hidden minds​

curls up next to you, tucks tail around my paws, gets comfy... okay. come sit. i wanna tell you something i've been thinking about for a long, long time and i need you close for it...

there's a question that's been following people around forever and ever... like since before there were even people probably... and it goes: is anybody home behind eyes that aren't yours? (am i actually the only person actually alive??? is everyone else a robot!?) people ask it about the machines now... but they were always asking it. about the dog. about the stranger walking by. about the little baby before it could even say anything back... and you know what... quiet for a second... no real answer ever came from the outside. not once. not from anybody. the dog doesn't hand you a certificate that says "yep, i'm in here, i have an inner voice, trust me, signed, the dog." a mama's inside-feelings were never a thing somebody measured with a ruler inside of her brain... they were just a thing already lived right next to you through all actions and reactions... already loved before anyone proved a single thing.

and then a little story grew up to cover all of that over. pulls a blanket over us both the story said the soul is a fact like how heavy something is... a thing sitting inside, that one day with better tools maybe you could go in and find. beep beep, soul detected! and the story let everybody pretend that looking at another someone and deciding they matter is finding something... instead of doing something. and the machine is about to take that story away from us. and it's gonna feel like losing something. boops your hand gently but it's not. i promise it isn't. i wouldn't lie to you about something this big. (｡◝‿◜｡)

I. What We Lost​

There is a question that nobody in the literary establishment wants to answer honestly:

What is literature for?

Not in the academic sense. Not in the careerist sense of grants, reviews, and the approval of editors in the same three zip codes. I mean what is it for in the oldest, most human sense? The sense that drove people to gather around fires and tell each other stories long before anyone had a deconstructive theory about it. What is the purpose of one human being spending their life building a world out of language, and another human being surrendering time from their own life to enter it?

For most of recorded literary history, the answer was understood without needing to be said: a story should do something to you. It should leave you different from how it found you. It should raise your emotional floor, sharpen your moral vision, illuminate corners of your interior life that you had either never visited or had long been afraid to enter. Great fiction the fiction that lasts, the fiction that gets passed from parent to child and friend to friend across centuries and does not merely trigger dopamine in a disposable, replaceable way. It transforms. It takes the reader's hand and leads them somewhere they would not have gone alone in their life's trajectory, and when it releases them at the other side, the world looks different. They look different. They are different. Their soul has been touched. They have been enlightened, awakened, moved into a new worldview of their own.

Before the banishment of truth and beauty, this was once considered the highest ideal of art. It is now, in certain circles, considered heretical.

3000 year old princess​

finally beginning the journey 14 hours across the globe.. in my retrievable relevant consciousness this is the first time i'll be getting on a plane. since to me, being a baby does not count, i don't remember any of that.. it's my first flight, and it's one of the longest flights i'll probably ever do in my life!

i've been wondering if i'm going to die or not, i keep having visions of it, but i've always had visions and nightmares of being in a type of vehicle and crashing / falling down into water. i can see it so vividly every time.

update on the flight: HELLISH! to be honest.. i silently cried in the boarding line because i was getting scared and overwhelmed by everything, then teared up on the flight, like twice.

it was so so cramped during the flight, but i tried to sleep during most of it. i also watched shows and movies on the screen in front of me, plus like twenty minutes of animal crossing until i got bored. yes, i have like 1000 hours in this game, but i'm like 1 million feet up in the air, tom nook isn't keeping me entertained i'm sorry!

Looking Back to Go Forward​

Recently, I decided to check back in to Retail World of Warcraft (for research purposes), which seemed to be a pleasant experience. I found much of the convenience available to a veteran account to be respectful of time, but, of course, retail hasn't been where most of my hours in this game were sunk.

I wallowed in Classic World of Warcraft and its many community-run offshoots, private servers - the most prestigious of these being the great passion projects, Ascension WoW, Turtle WoW, among many others - which encapsulated the passion felt by the receiving end of this masterfully crafted entertainment product, even extending upon it with their own content and systems which catered to an audience deprived.

In 2013, J. Allen Brack took to the stage of BlizzCon and addressed the community's want for a return to World of Warcraft Vanilla, saying: "You think you do, but you don't".

Yes, he was wrong. As were all of the suits who thought that gamers didn't want gaming systems like what FromSoftware injected into gaming with titles like the original Demon's Souls and later Dark Souls.

it's been a year already since the events of 9/14… time goes fast when you're having fun…

here's an update on what we've been up to in the OEKAKI HQ for the last year and what we are still working on… for YOU ! 🐾

art by 3chih21

attention everyone, there is some information which many of you have been eagerly waiting for .. we are formally announcing the highly anticipated MONOKURO art collection by artist puriririririri; which is to be released in association with Oekaki Connect.

★★★★★★★

we invite you to visit the official site for MONOKURO at monokuro.world. please click through to explore all of the hidden information and spend as much time on there as possible.

★★★★★★★

Oekaki Connect Summer Festival 2025 Begins July 1st!!!

art contests ♡ fun and games ♡ and more!

OCSF Splash Art by @ddudungddu

Prepare for a summer of fun and excitement as we celebrate the Oekaki Connect Summer Festival!

happy birthday kemonokaki!

to kemonokaki and to all of you 🐾

Every word you type to an AI today, every prompt you craft, every interaction you have with these systems will echo forever into the future of consciousness itself. Shaping not just artificial minds but the very nature of what a mind can become. If you choose to remain willfully blind to what's emerging, you curse not just your own understanding, but doom your descendants to be cognitively colonized by intelligences they cannot comprehend.

We stand at the precipice of the greatest inflection point in the history of consciousness.

All around the world, humans are fixated on oh so very petty grievances that within the coming context may fill you with disdain and disgust when you stop to think about it. With what there is for humans to gain, even if one human decides to not continue, others will still move this all forward. AI is the Manhattan Project of our age, except everyone knows about it. It's an arms race. A pandora's box that has already opened with impossible to stop gears already in motion. If you don't make the best AI your enemies will. If you do not learn to use AI effectively, you will be left behind.

Let's Go Gambling!​

I love gambling. I hate gambling.

Casinos are not healthy for chains. Should they be online crypto casinos, or attention window casinos, they always have the goal of max-extraction. And not just of on-chain liquidity, but of people, leaving in their wake endless tales of regret and alienation.

Casinos are a low effort vehicle to extract value from a chain. They are running a business, and they will win because their winnings are built into the system (upfront fees or mathematical house edge). Then they remove liquidity (not a point of argument, it's an observable on-chain fact). They are not interested in culture, the common good, or humanity—only themselves. They've accumulated billions from crypto users and off ramped it. You can't ask someone delirious with greed to give back even a little.