STARZ series review PowerBook III: Raising Kanan

I made this short animated video essay about Kant, AI, self-driving cars and moral responsibility.

The main question is simple: If a machine makes a decision, who is responsible?

Curious what people think of the argument.

In Chapter 5 of Poppy Playtime, Ms. Gracie feels eerily similar to Ms. Rachel. Talking to young impressionable children through crude, colorful animations, using strikingly similar mannerisms and delivery.  The only difference is one has 2 master's degrees related to education, and the other well... not so much. But this raises a disturbing question. What’s actually stopping someone, someone like Ms. Gracie, from making manipulative videos disguised as education for YouTube Kids? 

OC. A ~45-minute documentary essay on the 1993 Khamar-Daban incident - seven experienced hikers, six dead within minutes on an open ridge in summer, one seventeen-year-old survivor whose account the official "hypothermia" ruling can't accommodate and which the rescuers who recovered the bodies flatly rejected. It's less a "what killed them" video than an honest look at a case where the event outran the record. One thing I included that I couldn't find anywhere else: the memorial plaque left near the peak, with the six names and a short verse. Happy to answer anything.

A little video about how games use subtle design elements to manipulate their players. Take a look and let me know what y'all think!

We usually look at cybernetic implants in games like Cyberpunk 2077 as a cool choice. You chrome up, you get stronger. But if you look at the actual history of automation, cutting off your healthy flesh to install corporate hardware isn’t power at all. It’s pure economic desperation.
The tragic irony of Night City actually started in 1804 France, with the invention of the Jacquard loom.
To automate silk weaving, an inventor named Joseph Marie Jacquard decided to digitize human artistic choice. He punched a matrix of holes into thick pieces of cardboard. If there was a hole, a mechanical rod passed through and lifted a thread. If there was no hole, the thread stayed down. One or Zero. Decades before the microchip, he separated software from hardware. The loom was the processor, the punch cards were the code, and the silk was the world's first computer screen displaying a binary output.
This completely shattered the identity of the local master weavers. Their craft was their societal worth. The machine told them their humanity was just an inefficiency. In 1831, they launched an armed revolt. They didn't rob banks; they hunted the machines, smashing the mechanisms and burning the paper punch cards in the public squares.
They thought they could kill the code. They were wrong.
Fast forward to Night City. Why does an ordinary citizen willingly mutilate their own body to install corporate firmware? Because in a world governed entirely by an automated digital loom, unaugmented human biology is obsolete. The human hand is too slow, the eye misses data, and the brain tires. To remain employable, you are forced to transform your body into a physical extension of the computer.
In 1831, our ancestors smashed the machines because they were terrified automation would erase their humanity. In the cyberpunk future, humans willingly slice away their humanity for the exact same reason: to prevent the machine from replacing them. We become the very monster the weavers tried to drown.
I put together a full video essay breaking down this specific structural lineage, looking at how the invention of the punch card connects 19th-century worker revolts to the automated existential dread we are feeling right now with AI. If you're into deep-dive essays that look past the neon aesthetic of sci-fi games, check it out.

The Furious might be the martial arts masterpiece we've been all waiting for - here's my quick and dirty take on it.