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grimoire-of-geekery · 3 years

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Detect Magic: the Sixth World Tarot by Echo Chernik

(pictured here- the deluxe edition [left] and the Arcanist edition of the Sixth World Tarot by Echo Chernik)

Y'know, it's been a long time since I did one of these, but here goes. It's time for another Detect Magic review. I haven't put the Dork Magician hat on for a while, so let's give this a whirl!

Today we're taking a look at the Sixth World Tarot, by Echo and Lazarus Chernik. She has this available on her website (click the above link), which come signed by the artist and the author. I'm a bit bummed, I bought a copy of this deck juuuuust before she started signing them. Not her fault, but still. XD

For those of you unfamiliar with Shadowrun, it's a cyberpunk dystopian magic-and-mech RPG setting and fantasy novel universe which originated in the late 80's. The premise is that magic is growing stronger, the world experienced a big Awakening in the early 2000's, right around the same time that corporations managed to gain extraterritoriality. So, you have dragons running huge megacorps, which basically enslave people to be lifelong wageslaves from birth (or as soon as they can get their hands on a desired talent), immersive VR Matrix hackers, cyberware enhanced fighters and magic practitioners acting as "deniable assets" to said corps for all sorts of shady business.

Hence the name "Shadowrun."

This setting, one of my absolute favorite settings out there, has had the misfortune of developing a sort of eerie prophetic element akin to the Simpsons and its bizarre track record of prediction of ludicrous world events. Shadowrun was intended to be a cautionary tale, not an oracular one. That being said, that does make a tarot based on Shadowrun more than a little on-the-nose for predictive purposes. After all, they're telling the future without even trying. Wait until they actually put some effort into it...

All right, time to Detect Magic!

Accessory- Crit (4 out of 4) Stunning artwork, evocative imagery... this deck is gorgeous. It's so beautiful, and so intricate and well made, that people who don't even read tarot (or even particularly like tarot) buy several copies for their geeky collections, and even people who don't particularly care about Shadowrun have dropped their jaw when I showed the deck to them.

A bit busier than I'm used to working with (not the art, but the extras which I'll explain later), I was pleasantly surprised at how much I loved the cards when I first got them. The box for both editions I own are a nice durable gloss with a magnetic foldover closure, there's a ribbon inside each to help pull the cards and book out of the box, and the decorative artwork is gorgeous and fitting with the setting. Definitely aesthetically pleasing enough to take places, and durable enough to resist scuffing or tearing for on-the-go divination and gaming use.

Tome- Crit (4 out of 4) So, the Tome section of this review is supposed to be about how well the cards help one in the pursuit of learning magic and practicing geekomancy. And... really, I don't think I've found a deck (or any artifact of fandom) quite as good as this.

Let me explain.

Tarot, in the sorcery practice I teach, are already basically a pictorial grimoire, describing life in a way that allows us to learn the hidden movements, mysteries, and forces at play in our world. Art is good for things like that in general. It helps you see the world through a special lens, one which allows you to see things you might have missed.

The thing is, the lens of this deck is the Shadowrun continuity, which as I said earlier, has proven to be more than a little prophetic, and alarmingly so.

The magic system of Shadowrun is pretty adjacent to our own. Life force lines, spiritual power sites, astral projection and spirits and magical "energy" forms, initiatory mysteries... it's all pretty much the same as our own reality, just juiced up a bit, with some extra game elements added (don't even ask me about insect spirits).

This makes the deck particularly helpful if one wishes to learn magic in any of the myriad ways described in Shadowrun (and they're particularly respectful and diverse and true-to-life in their tradition descriptions).

BUT, it also has an entire lore-book called the Book of the Lost associated with it, which explains all these little secret sigils and images and easter eggs stored throughout the deck, which can be used for gamebuilding and storytelling, but are designed to be arcane indicators and omens, among other things. And the kinds of symbols they use range from sentences or mottos in dead languages, all the way to waveform patterns and dot-matrix maps. I swear, if you're one of those people who like puzzles and cryptography, this deck is even more fun than the Hermetic Tarot.

In summary, while you'll have to get some Shadowrun sourcebooks to really get deep into the canon lore, there's so much of it that the cards really show you on their own that I don't consider this a setback at all. Feel free to deep-dive with this deck, you'll learn a TON about magic if you let it guide you.

Relic- Success (3 out of 4) If you read the Book of the Lost, or Unearthed Arcana, or any of the 5th edition Shadowrun magic sourcebooks, you'll see that "tarot magic" is an up and coming thing in their canon. Each text helps you see how practitioners use the cards in-game for spellcasting, ritual magic, initiation practices and spirit summoning. The Tarot are already really valuable as central objects of importance to certain kinds of magical practice. This particular deck is designed to be so handy a central object that there's an entire book dedicated to it.

Weapon- Success (3 out of 4) The only reason I'm rating this a success instead of a crit is because they don't provide enough spreads in the various associated books for one to immediately begin casting spells with them, which means you'll have to do some designing. They do have a couple solid unique spreads for basic divination though.

The deck's canon in-game suggests ritual practices like gathering and doing a ritual with sets of related cards, and one such ritual was easily adapted in my own practice, into the Lucky Kimono spread I designed (which people can read about on my Patreon at the higher tiers). So, even without outright including spell-spreads, they sort of gave us clues anyway.

Again, you're going to need the sourcebooks, but it's only a few of them, and they're well worth a read even if you're not planning on playing the game (and I don't play in the actual Shadowrun mechanical system, though I do like the sourcebooks for campaign setting ideas).

Overall Rating: Critical Success (14 out of 16)

Achievement Unlocked: Novahot Echo's artwork is already legendary in the dork realms of geekomancy. She's done work for Dungeons and Dragons, Mage: the Ascension, House of Night... she's even working on a Fate: the Winx Saga playing card deck right now. Her art-nouveau delicacy combined with the powerful non-pandering way she draws women means that her paintings pack a punch!

That being said, it's rare that we see professional artists create a tarot deck of this magnitude as a gaming accessory. Most tarot decks of this caliber are found in professional occult catalogues or as independent projects by artists just wanting to flex their skills for their own reasons. To have a deck like this, clearly a labor of love by all involved, as a major element of gameplay within a franchise is really very special. And something this diverse, deep, and absolutely saturated with layers of ciphers and riddles... it's a geekomancer's dream come true.

Level Up: 2 Levels I think the only way anyone's going to be able to top this deck is if they manage to design a tarot deck that's also a fully immersive VR video game AND an AR game and divination tool useable with one's iPhone or Android. Legit, Echo and Lazarus left everyone in the dust. I haven't been this excited about Shadowrun since Shadowrun Returns first came out, and I got a set of dogtags that had a USB drive with the game on it.

It's just... crazy cool.

Full disclosure, I've had the deluxe edition of these cards for a while now, so I've basically been low-key squeeing about this deck since I first heard about it in 2018, even before I got it. I've been utterly astonished that people weren't more excited about them, and I wasn't hearing about them everywhere.

Before this, I created my own Shadowrun tarot method using the Universal Transparent Tarot (cuz, y'know, plastic and see-through and weird little mosaic readings all in one place, seemed fitting to me), and when I got the Sixth World Tarot? I don't think I've opened the UTT since!

Anyway, this is my review of this deck! Go follow the link up at the top of this post, and buy yourself one! And hey, let me know if you figure out the cool little map trick. My jaw literally dropped when I was shown that!

#detectmagicreview #shadowrun #sixth world tarot

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lingthusiasm · 5 years

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Transcript Episode 40: Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 40: Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 40 show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about artificial intelligence – teaching computers language – with special guest Dr Janelle Shane, who runs the blog A.I.weirdness.com and is the author of You Look Like a Thing and I Love You, which is a fun new book about A.I. But first, we have some announcements.

