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The Place That Taught Machines to Dream

Before Hollywood learned to animate pixels, Silicon Valley learned to animate light. The first dreamers weren’t directors — they were designers and engineers who turned math into motion, built the machines behind Jurassic Park and Toy Story, and taught computers to imagine. Now, those same roots are fueling a new frontier — AI video and generative storytelling.

By Skeeter Wesinger

October 8, 2025

Silicon Valley is best known for chips, code, and capital. Yet long before the first social network or smartphone, it was quietly building a very different kind of future: one made not of transistors and spreadsheets, but of light, motion, and dreams. Out of a few square miles of industrial parks and lab benches came the hardware and software that would transform Hollywood and the entire art of animation. What began as an engineering problem—how to make a computer draw—became one of the most profound creative revolutions of the modern age.

In the 1970s, the Valley was an ecosystem of chipmakers and electrical engineers. Intel and AMD were designing ever smaller, faster processors, competing to make silicon think. Fairchild, National Semiconductor, and Motorola advanced fabrication and logic design, while Stanford’s computer science labs experimented with computer graphics, attempting to render three-dimensional images on oscilloscopes and CRTs. There was no talk yet of Pixar or visual effects. The language was physics, not film. But the engineers were laying the groundwork for a world in which pictures could be computed rather than photographed.

The company that fused those worlds was Silicon Graphics Inc., founded in 1982 by Jim Clark in Mountain View. SGI built high-performance workstations optimized for three-dimensional graphics, using its own MIPS processors and hardware pipelines that could move millions of polygons per second—unheard of at the time. Its engineers created OpenGL, the standard that still underlies most 3D visualization and gaming. In a sense, SGI gave the world its first visual supercomputers. And almost overnight, filmmakers discovered that these machines could conjure scenes that could never be shot with a camera.

Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas’s special-effects division, was among the first. Using SGI systems, ILM rendered the shimmering pseudopod of The Abyss in 1989, the liquid-metal T-1000 in Terminator 2 two years later, and the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park in 1993. Each of those breakthroughs marked a moment when audiences realized that digital images could be not just convincing but alive. Down the road in Emeryville, the small research group that would become Pixar was using SGI machines to render Luxo Jr. and eventually Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated feature film. In Redwood City, Pacific Data Images created the iconic HBO “space logo,” a gleaming emblem that introduced millions of viewers to the look of digital cinema. All of it—the logos, the morphing faces, the prehistoric beasts—was running on SGI’s hardware.

The partnership between Silicon Valley and Hollywood wasn’t simply commercial; it was cultural. SGI engineers treated graphics as a scientific frontier, not a special effect. Artists, in turn, learned to think like programmers. Out of that hybrid came a new creative species: the technical director, equal parts physicist and painter, writing code to simulate smoke or hair or sunlight. The language of animation became mathematical, and mathematics became expressive. The Valley had turned rendering into an art form.

When SGI faltered in the late 1990s, its people carried that vision outward. Jensen Huang, Curtis Priem, and Chris Malachowsky—former SGI engineers—founded Nvidia in 1993 to shrink the power of those million-dollar workstations onto a single affordable board. Their invention of the graphics processing unit, or GPU, democratized what SGI had pioneered. Gary Tarolli left to co-found 3dfx, whose Voodoo chips brought 3D rendering to the mass market. Jim Clark, SGI’s founder, went on to co-create Netscape, igniting the web era. Others formed Keyhole, whose Earth-rendering engine became Google Earth. Alias | Wavefront, once owned by SGI, evolved into Autodesk Maya, still the industry standard for 3D animation. What began as a handful of graphics labs had by the millennium become a global ecosystem spanning entertainment, design, and data visualization.

Meanwhile, Nvidia’s GPUs kept growing more powerful, and something extraordinary happened: the math that drew polygons turned out to be the same math that drives artificial intelligence. The parallel architecture built for rendering light and shadow was ideally suited to training neural networks. What once simulated dinosaurs now trains large language models. The evolution from SGI’s Reality Engine to Nvidia’s Tensor Core is part of the same lineage—only the subject has shifted from geometry to cognition.

