The Next Stop is Lewknor Turn

Just what is the mystery of Lewknor Turn? Find out in this collection of four unsettling stories, brought to life in script, art, and letters by Ian Pointer, Nicolás Nieto, and Marin.

The Next Stop is Lewknor Turn is now available to one and all for free!

Next week, I’ll add some notes here on how the comic came together, the bits that got cut out, and the darlings killed. But for now, free comic!

Living In The Future

I won’t lie; having spent a large chunk of the weekend reimplementing parts of the ReAct and Toolformers papers on an 11bn parameter large language model, I get where people are coming from. I’m well aware of what happened with ELIZA, and I know enough about how Transformers work1 to know that ‘spicy autocomplete’ is not exactly wrong. And yet, after spending an afternoon wiring up prompts, helper functions and scaffolding code, to see the LLM reach out to the internet, get information, and summarize/report it in service to answering the question asked of it, well, it feels like witchcraft. Over 30 years of programming experience and you basically give a fancy graphics card a few examples and let the matrix calculations do the rest2.


  1. I know how the toys work too! ↩︎

  2. Well, not quite; it still hallucinates a lot of nonsense, so I guess there’s still a few years left of “please write code that actually makes sense” in my career. At least until GPT-4 anyhow… ↩︎

Prius Priors

Reader, I bought a Prius. Which, if I remember correctly, marks me out as a terrible person somehow, but my previous car was a hybrid as well, so I don’t think things have changed all that much. Except for all the new gadgets! My Insight was a 2010 model, so I have spent a lot of this week like somebody in Doctor Who taken to the far future. A camera for reversing! A Bluetooth pairing system! Apple Carplay! Little lights in the wing mirrors to point out a car is in your blind spot! It beeps when it thinks you’re going out of a line! Some radar and camera magic that even takes corners for you! (somewhat disconcerting for the car to suddenly pretend it’s KITT and start moving the wheel)

Anyway, I have been living in the future. Not quite the far future — the Kia EVs that I was looking at last year seem very expensive here in the US at the moment, and I really just needed a car that was a hybrid, wasn’t too old, and had all the safety features we need for the baby. So we went to Carmax and basically picked out a car that I didn’t hate. And one that hopefully doesn’t get caught in a massive hailstorm in its first long trip.

The comic is done. Lettered art, front and back covers, contents page, all of it. Assembled into CBZ and PDF files. The rudimentary website is ready too…all that needs to happen is to flip a few DNS entries and it’s out there. Expect to see it on 1st March. Well, it has to come out on a Wednesday as a New Comic, right?

Our visitors have left after spending a weekend with us. Christie and Evan brought what feels like half a ton of baby clothes and saw the giant teeth at the Cincinnati Museum Centre. There was even magic, courtesy of me remembering I have a WiFi-enabled plug. And Helvetica is now in a sunbeam enjoying her peace and quiet…for now at least!

Jumble of Things

I have finally joined the ranks of terrible people with wireless headphones (something of a gift to myself for surviving the week). I was getting tired of having to deal with carrying both Lightning and USB-C headphones whenever I went anywhere with the iPad and the iPhone. But! Just because I wanted to retain some sense of dignity, I got a set from Anker rather than Apple. They were even on sale! I’m too self-conscious to actually go outside with them, mind you…

Anyway, what else for the week? Baking, looking at a possible replacement for my car, getting the final lettering proofs for the comic, bashing a LLM into submission, and being a helpful villager in Blood On The Clocktower. Oh, and eating what seemed like five pounds of food from what is reportedly the best place to get pupusas in the city (and is literally just across the road!). Which makes it all sound like a very busy week!

Next week: guests!

Nolly And Letters

No, I didn’t really expect to spend two hours and a half hours on Friday night watching a drama mini-series about Crossroads of all things,https://www.itv.com/watch/nolly/10a1369/10a1369a0001 but that’s what Russell Davies does to you. And I will admit, briefly, briefly afterwards, I thought about buying Network’s frankly insane 97-disc DVD boxset. Don’t worry, I didn’t, but I came close…

How did it get to be February?

Lettering on the comic proceeds at a quick pace, which means I probably need to start on the teeny-tiny website as well as sorting out the cover, plus the pesky question of how to fill two blank pages in order to make sure the ‘two-page’ digital comic layout doesn’t break the flow of at least one of the stories. There is something quite transformative when you see professionally-lettered captions and word balloons on comic art — for the first time, the stories all felt like proper comics and not just some odd fancy in my head. Aiming for a March 1st release — after all, it is new comics day on a Wednesday.

Flash Frame of Vic & Bob

One of the surprising events of the week: going to Kenwood Mall on a whim early Friday evening to find it absolutely packed. If you’ve been wondering just who has been going to see Avatar 2, I’m placing bets on these people. Odd scenes of nostalgia and confusion: a packed shopping mall. In 2023.