Lauren: It’s a new year and we have new, big, exciting plans for the Lingthusiasm Patreon page. We are introducing a Discord, which is an online chat space, for patrons to share their lingthusiasm with their fellow lingthusiasts.

Gretchen: We’ve heard from a lot of you that you got into linguistics because of Lingthusiasm or it reawakened your memories of how much you like linguistics because you did some courses on it way back when and now you wish you could talk about linguistics more. We’re giving you a space where you can talk about linguistics, share your interesting linguistics links that you come across, and talk about them in a space with other lingthusiasm fans. We’re really excited to see what this community becomes. It’s a bit of an experiment, but we think it’ll be really fun to do. You can join the Patreon at the tier where you get bonus episodes as well, and you also have a space to talk about those bonus episodes and the regular Lingthusiasm episodes and any other linguistics things you wanna talk about.

Lauren: We want to see more Lingthusiasm not just online but also on all kinds of things, which is why we are also sending stickers over the next few months to patrons at the Ling-phabet tier. Patrons who are at that tier for three months or more will get stickers that say, “Lingthusiast” on them.

Gretchen: You can stick that to your laptop, your water bottle, your notebook, anything else in your life. Because the original trial run of stickers that we did with the special offer last year were really popular, we thought we’d provide a way for you to do that around the year. You can join that tier on Patreon as well.

Lauren: You can get other items at our lingthusiasm.com/merch page, but the stickers are an exclusive for our patrons.

Gretchen: Thanks to everybody who’s been a patron so far. We’re really excited to see you in the Discord. And we’re excited to get to try that out.

Lauren: Our last exciting announcement is that our patrons also helped us meet a new funding goal, which means that we now have some additional ling-ministration support.

Gretchen: Our fantastic producer Claire, who’s been with us since the very beginning, is also going to be taking on some more of the administration for the podcast, so you’ll see her around a bit on social media and on Patreon. You can listen to a bonus episode with Claire if you’d like to get to know her better as well.

Lauren: Our current bonus is on the future of English and what English might look like in a couple of centuries from now, inspired by Gretchen’s New York Times article.

Gretchen: You can get access to this episode and 34 other bonus episodes – that’s twice as much Lingthusiasm that you can listen to – at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Janelle. Welcome to Lingthusiasm!

Janelle: Hi, it’s great to be here.

Lauren: Janelle, we are so excited to have you on the show today to talk about how we can make machines do language.

Gretchen: I think one of the things that we have in common, definitely one of the reasons I enjoy following your blog and Twitter feed and so on, is that both linguists and your approach to A.I. like poking at systems and seeing where they break.

Janelle: Yeah, for sure.

Gretchen: In case some people aren’t already following you on all of the internets, I wanna give people an idea of some of the stuff that you have tried to make break.

Lauren: Janelle, in your work, for people who haven’t seen it, you take large data sets of particular sets of terms or particular language genres, I guess, and then you feed them into an artificial intelligence, and we’ll talk about what that is later, and then it spits out these delightfully whimsical outputs. It takes inspiration from the data set that it’s given. I have a sustained history of laughing inappropriately loudly on public transport while reading your blog because the results are always so entertaining. Gretchen, do you have a favourite to share with us so I can chortle inappropriately?

Gretchen: Lauren, I think we should start with ice cream because I know you have a deep and abiding love of ice cream, and Janelle has come up with ice cream flavours.

Lauren: Yes! Yes, yes, yes. Janelle, where did the ice cream data come from? Did you have a list of ice cream flavours that someone gave you or…?

Janelle: Yeah. In this case, it was a group of middle-schoolers, actually. There’s a school in Austin, Texas, called Kealing Middle School where there is a group of students in the coding classes who decided that – they saw my blog. They wanted to do it too, and they wanted to generate ice cream flavours.

Lauren: Aww.

Gretchen: That’s so great!

Janelle: The thing is, I had looked at that, and I’m like, “Oh, this would be cool.” Then, I looked online and I say, “I need examples of existing ice cream flavours” because the A.I. has to have something to imitate. It doesn’t know about ice cream flavours unless I have some to tell it about. They’re scattered around. There wasn’t any big master list of them. So, I kinda said, “Oh, well. I guess that’s not gonna work.” Then, these middle-schoolers kicked my butt because they went and there was, I dunno, dozens of them – 50, 60 of them. Like, a lot of them. Each of them went and collected a few from this site or that site. Each one site would only have a few at a time. They had to manually copy and paste to this data set. They just, through the sheer numbers and having the time to do it, they put together this amazing data set of existing ice cream flavours. These middle-schoolers ended up getting about 1600 different ice cream flavours. Whereas, I only managed to get together 200. With the data set that much bigger, it made a huge difference. They started generating pretty amusing flavours.

Gretchen: I’ve got the blogpost up about the ice cream flavours from the middle school students, and some of them are really good. There are these whimsical flavours like “It’s Sunday” and “Cherry Poet” and “Brittle Cheesecake” and “Honey Vanilla Happy.” These seem like kind of reasonable ice cream flavours, right?

Lauren: I’d be open to ordering a “Vanilla Nettle.”

Gretchen: “Cherry Cherry Cherry.” If you like cherries, this is the flavour for you. There are also some weirder flavours from this data set like, “Chocolate Finger” and “Caramel Book” and –

Lauren: “Washing Chocolate.”

Gretchen: “Texas Charlie Covered Stunt.” Then, there’s this even weirder category, “Nuts with Mattery,” “Brown Crunch,” “Cookies and Green.”

Lauren: Aww, so close, and yet…

Gretchen: “Mango Cats.”

Lauren: They’re weird to us because of the semantics of them – just to be linguist-y and spoil the moment for a second – but they still are English words, or they look like something we’d recognise as English words, even though I don’t think “mattery” is a word that I know of. I think it’s worth saying artificial intelligence doesn’t know what ice cream is, right, it’s just using this list of flavours to figure out what kind of patterns could fit into that list.

Janelle: Exactly. It’s doing it at a very basic level. Like, what kinds of letters tend to come after other letters? What letters are we often finding in combination? Which letters are we never finding in combination? It’ll learn frequent words like “chocolate” or something. It’ll learn how to spell that after some false starts during training, but, yeah, without any concept of what chocolate is.

Gretchen: If it ends up with something like “Vervette’s Caramel Borfle,” it learned “caramel” but who “Vervette” and “borfle” are, I don’t know. That’s just randomly combining some letters in ways that are probable as English words.

Janelle: Yeah, it’s like a kid who learns how to write and immediately starts putting down letters on paper like, “Is this a word? Is this a word? How do you pronounce this?”

Lauren: Because obviously we train the neural nets that are children’s brains by talking to them a lot and giving them more input and taking them to school and doing those kind of things, but a neural net-type artificial intelligence that we’re doing this kind of training by giving it lots of data, how does it know if it is generating something that is more or less English? Is there a little thing in the computer saying, “Good work, Computer”?

Janelle: What it’s trying to do, how it knows it’s making any progress at all, is its job is to try and predict the next letter or the next combination of letters. Then, it just checks its prediction against some example of real texts that it hasn’t seen before that it saved aside to check itself with and said, “Okay, did I guess close or am I still way off? Am I going to have to change my internal structure so that my guess would’ve been better and see if, going forward, that’s gonna be an improvement?” It’s like a trial and error, guess and check.

Gretchen: When you look at the different sorts of stages – because it goes through several different generations, right? It might start out with just “Here’s a bunch of Es because E is really common.” And then the check is like, “Yeah, but you could do better.”

Janelle: Yeah. It’s like guessing lots of Es is more correct than guessing lots of question marks or lots of Qs. Yeah, it has to say, “Oh, well, maybe I could work in an S from time to time. What do you know? That’s slightly more correct,” and proceeds from there.