Adobe and Autodesk played parallel roles, transforming these once-elite tools into instruments for everyday creators. Photoshop and After Effects made compositing and motion graphics accessible to independent artists. Maya brought professional 3D modeling to personal computers. The revolution that began in a few Valley clean rooms became a global vocabulary. The look of modern media—from film and television to advertising and gaming—emerged from that convergence of software and silicon.

Today, the next revolution is already underway, and again it’s powered by Silicon Valley hardware. Platforms like Runway, Pika Labs, Luma AI, and Kaiber are building text-to-video systems that generate entire animated sequences from written prompts. Their models run on Nvidia GPUs, descendants of SGI’s original vision of parallel graphics computing. Diffusion networks and generative adversarial systems use statistical inference instead of keyframes, but conceptually they’re doing the same thing: constructing light and form from numbers. The pipeline that once connected a storyboard to a render farm now loops through a neural net.

This new era blurs the line between animator and algorithm. A single creator can describe a scene and watch it materialize in seconds. The tools that once required teams of engineers are being distilled into conversational interfaces. Just as the SGI workstation liberated filmmakers from physical sets, AI generation is liberating them from even the constraints of modeling and rigging. The medium of animation—once defined by patience and precision—is becoming instantaneous, fluid, and infinitely adaptive.

Silicon Valley didn’t just make Hollywood more efficient; it rewrote its language. It taught cinema to think computationally, to treat imagery as data. From the first frame buffers to today’s diffusion models, the through-line is clear: each leap in hardware has unlocked a new kind of artistic expression. The transistor enabled the pixel. The pixel enabled the frame. The GPU enabled intelligence. And now intelligence itself is becoming the new camera.

What began as a handful of chip engineers trying to visualize equations ended up transforming the world’s most powerful storytelling medium. The Valley’s real export wasn’t microchips or startups—it was imagination, made executable. The glow of every rendered frame, from Toy Story to the latest AI-generated short film, is a reflection of that heritage. In the end, Silicon Valley didn’t just build the machines of computation. It taught them how to dream big!

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Burning the Future

Burning the Future: Why Waymo Robotaxis Are Being Targeted in Los Angeles

By Skeeter Wesinger
June 11, 2025

The future is burning in Los Angeles—and it’s driving itself into the flames.
In recent weeks, autonomous vehicles operated by Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving subsidiary, have become a flashpoint in the city’s ongoing social unrest. What began as scattered protests against housing inequality and police overreach has turned sharply against the most visible emblem of Silicon Valley’s quiet conquest of urban life: the driverless car.
Waymo’s robotaxis—sleek, sensor-laden electric vehicles that glide through city streets with no one at the wheel—have been set on fire, spray-painted, disabled, and blocked. In some cases, protesters jumped on their hoods. In one instance, the vehicle’s lithium-ion battery ignited, blanketing an intersection in black smoke and toxic fumes. Five cars were torched in a single night near the Beverly Center. Waymo has since suspended service in key areas.
Why Waymo? Why now?

A Rolling Surveillance State
Part of the answer lies in optics. A Waymo car looks like what it is: a surveillance platform in motion. Packed with LiDAR, radar, and 360-degree cameras, each vehicle is effectively a roving sensor array collecting vast troves of visual and environmental data. Protesters increasingly believe that Waymo footage is being shared—or could be shared—with law enforcement. That makes the robotaxi a surveillance threat, especially in communities already skeptical of over-policing and state monitoring.
In an age when public space is contested ground, a driverless car is not just an anomaly—it’s a trespasser.

Automation as Class War
But the backlash isn’t only about privacy. For many in Los Angeles, Waymo represents something even more existential: job loss at the altar of automation.
The city’s economy still depends on tens of thousands of human drivers—Uber, Lyft, taxis, delivery vans, and commercial transport. Waymo’s expansion signals a not-so-distant future in which those workers are rendered obsolete. That future is arriving without public input, without protections, and with little concern for who gets left behind. The Teamsters and the LA County Federation of Labor have protested Waymo’s rollout since 2023. Their warnings are now finding a wider audience, and a louder voice.
If you’re looking for a symbol of job displacement and unaccountable tech governance, you won’t find a better target than a car that drives itself and costs a man his living.

