Neal Curtis

@nihilcurtis.bsky.social

1312 Followers 1212 Following

Comics scholar, one-time critical theorist. Interested in science communication & graphic medicine. Enjoys SF. Concerned (to say the least) by climate emergency and fascism. Escaped UK for Aotearoa. Tangata Tiriti. He/him.

Map showing when women were given the franchise in Europe. Earliest is 1913 in Norway.

Bag of Proper Crisps, Big Cut, Purple & Gold, Cracked Pepper & Sea Salt.

Hajime Moryasu with a Shinigami looking over his shoulder.

McDonalds ad on side of a bus shelter. 'Hotcakes' written centrally in white on red background. 'You know where's written smaller in yellow, bottom right.

Publicity photo for TV series Outrageous showing all six sisters.

The Guardian and The Independent from 12th September 2001 with images of Ground Zero.

"At the root of these problems lies a technocratic and post-humanist mentality that tends to regard the human person as an object to be manipulated or a resource to be optimized, removing all safeguards against the unchecked pursuit of profit. What prevails is efficiency, rather than respect for freedom and human dignity. Some post-humanist currents even go so far as to envision “second-class” human beings, subordinate to the interests of elites who consider themselves superior. This troubling prospect becomes all the more serious when combined with technological tools that exponentially increase the capacity for control and selection. Even certain forms of structural indebtedness, which keep entire peoples in conditions of dependence, reflect the same mentality, in new forms, that tolerates relationships of subordination akin to slavery.”

Title: Comics as Bricolage in Di Morris's The Writing Desk.
The comics is a family biography and a colonial history of NZ.
Location is the Clock Tower room 029.

Links include Mastodon, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook and Youtube

Cover showing Struwwelpeter in belted orange frock coat with huge mass of frizzy hair and long fingernails like Ed Scissorhands.

Brightly coloured image shows a group of Huni Kuin people leaving the forest, crossing a rive on the back f a giant crocodile and re-entering the forest. Website says: "“I sell canvas, I buy land” is the motto of the MAHKU collective, artists from the Huni Kuin ethnic group living in the Amazon region between Peru and Brazil: they sell their work, created under the influence of ayahuasca, to buy land around their village in order to protect it from deforestation. They were commissioned to create a large mural on the façade of the Giardini della Biennale. Meanwhile, their home region was struck by severe flooding in early March 2024."

An orange post-it note reads "I did not get you a card as I do not believe in capitalism

The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth

EWD wearing large straw boater and feather boa.

First, they're not good at telling the truth. In fact, they sometimes just make stuff up that sounds true, like when ChatGPT cited six fake court cases in a legal brief or when Google's Bard (the predecessor to Gemini) mistakenly credited the James Webb Space Telescope with taking the first pictures of a planet outside of our solar system. Those are known as hallucinations.

"They are extremely unreliable in the sense that they confabulate and make up things a lot," Sap said. "They're not trained or designed by any means to spit out anything truthful."

They also struggle with queries that are fundamentally different from anything they've encountered before. That's because they're focused on finding and responding to patterns.