Lauren: So, that’s how it learns “chocolate”? Because it might go in with CH and HC, and every time it goes, “Is HC right? Is HC right?” And the data set is like, “Naw, not really.” But when it’s got the CH for an ice cream list, it’s like, getting lots of positive feedback that that’s gonna appear in “chocolate” and “chip” and “cherry.”

Janelle: Yeah, exactly. The process, yeah, it is a lot different from the human child learning language because it’s taking place, really, in isolation with no other context. It’s as if you are setting somebody in a room with just a few dictionaries or a few encyclopaedias written in a language that they don’t understand. It’s even harder for the A.I. because it doesn’t have a concept of what language even is to start out with. It’s all just guessing what comes next in this sequence of arcane symbols.

Gretchen: It doesn’t have a sense of what’s probable in the world either, right?

Janelle: Yeah.

Gretchen: Because you have some of these flavours like “Peanut Butter Slime,” which those are all English words, it’s just it would make a terrible ice cream because slime and peanut butter and ice cream are not things that go together.

Janelle: Yeah, exactly. Or, if I’m getting it to generate Halloween costumes, it’ll come up with “zombie school bus.” It’s like, “Okay, zombie school bus. There’s magic school bus. Why is that more likely than zombie school bus?” We know. It doesn’t.

Gretchen: It doesn’t have any of that real-world knowledge that you can do – or like “Mango Cats.” What does it mean for a cat to be mango? I don’t know.

Lauren: If an artificial intelligence gained sentience, it’s likely it actually wouldn’t be a very good linguistics student because it doesn’t really understand the concept of sounds. It doesn’t seem to have a lot of understanding of the structure of a sentence. We talk in one episode about syntax essentially being this structure that we can hang other bits of sentences off. It has much more of a flat, just looking at the patterns on the surface kind of approach to language.

Janelle: Yeah. Keep in mind, too, the amount of computing power it has to work with is so much less than what it takes for sentience or anything near human level. If you’re looking at raw computing power, the neural nets we have today are somewhere around the level of an earthworm.

Gretchen: Maybe an earthworm would like peanut butter slime-flavoured ice cream.

Janelle: I’ll give all my Peanut Butter Slime to the earthworm.

Lauren: That’s very generous of you.

Gretchen: This was one of the analogies that I liked in your book, which I enjoyed very much. You Look Like a Thing and I Love You – the title of this book was named after another neural net, right?

Janelle: Mm-hmm. This was a phrase generated from a neutral net that was trying to do pick-up lines.

Gretchen: I guess that could be a pick-up line.

Lauren: We have things like ice cream names, and you’ve done death metal names, and Halloween costumes, and colours, and these are all three or four words at most. Pick-up lines is moving into more of the sentence/couple of sentences-type of thing. As the amount of words you’re trying to generate grows longer, how much more difficult does that make it for the artificial intelligence?

Janelle: It makes it a lot more difficult. When I was generating the ice cream flavours and things, I was deliberately going exclusively for these kinds of problems where it would just have to do a couple words at a time because when it tried to do longer sentences or phrases, it would not make sense. One of the things is that the A.I. I was working with at the time didn’t have very much memory at all. So, it would kind of lose track of things that happened a couple of words ago. It wasn’t really able to figure out then how to make a sentence work or make phrases work. It was a bit beyond it. The pick-up lines was definitely a case of, “This is too hard for the A.I.” It struggles, okay, not just the “How do you make a grammatical phrase?” but also “How do you do puns? How do you do innuendo?” These were all things that require a lot of background knowledge that this thing just did not have.

Gretchen: Another example that you use in the book is with recipes, right? It can figure out that you need to list some ingredients, you need to list some instructions, but then those instructions won’t contain the ingredients that were previously mentioned, necessarily, because it doesn’t remember that those are what it listed before.

Janelle: Yeah, we’ll see that. You’ll get something that on the surface at first glance looks like a recipe and then, when you actually read more closely, you’re like, “Wait a second. It has no idea what’s going on. It’s forgotten its ingredients. It’s telling me to chop the milk into cubes. Something’s going on here.”

Lauren: There’s something very confident about the way it fakes its ability.

Janelle: Yeah. Well, I mean, part of the reason it sounds so confident is that it’s copying what humans have written, and humans generally didn’t tend to write in the middle of a recipe, “Uhh, wait a second. I have no idea what’s going on.” It learns that is not a phrase that appears in a recipe, so it’s going to express any kind of confusion. It’s just going to plough ahead with its best guess at what a human would say.

Gretchen: This is where, I think, your famous giraffe question comes from.

Janelle: Ah, yes. I love this chatbot. It’s a chatbot called Visual Chatbot. It’s designed to answer questions about an image. You show it an image and then it comes up with a caption, and then you can have this back and forth conversation with the bot about what it sees in the image. You think that premise would be fairly straightforward, but there are weird quirks that arise just because this thing is trying to copy how humans ask and answer questions about images. The training data is important. In this case, the training data is a whole bunch of people hired through Amazon Mechanical Turk to take turns asking and answering questions about images. Then, the chatbot was trained on answers. So, given this kind of image, given what the question is, what would humans tend to answer in this situation? Some weird quirks emerge just from that premise. One of the things that they wanted to make sure to avoid was this thing called priming. People tend to ask questions to which the answer tends to be “yes.” They found in an early version of this chatbot that they could get 80% accuracy just by answering “yes” to every single yes-or-no question.

Gretchen: Uh-oh!

Janelle: They ended up having to hide the image from the person who was asking questions, so that helped a little bit. Now, it’s about 50/50 if you ask a given question whether it’s going to answer yes or no to that. One of the things that they weren’t able to correct was this interesting thing with the giraffes. What happens is, if you ask the question, “How many giraffes do you see?” the chatbot will almost always return a non-zero answer. It can be doing great about an image and, “Oh, yeah. This is a person on a snowboard. There’s snow,” up until the point where you ask, “And how many giraffes are there?” It will answer, “Three” or “Two” or “Too many to count.”

Lauren: I think it’s just worth clarifying, just to really make this clear, this is not a data set in which giraffes appear in every image.

Janelle: True. Yes. I would love to see that data set – snowboarding with giraffes.

Lauren: “Yeah, there are three giraffes.”

Gretchen: Giraffe snowboarders – this is possible. Because I know this is an ongoing joke that you have, I tested with an image of the cover of my book which, as I think as everyone knows, contains zero giraffes because it’s not about giraffes. Visual chatbot told me that it is a sign that says, “Unknown, unknown, unknown,” on the side of it which I guess is not the worst for a cover that has text in it. It just can’t read the text – sure. Then, I said, “How many giraffes?” and Visual Chatbot said, “Two.”

Janelle: It comes from this thing is copying how humans tend to answer this question. In its examples of humans hired through Amazon Mechanical Turk, the humans had not tended to ask the question, “How many giraffes are there?” when they didn’t know if there were any giraffes.

Gretchen: Right. You’d say something like, “Are there any giraffes?” The person says, “Yes,” and then you say, “How many giraffes?”

Janelle: Exactly. If you ask the chatbot, “Are there any giraffes?” it will answer, “No,” quite often. But then, if you follow up with the question, “And how many giraffes do you see?” it’ll say, “Five.”

Lauren: This approach reminds me of, as Gretchen said earlier, as soon as I get my hands on some kind of thing that’s doing this back and forth question asking or as soon as I’m let loose on a Google Translate, I think it’s a very linguist-brain thing to try and find these points at which the computer can’t handle language properly. It’s always great when you have an approach that understands how humans actually interact with this data that helps explain why you end up getting these really strange answers and why it’s good to have linguists help design artificial intelligence or chatbots and these things because the way humans choose to do language is very different to what we think of as the nice, straightforward application at the end.

