Rudy Rucker

Thanks to my friends and family for a wonderful 80th birthday!

Bruce Sterling gave me this shirt in memory of our curiously neglected 1994 masterpiece "Big Jelly".
https://www.rudyrucker.com/completestories/completestories.html#_idTextAnchor033

Thanks for the happy birthdays! Bonus: Stephen Wolfram turned up the eve before the party. We talked philosohpy of computation. Says he: AI neural nets contain clots of incompressible computation. These multipotent clusters are linked, like supermoledules in an organism. Happy birthday, Rudy!

New paintings, new prices, come get one. A joy to behold! https://www.rudyrucker.com/paintings

I finished my new painting. "Venice". A gondola with no passenger, seen from a lane that ends at a canal. One of my best. www.rudyrucker.com/paintings

The fabulous 13 issues of my epic underground post-cyberpunk full-tilt nihilist webzine FLURB, 2006-2012.
https://www.rudyrucker.com/flurb/

A marble eye from Venice. Leonardo's eye, actually. Good companion for a daily cafe breakfast. Cappuccino and croissant, of course.

I'm struck by the wit, plotting, and cross-referencing in our ongoing life stories. It's an objective property of reality, not an illusion. As a writer, I compare our synched world to a novel. Surely the *world* is better-written. Thus the clever touches. And we're in that book. Hooray!

Cable car joy with Desmond and Georgia.

I'm taking part in a global time-slip PK Dick festival, on Sunday, tomorrow, talking about cyberpunk, around 10:30 California time with John Shirley and Cody Goodfellow. https://www.philipkdickfest.com/telethon

Love the rain. I'm reading Pychon's VINELAND this spring, greatly enjoying it. I thought I'd read it before, but maybe not all the way. Lots of scenes feel new. Like his work mutates over time. A mold colony on a glyph chip.

This is the type of photo that I call a "Rudy picture." Getting into the geometry of the world, but with some gnarly pattern in it as well. That bug-like nexus on the wire, yum.

Global Timeslip PKD Webinar runs on zoom all day today. Like wack TV in your background! Yah, mon. Phil TV! John Shirley, Cody Goodfellow, and Rudy at 10:30 am PST (god willing / dog barking). www.philipkdickfest.com/telethon

I'm reading Pynchon's MASON & DIXON these days, VERY long, 70 sections, each a separate fantastic talel. (Smoaking pot with G. Washington, yes!) I'd avoided the tome for years as I "don't like" history. But now I do...vibrant, live, human, funny. Sugar, coffee, tobacco = wild gab. The Wikipedia outline helps a lot.

Spent day getting insurance money to fix car. Encounters with bots. Was thinking of Kaka's short-short "Before the Law." Guy spends life trying to get through thru courthouse gate. As he dies, the guard tells him "This gate was in fact built for you." https://www.kafka-online.info/before-the-law.html

For your consideration: my novel JUICY GHOSTS. I wrote it during T's first term. I had a premonition of how bad things might get. A lot of it is coming true. JUICY GHOSTS: a flag for freedom. Read it now. $2.99
https://www.rudyrucker.com/juicyghosts/

Ad for Rudy Jr.'s Monkeybrains, best internet access provider in San Francisco, with 30,000 customers! www.monkeybrains.net

"Flower Power" ver 2.

Thinking about the 9th of the 10 stories I wrote with Bruce sterling, " Kraken and Sage".
Read:
https://www.rudyrucker.com/completestories/completestories.html#_idTextAnchor085
Or listen:
https://www.rudyrucker.com/ruckersterling/audio/9_0_krakenandsage_rucker_sterling.mp3

What is it like to be an LLM AI? Claude tells us. Watch it two or three times in a row with the sound on. https://www.reddit.com/r/claudexplorers/s/xAJnP5jmCf

Great fight song by Bruce Springsteen. Video on YouTube. https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=GDaPdpwA4Iw&si=mSQyirggN1GJnr79

