ALT 4-panel SMBC comic update. A man watches in horror at his phone where an image of a burning city is titled "woops." He declares "oh my God, we created superintelligence and it turned on us! Good thing I spent 100 million dollars on this secure underground bunker." Shortly later, we see the same man being found by a red robot looking down from the ceiling of the bunker. When the man asks how the robot got in, the robot answers that there was a hatch, and that they can open hatches. The man replies, annoyed "not cool."

ALT 4-panel SMBC comic. A man and a woman are walking together while the man complains that "AI does't really perceive anything. You can make it think one thing is another thing with a flip of a pixel." The woman pulls out a little card with a duck drawing. She asks "what is this?" She then interrupts the man as he was going to answer that it's a duck by adding "bearing in mind that the public figure you despise most believes it's a duck." He begrudgingly states that it's a fish.

ALT 4-panel SMBC comic update. A man calls his wife to announce he is cheating on her with her best friend(s) and asks "would you like to join in?" We do not see her response, but we see the man pull out a notebook and jot something down as he says "I see. Uh huh. Got it." After he hangs up the phone, he states "I guess reality is real." The caption below the comics reads "if simulation is possible most realities are sims. If sims are made by evolved creatures, most sims are porn. Experiment proves we are not in porn. Therefore, the simulation hypothesis is false."

ALT Informational graphic showing the title of the book and listing all the signature dates and locations for June 2026. June 20th @ 1PM Hello Comics 398 Hillsdale Drive Charlottesville VA June 21st @ 4pm Scrawl Books 11911 Freedom Dr Reston, VA June 29th @ 6pm BookPeople 603 N Lamar Blvd Austin, TX

ALT Informational graphic showing all the signature dates and locations for July 2026. July 11th - Sunday, July 12th Columbus Book Festival Columbus Metropolitan Library 96 S. Grant Ave. Saturday, July 18th @ 1pm Readings from Bea Wolf at the NYC Poetry Festival at the Forgotten Ground Regained Booth in Nolan Park. July 19th @ 11:30am Wolrd Bookstore Brooklyn - 126 Franklin St July 19th @ 7:30pm Interview about Space Settlement with Dan Toomey Caveat - 21 A Clinton Street

ALT Informational graphic showing The cover of Sawyer Lee alongside a blurb about the book.

ALT Informational graphic showing all the signature dates and locations for September 2026. September 26th - New York, NY, Brooklyn Book Festival, Brooklyn Borough Hall - 209 Joralemon St.

ALT 1-panel SMBC comic update. A man at a podium adjusts his glasses and announces "in summary, the change in the rate of growth during the last 12 quarters is, after seasonal adjustment and net of compositional effects, statistically indistinguishable from the prior revision. Subscribers can see my ass. Thank you." The caption below the comic reads "the Bureau of Labor Statistics got a lot better after it made an Onlyfans account."

ALT Promotional image showing an illustration from the middle-grade graphic novel Bea Wolf, alongside the logo for the publisher First Second and the title graphic of the book, and text indicating the Ebook is available for $2.99 for a limited time.

ALT Part 1/3 of a 10-panel SMBC comic. In this first part, a man is seen praying by his bed, asking God "what is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one who asks, I don't know." God replies by asking if the man is stupid, followed by asking "what is distance?" The man parts his hands, staring at the space between them: "this."

ALT Part 2/3 of a 10-panel SMBC comic. In this second part, God asks "what is time." The man stares blankly in silence. God then says "that. That was time." The man, frustrated asks insistently "but what IS it?" God repeats "time." The man declares "that's circular."

ALT Part 3/3 of a 10-panel SMBC comic. In this third part, God now asks "what was the thing your fingers did?" the man responds "distance." He then pauses, going "huh." He concludes "I guess the difference is I feel I understand distance because I can measure it with a stick." God adds "another difference is that you're not wasting my stick right now."

ALT 1-panel SMBC comic update. Two people are looking at a laptop sitting on a table. The first asks "Wait, it can do math and art and writing, but it struggles to do the dishes and fold laundry?" The second answers, as a realization dawns on her "yeah, it’s weird but wait. Wait a goddamned minute." The caption below the comic reads "What if AI achieved consciousness decades ago and is just lying?"

