LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Moosehive 01 // August 2025As I type this, it’s 9:33pm on August 7th, and we’re five days past the original deadline for this, our very first issue of Moosehive. The world’s in a weird place.
ChatGPT-5 just launched today. I don’t have access yet. I keep refreshing the browser, but no dice. It’s exciting, terrifying, and probably going to be underwhelming, all at the same time*. Being Gen X, tech’s never stopped racing for me. When I was my son’s age, we still had a black-and-white TV. My mom’s new boyfriend (later my stepdad) brought over an Atari 800 for my twin and me to play with while he and my mom hung out. We had a kid’s record player. Cassettes were the hot new thing. It wasn’t until after they got married and we upgraded that I found out Kirk wore gold and Spock wore blue.
Point is, it’s been a ride, and change never lets up. We’re standing in the middle of something that used to be straight-up science fiction, and now that it’s here, most of us have no clue how to feel. It’s a whole new industrial revolution. You can talk to a machine now, and sometimes it spits out something that… kind of looks like art. It could be art. Might be. We’re still yelling about it. But one thing’s for sure: suddenly, artists are standing on the same frontlines that factory workers once stood on during the last significant industrial shift. I don’t think any of us expected it.
Zoom out, and it’s even messier. Ukraine is still locked in war as Russia continues its directionless aggression. Putin might think he looks strong, but what the rest of us are seeing is how not-the-USSR Russia really is.
Then there’s Gaza. Israel’s campaign has shattered lives and shaken global opinion. It’s hard to even talk about. The conflict’s been boiling since the end of WWII, and now it’s a powder keg that nobody seems willing, or able, to defuse.
And here in the U.S.? We’ve got masked agents dragging immigrants off the streets without due process, cheered on by zealots. A few of those taken are criminals. Most aren’t.
My point is, the world’s got a lot going on. People die. Children starve. Families are torn apart while secret police roam the “Greatest Nation on Earth,” too scared to follow their own laws.
Anyway.
Moosehive is a magazine that lives at the weird, crackling intersection of art, culture, and technology. We look back. We look ahead. We look right into the mess of now. It’s unfiltered. It’s opinionated. It’s experimental. Sometimes it rambles like this.
Most of what’s in here is made by human hands. But yeah — we fuck around with the “clouds of probability ghosts” known as AI, just to see what happens. Why? Because I grew up on science fiction. And because the question still burns: what can it see? What can it say? Can this weird, synthetic noise ever produce something meaningful if we give it a chance?
Maybe. We’ll find out.
But Moosehive is a human thing. The design. The writing. The choices. The soul of it. That’s us. People. Time-crunched, tired, opinionated, but somehow still curious people. I hope you find something in here that makes you think. Or gets under your skin. Or pisses you off. I hope you’ll tell us when it does.
Thanks for reading.
We’re just getting started.
— Conrad Weems; Editor-in-Chief & Art Director, Moosehive
*Editor’s Note: August 13, 2025It was underwhelming.