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Egypt Urnash
Personal blog · egypt.urnash.com/blog · on HN as egypturnashculturewriting
Egypt Urnash's personal blog at egypt.urnash.com covers culture and writing. Since 2011, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 90 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-01, and you can follow it by feed.
90mentions?
8HN people?
2011–2026first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link Egypt Urnash's cartoon and illustration work and the web serial Decrypting Rita. They praise the art style and say the story is captivating and innovatively told.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /rita/chapter/01/4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2014-08-08
- /2 people · 22 mentions · first linked 2013-12-29
What Hacker News says?
I've got all his books and he's even linked to one of my comics in the past. http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/ if you're curious. It's pretty cool on a decent-sized screen, it was designed around the size of the iPad I'd just gotten when I started it. Not so cool on a phone. Try it on both and you'll see what I mean.
Comment linking /rita/
on “Cramming 'Papers, Please' onto Phones”Submitted Show HN: The Tarot of the Silicon Dawn. as a story · 2 points
HN discussionMostly working on the same thing I’ve been working on: a YA SF comic. “Parallax” is about culture clash, adults acting in the cold interests of what they think is the greater good, growing into adults facing those same kinds of hard decisions, and lots of cute cartoon animals. I draw it, my SO writes it. It’s free online at http://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/ , if you have piles of money from your software job and you…
Comment linking /parallax/
on “Ask HN: What projects are you working on now?”...if you would like a bespoke adorable mascot for this project, I do a lot of smutty art in Illustrator and would be interested. http://egypt.urnash.com has art and contact info. I would gladly take money but this might be a thing I'd think of doing pro bon(er|o) as well.
Comment linking /
on “Buttplug: An open-source software suite for teledildonics”> A couple decades ago I made a Tarot deck. https://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/ Sadly you can’t get a copy right now, I really need to get a reprint happening. It’s got spot gloss on the cards so that’s kind of complicated to do. I don't know if it is the blocker but makeplayingcards.com has a `high gloss` finish and does print on demand.
Comment linking /tarot/
on “Do things, tell people (2012)”Okay. Here’s some things that I’ve done. A couple decades ago I made a Tarot deck. https://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/ Sadly you can’t get a copy right now, I really need to get a reprint happening. It’s got spot gloss on the cards so that’s kind of complicated to do. Then I went on to draw a comic book about a robot lady dragged out of reality by her ex-boyfriend. https://egypt.urnash.com/rita/ It managed to get cover…
Comment linking /parallax/
on “Do things, tell people (2012)”http://egypt.urnash.com I draw stuff. (Perhaps someday I will feel like making my site work better with phones. I last did major work on it before that was a concern. If there is something you would like to see me draw then perhaps we can make a deal that fixes this, whether by you getting hip-deep in Wordpress, or by paying me a couple thousand bucks for something I can knock out in a week so I can finally bother g…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Share your personal site”http://egypt.urnash.com I'm mostly an artist, and I take delight in the aggressive unhipness of my site running on top of Wordpress. It's had the same front page since 2011. Someday I should really change the menus in the blog/portfolio sections to work with touch browsers. I got comics to draw, though.
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on “Building a Kickass Portfolio”A graphic novel about a future world run by benevolent AIs who have found that the best way to get humans to behave in easily-predictable ways is to manifest as extremely unctuous clowns. http://egypt.urnash.com/npol/
Comment linking /npol/
on “Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?”Egypt Urnash is the pen name of a cartoonist and illustrator. Her art style is quite impressive, and I've admired it for years. Enjoy: https://egypt.urnash.com/
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on “It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs”Even better: skins that let you relocate everything. It was super-awesome to have a little cartoon cat sitting on a spaceship on my desktop, and poke at various parts of it to control Audion. ( http://egypt.urnash.com/portfolio/contragravity/ )
Comment linking /portfolio/contragravity/
on “A Reimplementation of Winamp 2.9 in HTML5 and JavaScript”I’m taking a break from drawing a comic book about a jackal lady teaching some basic magic techniques ( http://egypt.urnash.com/Stella ) to do some commissions and some standalone art. This comic is in itself a project designed to do as a break from a massive graphic novel about two sides of a YA space opera. http://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/ If you enjoy any of this stuff and have a big pile of money from your FAAN…
Comment linking /parallax/
on “Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)”Yes, there is. I draw comics in Illustrator, and I have created files that are larger than the corresponding 300dpi TIFF. I think the first page in http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/chapter/viii/ is one of them, that dense setting at the bottom is super complicated. (And it's a TON larger if I save the file as a pdf, Illustrator is doing a lot of high level abstraction to make this file smaller, that I’m not sure if SVG…
Comment linking /rita/chapter/viii/
on “Super Tiny Website Logos in SVG”I'm still drawing my comic about a post-scarity dystopia ruled by AIs who present as horrible, unctuous clowns: http://egypt.urnash.com/npol/
Comment linking /npol/
on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)”Figuring out the plot and character designs for the next chapter of my graphic novel about a utopia run by AIs who have found that taking the form of unctuous, glazing clowns is the best way to get humans to behave in ways that fulfil the AI's reward functions. http://egypt.urnash.com/npol/ And moving my financial support for this graphic novel over to a new crowdfunding platform that's run as an employee-owned co-o…
Comment linking /npol/
on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)”Decrypting Rita: http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/ It's a graphic novel about a robot lady who's dragged outside of reality by her ex-boyfriend. She's got to pull herself together across four parallel worlds before a hive mind can take over the planet.