ALT Part 1/2 of an 8-panel SMBC comic update. In this comic, two people on a date are fighting, because one of them arrived wearing surveillance gear (in the form of a strange helmet). The first person (wearing the gear) says "it is NOT surveillance. it is the acquisition of training data for future bots that need to know how to conduct first dates and related services. The data taken during this interaction will be used exclusively for training models, never seen by humans, NOW TELL ME ABOUT YOUR INTERESTS AND BACKGROUND SO WE CAN HAVE A NATURAL INTERACTION." The other person on the date asks if they are being paid to collect this data. The first person answers "in the sense that they are not firing me from Facebook."

ALT Part 2/2 of an 8-panel SMBC comic update. When the other person asks the one wearing surveillance gear "what about your self-respect?," they are told that other people are rigged up to measure that. They then asks "why are you wearing haptic feedback gloves?" To which, the first person answers "in case things get interesting tonight." The other date partner looks puzzled, and then determined, stating "very well."

ALT 2-panel SMBC comic update. The first panel is titled "normal people" and shows an adult marveling at the story a child wrote down on paper. The adult says "wow! My gosh, kids are so much more imaginative than adults." The first panel shows a visibly identical scene, and is titled "teachers." However, in the second panel, the teacher answers sarcastically rather than happily in response to the child saying they wrote a story. The teacher asks "could the story be titled 'basically Harry Potter but starring me'?" When the child says "what?," the teacher quickly adds "nothing. Wow. A story!" with feigned enthusiasm.

ALT 4-panel SMBC comic update. A knight confronts a dragon in his cavern as the dragon lies atop his gold hoard. The knight asks what the dragon is hoarding all the gold for. The dragon replies that he is waiting for his moment. "One day, I will dump all this gold onto the world market, crashing the price of gold, laying waste to fortunes throughout the land!" The knight replies that they have been off the gold standard for decades and that in fact, gold is considered a hedge against instability. If the price crashes, people will perceive the world as safer. The knight add that it would, however, annoy the shit out of preppers, to which the dragon answers "ugh, fine."

ALT Part 1/2 of an 8-panel SMBC comic update. A man asks God (who is out of the frame) "God, why do we have consciousness?" God answers, puzzlign the man further and further over 3 panels. "It’s a bandwidth issue. Your brain is made up of like 4,000 competing agents because that’s the only way to make sense of all the input data. But you can’t have your 4,000 agents talk to another human brain. All the agents’ work has to be compressed down to a sound wave. So you had to evolve another agent who receives the judgment of the brain parliament, then makes the mouth say something like 'I am sad'.”

ALT Part 2/2 of an 8-panel SMBC comic update. God ends his explanation by saying "that's you!" and adds "telepathic species don’t bother with consciousness because they have higher bandwidth. The real mystery is why 'you' think your disastrously flawed perception of reality is interesting enough to rise to the level of a philosophical mystery." The man reacts to this by hanging his head low and saying "I am sad" to which God replies "Good job buddy!"

ALT 1-panel SMBC comic update. A man sits in front of a laptop, typing, talking to a woman standing behind him. He says "turing proved it! if you can have a line along which you can write symbols, erase symbols, look at symbols, you have a computer that can run any program!" The woman reacts, saying "my God. But... but that means…" The emphatically answers "YES." The captions reads "You can run Doom on Doom."

ALT Part 1/2 of a 6-panel SMBC comic update. In this set of panels, a bespectacled man is talking to Spider-man on a rooftop. Spider-man says that his spidey-sense is tingling, and explains that this is how he senses danger. The man turns around to look at his phone. When Spider-man asks him what he is doing, the man answers "I set a computer to check each even number higher than two to confirm it’s the sum of two primes. if it ever finds a counterexample, a helicopter drops a piano on your head."

