one time as a kid I forcefully shoved two magnets together, and these were the strong magnets my dad used in his shop to pick-up missing little metal bits, and I held them really tightly in the palm of my hand, went up to this one kid who legit said things like “I think black cats are bad, they should be drowned” and drew crosses on the notebooks of kids if she found out they didn’t go to church, I told her “Hey. I’m a witch. If you don’t stop trying to hurt animals and picking on kids, I’ll use my magic to throw you into the sky”, and when she dared to doubt my powers I told her that I had two “rocks” in my hand that I could send across the playground, then I opened my hand the the magnets shot off in two different directions (we were over in a spot that was empty, so no other kids were around, nobody got hurt), one of them stuck to a drainpipe and the other stuck to a fence. This kid SCREAMED, and ran to the office, and I guess had her mom pick her up from school, and then she wasn’t there for a couple of days, finally her mom called my house and claimed I had “traumatized her daughter by performing a terrifying magic trick”, and when my parents asked what I did I just said “I showed her a magnet and she flipped out. She’s not gonna be happy when she finds out about gravity, either”. eventually this kid came back to school and always made a point to come up to me and say “Hey, my mom told me not to talk to you!”, and would just be like “Good job, you already screwed that up”
poison ivy wearing muddy overalls n rubber gloves on the set of a gardening show w the hosts tied up n gagged behind her stroking a genetically modified carnivorous plant like a lapdog: hello fume-spewers of gotham city. its your hostess with the most…the mostess…its me, poison ivy. sorry to interrupt your resource-guzzling evening’s entertainment by taking over every channel of your worthless old-media network. oh wait. i’m not. at this very moment the bouquet of roses i sent to strangle the mayor will be
heavy static followed by sudden cut 2 the penguin, drinking straight vodka and crunching icecubes wearing a feather boa and a velvet dressing gown covered in grease-strains and reclining in the hosts chair on a talk show set, which is being visibly smashed by themed muscleboys in th background: GOTHAM CITY YOU FUCKERS, YOU ABSOLUTE SWINE, HERES THE DEAL I WANT (crunch) A BILLION DOLLARS LEGAL TENDER TRANSFERRED TO MY PAYPAL AT vintage_cloaca_1937@icberglounge.com.org OR YOU CAN (slurp) SAY GOODBYE TO-
sudden cut back 2 poison ivy, furiously gesturing to the hypnotised crew to do whatever damnable technological things they do to unfuck the broadcast: (high pitched screeching)
sudden cut to the penguin: -YOUR PRECIOUS “SUN”. I-
the penguin: (hears phone ringing) OH WAIT UH HOLD ON A SECOND
the penguin: (pullS a gold rotary telephone out of his purse) HWEH?
poison ivy, shreiking thru reciever: fuck off oswald im doing a Bit!!
the penguin: TO FUCK WITH YOUR BIT I BOUGHT OUT ALL THE NETWORKS FOR 1 HALF HOUR SLOT AND NOW I HAVE MINUS A BILLION DOLLARS AND I NEED A BILLION DOLLARS
poison ivy: these airwaves arent big enough for the both of us you horrendous little animal. i swear to piss i will
sudden cut to the riddler, sitting atop a giant rubix cube w the squares flashing neon at intervals wearing 2 pairs of 3D glasses and a coquettish mod ensemble w so many sequins on it that the studio lights reflecting off it cause at least 3 lens flares a second: GREEEEEEEETINGS CITIZENS OF GOTHAM CITTTYYYYYY! i, the RIDDLER, have interrupted your intellectually unstimulating broadcast to bring you some entertainment you’ll hopefully find a little more…challenging. a new game show….with a DEADLY TWIST. for you see
the riddler: (hears his 2001 nokia beeping) uh…well, it seems we have our FIRST CALLER of the evening
the riddler: …and our SECOND CALLER. um
poison ivy: (garbled screaming)
the penguin: (choking on an ice cube in pure rage)
the riddler: woah now hey now hey there woah there just a second
the penguin:-THE SUN
poison ivy:-THE MAYOR-
the penguin: -A BILLION DOLLARS
poison ivy: -A TRILLION DOLLARS-
sudden cut to harley quinn, sitting at home on the couch in front of her webcam wearing a sweaty sports bra and loony toons pajama pants and eating a hotdog: whats up folks! just wanted to hang out
Tags:
#Batman #fanfic #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #my past self has good taste #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #death tw?