Comment linking /rita/
on “Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?”Yep! Glad you like it, thanks! These days I'm mostly busy with a graphic novel: http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/
Comment linking /rita/
on “Placebo Button”my current graphic novel http://egypt.urnash.com/npol/ and apparently I am doing a set of fan covers for Roger Zelazny's Amber books? https://egypt.urnash.com/blog/2024/10/24/nine-princes-in-amb...
Comment linking /blog/2024/10/24/nine-princes-in-amber/
on “Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024)”I'm just drawing stuff, including a comic book about a future run by horrible AIs that find they get the best response from humans when they present as horrible, unctuous clowns. http://egypt.urnash.com If you have lots of money to burn and want to support a queer artist in the Gulf South, I have a Patreon.
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on “Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)”Well mostly I draw comics. In Adobe Illustrator. I spent four and a half years drawing a story about a robot lady dragged outside of reality by her ex-boyfriend: http://egypt.urnash.com/rita There's other art stuff lurking around my site, too: http://egypt.urnash.com
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on “Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?”I'm afraid I'm too busy making the comic books I want to see in the world. ( http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/ )
Comment linking /rita/
on “Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario”Thanks! I'm not sure urgency is always what you need for a personal project. I've been working on a graphic novel[1] for four years; there are some days where I get several hours in, there are other days where I only manage a half hour. Even if I only get a half hour's work in, at least it's a half hour closer to the end than it was when I got up that morning. Past a certain point, what matters is not that you burnt…
Comment linking /rita/
on “There are too many shiny objects and it is killing me”I've been using Illustrator as my main medium[1] since 2000. Mostly I bitch about it doing terrible things when I open up older files, and the occasional update that's a crashfest for me even after I remove all plugins. (I'm currently running the last release because CC 2015.3 is one of those.) I don't think anything is going to take the place of vector tools, especially as screen DPI continues to increase. I keep f…
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on “A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art (2015)”It's pretty much all available free here: http://egypt.urnash.com And yeah, it's a pretty good life if you can get lucky enough to have the money to do it.
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on “The real use of money is to buy freedom”Dealt with fulfilling my last Kickstarter. Which was initially going to be "ship books to Amazon, have them send them out, and then leave them on Amazon's store" until it turned out that Amazon is bureaucratically incapable of doing anything to an oversized paperback book than slipping it into a bubble envelope. I finally got the high-tier books drawn in and shipped out this month. https://www.kickstarter.com/projec…
Comment linking /parallax/
on “Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?”Frank Herbert was born in 1920. It took him five years to research and write his second published novel; it was first published as a serial in 1963. That book was called "Dune". You do the math. ---- When I was 25 I moved out to California to attend animation school. When I was 30 I'd been a part of the first wave of dotcom boom funded Internet cartoons, watched some of my colleagues go in to TV work, and burnt out.…
Comment linking /tarot/
on “I'm turning 30 and I've produced no amazing art.”“I wonder if I made this cut”, I asked myself. Karma > 10k, check. Then I scroll down and my sci-fi graphic novel (1) is #3 on the hand-curated list. Thanks! I just finished a short comic for a Webtoons contest; engagement is a significant part of how they’re gonna judge it, so if you like my stuff then check it out (2) and leave a nice comment to increase my chances of getting a $5-50k prize. I don’t make anything…
Comment linking /rita/
on “Famous HNers and their sites”10y of http://egypt.urnash.com running on Wordpress with a small set of plugins, including one for security, says otherwise.
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on “Shirky.com is gone”Decrypting Rita , the graphic novel I've been working on since April 2011. http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/ I made a major mistake in the prepress process and had to eat it, losing all profits from the Kickstarter from the second volume. It has also gotten kind words from more than one Hugo winner. On a productive month, its Patreon is starting to pay about half of my rent; I feel like the push of publicity for the fin…
Comment linking /rita/
on “Ask HN: What book changed your life in 2014?”I recently finished a graphic novel about a robot lady dragged out of reality by her ex-boyfriend and am procrastinating on the Kickstarter for the printed version. http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/ "Seriously folks, if you haven't looked at "Decrypting Rita" yet you really ought to. Innovative, fresh, interesting, and it does my head in." - Charlie Stross (Accelerando) "Deliriously confusing and addictive... It’s kind…
Comment linking /rita/
on “Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Please include URL”
