FREQUENTLY QUESTIONED QUES- ugh, 9front did me dirty.

#-1 What is surrealism?

  • Pure psychic automatism.

#0 Are you single?

  • The lore of unix_surrealism, techno-mage and by extension the entirety of the Analog Nowhere universe is opensource. You are free to customize and add to it, as you see fit. However, upstream (me), is governed only by surrealism.

#1 What year was the Techno-Mage born?

  • 2525

#2 How many OpenBlades are there

  • Just the one. OpenBlade(AI) is/was/will-be(?) a prototypical technology developed by MilTek inc. in order to deal with the raising prices of gunpowder, commissioned by the UCSEAA . In 2374, MilTek would be acquired by MATA inc. The surviving hardware was recovered from the Museum of Open Technology by the one remaining blowfish, patched and gifted to the Techno-Mage in 2534.

#3 What’s UCSEAA?

  • United Corporate States of Euro-Afro-America, a failed attempt at unifying (a portion of) the globe.

#4 What’s the deal with the socket in the grown-up Techno-Mage’s forehead?

  • That’s OpenWellington, only 6 were ever produced. It’s a bus that allows its user to interface with machines. As opposed to the vastly popular MATA developed Jack2Head, OpenWellington does not transmit any data to centralized servers. OpenWellington was developed by Charles Wellington, the original author of OpenBladeAI, the operating system of the (inappropriately) named OpenBlade hardware.

#5 What is the Corpo-Foss war?

  • a global conflict between corporations and the remainder of free people. The war would end in 2449 inconclusively. Most of the planet reduced to deserts, with corpo-controlled enclaves spread about, known as METACITIES.

#6 Are you sucking out all these answers out of your thumb?

  • There are about 400 posts somewhere in the fediverse under the #unix_surrealism tag, which may yield more information, but, yes, I am sucking it out of my thumb. And I don’t even like it - most of the time.

#7 What does the techno-mage run?

  • she runs BSD

#8 What is MATA?

  • the big bad

#9 What’s the point?

  • exactly.
    • pmjv@lemmy.sdf.orgOPMEnglish
      9·
      7 months ago

      Yes. In fact most of the pictures here are made on freebsd. The few monochrome ones are drawn in uxn on openbsd. or 9front, which I like to use to remind myself I’m too stupid to use computers.

      • DriftinGrifter@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        4·
        7 months ago

        Dope I broke my laptops arch installation trying to run openbsd so rn I’m using a terminal install of openbsd until I can get both dualbooted and openbsd gets proper Wayland support

    • pmjv@lemmy.sdf.orgOPMEnglish
      14·
      1 year ago

      In the year 2532, an elder of a tribal village in the Wild calls for a young child. The girl is told to venture into the world to seek out the mythical FISH of the blowfish clan. After an eventful journey, she tracks it down and enters into the FISH’s tutelage to learn the trade of a unix techno-mage (a role highly persecuted by the gov-corp).

      The actual origin of this particular Puffy is uncertain, but it’s generally understood to be the last of its kind. The girl only refers to it as ‘Master’. In several issues of ‘Techno-Mage’ it is revealed that the FISH is indeed mechanical, but as most free machines of this age, possesses full sentience - (see 'Techno-Mage in AMBUSH: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/336634).

      The girl eventually grows up and becomes the revered Techno-Mage, to an extent a blowfish herself, certainly thanks to the OpenWellington brainbus inside her forehead, which was in her youth used to install OpenBSD inside her [brain].

      In episode #92 ‘Root’, when the Master is gone and the mage is an adult, it is revealed that the MATA corporation managed to recover a baby-Puffy. The mage sets out to rescue it and raise it herself. This is the little Puffy seen to accompany the Techno-Mage in certain portrayals. The baby could be perceived as the mage’s system, but due to its machine sentience, it is not referred to as such.

      The mage does have a laptop from 2006, given to her by the Master during her studies, which runs a BSD system, hostname ‘Spike.’

  • Wheaties [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    2·
    8 months ago

    i’ve been interpreting the puffer fish as a persons ability to offload mental tasks into the spaces and tools around them - is that a decent read or am i doing surrealism wrong?

    • pmjv@lemmy.sdf.orgOPMEnglish
      2·
      7 months ago

      If it makes sense for you, sure!

      Look, I make these drawings with not much clue. If you can find any meaning in them, that warms my heart.

      You can’t do surrealism wrong. You either do it, or you don’t. 😈

  • Faresh@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    7 months ago

    What does the process of creating your comics look like? Do you begin by drawing or with the words? Since you have a universe where this takes place and that the images must generally be recognizable as something (ie. it can’t just be an amorphous pile of pixels), I reckon that your mind isn’t entirely free? Or do you begin writing/drawing without the initial intent of posting it on this community, and if the image takes on a shape and reveals something out of Analog Nowhere do you post it on here? Or do you pull the core idea or picture of the comic out of your mind onto the screen, where you fill out the blanks so as to make it real?

    • pmjv@lemmy.sdf.orgOPMEnglish
      6·
      6 months ago

      The longer comics have mostly been sourced from story boards I sketched in surrealism ~2 years ago. Generally speaking, I will begin with sketching the characters in a seemingly random situation with no pretense and when ideas appear of what the single panel might be a part of, I indulge them and continue. In a way I understand this as opening a window into a world and progressively peeking through more and more.

      I spoke about comic-surrealism here https://analognowhere.com/unix_surrealism/ , trying to dispel the idea that the output should be a pile of arbitrarily placed pixels. I use the characters as a medium or a tool for creating a surrealistic output. Ie: I know I will draw Girl and Fish, but not in what situation.

      Most of the initial work is still done on paper. And most of it, like you suggest, never makes it into the world of Analog Nowhere.

      For the more topical ideas, my mind is indeed not entirely free. Like the MATAVPS comic ( https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/14480541 ), but in that instance as opposed to the characters, I use the topic as my medium and let my hand construct the situation around it.