Janelle: There’s so many start-ups that are trying to have some kind of bot that you can interact with in an open-ended manner. Then, they run into trouble. Facebook M is one of these services that was discontinued last year because they thought it was going to be like a digital assistant, lives in your browser, you can ask it to do things like look up show times and stuff. But what people ended up asking for was the weirdest, most complicated things. One guy documented, oh yeah, he asked it if it could arrange for a parrot to visit his office. I mean, you’re not gonna prepare for that when you’re training one of these chatbots. It turned out to be the chatbot kept needing humans to step in and rescue it. They realised it was going to be too expense because they were always gonna need these humans.

Lauren: This is a company that has no shortage of resources to throw at a problem like this.

Gretchen: I think if you tell people, “You can interact with this like a human,” they think they can do things like make a request for parrots because humans can understand a request for parrots. Even if I can’t personally deliver you a parrot, at least I understand this request. Whereas, a chatbot, if parrots aren’t in the training data, then parrots don’t exist.

Janelle: This is one of the things, too, that makes it hard to tell the difference between humans and computers when you’re chatting with them. If you’re in a customer service situation, they try to really narrow the context in which you can ask questions and not make it open-ended, especially if they’re going to invisibly use bots because they don’t want you asking for parrots out of the blue.

Gretchen: Right. It’s like when you call into a customer service line, it’s like, “Press 1 to talk to this,” “Press 2 to talk to that,” they really wanna keep your options constrained because then the computer can help you. It’s when it’s open-ended and people start behaving as if it can do anything that a human can do that you start running into problems.

Janelle: Yeah. What you’ll get is you’ll get these companies that’ll build chatbots where it’ll start out as an open-end conversation with something that is secretly a bot but it hasn’t said it is. But then if it gets confused, it’ll invisibly hand control over to a human. That can be problematic because then, if the customer by then is frustrated and thinks they’re dealing with a robot, the poor human employee may not have a very pleasant time with that conversation. What I would really love – what I would love linguists to design for me – is some kind of very polite, in-context way to ask a question or interact with one of these bots that would reveal whether it is a human or a computer, some kind of shibboleth that is never – not asking about his favourite Star Wars character, because that’s impolite if you’re talking to a human employee – but some phrasing or something that’s tricky.

Gretchen: That’s an interesting question because I think, a lot of times, asking for something that’s a little bit non-cooperative, like “How many giraffes?” out of the blue, is maybe gonna deliver that answer. But it’s also gonna be confusing and annoying to a human.

Janelle: Exactly. My default has always been, as soon as a human – because better be polite to a computer than rude to a human sort of thing – but it would be lovely to be able to tell the difference. Companies should just tell us or have a “Talk to a human” button or something, but yeah.

Gretchen: You’re looking for an inverse Turing Test. A Turing Test is this classic test in computer conversation where, if a computer can fool a human into thinking that they’re talking to another human, then they’ve passed the Turing Test. There are ways of passing the Turing Test if you constrain the context enough. Or if you tell people that they’re talking to a child or they’re talking to somebody who’s on some drugs or something like this – or a philosopher – then they’ll be more likely to believe – these are the three kinds of people that a robot can be. But if you try to do something that’s very practical or that is grounded very much in reality, then people aren’t as willing to be generous with the computer’s misinterpretations. Janelle, your blog post that you make the neural nets do funny things, they’re really funny. And yet, I have a feeling that it’s not only that the neural nets are funny, it’s also that you’re really good at spotting the funny bits and bringing them out to a blog post for us.

Janelle: Yeah, there’s a lot of human storytelling work that goes on. How is this going to be interesting? Where is the funny thing that it’s doing? Sometimes, the ratio is like 100 to 1 of things that aren’t very funny that it generates and the one thing that I’m like, “Oh, yeah. I’m posting that.”

Lauren: Because, I guess, the thing about it being a computer process is that you could just generate infinite numbers of nonsensical ice cream names, but a lot of those are too nonsensical to even be particularly amusing.

Janelle: Yeah. It also has a tendency to – especially if we’re dealing with something short-ish and simple-ish like ice cream, then it’ll generate something and it says, “Mint Chocolate Chip,” and I’m like, “Oh. It just copied that.” It learned that one.

Lauren: Learnt that one too well.

Janelle: Yeah. Because as far as these A.I.s are concerned, exactly copying my examples is a perfect solution to the question I’m asking of it. If it can predict every single word, word for word, in the text file that I gave it, then that is a perfect score. Sometimes, it’s almost like a battle for me to try to get it to be just bad enough at the task.

Gretchen: Not so bad that it’s incoherent, but bad enough that humans can resolve what it’s supposed to mean and it’s still funny.

Lauren: One application of this name-generation process you’ve been doing was when you created a list of craft beer names and a company actually took one of those names to create a beer. Was that a process that you embarked on because you thought this was a good place to experiment with creative naming or how did that come about?

Janelle: This was one of the things where I happened to know somebody who was friends with the owner of the brewery, and I thought, “Well, this would be fun to actually get one of these beers to exist in real life,” because people keep saying that the names A.I.s are generating are pretty good. In the case of craft beer names, there’ve actually been companies who have taken each other to court over having beer names that were too close to one another. There’s this need to maybe show there’re ways to still come up with new beer names and we hadn’t exhausted all the possibilities yet.

Lauren: It’s really a collaboration between you and the A.I. where you are curating all of the names that it gives you in order to find the ones that have that perfect balance of following the rules you’ve given it but with a bit of a lateral thinking approach.

Janelle: Yeah. Just the right amount of lateral thinking as well, too. Sometimes, it’s way off the mark and comes up with, I don’t know, “Farm Fight,” as a name for beer. I’m like, “Well…”

Gretchen: Here are some of the beer names that were on the list like “Dang River” and “Binglezard Flack” and “Toe Deal” and “Devil’s Chard.”

Lauren: Some of them I can almost imagine being a craft beer. In the end, it was “The Fine Stranger” that was bottled and labelled.

Gretchen: That’s good. I think the examples are very funny, but there’s also an important part of making a lot of funny examples, right? It’s not just to entertain people, even though it is very entertaining.

Janelle: There’s people using these practically as their business in coming up with brand names. I did this one beer. There’s a whole art to naming brands, and it’s not just coming up with the names, but it’s also this whole framing of “Because of the etymology of this and that” or “Because the computer mashed this together with that.” There’s definitely a storytelling element to it as well. When I was going through this process with the beer, I was definitely getting the sense of, “Oh, yeah. I’ve got all these great names.” Any – not any one of these – but many of them would make great beer names, and the beer would sell well, and the brewery would be happy with it. But, yeah, how do I put it on the marquee, put it on the silver platter and make them actually say, “Yes. The authority has spoken. This is the name.”

Gretchen: Beyond brand names, there’re also lots of other practical applications people are using artificial intelligence for now, whether that’s machine translation or self-driving cars or all of these sorts of very practical aspects to things. It’s hard to see the inside of a self-driving car, and what that looks like, and how it’s making problems for things. Whereas, it’s easier to see what happens when you make a bunch of weird ice cream flavours.

Janelle: Exactly. That’s why I like doing these tests. Some of the biggest applications for A.I. is in doing financial predictions or looking for fraudulent logins and things like that where it, maybe, is comprehensible to somebody who’s in that field, but the way that they’re making mistakes in that field is not very obvious, not very interesting, if you’re not right there in that field working with these kinds of numbers all the time. If it’s making a mistake on an ice cream flavour, that is much faster to see, “Oh, yeah, it’s doing pattern matching. Oh, yeah, it doesn’t understand what it’s doing.” A lot of these same mistakes really do translate over to commercial applications.