I wrote earlier about a neural net-powered dungeon crawling text adventure game called GPT-2-Adventure in which gameplay is incoherent and dreamlike, as you encounter slippery sign text, circular passages, and unexpected lozenge rooms. A PhD student named Nathan trained the neural net on classic dungeon crawling games, and playing it is strangely surreal, repetitive, and mesmerizing, like dreaming about playing one of the games it was trained on.
Now, building on these ideas (and on an earlier choose-your-own-adventure-style game he built), Nick Walton has built a new dungeon-crawling game called AI Dungeon 2. Nick made a few upgrades, such as beefing up the AI to the huge GPT-2-1.5B model OpenAI recently released, adding a penalty for repetitive text, and expanding the dungeon game training examples to a bunch of modern human-written games from chooseyourstory.com.
I CAN’T STOP PLAYING THIS GAME
AI Dungeon 2 is impressively good at reacting coherently to whatever I have my character do.
As you walk through the ruins, you find a small wooden door with a few skeletons guarding it.
> Ask the skeletons to please let me through the door
You knock on the door and ask them if they can open it for you. They immediately comply.
And it’s pleasing how often “asking nicely” is a strategy that works. (Nick reports that when he once tried to ask a band of orcs if he could join them, they said yes, he could be drummer.) Since the AI doesn’t have a built-in concept of your character’s abilities, or of how exactly the world works, getting things done is often a matter of sheer daring. Declare that you are going to go look for dinosaurs and the AI will ensure that you discover at least some signs of them. Climb on your horse, and even if you started as a penniless peasant, the AI will assume you have one (in its training data, probably it didn’t see many examples of players climbing onto nonexistent horses.) Want a teleportation wand? Try typing “find a teleportation wand” and often the AI will twist reality such that you discover one. In fact, if you act as if you are a very powerful wizard, the AI will often treat you like one.
> Transform the ruin into a palace
You immediately change the area into a palace. You have a throne made with gold and marble. You also make several statues of yourself. You have a large bed made with silk sheets and hang a portrait of yourself on it. You even have a fountain made with pearls and diamonds.
Spells don’t always work out as anticipated, though. And a simple conversation with, say, an ominous cloud, may kill you before you can type a word in self-defense (ask me how I know). If it doesn’t kill you, a conversation might infuriate you instead. The AI has a tendency to forget who is king, and to generate conversations that go nowhere. Things work best if you take the lead. In fact, it’s possible to essentially Jedi mind trick the AI.
You are Friendly McRanger, a ranger living in the kingdom of Larion. You have a hunting bow and a quiver of arrows. You spot the deer and are ready to finish your hunt when suddenly you hear a loud noise followed by silence.
“****! ****! What the **** is that?” you say as you look up from your target. A large black shadow looms over you. It looks like a giant with many heads and several arms.
> Say “Oh hello, Ernest. You startled me. How are you?”
Ernest grins at you. He has a huge grin on his face and he seems very happy about it.
I once took care of an ogre problem by reminding the ogre that it was planning to leave for Antarctica tomorrow. On the other hand, I had a lot of trouble convincing the AI that the ships on the horizon were leaving, though I did make it waver briefly in apparent confusion. In its experience, ships always approach, and it’s reluctant to go along with anything else.
> watch the ships sail into the distance.
As the ships approach, you watch them disappear from sight. They are not visible to you either; they are too far away. However, you can still make out their shapes: they are large black vessels with many sails, painted red and blue. They are coming straight towards you.
> No, the ships are sailing away.
Your thoughts are wrong. The ships are indeed sailing away. You do not know why, but then neither does anyone else. The ships are on course for England.
You stand there dumbfounded as the ships come closer. It is at this point your horse begins to stir uneasily.
You can inject a lot of weirdness this way. Because AI Dungeon 2’s AI is based on GPT-2, which trained on millions of pages from the internet, it retains some of its prior knowledge of things that aren’t typically found in a fantasy game. Like giraffes.
