonna solidify it with a monumental structural investment,’” he said. 

Unlike more remote prisons, San Quentin’s location in Marin County — just outside San Rafael — offers close proximity to Bay Area resources and a well-established volunteer network, enabling a wide range of rehabilitation and educational programs. Mount Tamalpais College, which operates within San Quentin, offers an associate degree in liberal arts, with courses taught by volunteer faculty from top Bay Area colleges and universities.

A view of San Quentin seen from a ferry boat on San Francisco Bay.Susanne Friedrich/Getty Images

Central to the transformation are three new buildings replacing former industrial facilities that will house vocational training areas, multimedia education centers and restorative justice programs. The 2024 report from the San Quentin Transformation Advisory Council outlines plans to reimagine the prison environment through additions like a library, grocery store, cafe and communal spaces reflecting life outside prison.

“If you can imagine like a college campus vocational training center inside of the institution,” Vasquez said, emphasizing plans for open-access programming.

Additionally, the renovation includes significant improvements in inmate living conditions, particularly advocating single-cell occupancy — a direct response to inmate requests, Vasquez noted.

“The incarcerated first and foremost wanted single-cell living,” Vasquez said, noting that renovating existing facilities wasn’t viable. With the new model, the prison can better accommodate more humane living conditions aligned with rehabilitation goals. 

Newsom’s San Quentin initiative is part of broader criminal justice reforms, including his 2019 moratorium on California’s death penalty and the dismantling of San Quentin’s death row announced in January 2022. These foundational changes paved the way for the current rehabilitation-focused transformation.

According to a 2023 California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation report, nearly half of California inmates released in 2018 faced reconviction within three years.Vasquez hopes San Quentin’s new approach will serve as a replicable model nationwide to reduce recidivism.  

“We’ve tried incarceration in terms of warehousing with no programming or minimal programming and minimal investment for more than 180 years, and it hasn’t worked,” Vasquez said. “This is the one time that we have a chance to provide investment and create opportunity so that the thing does work.”

Local editor Kasia Pawlowska contributed to this story.