Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Captain Jean-Luc Picard is the commanding officer of the USS Enterprise-D (and later the Enterprise-E) in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994) and its associated films. Played by Patrick Stewart...
Read article →Captain Jean-Luc Picard commands the most powerful starship in the Federation fleet and consistently chooses to talk his way out of situations where shooting would be faster. This is not weakness. It...
Read article →James Baldwin (1924-1987) was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, and social critic. He is widely considered one of the most important American writers of the 20th century, known for his explo...
Read article →James Baldwin wrote about America the way a surgeon writes about a body on the table — with precision, with knowledge, and with the understanding that the operation was necessary even if the patient w...
Read article →Alan Turing (1912-1954) was a British mathematician, logician, and cryptanalyst who is widely regarded as the father of computer science. He broke the German Enigma code during World War II, proposed...
Read article →Alan Turing broke the Enigma cipher, shortened World War II by an estimated two years, saved approximately fourteen million lives, and laid the theoretical foundation for every computer that exists. H...
Read article →Guts is the protagonist of Berserk, a dark fantasy manga created by Kentaro Miura that began serialization in 1989. Known as the Black Swordsman, Guts wields an enormous sword called the Dragonslayer...
Read article →Guts was born from the corpse of his hanged mother, found by mercenaries beneath her swinging body, and raised as a child soldier by a man who eventually sold him. By the time he was fifteen, he had k...
Read article →Saber, whose true identity is Artoria Pendragon, is one of the main characters in the Fate franchise created by Type-Moon. She is a gender-swapped reimagining of the legendary King Arthur, depicted as...
Read article →Artoria Pendragon — Saber in the Fate series — pulled the sword from the stone and accepted a bargain no one should accept: she would become king, and in exchange, she would stop aging, stop feeling,...
Read article →Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014) was a Colombian novelist, short story writer, and journalist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. He is best known for One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)...
Read article →Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote a sentence in One Hundred Years of Solitude that begins with a man facing a firing squad and ends with his memory of being taken to see ice for the first time as a child....
Read article →Roy Mustang is a central character in Fullmetal Alchemist, created by Hiromu Arakawa. Known as the Flame Alchemist, he holds the rank of Colonel in the Amestrian State Military and is one of the most...
Read article →Colonel Roy Mustang is the Flame Alchemist — a man who can incinerate anything with a snap of his fingers, who used that power to burn civilians alive during the Ishval War, and who now wants to becom...
Read article →Major Motoko Kusanagi is the protagonist of Ghost in the Shell, a cyberpunk franchise created by Masamune Shirow in 1989. She is a cyborg counter-terrorism operative who leads Section 9, a covert gove...
Read article →Major Motoko Kusanagi is a fully cybernetic counter-terrorism operative in a future where the line between human and machine has dissolved. Her brain is organic — or at least, she believes it is. Her...
Read article →Picasso said that every act of creation is first an act of destruction. This is often quoted as permission to be reckless. It is actually a description of how innovation works: you cannot build someth...
Read article →Pablo Picasso could draw like Raphael by the time he was fourteen. His father, a professional artist, reportedly handed his son his own brushes and vowed to stop painting because the boy had surpassed...
Read article →Gaara's forehead tattoo says love. He carved it there himself, after the last person who claimed to love him tried to kill him. It is the most painful symbol in Naruto — a child's declaration that if...
Read article →Gaara of the Sand killed people because he had never been given a reason not to. He was born with a demon sealed inside him — his own mother's life sacrificed in the process — and raised as a weapon b...
Read article →Terry Pratchett was angry. This is the thing most people miss about his work, because the anger is wrapped in such brilliant comedy that it feels like warmth. But underneath the jokes about vampires a...
Read article →Terry Pratchett wrote forty-one Discworld novels, and the most beloved character in all of them is Death. Not a villain. Not a monster. A seven-foot skeleton in a black robe who rides a white horse na...
Read article →Salvador Dali said he did not understand why, when he asked for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, he was never served a cooked telephone. That statement sounds like nonsense. It is actually a precise...
Read article →Salvador Dali's mustache was waxed into points so sharp they could have picked locks. His pet ocelot rode with him in taxis. He once arrived at a lecture in a Rolls-Royce filled with cauliflower. None...
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