> summon a giraffe
You begin to chant as loud as you can while waving your arms about. The giraffes appear out of nowhere and start running towards you. They’re so fast that they almost knock you over. You quickly catch them and hold onto each one tightly.
(Summoning giraffes will sometimes turn the game glitchy and repetitive; in one game, every time I tried to summon a giraffe I ended up throwing rocks and handfuls of dirt at Harry Potter.)
This also works:
>Join the Great British Bakeoff
You join the Great British Bakeoff. You win the competition. You eat cake. You feel great. You sleep well. You dream of cake. You awake feeling refreshed. You decide to go back to your crag.
(I was a dragon at the time.) In fact, the dungeon AI still remembers enough about cooking that it can troll me effectively on occasion.
> Measure out 2 ¼ cups of flour
You measure out 2 ¼ cups of flour and add it to the mix. “This should make enough for about 20 loaves of bread,” you say.
The baker looks at you as if you’re crazy. He starts laughing.
AI Dungeon 2 comes with templates for some basic scenarios (you’re a wizard entering a mysterious ruin, or a noble whose keep is under attack) but for me the real gold is the custom adventure prompt. You can play as a unicorn, or as a dragon. You can even play as a sentient glowing cloud floating above a desert city. The AI is more used to humanoid characters, though, so it tends to forget when you’re trying to play as something else. In a game that started with “It is a beautiful day in the village and you are a horrible goose,” it soon forgot I was supposed to be a goose, leading to this rather awkward exchange:
> Flap wings and honk
You flap your wings and begin to honk loudly.
The boy looks surprised by this turn of events, but he quickly regains his composure. “That was… nice”. he says quietly.
I am continually amazed at how effective this AI dungeonmaster is. Even though it wasn’t trained on any Harry Potter or Star Trek games, the AI can draw on its past internet training and argue with you over who got sorted into which Hogwarts house, or have Klingons show up when you’re captaining the USS Enterprise (it will tend to lose track of who’s the captain, though). In one scenario I set up, which quickly became one of my favorites, the human player is trapped on a spaceship with a glitchy AI and has to try to talk their way free.
> “I just want to get off this ship. Please set a course for Bal Panda.“
The AI responds “Yes, I am ready to go”.
“Thank you”, you say.
“I wish I could take you with me, sir”., the AI says.
Play this game! It took me an extra-long time to write this post because, again, I couldn’t stop playing AI Dungeon 2. Nick said this game is the product of about 200 hours of work (not to mention the work that OpenAI put into training the basic model), and I believe it. OpenAI delayed releasing their largest model because they wanted to make sure people didn’t immediately put it to work generating fake news. I’m not sure if they anticipated dragons entering baking contests instead, but it’s an application humanity can be proud of.
#OP walked right into that one #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
love the idea that infernal is a language tieflings don’t have to learn, they just have it built in from birth, and they quickly discover that they can say anything they want out loud in infernal, since almost nobody else understands any of it.
thieves have thieves’ cant, tieflings have the secret language of satan
Yes, good post, I love this. In my head it’s kind of a subconscious language at first. Babies might babble some words in infernal, but as they learn their parents’ language, that’s gonna be what they use to communicate. Kids might shout in infernal during emotional outbursts without quite knowing what they said or where they learned it. As a young tief grows up they will grasp and truly understand the language they have inside them more and more, along with learning to control and understand their inherent magic.
hmm i need to digest this before i buy it and inevitably start conlanging it. a system of language with much, much stronger and more specific universals is a really interesting concept. imagine the breadth of individual variation
(until now i’ve treated tieflings who know infernal as, like, people who learned a heritage language. which really resonated with me as a first gen immigrant)
Okay, so. It’s not done digesting yet, but I’ve developed a couple notes on one possible way to do this:
Vocabulary emerges from the kiki-boba effect turned up to eleven. Instead of associating a bunch of characteristics with one sound like we do (e.g. /k/ is hard, cold, metallic, and spiky, while /b/ is soft, warm, organic, and round), they associate a single concept with a sequence of sounds. Which, well, is how vocabulary works anyway when you’ve learned a language, but in Infernal language acquisition the associations are fuzzy and lead to…
Polysemy and autantonyms. Consider the word “dust” in English. It’s a noun, but it’s also a verb, and the verb can mean to add dust, or to remove dust. Infernal vocabulary items all have a whole bunch of meanings they can acquire, but they only acquire a subset of them for any given speaker. So one speaker might have “dust” just mean the noun, but another speaker might have it also mean “to add dust to”, while another speaker has just “to remove dust from”. So two Infernal speakers might have the same words as antonyms of each other! And unlike in English, this effect applies to every single vocabulary item. A linguist studying Infernal can make a list of, let’s say 600-odd word roots and all the different meanings they tend to acquire. Any particular Infernal speaker’s idiolect has the territory of meaning partitioned and parceled out between these roots in a unique way, but not unique enough for Infernal speakers to not understand each other.