Tech as the Face of Gentrification
There’s also the unavoidable truth that Waymo vehicles are highly visible in neighborhoods already under pressure from gentrification. The sleek, whirring robotaxis feel alien, indifferent—like emissaries of a world that values efficiency over community, and sensors over people. For longtime residents, they are reminders of a city being hollowed out, algorithm by algorithm, until only the surface remains.
In this context, setting a Waymo car on fire is not just an act of destruction. It is a political statement.

Spectacle and Strategy
And then there’s the media effect. A burning Waymo is headline gold. It’s instantly legible as a rejection of Big Tech, of automation, of surveillance, of the inequality that comes when luxury innovation is layered on top of public neglect. Images of charred autonomous vehicles make the evening news, circulate on social media, and galvanize protestors elsewhere.
It’s not unlike what the Luddites did in the 19th century—targeting the machines that symbolized their displacement. Only now the machine drives itself and livestreams the revolution.

A Dangerous Road Ahead
Waymo’s executives are right to be concerned. What’s being targeted isn’t just a brand—it’s a future that many people were never asked to vote on. One where machines replace people, where public spaces are privately surveilled, and where “innovation” often means exclusion.
The destruction of these vehicles may be unlawful, but the message is clear: you can’t automate your way out of accountability.
Until the tech industry confronts this unrest not with PR statements but with real dialogue, real reform, and a real respect for the communities it drives through, the streets will remain dangerous, not just for Waymos but for any vision of the future that forgets the people in the present.

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Two Paths into the Valley of the Little Big Horn

Two Paths into the Valley of the Little Big Horn: The Stories of Lieutenant Donald McIntosh and Private Walter O. Taylor
By Skeeter Wesinger
May 25, 2025

In June of 1876, the U.S. 7th Cavalry rode out from Fort Abraham Lincoln on a campaign that would end in blood, confusion, and legend. Among those troopers were Lieutenant Donald McIntosh, an officer with deep roots in both American and Native heritage, and Private Walter O. Taylor, a young blacksmith from Rhode Island. Both served in Company G—one as its commander, the other as a soldier in the ranks. Their fates diverged sharply on the banks of the Little Big Horn River.

Lieutenant Donald McIntosh
Born in Montreal in 1838, McIntosh was the son of a Hudson’s Bay Company trader and Charlotte Robinson, a direct descendant of Red Jacket, a famed Seneca chief of the Six Nations. His father was killed by Native warriors when Donald was just 14, a loss that shaped much of his early life as he moved between fur posts and western settlements before settling in Oregon.

During the Civil War, McIntosh served as chief clerk to Brigadier General Daniel Rucker—more ledger than saber—but by 1867, he was commissioned in the 7th Cavalry. Promoted to first lieutenant in 1870, he was tapped by Custer to command Company G during the 1876 campaign.

At Little Big Horn, Company G was one of three companies under Major Marcus Reno ordered to cross the river and assault the southern edge of a vast Indian village. McIntosh’s men dismounted and formed a skirmish line, holding it for perhaps fifteen minutes before being driven back into a stand of timber near the river. When Reno’s Arikara scout Bloody Knife was killed, splattering blood across Reno’s face, the major lost control. He ordered an immediate retreat up a nearby coulee toward the high bluffs.

McIntosh was among the last to leave the timber. He never made it out. Knocked from his horse in the chaos, he was killed and later found horribly mutilated. He was initially buried where he fell, later moved to Fort Leavenworth, and eventually reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery in 1909. His widow, Mary, who received a pension of $30 a month until her death in 1910, was buried beside him. A ring bearing their initials and wedding date—a wedding band lost at the scene—was unearthed in 1995 near McIntosh’s memorial marker and now rests in a private museum in Garryowen, Montana.