I haven’t been feeling all that well this weekend, so pretty much all I have been able to do is watch old Top Of The Pops videos like this and this and get lost in the hauntology of a time that never quite existed (but how can you not love a performance where the front row have all made their own Noddy hats?). Oh, and Lovejoy. Because you have to, don’t you?1

Also, I realized on Friday that I haven’t crossed the border back into Kentucky since I got home the airport in December. Which is really quite odd. Normally, I’ll go to the big Kroger in Newport at least once a fortnight, but all of this month, I have had plans to, only to get up in the morning and think “but what if you just go to the little Kroger just around the corner, eh?” I don’t think I have actually left Colerain in my own car this month at all. Which…might not be great.

Next week: hopefully something a little more interesting instead…


  1. I realize this is mainly just me… ↩︎

Putting The Letters In

Definitely a quiet month so far. But, the lettering work for The Next Stop is Lewknor Turn has begun, so if all goes well it should be out towards the end of February. I finally worked out the idea for the cover, which will of course involve a couple of new fonts. I’m also toying with the idea of making a variant cover with Stable Diffusion and some photos I took in December. The idea would be that when you click on the download link, there’ll be a chance you’ll get a CBZ with the variant instead of the normal cover. That essential 90s comics experience!

(trying to work out the actual page flow when you’re actually only producing a digital copy, but you still have to make it work as if it was printed due to how digital comics readers work is also proving to be a fun exercise!)

I guess the other big thing of the week was my last third-party Twitter client, Twitterrific (macOS) having its API key revoked by Space Karen. After almost a decade and a half of using non-Twitter clients to access the service…wow, it’s pretty user-hostile over on the actual website, isn’t it? I’ve gone from reading 1000s of tweets in a day to perhaps a hundred or so. Which is likely better for me. I just wish a few more groups would migrate over to Mastodon; it would be funny if what Musk ends up doing is bringing his mooted ‘open, accessible timeline’…but by other people who leave him to all those big debt repayments…

Quiet. Too Quiet?

A long weekend, but without much to say. Except, maybe, that The Guardians (1971) seems to have aged better than Wild Palms (1993)?

A Pacojet By Any Other Name

As many of you know, I have a considerable amount of pastry-related equipment in this house. Some might say more than you’d find in many a high-end restaurant, but I couldn’t possibly comment. But, despite things like the tempered, the melangeur, and enough molds to start a chocolate factory, there has always been a white whale that I could never justify: the Pacojet.

Now, the Pacojet (which I believe makes a starring appearance in The Menu) is a fancy, fancy way of making ice cream. You basically freeze an ice cream base to -20°C and the Pacojet spins a blade at around 2,000 RPM inside the base, making a creamy, silky ice cream in seconds. You’ll find it as a mainstay in most three star Michelin restaurants. The only slight catch is that it costs around $5,000. So, more than just a little pricey. You can’t really justify paying the cost of two fridges just for making ice cream.

But then, just before Christmas, I learnt two things that I hadn’t been expecting: the original Pacojet patents expired a couple of years ago, and over a year previously, Ninja released something called the Creami1. This is essentially a Pacojet. That costs under $2002. Needless to say, I had one ordered even as I was on my way to the airport.

Now, given that it’s about 25 times cheaper than a Pacojet, there are some economies; mainly that instead of the almost indestructible metal canisters, the Creami uses plastic, and it doesn’t quite have the same oomph as today’s Pacojet models. But all that really means is that you may have to spin the base twice instead of once…and you know, I think I can live with that.

And this weekend, I finally tried it out! I made an ice-cream base using Eddie Shepherd’s caramelized white chocolate recipe (I had a bunch of chocolate left over from Thanksgiving that I needed to use anyhow!), stuck the mixture in the freezer for 24 hours and then…made ice-cream in three minutes flat.

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A post shared by Ian Pointer (@carsondial)

All hail our new knock-off Pacojet gods!


  1. Yes, I know, it’s an absolutely terrible name, but I am willing to forgive them just this once. ↩︎

  2. You can often find it at Costco or Sam’s Club for $130, which is quite amazing. ↩︎

2023 And All That

Well hello there, 2023. Wait, you mean I have to go to work again next week? Starting as we mean to go on, I guess…

Anyway, you can expect more of the usual in 2023; short entries most of the time and then suddenly a long rant about architectural trends in London. I know that’s the content you all crave.

I didn’t quite get into Stable Diffusion as much as I wanted to over the holidays, but I did create a few different Dreambooth fine-tuned models on everything from Christmas toys in our house to a combination of Bagpuss/The Clangers, creating a model with a lovely Postgate feel:

Stable Diffusion

Stable Diffusion

Definitely more to come in 2023 as I play around with coherency and a few other things…I’d really like to be able to move around in a scene, which is somewhat hard to do right now.

Oh, if you want, you can go off and see all the books I read in 2022. I am going to try and keep a 2023 page continuously updated this year rather than scramble for ISBNs at the end of December. But maybe I won’t read that many books to make it worthwhile…