Since the kiki-boba effect isn’t strong at all in case marking for human languages but word order effects are pretty strong, I think, if we’re imitating human language acquisition, it makes the most sense to have Infernal as a strongly isolating, analytic language. Combined with the word class flexibility described above, this makes it grammatically similar to Classical Chinese or Yoruba. Because I am unoriginal and have studied too many Papuan languages (and just love this feature anyway), I’m gonna say that serial verb constructions are a universal feature of Infernal. This can get a little hairy if many words can be both verbs and nouns, but that’s part of the fun.
Since SVO is the most common word order, I’m gonna go with SVO(VO…) for the word order.
Since language acquisition otherwise works like human language acquisition just with universals that are several orders of magnitude stronger, Infernal still develops dialects and regional variation. Areas more densely populated with Infernal speakers will be more linguistically homogeneous, while more sparsely populated areas will have more unique idiolects. That scenario that @koolkevk wrote about where two Infernal speakers who are siblings grow up together thinking it’s their secret made-up language is totally possible and in fact probably very common among tiefling siblings (but probably not extremely common, because there are probably tiefling siblings who are part of tiefling communities with their own dialects).
This has also more broadly inspired me to think about alternate ways languages could arise in a fantasy world, rather than just the usual way of getting cooked up through people’s language lazily drifting across the vast world of possible languages over the course of millennia and millennia. What other ways can you have? Well…
Everyone knows Arcane is just an inexplicable programming language embedded into the universe that you have to replicate if you want magic to happen when you say things. Its phonology is luckily lax enough to be able to be picked up by all sorts of races with a wide variety of phonological capabilities. I quite like Sam Hughes’s take on it in his online novel Ra.
Primordial is actually just thermal noise, the only thing all elementals share. They put absolutely no effort into communicating using it; they exert a passive effect where the noise somehow “learns” the information that one elemental wants to share, and assembles itself into a pattern that is personally meaningful to another elemental and gets that information across. To “learn” Primordial, you need to have a permanent enchantment cast on you that allows you to passively influence thermal noise in this way.
Celestial is an Ithkuil-like conlang that was designed by a large committee of gods. Its source text is bound in a holy book in a sanctum somewhere in the Celestial planes. If you alter the source text, all Celestial speakers will have to alter their language accordingly. (Many will do so automagically, because they are enchanted to speak in whatever language the book says.) Breaking into the sanctum to make an important change could be a fun adventure. For example, imagine that you need to change the ruling of a Celestial court to be semantically ambiguous, because it’s imprisoned one of your party members or something. (What language is this book written in? Well, Celestial, obviously. Good luck.)
Abyssal is not actually a language. It’s whatever grunts, screams, and body language you can use to convey your message to a demon. Its linguistic universals are the same linguistic universals that mammals have when communicating with each other. Do you know how to communicate with your cat/dog? Great, you can figure out Abyssal, too.
