19th October, 2026

What am I working on?

Trying out new Yudu pencil colours (perks of having a friend who manages the Fevicryl brand portfolio) and working on the commission designs from last week.

I should not have done the black border on the chopsticks. Sigh, cannot be undone.

What am I reading?

Last week, I read The Waiting by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim. It is a heartbreaking story about the separation of families during the Korean war. It is rooted in the author's family history (her mother's separation from her sister during the war) combined with interviews of South Koreans who applied for the official Red Cross family reunions with family members who are now in North Korea, but the story is fictional. It takes us through the harships faced by the people during that time through the story of Gwija -  an aging refugee living in Seoul who was separated from her first husband and young son during a chaotic escape while carrying an infant daughter. Decades later, her middle aged daughter Jina (from the second transactional marriage) carries a promise to make her mother meet her long lost family. The inky illustrations are rendered in black and white. Through the panels, we see families torn apart in the panic of escape, people forced into impossible acts of self-preservation, the dead left behind, children crying beside dead parents and survivors carrying the guilt of having made it through.

For people like us, the Korean war is a thing of the past. But when you read these stories, you realise that wars do not end when the fighting stops. The pain is carried through generations - it is immense for those you faced it but there is also an emotional weight for the children trying to honor their parents' lingering pain. It shows in subtle ways like when Jina avoids topic of her marriage. Maybe it is because of the generational trauma that has coloured her worldview.

I feel grateful that I have my family happy and healthy. At the same time, my heart broke knowing that across the world, even today, there are people enduring similar separations, living with uncertainty and maybe stuck in the state of 'Waiting'.

What am I watching/watched recently?

I watched Son of the White Mare last week. This morphing psychedelic animation is unlike anything I have ever seen before. Its a Hungarian mythical story of human son of a divine white mare. He reunites with his two super strong brothers to battle three multi-headed dragons and rescue three captive princesses from the underworld. Yes, everything in this story follow the rule of three. It is a hero's journey - a fallen king, a noble son rising from the ashes, a journey into the underworld and the final triumph that ends in happily every after. The movie has a very unique visual language - raw dream like visuals, fluid animation with stunning transitions that dissolves and assembles with every movement in the scenes and an eerie electronic music. The character design is also very unique, especially the dragons are not your usual fire spitting demonic creatures, but they are embodiments of human greed, war, and capitalistic growth. This is a very very unique movie in the way it is designed and a must watch for animation enthusiasts.

It is said that Jankovics used symbols and patterns in this film that he had found while studying folklore. The film’s intense color scheme came from Goethe’s Theory of Colors: “morning is green, yellow is noon, twilight is red, night is blue” he said.

New thing I learnt lately?

I came across an interesting Substack article: I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me. The author mentions that many 'tells' that an article is written by AI like semicolons and dashes, structured arguments with 3 points, not only X but also Y, words like 'tapestery, furthermore' etc are not really tells at all. They are the result of how many Kenyans (and people from other former British colonies) were taught to write in school. He mentions how he was taught to write well graded essay in school - start with an idiom or a proverb, use ornamental language and describe with great depth (not just 'see', but 'behold a magnificent spectacle') and maintain structure across the prose. That is what my English teacher also taught me in school.

The irony is that AI models were trained on millions of human written texts which came from the same tradition of structured, formal English. I think the danger is not that AI will write like humans. The danger is that humans whose voices resemble AI may have to constantly prove they are human.

"The dumbest person you know is currently being told ‘You’re absolutely right!’ by ChatGPT.” A recent study from Stanford computer scientists found LLM “sycophancy can undermine users’ capacity for self-correction and responsible decision-making”. Researchers found that LLMs mostly prioritizes agreeableness when responding to users, especially in interpersonal conversations or emotionally charged situations. In fact, across multiple datasets of interpersonal dilemmas, AI models endorsed the user's take 49% more often than human respondents.

The concern is that AI is frequently optimized for user satisfaction and engagement, not necessarily for truth or rational decision-making. Rather than challenging users, many models tend to validate their views making it easier to avoid any new perspective. This is something that me and my friends discuss often and there have been cases where AI sycophancy has been linked to psychological harms such as delusions, self-harm and suicide. At this state, I believe it is a societal risk and the makers should really look into ways to address this.

It is also so subtle and almost academic in its response that users could not distinguish when an AI was acting overly agreeable. The researchers argue that AI can make it easy to avoid uncomfortable conversations and while that feels good in the short term, those difficult conversations are important for healthy relationships and personal growth.