Private Walter O. Taylor
In contrast, Walter Taylor was just 21 years old—a blacksmith by trade, not birthright—when he joined McIntosh’s Company G. He rode into the Little Big Horn not as a commander, but as one of the many enlisted men whose names often slip through the cracks of history. Taylor was there on the valley floor when Reno’s advance stalled and then crumbled. He took part in the brief, bitter fight along the skirmish line, and the frantic pullback to the timber. And when Reno ordered the retreat, Taylor was among those who made it out.

He survived the chaos of the withdrawal, survived Reno Hill, and lived to see the relief column under General Terry arrive. He witnessed what remained of Custer’s five companies—gone. Nearly 270 of his fellow soldiers would not return, including his own company commander.

Taylor went home to Rhode Island after the war. He married Emma King and together they raised eight children. In his later years, he moved to Rockland, Massachusetts, to live with family. He died in 1931 at the age of 75 and is buried in a family plot in East Bridgewater.

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The Fall of Saigon

Fifty Years Gone: Saigon and the End of America’s Long War
By Skeeter Wesinger
May 4, 2025

This week marks fifty years since the fall of Saigon—though in truth, the city did not fall. It was abandoned. On April 30, 1975, a North Vietnamese tank breached the iron gates of the Presidential Palace, and the war America had fought, debated, televised, and tried to forget came to a shattering close. It was a scene not of triumph, nor of reconciliation, but of exhaustion—ours, theirs, everyone’s.

For those of us who remember it, the day belongs on a short list of American cataclysms. It is spoken of in the same breath as the day Kennedy was shot, and the morning the Challenger fell from the sky—moments when the national spirit broke mid-sentence, and even those far from the epicenter felt the tremor in their bones.

We watched Saigon not fall but flee, beneath the thudding blades of overloaded helicopters evacuating the last Americans and desperate allies from rooftops. On the ground, South Vietnamese citizens begged for an escape that would never come. Inside our borders, we watched it unfold on television—grim, chaotic, and final. No one cheered. There was no ticker tape. No “Mission Accomplished.” No applause from the Senate floor. There was only silence and a gnawing sense that something had gone irreparably wrong.

And then there was the deck of the USS Hancock, where desperate choices were made. To make room for a South Vietnamese pilot flying a tiny Cessna Bird Dog—his wife and children crammed aboard—American crews pushed helicopters overboard into the sea. It was an act of mercy and madness that defined the war’s end in miniature: sacrifice, chaos, and a brief moment of grace.

The war had ended, but in a way that left every side wounded. The Vietnamese people were forced into the arms of a harsh new regime, or onto the decks of overcrowded boats. Here at home, American soldiers—many barely old enough to vote—returned not as conquering heroes, but as a generation to be pitied, or worse, ignored. Even those who had never served, who had only sat cross-legged on shag carpet while Cronkite or Chancellor intoned solemn truths from behind a desk, were shaped by it. For them, the war was not a memory but a nightly ritual of body counts, jungle footage, and questions that no one in Washington could answer.

In the years that followed, we turned inward. Distrust in government deepened. The myth of American infallibility lay smoldering alongside the burned files on the embassy floor. We began to ask harder questions—about power, about intervention, about what patriotism demanded. And many, too many, stopped asking at all.

It would be decades before any measure of healing began. But even today, the scar remains visible to those who know where to look.

Anniversaries like this are not just for commemoration. They are for reckoning. We remember April 30, 1975, not because it ended a war, but because it forced a nation to look in the mirror—and see not the arsenal of democracy, but a republic uncertain of its own shadow.

Fifty years have passed. The names have faded from headlines. But to those of us who lived through it—who watched that tank roll through the palace gate, who still hear the hum of rotor blades in our memory—it is as vivid now as it was then.

History does not forgive forgetfulness. It requires us to remember—and to reflect—not with romanticism but with clarity. We owe that to the dead, to the displaced, and most of all, to the living, who still carry the war with them fifty years later. In case you missed it.