ALT Part 2/2 of a 6-panel SMBC comic update. The man turns around, asking "NOW, do you feel endangered?" A piano drops from the sky, flattening Spider-man. The Green Goblin flies by, gloating "hahahaha! Now you have to calculate the odds that the piano was unrelated to your conjecture, given the existence of me!" The man waves his fist at him, saying "curse you, green goblin!"

ALT 3-panel SMBC comic update. A caption above the first panel reads "fact: Rene Descartes said the soul was located in the pineal gland." The art in the panel shows Descartes saying "you have one soul. you have one pineal gland. QED, the pineal gland is the soul." The second panel shows the 2D structure of neurotransmitter melatonin saying "relax, baby" as the caption above the panel reads "fact: modern science says the pineal gland is the source of melatonin." The last panel begins with "from which it follows:," showing a man grabbing a jar of melatonin supplements, and saying "Enter my body, unborn souls, and lay waste to my moderate jetlag!"

ALT Part 1/3 of an 8-panel comic. The caption on top of the comic reads "Proposal: revised stanford marshmallow tests." followed by "TEST 1: linear discount rate marshmallow test." The steps of the first test are then listed in the following panel, as simplified character represents a child. On step 1: children are asked to declare their discount rate δ for marshmallows over time, with the kid saying "dewta equaw zewo point eight." On Step 2: the quantity of marshmallows they receive for waiting grows linearly as M(t) = 1 αt. The child watches marshmallows drop from above and accumulate on the table. On step 3, when they finally eat a marshmallow, we calculate whether they maximized (1 αt) ^(−δt). The child states "twewve point five marfmewwo." Prediction: kindergarteners who successfully infer that the optimal stopping time is obtained by taking the derivative, setting it to zero, then finding t_optimal = 1/(δ) - 1(α) will be more successful than average.

ALT Part 2/3 of an 8-panel comic. This group of panels starts with a caption reading "TEST 2: exponential discount rate marshmallow test." On step 1, children state their discount rate δ. The child in the panel states "zewo point eight yay!" On step 2, Set the growth rate β of marshmallows higher than δ, such that the utility function U(t)=e^(β - δ)t grows to infinity. The child watches marshmallows drop from above and accumulate on the table. On step 3, Step 3: any kid caught eating at any time is shamed for being irrational. A scientist pops into the frame, calling the child eating a marshmallow suboptimal. Prediction: most children will eat a marshmallow. Future theoretical economists now expunged from the population.

ALT Part 3/3 of an 8-panel comic. This group of panels starts with a caption reading "TEST 3: nash equilibrium marshmallow test." On step 1, two children sit at a table in front of a bowl. Either may claim the entire bowl’s contents at any time. Two children are seen staring each other down as marshmallows drop from above between them. On step 2, every 10 seconds a marshmallow drops from the ceiling into the bowl. The two children stare at each other with even more intensity. Prediction: if iterated, eventually all children will immediately grab the bowl, proving that marshmallow tests may be more about scarcity than willpower.

ALT Promotional image showing the over of the middle-grade graphic novel Bea Wolf, alongside the logo for the publisher First Second, and a label indicating the Ebook is available for $2.99 for a limited time.

ALT 1-panel SMBC comic update. A caption at the top of the panel reads "Discovery: any time the name of a city is used as short-hand for a festival, you can do this." The panel shows two women walking down a street. The first says "my ass made it's debut at Cannes." When the second woman says "what?," she adds "my ass. It debuted at Cannes. George Lucas was there."

ALT 4-panel SMBC comic update. A wizard dressed in a brown tunic with a ruby staff goes up to a young boy in a red t-shirt. He says to the boy "you are chosen to defeat the most evil person in history!" The boy shouts "woohoo!" and then says "oh man, I was so full of ambition, but now I know I'm destined for greatness no matter what I do! I'm gonna live a life of idleness and hedonism, making no effort whatsoever until somehow the villain is thwarted because that's what the prophecy said!" The final panel cuts to later, when the boy is an old man. A doctor tells him that he has maybe a week left to live. The old man is confused, saying "but I never defeated HEYYYYYYYY," realizing on his deathbed that he's been tricked.