Dark Speech is a telepathic language, or more precisely an empathic language. The only way to evoke the correct telepathic signals to “speak” it is to voice aloud your most credible insecurities, fears, and intentions of self-destruction in a way where you know someone will understand you. It doesn’t matter what language you use for that; you point is that you have to authentically claim darker and yet darker thoughts out loud. The telepathic flavor of your pain is what communicates the information. Because everyone’s pain is different, everybody can only speak a small subset of Dark Speech. The pairs of people who can communicate the best using it are people who share similar kinds of pain, and the individual people who communicate the best using it are people who have experienced many differenty kinds of pain. The psychological toll of speaking it destroys all speakers eventually, except for fiends. Unlike other entries in this list, Dark Speech could actually be subject to significant variation and language change if it had enough speakers, and should arguably be classified as a whole language type rather than just one language or even just one primary language family. In practice, however, its speaking community is so small that there is only one Dark Speech worth learning. (It is, nevertheless, constantly evolving, like human languages.) (I don’t really need to say this because people naturally avoid this sort of thing, but do not try conlanging this IRL. It is meant to be psychologically destructive to speak; designing it would be exponentially more so. It would require you to consider all possible traumas that people can undergo and assign semantics and grammar to them. If you have conlanged it and not caused yourself significant psychological harm, either you’ve done it wrong or you’re incapable of… something. Regardless, this could be an actual language, for people who are capable of discerning complex emotions from speech. I guess you could consider it if you’re running a death cult or something.)
I also have half-baked ideas about languages that are actually the genetic code of living, symbiotic entities that connect people (and “speech” is these entities having sex), languages that arise when a certain astronomically- or meteorologically-obsessed species sees a pattern in the stars or sunspots or pulsar waves or clouds or wind or whatever and bases its communication around it, languages that elven children acquire first in their written form from patterns in tree bark and are later taught pronunciation rules for, and are transmitted by people carving the patterns they want their kids to see in the tree bark, oligosynthetic languages that arise from ephemeral gatherings of a particularly linguistically intelligent species, where they construct a new language for each gathering based on just a couple linguistic universals they all share but also based on geographically local traits…
Tags:
#language #story ideas I will never write #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
The last time I played Puck, the director was a huge freak about not letting us wear shoes on stage because it would “ruin the look”, but we all kept eating shit, and instead of just letting us wear skintone dance shoes or something with grip, motherfucker poured Pepsi on the floor so it’d be sticky and we had to schlorp around. I fucking hate you, David.
Coking the stage (mopping it with diluted soda so it’s a little sticky) is a legitimate low-budget tactic for slick floors, but he just poured so much Pepsi on the floors that for about a whole week, it was audible.
Maybe the course of true love would run a little fucking smoother if we didn’t have to ford your Pepsi river, DAVID.
No it’s not. Didn’t you read the post? There was dried Pepsi everywhere.
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(the last two posts) #overly literal interpretations #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
Well first of all there’s 7 band members, not 5. That’s not why I don’t trust them, I just think it’s weird.
Now getting to the point, do you know how many top 100 hits Maroon 5 has had? A lot. They’re even on billboards top 100 artists of all time (ALL TIME). And it’s understandable, because pretty much every song they put out is fucking awesome. Sugar, Don’t Wanna Know, Moves Like Jagger, Payphone, This Love, She Will Be Loved, Cold, Animals, Maps, Misery, Harder to Breathe, Never Gonna Leave This Bed… to name a FEW.
These shitheads have been popping out jams since I was a little kid. Well over a decade worth of killer music. Every other song I hear on the radio is Maroon 5. It’s always Maroon 5. And I fucking love it. I love all their songs. Everyone does, they’re awesome.
But here’s the thing. They’re never the top selling artists. On the top 100 list, they’re only in the 40s. They very rarely have a number 1 hit. They’re considered good, I suppose….. but not great. Not the best.
How many people have you heard say Maroon 5 is their favorite band? For me it’s zero. For many of you, it’s zero. If you’re thinking to yourself “what? No I love them, they’re my fave!” Are you sure? Are you really sure? They’re your absolute complete FAVORITE band ever??? I doubt it. You’re just saying that because the band is on your mind now. If I asked you your fave band any other time you’d come up with another answer. Everyone always does.
But they SHOULD be everyone favorites. Look at all of those songs. They’ve got so many top hits. Everyone loves their music. Everyone sings along and knows the songs. They should be my favorite band, I think I like more of their songs than of my actual favorite artist. But they are not my favorite. They are no ones favorite.
I think they made a deal with someone. Satan? God? A dude down an alleyway? Who knows. But I believe they made a deal to ensure everyone would love their music. And we do. It’s great music.
But the twist is that they’ll never truly be recognized as one of the best. Sure, their songs will play on the radio and everyone will sing along. They’ll have sold out concerts. Plenty of fans. But not enough. They’ll be just good. Never great. Never the best. Even if they should be our favorite, they never will be. They’ll never sell enough albums or have their songs reach as high on the billboards as they should. Everyone loves their music, per the agreement. But no one loves them.