Lauren: We’ve talked a little bit about how you have to curate the output because it will just keep spitting out silly ice cream names forever. We’ve talked a little bit about some of the problems with the types of data that are put into these processes in terms of, you know, if you don’t set it up very well and you have people answering questions about giraffes in a way that the A.I. is going to implement weirdly. There are bigger and more serious implications for thinking about the kind of data that we are using to create artificial intelligence processes not just with language but particularly for this topic looking at the kinds of data that people use to build artificial intelligence. You talk about this a bit in your book. Where do you see some of the biggest challenges in creating good A.I.?

Janelle: One of the things is, remember these A.I.s have about the raw computing power of an earthworm and they don’t have the context, then, to realise that there are some things that the humans do that they probably shouldn’t be copying. Completely unknowingly, they will copy things like racial/gender discrimination and they won’t know that that’s what they’re doing. They won’t know that that’s a bad thing. They just really can’t comprehend it.

Gretchen: It’s kind of like the chatbot that figures, “Oh, if I just answer yes to everything, I’ll get 80% accuracy,” even though it’s not actually useful, communicatively, to just answer yes to everything.

Janelle: It’s like this is exactly what you have asked for but is not necessarily what you want. When we give it a bunch of human decisions on resume sorting, for example, and we tell it, “Copy these human decisions,” then these algorithms can look and say, “Well, this is a very difficult problem, but looks like all of the applicants who’ve gone to this one college tend not to be hired” and “Oh, that college is a women’s college” and it is implementing the gender discrimination that it’s seeing in its training data because it saw this signal, didn’t know what it was, only knew that it was helping it copy the humans a little better.

Gretchen: Right. If the humans are already having their sets of bias and if I can magnify that bias, like if you have a human that’s answering “yes” 80% and now the A.I.’s answering “yes” 100% of the time, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.

Janelle: Exactly. Yeah. They are so good about being sneaky about – you may think that if you set up a resume sorting algorithm saying, “Well, we’re just not gonna tell it what gender any of these applicants are” and it is very good at figuring this out not just through colleges but through if somebody has their extra-curriculars listed and “women’s soccer team” is on there, it will glom onto that. Or even subtleties with word choice and phrasing, it will start using those kinds of trends and use them to copy the humans better.

Gretchen: I’m thinking about a different resume study which showed that people – they had the same sorts of resumes – people with a white-sounding name versus with a black-sounding name were more likely to get called back for interviews. You can imagine in the A.I. that it actually just learns how to predict based on someone’s name. Like, “Oh, we’ve hired a lot of people named ‘Mike’ at this company.” We all know these companies that have a whole bunch of people named “Mike” and “Adam” and stuff. “Maybe we should just only interview the people named ‘Mike.’”

Janelle: It will absolutely do that sort of thing. You see there’s a lot of companies out there that are offering resume screening but knowing what I know about how commonly these A.I.s can pick up on this bias I would not want one of these programs screening resumes for my company, for example. Or I would, at the very least, demand to see the evidence that this thing is not making biased decisions.

Gretchen: Right. That’s a sort of way of saying, “Okay, well, if this A.I. still thinks ‘Slime’ is a good flavour for ice cream, then really how much can we trust it to make a good decision about resumes?”

Janelle: I think that’s almost the counter-intuitive danger about A.I. in a lot of ways. It’s not that it’s too smart and it’s going to take over the world and it’s not gonna obey humans – no. The problem is that it’s not smart enough to realise what we’re actually trying to ask it to do.

Lauren: It keeps obeying us too well in ways that we don’t want it to.

Janelle: Yeah, if it can. When it comes to language generation, language processing, human language is really, really difficult. So, that particular domain, more than a lot of others, you’ll see these A.I.s that are really struggling to get a handle on what the humans are saying.

Lauren: It’s good news that linguists will have jobs for a little bit longer.

Janelle: Yeah.

Gretchen: One of the questions that really came up in my mind when we were thinking about interviewing you was, can the A.I. take my job as the co-host of the podcast, Lingthusiasm? If Lauren and I want to go live on a beach somewhere, can we replace, as co-hosts, a bot-generated Gretchen and Lauren to run this podcast? Lauren, what do you think?

Lauren: We actually put this to Janelle a few years ago, back when we started releasing transcripts for our early episodes. About three years ago, in 2016/2017, we didn’t have many episodes, so we didn’t have a lot of data to work with, but also it seems like in these last few years, the ability to process larger text has gotten better. Is that the case, Janelle?

Janelle: Yeah, that’s definitely the case. The kinds of things I was doing in 2016 – generating words, short phrases, paint colour names, ice cream flavour names, those sorts of things – I wouldn’t think of tackling entire sentences or, let alone, sentences that follow one another that make sense. But now, just pretty much in the last year, there’s been some really big A.I.s that have been trained on millions of pages from the internet. They are much better at generating text. They can generate grammatical sentences most of the time now. Most of the words that they use are real words. They still don’t understand what they’re saying. I think, yeah, it has gotten better.

Gretchen: You can potentially take something that’s been trained on, let’s say, most of the English pages of the internet and then fine-tune it on a smaller data set to try to push it more in the direction of just, for a random example, Lingthusiasm episodes.

Janelle: Yes. If, hypothetically, I had many episodes worth of Lingthusiasm transcripts, I might be able to make a robo-Gretchen and a robo-Lauren.

Lauren: Do you know what else has happened in the last couple of years, Gretchen?

Gretchen: I think we’ve produced a lot more episodes of Lingthusiasm.

Lauren: Between the main episodes and the bonus episodes, we have 70 transcripts, which is over 800 pages of data. Janelle, would that be enough to have a go at creating a robo-Gretchen and a robo-Lauren?

Janelle: There’s one way to find out.

Gretchen: Oh, boy! Let’s do some live neural netting on the podcast.

Janelle: All right! What could possibly go wrong?

Gretchen: Okay. Can you walk us through what are you doing right now on your computer?

Lauren: Janelle’s gonna share her computer with us so that we can see what’s happening, but we might get some screen grabs as we go through.

Gretchen: We may put some links into the show notes if there’s stuff that’s visual that’s hard to see as well.

Janelle: What we’re looking at right now, this is actually just a browser window in Chrome. What I’m looking at is a thing that is an interface to an A.I. that’s being hosted on Google’s computers right now. Google is graciously allowing people to use their powerful computers that are pretty specialised for these kinds of calculations. Even though I am working on a fairly ordinary laptop, I’m able to connect to some fairly serious firepower here.

Lauren: It’s really interesting to get to see under the hood of making an A.I. run. I think we’ll give people a bit of a taste of that here, but if you want more details and more of an explanation of how we made “Robot Lingthusiasm,” we’ll make that into a bonus episode.

Janelle: So, here we are. I’ve connected to this A.I. I’ve downloaded a copy of it. Now, I’m going to upload lingthusiasm.txt. I’m going to upload this file of 2.4MB of you two talking. Let’s – okay. Okay. We’ve got our first sample out here right now. “It is already conversations.”

Lauren: Except it’s just conversation by someone called “Gina.”

Gretchen: Maybe this is the hybrid between the two of us – our merged alter-ego? Shall we read a few of these lines, Lauren? I think we should each start with “Gina” as we’re reading the lines.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: First line. This is the first of Gina’s lines. “Gina: Yeah, that’s why I’m gonna be honest with you.”

Lauren: “Gina: We’re not always going to be like, ‘Oh, we don’t know why we did that.’ That’s why.”

Gretchen: “Gina: I know. The people who’ve come to me to ask me are gonna be like, “Yeah, I didn’t know who was getting up and down the stairs and going to a doctor’s appointment.”

Lauren: Okay. So, not very Lingthusiasm in content there, but I like where Gina’s going.

Gretchen: Yeah. I like that it’s getting a dialogue thing. We’re pleased to announce that, in fact, your Lingthusiasm hosts will be replaced by robots but only for one episode and it will be bonus and it will be very, very funny. You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to listen to the next bonus episode, which will be written by robots and performed by you and me, Lauren.