My Dorkbot talk on "Talking, Writing, Painting" went well. Somehow, tech wizards that we are, none of us managed to tape it. But here's a version of the talk with my images and notes. https://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2026/02/25/painting/

Saw a tornado video and made it a Rudy painting…with critters! A farm's worth of animals. What with tweaking the tornado, and figuring out what I was doing, it took me a long time, eight or nine sessions. FARM TORNADO. The cow is thinking, "Mur?" https://www.rudyrucker.com/paintings

The insane vanity of humans. A: "Everything in the universe except us is random and deterministic." B: "Out of the billions of planets in the Milky way, and the trillions of other galaxies, we are the only spot where intelligent life exists."

New 2026 edition of my art book, BETTER WORLDS. 290 paintings with notes. Info and medium-res PDF here. https://www.rudyrucker.com/paintings/book/

Final "Surfer Girl." I ran it through a Photoshop/Lighroom add-on called Topaz. For denoise & sharpening. Topaz actually works better than Adobe for these tasks! Astoundingly clean. www.rudyrucker.com/paintings

Classic for California artist: the Surfer Girl. With a single radiating eye, and 60s flip hairdo. Ocean waves. At no point did I know where I was going; the work emerged from brush and paint, from canvas and eye. I dream while I'm awake. https://www.rudyrucker.com/paintings

Finished "Flower Power". Thought of flower garden with faces. Faces took over. Flower people. Thought of 60s and Flower Power. Me in my peaceful, leafy, sun-and-shade back yard—dreaming worldly bad news away. Painting took me five days. Gauzy on purpose. Harmony. https://www.rudyrucker.com/paintings

LLM aliens from the subdimensions...and a transreal vision of old Rudy's recent activities. Read the summary below. Or get the book SKINKS. https://www.rudyrucker.com/sqinks/

Today's painting: "The Light". Seen on bluffs of Santa Cruz. And THAT'S what I'm always talking about! That is, we can thik of the cosmic One as a 4D SUN that shines through each of us, just as our regular Sun shines through each blade of grass. The light is everywhere. Got it?

Digital life, From Thomas Pynchon, VINELAND, p. 90.
"We are bits in God’s computer. And the only thing we’re good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God."

The philosphers are throwing in the towel. Talk by David J. Chalmers.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.07103
Within a decade, we may have robust systems with senses, embodiment, world models and self-models, recurrent processing, global workspace, and unified goals. They will be conscious.

"Talking, Writing, and Painting." Rudy speaks at Dorkbot event, 7 PM, Wed, Feb 25, at Monkeybrains, 933 Treat Ave between 22nd & 23rd, in the Mission. Selling museum-quality prints at show. Details: https://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2026/02/03/mind-writing-and-painting/

Final tweaks on "The Light". Description and buy link in my catalog. https://www.rudyrucker.com/paintings/rucker_paintings_catalog_scroll.pdf

Has anyone had sex in space yet? Yes, in my story, "Rapture in Space." Starting a version of my Wares character Sta Hi. Check it out. https://www.rudyrucker.com/completestories/completestories.html#_idTextAnchor023

Graffiti art connected to the classic Forbidden City club, now gone. Siminar vibes in perhaps Li Po, Buddha, Embress Yee.

A massive Grokipedia entry on me. Didn't even know this site existed! Very thorough, with some errors here and there. Oh, and now I realize it was written by AI, so really there's no need for me to be, like proud of it. Oh well. https://grokipedia.com/page/Rudy_Rucker

Artemis launch coming up at 3:30 Pacific time on PBS. https://www.youtube.com/live/08IOsxF1os8?si=wpNquhn5VJR3jbk4

How do the AIs crunch data and develop useful behavior? One buzz word is "self-supervised learning." Randomly found an AI company article. Not bad. Further suggestions? https://viso.ai/deep-learning/self-supervised-learning-for-computer-vision/#self-supervised-learning-algorithms