 

https://open.substack.com/pub/skeetersw/p/the-fall-of-saigon?r=1sp2om&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

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Tailspin

Tailspin, by John Armbruster, is more than a memoir of war—it is a painstaking excavation of memory and mortality, told through the dual lenses of witness and chronicler. At its center is Gene Moran, a boy of eighteen from Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, flung without ceremony into the great conflagration of the Second World War. As a tail gunner aboard a B-17 Flying Fortress, he occupied the most vulnerable position in one of the most imperiled machines in the Allied arsenal.

By Skeeter Wesinger
May 3, 2025
On a bombing run over Bremen in 1943, his aircraft was torn apart by German flak. The tail section—Moran’s solitary outpost—sheared off from the fuselage and plummeted to earth. That he survived the four-mile descent without a parachute is not merely improbable; it borders on the metaphysical. His body shattered, his skull fractured, Moran was nonetheless taken alive by German forces and would spend the next seventeen months in the tightening vise of captivity. Hunger, isolation, and a brutal 600-mile forced march across the collapsing Reich marked the twilight of his war. He emerged at last in 1945, not unbroken, but unbowed.

For nearly seventy years, Moran spoke little of these events. His nine children knew only fragments, the silence around them more eloquent than words. It was not until a high school history teacher—Armbruster himself—encountered the tale that the long-withheld narrative was drawn out, session by painstaking session, in what the author came to call “Thursdays with Gene.”
And yet, Tailspin is no simple war chronicle. As Armbruster peeled back the layers of Moran’s trauma, he found himself walking a parallel path of anguish: his wife’s harrowing decline from brain cancer. In this dual descent—one into memory, the other into grief—the author traces a shared terrain of endurance. The result is a book as much about what men endure as what they remember. It is a study in quiet heroism, and in the haunting persistence of the past.

That Tailspin is John Armbruster’s first book is, frankly, difficult to believe. The prose bears none of the hesitancy of a debut work. Rather, it reads with the confidence of a seasoned chronicler—one who knows not only how to follow the thread of a remarkable life but how to weave it into the larger fabric of human endurance and moral complexity. It is, in every sense, a great read—for veterans and civilians alike, for students of history and those merely seeking to understand the cost of silence. In a literary landscape crowded with noise, Tailspin speaks quietly—and all the more powerfully for it.

 

https://substack.com/profile/108665302-skeeter-wesinger/note/c-114148360?utm_source=substack&utm_content=first-note-modal

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The Last Arizona Ranger

The Last Arizona Ranger: Remembering Harry McPhaul, Lawman, Prospector, Legend

By Skeeter Wesinger

April 15, 2025

In an era when the American West was still being shaped not by policy but by the blunt instruments of grit, lead, and willpower, Henry Harrison “Harry” McPhaul carved his own story into the sun-bleached soil of Arizona.

He arrived in Yuma around 1897, just as the frontier was fading and statehood remained a distant promise. Some men came west to escape; others came to build. Harry, it seems, came to do both.

He quickly found himself in the thick of the territory’s law-and-order struggle—first as a constable, then as a guard at the Yuma Territorial Prison, where discipline was as much about reputation as regulation. He later became a deputy sheriff, and then Yuma’s town marshal, earning the respect—and perhaps the fear—of both outlaws and citizens alike. But of all his titles, one stands alone: Arizona Ranger.

McPhaul is remembered as the only Yuma resident ever to serve in that elite corps. The Rangers, active between 1901 and 1909, were no ordinary deputies. They were handpicked, armed to the teeth, and expected to ride into the most dangerous corners of the territory without backup. It was frontier justice at full gallop—and McPhaul was right in the saddle.

But Harry wasn’t just a man of the law—he was a man of the land. After hanging up his badge, he turned his attention to prospecting, chasing the shimmering illusions of gold and copper in the Gila Mountains. His claim near the Dome Bridge became something of a personal kingdom. The bridge itself, later renamed the McPhaul Bridge, spanned 798 feet and held the title of Arizona’s longest suspension bridge until it was retired in 1968. Today, it stands abandoned, a skeletal echo of a past that refuses to die.