Lauren: To listen to that bonus episode, check out patreon.com/lingthusiasm. You can hear us reading some of our favourite examples. We will also give patrons access to some of those reams of examples so you can find ones that make you chortle as well. It’ll have some screenshots from the A.I.-building process for patrons as well. Thank you so much, Janelle, for taking us through the process of actually training a neural net artificial intelligence and showing us some of the pitfalls and some of the challenges and for talking to us today. If people want to read more about how artificial intelligence is making the world weirder and more wonderful, and some of the challenges and limitations, your book is You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. I loved reading it.

Gretchen: Yes, I can personally attest that I got my copy the night before my book came out when I was very distracted. It successfully distracted me for several hours while I was waiting for that countdown, midnight, to have that happen. It has lots of fun pictures of weird things that the A.I.s are doing as well. Thanks again for coming on the show.

Janelle: Oh, it was my pleasure. This was a lot of fun. I loved listening to your very strange generated conversations.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, including extended versions of A.I.-generated Lingthusiasm transcripts, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts, and you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, IPA socks, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. Janelle Shane is @JanelleCShane on Twitter, her blog is aiweirdness.com, and her book is You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. To listen to bonus episodes and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Recent bonus topics include future English, onomatopoeia, and linguistics fiction. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay too. We really appreciate it if you could recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer to Claire Gawne, and our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Janelle: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#language #linguistics #lingthusiasm #episode 40 #transcripts #Janelle Shane #artificial intelligence #Neural net #roboLingthusiasm #AI

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mayorofcattown · 4 years

Text

Patreon updates

I’ll put more in depth info about all this under a read more, but I’m gonna start updating my patreon again but this time with speedpaints instead of/alongside visual novel stuff. There isn’t anything posted just yet, I’ll post the first speedpaint sometime in the next week.

Also was curious if people would be interested in longer, slower recordings? Not real time of course, but maybe like 1 hour instead of 10-20 minutes? Do people actually watch those, I have no idea lol

I’ve also updated the main intro on my main patreon page here (or if you just wanna check it out in general): https://www.patreon.com/mayorofcattown

Anyway, more info under the cut

So uhh its been a while lol. I’ve been pondering what do do with my patreon for the last few months, cause I didn’t really know what to do w it. I was originally gonna use it for visual novel related stuff exclusively, but since I finished the last fan game I made there hasn’t really been much to post.... cause while I have been working on stuff, it’s all boring backend programming stuff, or stuff that would be better shown publicly to get ppl interested in the first place. I’d always pitched it as mostly just a tip jar anyway, so I figured I’d just take a break for a bit and anyone could drop off if they weren’t interested anymore, but I still felt kinda bad abt leaving it, so I wanted to do something with it.

I had however been thinking of including speedpaint videos instead/in the meantime. I’ve always liked them personally, but they’re kinda a pain to make, and youtube’s algorithms make it hard to really get anywhere with them, so I could never be bothered doing them, but I figure they’d be a cool thing to put on my patreon instead. They’d be more worth my time, and I don’t have to deal with any of youtube’s bull.

Another reason I’ve been thinking of doing this is I finally got around to buying the full version of the screen recording software I use, Flashback, (it turns out they had a Very Good student discount lol) which makes editing the videos WAY easier, cause I used to have to export every piece of footage individually to be able to edit them, which took ages, but now I can edit them all in the software itself, and then just export it Once as the final copy, which saves So. Much. Time.

tbh the only reason I even use it is that all the other screen recorders I tried HATED clip studio for some reason, at least on my laptop (Especially OBS..... for some reason having OBS open on my laptop At All breaks pressure sensitivty in CSP for me??? but not in anything else??? wtf??) tho I mostly just like how simple it is to record stuff too

Basically I can make speedpaints way easier now but also I hate using youtube so I figure I’ll slap them on my patreon instead.

Also like I mentioned, I’m thinking of offering slowed down ones too? not real time, that’d be like 6+ hours at bare minimum, no one wants that, but I could do like. hour long ones if people are into that? I’ve seen ppl offer them, but I don’t have the attention span to watch someone draw for that long lol, so I dunno if people actually watch them. they would take like no extra effort to make, if I’m already doing sped up ones anyway

I will probably do abt one speedpaint (2 if I do the slowed down one too, but same footage) a month, available on the $1 tier. I don’t plan to do other tiers, this is still mostly just a fun tip jar thing, so I never want ppl to feel obligated to pay, it’s just a fun bonus for the ppl who do and are able to support me, but it’s totally not necessary. I might end up making the speedpaints public after like. a year or so, and I’m never gonna have like. actual art exclusive there or anything.

I don’t record Everything that I draw, cause it can be a hassle sometimes, but I do have a bit of a backlog of footage that I can use, so I have a buffer I can go back on if I don’t get anything recorded that month. The first speedpaint I’m gonna post is of the tanuma bday pic, with him and natsume on chilling on madara, and I also have recordings of the Ass Class and Tales of Vesperia pics I drew a while ago.

#sorry I rambled more than I thought I would lol #anyway #I'm also gonna make a separate post about visual novel stuff I've been doing #cause I've been doing stuff! It's just mostly boring programming stuff

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halloweennut · 5 years

Note

A little cheesy but, how about Lou discovers that Draxum has never kissed anyone before, and Lou offers to “teach” him

(I’ve been trying to do a tiered release between here and patreon but I’m really excited about this one, and the Sunday fic might be late because I’m getting finicky about it)

(Pre-relationship)

The idea that no one had ever kissed Draxum outside of a familial or friendly kiss on the cheek or forehead was preposterous to Lou, and a downright insult to the yokai. Who wouldn’t want to kiss him? Theoretically speaking of course. Sure, he was aloof and a little stand-offish, perhaps a bit too uptight at times, but past all that…Draxum was sweet, gentle even, with a brilliant mind and hair that would be so easy to tangle fingers into-

Lou had to rectify the situation immediately. As a friend. Close friends. Nothing more.

“Would you like a kiss? I know that sounds like one of my normal teases and goads, but I’m highkey serious,” Lou asked, quickly adding in that he was being truthful as Draxum’s look of shocked disbelief. Lou swore he saw a faint tint on his cheeks before Draxum turned away indignantly.

“I do not have the experience to perform to your expectations, whatever they are,” Draxum replied, arms crossed.

“That’s fine, I’ll just have to teach you,” Lou said nonchalantly, stepping in front of him. Draxum raised an eyebrow. “I do have more experience after all.”

He hated how that last sentence sounded, but it was true. Between his films and numerous romantic exploits, he had kissed a lot of people, actor, actress, socialite and the likes alike. Draxum knew that, Lou just hoped he didn’t diminish the experience. He hoped that Draxum said yes, without much badgering on his part.

“Fine,” Draxum huffed. “Only because I know you won’t let the issue drop until I let you.”

Lou grinned, pumping a fist in the air. “Yes!”

“Do not make me change my mind, Lou,” Draxum sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “And not a word of this to Big Mama or anyone else! At least Huginn and Muninn aren’t here.”

“Probably off at the Battle Nexus viewing lounge or something. Come on, the lesson starts now!” Lou said, grabbing his hand and dragging Draxum to a more secluded room in his house, settling on what appeared to be a small sitting parlor. He stopped and turned to face Draxum. He didn’t look too amused.

“Okay, first lesson,” Lou started. “Eye contact is very important, I cannot stress this enough. This is one of the best ways to communicate interest to a partner and see if they’re just as interested. Verbal communication is always good if you can’t get a read.”

Draxum nodded, perhaps a bit halfheartedly, and brought his eyes up to meet Lou’s, bright and intense. Lou smiled in approval, keeping his eyes locked on his.

“Good! Second lesson, closeness and physical contact,” he continued, stepping closer. “There’s a few points of contact you can employ for a kiss, all optimal for pulling your partner close.”

