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New Fossils, Old Drama: A First-Person Encounter with the Origins of Complexity

By Tony Hicks
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I wasn’t expecting to feel personally attacked by a pile of rocks. Yet here we are. Somewhere in a lab—probably lit like a crime scene but with fewer fingerprints and more grant anxiety—a group of scientists brushed away dust from newly discovered fossils and accidentally exposed not just the earliest hints of complex animal life, but also the uncomfortable reality that everything we call “advanced” is built on a foundation of squishy, experimental weirdness that barely knew what it was doing. And honestly? That tracks. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from both evolutionary biology and modern life, it’s this: complexity doesn’t emerge gracefully—it stumbles into existence like a drunk idea that refuses to die. The Moment Complexity Blinked Into Existence Let’s start with the headline: scientists have uncovered fossils that give us our first real look at how early complex animals evolved. Not imagined. Not inferred through wishful thinking and PowerPoint diagrams. Actu...
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Is It Wrong to Write a Book with A.I.? Let Me Confess Before You Cancel Me

By Tony Hicks
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I wrote a book with A.I. There, I said it. No PR team, no apology video filmed in front of a bookshelf I haven’t read, no carefully curated “journey” thread about how I found my voice after six months of journaling and herbal tea. I sat down, opened a machine that doesn’t sleep, and said, “Help me write something people might actually finish.” And it did. Now, apparently, this makes me either a visionary or a literary criminal. The internet—judge, jury, and permanently outraged neighbor—has decided that using A.I. to write a book is either the future of storytelling or the creative equivalent of showing up to a marathon on a Segway. And since I am now both the runner and the guy on wheels, I feel uniquely qualified to say something deeply inconvenient: Everyone arguing about this is missing the point. The Fantasy of the Sacred Author Let’s start with the mythology we’re all pretending is real. Writers, we’re told, are these fragile, tortured vessels of originality. They sit al...
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105 Facts So Weird They Upgraded My Brain From Pinto Bean to Slightly Alarmed Legume

By Tony Hicks
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I didn’t wake up today expecting intellectual growth. I woke up expecting coffee, mild disappointment, and maybe a slightly less chaotic version of yesterday. Instead, I accidentally wandered into a rabbit hole of weird, interesting, and downright unhinged facts—and now my brain feels like it went from pinto bean to…slightly larger pinto bean with ambition. So here we are. Me. You. And 105 facts that collectively forced me to reconsider everything from octopus etiquette to why time feels like a scam. I’ll walk you through them the only way I know how: with confusion, mild outrage, and the occasional existential crisis. 1–10: Nature Is Not Okay Octopuses have three hearts. I struggle managing one. Sloths can hold their breath longer than dolphins. Evolution said, “Let’s make the slowest thing weirdly elite at something random.” Wombat poop is cube-shaped. Geometry is everywhere, apparently. Some turtles can breathe through their butts. Nature, please explain yourself. Bana...
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Back to 16-Bit Madness: Why a Legendary Creator Is Dragging Gaming Into the Past With a Bizarre New Controlle

By Tony Hicks
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I swear, every few months the gaming industry coughs up something so weird, so beautifully unnecessary, that I can’t tell if it’s a bad idea, a genius move, or a midlife crisis wearing a cartridge slot like a badge of honor. This is one of those moments. So here we are: the creator of Alone in the Dark —yes, that Alone in the Dark , the grandfather of survival horror before we were all emotionally traumatized by limited ammo and door-opening animations—is back. Not with a gritty reboot. Not with a cinematic universe. Not with a battle pass or a live-service roadmap. No. He’s crowdfunding a brand-new game… for the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis. And just when you think that sentence has reached peak absurdity, he adds a unique controller into the mix. Because apparently, simply reviving a 16-bit console era wasn’t strange enough—you also need to reinvent how thumbs suffer. I love this. I hate this. I cannot look away. The Moment I Realized We’ve Time-Traveled (But Sideways) The first ...
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35 Years, 15 Books, and Zero Excuses: The Inconvenient Discipline of Kim Heacox

By Tony Hicks
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There’s something deeply inconvenient about people like Kim Heacox . Not inconvenient for them, obviously—they’re out there living full, purpose-driven lives, stacking decades of meaningful work like cordwood. No, the inconvenience is for the rest of us. Because every time someone like Heacox quietly marks another milestone—35 years writing, 15 books deep—it raises a question we’d all rather not answer: What exactly have you been doing? I don’t mean that in the motivational poster sense, with a sunrise and a quote about chasing dreams. I mean it in the uncomfortable, stare-at-your-own-browser-history sense. Because while most of us have spent the past three decades toggling between distraction and mild existential dread, Heacox has been out here building a body of work that actually holds together. And the worst part? He’s not loud about it. No viral gimmicks. No personal brand engineered for algorithmic affection. No desperate pivots into whatever the internet is currently rewardi...
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My Brain Was a Pinto Bean—Then 105 Ridiculous Facts Ruined My Comfort Zone

By Tony Hicks
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I didn’t set out to grow as a person. I set out to procrastinate. There’s a difference. Growth implies intention. It suggests discipline, effort, maybe even a journal with soft lighting and a pen that costs more than your monthly streaming subscriptions combined. Procrastination, on the other hand, is what happens when you open your laptop to do something meaningful and instead fall into a wormhole titled something like “105 Weird, Interesting, Or Bizarre Facts.” Which is exactly how my brain—roughly the size and nutritional value of a single pinto bean—ended up expanding like it had just discovered compound interest. Now, I could sit here and pretend I retained all 105 facts in some organized, intellectual framework. I could say I categorized them, cross-referenced them, and reflected deeply on their implications for the human condition. But let’s be honest: I absorbed them the way a raccoon absorbs shiny objects—impulsively, without context, and with a suspicious level of emotio...
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