Even in old age, Harry never really slowed down. A Life Magazine photo from November 3, 1947, shows him reclining against a tree, map in hand, eyes fixed not on memory, but on possibility. He was still looking—still hunting—for that next big strike. In that same article, he reportedly boasted of killing five men. Whether in self-defense or as part of his duties, he offered no justification. The number was presented like a resume line—grim, unapologetic, and final.

Harry’s story ended at the Arizona Pioneers’ Home in Prescott, where he spent the last six years of his life. On March 4, 1948, the last breath of a frontier lawman slipped quietly into history. His death certificate recorded him as a retired miner. But that’s not what he was.

He was a husband, once, to Mary Emma “Mae” Despain, whom he married in 1894. Together, they raised five children—Francis, Hortense, Thomas, Gladys, and William. But even family life couldn’t fully tame a man whose soul was more wilderness than hearth.

When he died, his body was returned to Yuma, to the place that had made him and that he in turn had helped shape.

Harry McPhaul didn’t just live in Arizona—he became part of it. In his bridge, in the fading records of Ranger deployments, in the dust of the Gila, his story endures. And like the gold he chased, it glints just beneath the surface—waiting to be discovered by those who still care to dig.

https://skeetersw.substack.com/p/the-last-arizona-ranger

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A man between tempests

A Tale from Bud McCrary

You know, my great-grandfather, Joshua Grinnell, was born back in 1834 in Fairhaven, Massachusetts—right there in Bristol County, where the shipyards once hummed, and the salt breeze still clings to every old rope coil and weathered dock.

His father, also named Joshua, was 37 when he was born, and his mother, Jane Peters Merrihew, just 23. Folks don’t carry names like that much anymore—names with sea wind in them.

Now, Joshua was never what you’d call a famous man—his name’s not printed in any history books I’ve seen. But to our family, he was the kind of man whose stories linger. The kind you measure your own steps against, even if you don’t say so out loud.

I first heard his story as a boy, sitting at my grandfather Trovillo’s knee. That would’ve been sometime before 1933, when he passed. We were out in Swanton, California—tucked up in the redwoods where the morning fog comes in quiet, like it’s listening.

Back in 1861, just as the war was breaking loose back East, Joshua set sail from the United States. With him were his young wife and her two-year-old son—no blood of his, but my grandfather and family all the same. They were headed south, maybe to round Cape Horn, maybe chasing opportunity—nobody ever told it the same way twice.

What everyone agreed on was the storm.

Off the coast of Brazil, near Ilha Grande, the ship ran headlong into a squall so fierce it nearly cracked the sky in two. Lightning crawled across the rigging, and waves broke like thunderclaps. The vessel didn’t sink, but it came close enough to taste the bottom.

They made land, barely. And for reasons nobody ever fully explained—panic, caution, or providence—Joshua’s wife and the boy were left ashore, marooned, really. Some said it was meant to be temporary. Others reckoned it was a necessary sacrifice.

Joshua pressed on. Headed north. Maybe to find another ship, maybe to clear his head. He eventually doubled back—returned to Brazil—and brought them both out. From there, they sailed on to California.

He settled in Swanton, high in the hills above the Pacific, where the forest breathes slow and deep. Built a life. Had a daughter with Elizabeth Trumbo—my grandmother—and passed on in 1904, at the age of 70. His story could’ve gone quiet right there. But in our family, it never did.

You see, the timber in this country has memory. And when my Uncle Trubo Homer helped start Big Creek Lumber in 1946, along with my brother Lud and my farther right there among those redwoods, I like to think he was following in Joshua’s footsteps—carving a life from wild land, just like the old man did when he stepped off the boat.

And when I walk those woods today, or catch sight of a schooner out on the blue, I think of Joshua Grinnell. Born of New England salt. Tempered by storm. Rooted in California soil.

A man between tempests.

By Skeeter Wesinger
March 26, 2025

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