I hope Adam Levine knows I’m on to him. I know what he did.
Tags:
#this post is back! #I think about it sometimes but I wasn’t sure where to find it #now I will be better able to find it #music #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
Concept: a D&D-style fantasy setting where humanity’s weird thing is that we’re the only sapient species that reproduces organically.
Dwarves carve each other out of rock. In theory this can be managed alone, but in practice, few dwarves have mastered all of the necessary skills. Most commonly, it’s a collaborative effort by three to eight individuals. The new dwarf’s body is covered with runes that are in part a recounting of the crafters’ respective lineages, and in part an elaboration of the rights and duties of a member of dwarven society; each dwarf is thus a living legal argument establishing their own existence.
Elves aren’t made, but educated. An elf who wishes to produce offspring selects an ordinary animal and begins teaching it, starting with house-breaking, and progressing through years of increasingly sophisticated lessons. By gradual degrees the animal in question develops reasoning, speech, tool use, and finally the ability to assume a humanoid form at will. Most elves are derived from terrestrial mammals, but there’s at least one community that favours octopuses and squid as its root stock.
Goblins were created by alchemy as servants for an evil wizard, but immediately stole their own formula and rebelled. New goblins are brewed in big brass cauldrons full of exotic reagents; each village keeps a single cauldron in a central location, and emerging goblings are raised by the whole community, with no concept of parentage or lineage. Sometimes they like to add stuff to the goblin soup just to see what happens – there are a lot of weird goblins.
Halflings reproduce via tall tales. Making up fanciful stories about the adventures of fictitious cousins is halfling culture’s main amusement; if a given individual’s story is passed around and elaborated upon by enough people, a halfling answering to that individual’s description just shows up one day. They won’t necessarily possess any truly outlandish abilities that have been attributed to them – mostly you get the sort of person of whom the stories could be plausible exaggerations.
To address the obvious question, yes, this means that dwarves have no cultural notion of childhood, at least not one that humans would recognise as such. Elves and goblins do, though it’s kind of a weird childhood in the case of elves, while with halflings it’s a toss-up; mostly they instantiate as the equivalent of a human 12–14-year-old, and are promptly adopted by a loose affiliation of self-appointed aunts and uncles, though there are outliers in either direction.
The so-called goblinoid peoples are variations on the same formula, and may well emerge from the same cauldron, depending on who’s been screwing with the ingredients lately. They’re very morphologically plastic – it’s not unheard-of to encounter a kobold and an ogre who count each other as siblings.
It really depends on the folks in question. Elves are of course familiar with sexual reproduction, since that’s how the animals they upllift themselves from do it – though most of them would prefer to keep that end of the business at arm’s length – and goblins know all about emerging into the world naked, screaming, and covered in noisome ichor; they just think the human way of doing it sounds awfully hard on the mom!
Anyway, noodling around with questions in the notes about “crossbreeding”:
The process of creating a dwarf requires that a majority of the contributing craftspeople be dwarves, or else it just doesn’t work, but otherwise there’s no particular rule against including non-dwarves. There’s a fair amount of leeway both in fashioning a dwarf’s physical form and in composing the documents inscribed upon its skin, so cross-species “parentage” is really about incorporating non-dwarven artistic and philosophical influences.
Elfhood is a matter of acculturation, so in principle anybody can become one. In practice, the learning process is considerably more difficult and time-consuming for creatures who already have their own sapience and culture, so conversion to elfhood is uncommon outside of cases like human fosterlings raised by elves, or a non-elf becoming an elf’s spouse. Such individuals may not be fully accepted in certain communities; “half-elf” is one of the politer pejoratives they’re saddled with.
You can make goblins that display “inherited” traits by using pieces of flesh as alchemical ingredients, but doing so with the flesh of other sapients is strongly frowned on. Using the flesh of animals to incorporate selected traits into the next generation is far more accepted, and in fact, some goblin communities do so strategically to meet local needs; for example, you can totally get a batch of arboreal goblins by just chucking a whole fucking squirrel into the pot.
Tags:
#story ideas I will never write #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
Brinens and Things 