Lou grabbed one of Draxum’s hands, placing in on his waist. “Waist is always a good place to start, and from there, other spots can be utilized.”

“You’re approaching this very analytically,” Draxum said. “I can appreciate that.”

“No problem,” Lou replied. “I know how your brain works by now.”

He grabbed Draxum’s other hand. “You can place both hands on the waist to start, then move one of them up to the upper back, the back of the head, or one of your partner’s hands. All will get them closer.”

“Back of the head? Wouldn’t that be more akin to a neck based attack?” Draxum asked, ever the warrior. Lou laughed.

“No. Back of the head allows for - oh, just let me demonstrate.” Lou raised a hand, placing it on the back of Draxum’s head, maintaining a gentle grip and tangling his fingers in the red locks. He let himself appreciate the sensation a moment before continuing. “There’s something intimate about the touch, and you get to move their head for better angles. Angle is good for this, and both parties can do this.”

“Ah, I see…,” Draxum replied. Lou felt a hand leave his waist, trailing up his back to the back of his head, perfectly copying his movement moments before. Lou tried not to shiver at the sensation. “Like this?”

“Mhmm,” Lou swallowed a lump in his throat. “Perfect…ahem, so, from here, in one motion - that’s key - you pull them close, angle them just slightly, and then, and this is also key, you pause for a second, before the kiss.”

“And the kiss?” Draxum asked. Lou felt him pull on him slightly. “Any guidelines?”

“Not that I can think of…,” Lou suddenly realized that he didn’t have as much control over the situation as he thought. Mostly because Draxum had already pulled him in close, and there was little space between then two. “Draxum-”

His voice came out quietly, half silenced by the closeness and the intensity of Draxum’s eyes. Time stopped for a moment. He only broke away to glance down at Draxum’s mouth and back up, then slowly Draxum closed the gap between them.

It was gentle, cautious, uncharacteristically unsure and done as though Lou was something small and delicate. Lou leaned into the kiss, angling to deepen it and encourage Draxum to do so as well, draping his arms over his shoulders. Draxum tightened his grip on Lou as though the space between them could possibly get any smaller. Lou felt his chest threaten to burst when Draxum finally threw caution to the wind, throwing himself fully to the kiss.

And then he pulled away. Lou felt breathless, holding onto Draxum’s shoulders and he felt his face heat up. Draxum moved his hand from his head to his chin, slightly tilting it up. Lou tried to hide that he had gotten flustered over just a kiss as the line of sight was reestablished. Draxum looked calm and cool! How?!

There was a second’s pause before he spoke. “Was that…Was that satisfactory?”

There it was, the lack of composure! Lou nodded, still trying to find his voice.

“Uh-huh. You learn fast,” he forced a laugh. “It was good, it was good.”

Lou pulled away after realizing they were still in that intimate closeness. Draxum stepped back as well, trying to regain his normal collectedness. Lou awkwardly pointed behind him to the door, gracelessly stepping around him.

“I, um, gotta go,” he said, turning to face him as he walked backwards to the door. “You know how it is, training and everything. Got to stay the Champion! I’ll - oof!”

In his rush, he nearly walked into the doorframe. Avoiding Draxum’s eyes, he quickly finished his goodbye and rushed out. Lou mentally kicked himself for looking like a fool and acting so foolishly and flustered over a simple kiss!

….It was just a kiss, right?

#rottmnt #baron jitsu #baronjitsu #baron draxum #lou jitsu

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breezethegame · 6 years

Video

youtube

Mini Devlog - #9

February 27, 2019

Well, last week was a busy week! Let’s get started

Accomplishments this week:

I ended up having to rewrite a lot of the input code. This was mostly due to how I was handling presses vs holds (which I may or may not even use too much). I needed to decide how to handle determine what's a button hold vs a button press, while also making sure that the check for holds didn't cause there to be any delay (for example, 0.1-0.2 seconds actually felt noticeable). Ultimately for the meantime, I decided that a press will execute and a hold will follow afterwards, this basically means a hold will act somewhat like a follow up attack.

I also had to review my input queuing system. The purpose of this system is to collect inputs and store them into a list, then giving the “inputs” an evaluation/expiration time. This will allow for reviewing inputs over a short period of time, and subsequently make the controls feel a little more “responsive” when pressed in succession as inputs will "register" as soon as a character is in a state that can use them (assuming that input doesn't expire first). I’m currently using this for combat inputs.

I might be doing a wack job explaining it, but here's a video I stumbled upon a while back that inspired the idea of implementing Input Buffering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmTkH80uojE

I also finished the Team site I mentioned in my last update. The team seems to like it, and it allowed me a chance to review a lot of materials that were written up but haven’t looked over in a while.

As some of you might have saw, I posted a recruit post on the blog/twitter last week. We received a little over 50 portfolio submissions! As of this update, we’ve reviewed all of them, and have started reaching out to some of the finalists!

This was definitely an insightful opportunity in many different ways (and in some ways, a tad bit stressful!)

We also begun discussion on the game’s UI, which also brought up some game design concerns that we will be looking to address, such as Breeze’s stats.

Some Additional Coding Items and Bug Fixes

I fixed a bug where Breeze wasn’t positioned on the wall correctly when wall sliding

I also fixed another bug where Breeze’s wall sliding force wasn’t correct, and also noticed that he was actually going in and out of wall sliding (which was causing a ton of state transitions!)

Reimplemented game pausing! I went through all the character states and other systems to lock down what shouldn’t be operating if the game’s state was either paused or in cutscene.

I also implemented a nice shader to blur stuff that’s behind certain UI elements.

I added in a “Tweening” plugin that allows me to animate UI and other elements in fancy ways. I also found a cool source that demonstrates some of these different types of tweens: https://easings.net/

I’ve updated the game’s UI manager to make it easier to access UI elements and their events (like hiding the health bar, or displaying the pause screen) in a much easier way.

Next Focus:

Select the VisDev/Background artist (or artists)

Continued work on a new testable build

Begin implementing some particle effects

Add in a couple more character states that are needed (mostly transition states)

Updating the main Website and blog! I noted in the last update that already done some updates to the Patreon page, and also added a new Sodo tier!

Continued work on UI design/planning. Notably, the health bar and some other in-game UI elements.

I still haven’t found a company to work with for shirt printing and enamel pin creation. If anyone has some recommendations, feel free to share!

If you didn’t know already, if you’d like to support the project, we’re on Patreon! Or, if you’d rather donate once (or on occasion), you can do so here via Paypal!

#game development #Breeze in the Clouds #devlog #mini devlog #patreon #indie game #unity #Unity3D #video #video game

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yuurivoice · 6 years

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The YuuriVoice Survey Results

A few days ago I put out a survey here on Tumblr in hopes that I could dig up some helpful information in regards to what I can do to improve moving forward and keep things here fresh and on point. With over 1,100 responses I think it’s safe to say we can take a look at the data and see what we’ve got! So...let’s break it down! (Shoutout to Lucio mains!)

How long have you been following the blog?

I found this interesting because nowadays on the internet people don’t always stick with a thing for very long. Certainly there’s plenty of follower turnover on my blog, people are REALLY hype for one thing, then over time they may move on to other things for a whole variety of reasons. Having 1/4 of the responses be from those who have followed for over a year is huge. It doesn’t surprise me that less than 3 months is the smallest portion because it’s been a pretty slow three months in general for me, but that’s how it goes sometimes!

How did you first discover my content?

I’m not shocked to find that most people discover my content when searching for specific characters, given my fandom based approach. I want to dabble in some non-fandom audios more often because that’s a whole demographic (i.e. people specifically looking for audio porn) that I don’t always tap into. When I do, the results are usually really great, and you’ll see in a moment that the people who show up because of the characters don’t necessarily ONLY want that character they found me through.

What is shocking, however, is that nearly 10% found me through YouTube. That might not seem like a lot, but I haven’t been doing the YouTube thing for long (or consistently for that matter) so I think that might help show you all why I’m putting value in getting content onto YouTube. There’s infinitely more reach on YouTube than there is on Tumblr.

Do you have a favorite character/voice of mine?

This was one that I already knew the answer to because of my own prior research, but I think it’s important that we all take a look at it here together. Guzma is the most popular voice by an impressive margin. I say impressive because I honest to god never would have expected things to play out like this. Yuuri and Sidon are also very popular, of course. Then there’s a healthy 20% that like two or more of the voices.

So you see why it’s not always easy for me to keep up. Between balancing the big three and exploring new voices and my own as well, there will naturally be less of some things. Yuuri is obviously super important to me, but there’s also significantly more content for him than all the others, even after slowing down a bit. A lot of what I do is primarily based on what is getting commissioned as well, and it’s no surprise that Guzma has been the most commissioned character due to his popularity.

There’s not a lot else to say here other than I’m doing my best to make sure there are no Good Boys (TM) left behind, but I’m also just one man. I’m glad that there is crossover between fans of the voices as well. I haven’t got a “I hate when you post this instead of that” message in a long, long time. It’s nice that most people can at least enjoy one of the other voices aside from their fave, even if it’s not EXACTLY what they want. Y’all are real good to me in that regard.

Do you listen to non-character audios of mine?

Pretty straight forward. The vast majority of the followers are cool with checking out things regardless of whether fandom is involved or not, so long as it’s their jam in regards to content. This makes me happy and hopeful. Characters have always been a great way to get people to discover me, but I think the future is not just doing fandom stuff.

Do you prefer One Shot audios, or series?

This one is extremely clear, my current process of having some audios that are a series that ties together and most that are just one shot scenes is working just fine. I figured as much, but it never hurts to ask!

Does having my SFW content on YouTube interest you?

This was a relief, honestly. Moving older stuff to YouTube has been a process, and the earlier data showed that it does have a positive impact. In the future there will be new stuff hitting YouTube and Tumblr at the same time, but it has taken me a long time to try and get caught up so old stuff is up on YouTube and I can move on to new. It’s happening slowly, but you can at least rest easy knowing I’m not gonna crush your dashboards with spam of old audios uploaded in video form.

Would you submit scripts/ideas if there was a system to do so?

Well what the hell am I waiting for? I’ll get to work on creating a submission system where you can send in scripts and ideas. Something better than Tumblr’s submissions. I’ll have examples for you to look at so you can see how it should be formatted and other information as well. I’m very interested to see how that plays out, so I’ll get to work on it soon!

Would you be interested in my own original characters, voices, and stories?

This is a very encouraging bit of information! In the not so distant future I want this to be a thing. My own characters with their own art, backgrounds, personalities, and voices. I had a pretty expansive idea for what this could look like, but perhaps an early taste with just one character to give people a real idea of what I’m talking about would be cool. Interesting.

Are you a current or former supporter of my Patreon?

No surprise here given how big my Tumblr audience is versus 350 people on Patreon, but I wanted to ask this so I could give context to this next question.

Is there something in particular that would make you more likely to become a Patron?

First things first, my bad on not having the foresight to include a “financial situation” answer. That’s a good 20% of responses and I really should have included it.

I was very, very interested to see that input and voting was such a big deal! This seems to have been a blind spot for me, perhaps because I’m just bad at running polls and figuring all of that out, but damn. The Patreon version of the survey also confirmed that this is a big deal. So I am going to be sitting down with my Patrons and figuring out what tiers need to be voting and the resulting audio, as well as how I’ll be able to deal with things like the big split between characters. I don’t know exactly how that’ll play out, but obviously it’s an important factor that needs to be incorporated to my Patreon.

I’m also flattered that 25% of responses just want more access to me, my process, and stuff like that. I can post more. I’m looking at doing Patreon specific monthly Q&A’s for a start and I’ll also pick my Patrons’ brains for more ideas.

As for more exclusive audios, this is tough. I already do three as it is, and now I’ll be figuring out how to get Patron input on those. I don’t want to put too much content behind a paywall, you know? Like, I get it, people would pay for it. That’s really cool! There is a trade off, though. More exclusives may in some cases mean I can’t always put out as much public stuff. Now, that might change with script submissions taking some of the workload off of me. As it stands, I just don’t know. First things first, I’ll figure out the whole voting and submission thing and improve the exclusives that are already in place.

Does personal engagement with me matter to you?

You like me! You really like me! My big takeaway here is “Yeah, you’re alright, but don’t answer 20 questions in a row and ruin my dash, please.” I think that’s what it means, at least. I needed to know if I needed to STFU or just keep doing my thing, so I’ll keep on doing my thing. <3

One of the recurring themes in the additional comments section was that Tumblr kind of sucks for audios. A better system would be ideal and I think everyone is absolutely right. I don’t have any answers right now, but know that I’m thinking about this a lot, and I want to do something about it.

Thank you all for taking your time to fill out my survey, and of course, thank you for following, listening, and being all around awesome. This was incredibly insightful and I hope that with this information I can make some big improvements around here!

#long post

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dzpenumbra · 2 years

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9/24/22

Today was much better, but really fuckin weird. I got like 4 hours of sleep, woke up and smoked. When I went back to bed, my inspiration just cracked wide open. I started combining different cool ideas I had seen that I really thought were doing something new and original. I started stitching them together to make a series idea that I was so excited about that I literally couldn't stop talking about it, for 2 hours. I was on a goddam roll. So I got up, made some spicy chicken ramen in the microwave and started writing it down.

Think Survivorman, but Rimworld. No more settling down and building a fortress with killboxes and shit. We're going nomad. And my chat is going to guide our journey. I mean... the Patrons will, of course... And current Twitch subs.

I think I'm going to leave Twitch for YouTube. I dipped my toes in the water years back, the adjustment would be minimal at worst. The only reason I'm on Twitch in the first place is because I could get money there. Because getting Affiliate was easier to achieve than getting 1000 Subscribers on YouTube. It's much easier to get 5 friends to watch your streams (or in my case, 5 strangers pretending and trying to be my friend) than to get 1000 followers on your no-name YT channel when you have no friends. Then YT has to actually approve you for donos and shit. So... I just figured Twitch would be easier to get started on and stuck with it. Raids are a thing too, but whatever.

I was thinking I could use a dono menu as incentive to get my Partnership and unlock money making abilities. Like... people can donate to set ingame goals for the character(s), off a list so it doesn't get too "I gave you money and you couldn't do what I asked". And they can help me get exposure in order to unlock that menu and be able to use it. Patreon Tiers could work too, but I really just kinda need to keep it on one site. People just don't like jumping onto other websites than where they're at. I would really like to incentivize Patreon shit directly through YT and make the rewards more visible on my end (like their Patreon Tier in chat or whatever), but yeah, maybe that's coming up in the future if they try to merge or at least work together with them or something.

I want this thing to be running at all times. No pausing. No fast forwarding. So this character is living in real-time with the stream. This would be really fucking good for a subathon, too. And the best part... if I can figure out a UI substitute for those shitty green screened cameras pointing at the streamer... But instead the Rimworld colony there... ideally if people could just listen to the same audio track but swap between Rimworld and whatever I have on the other monitor... Because then I can do art streams, and music streams, and even Minecraft streams... while I'm streaming Rimworld. The colony will always be running and I can just tab over to check in, I already have follow-cams set up to follow the colonists around.

I get so immersed in these ideas, they get so visceral. I can see myself at a desk hosting this. I can feel the cold morning feeling that would be my equivalent of PiG's morning coffee and breakfast in his Sydney apartment with his wife. As I get up and get my day started with Max, and check in with chat, who is watching my replays as I sleep. Like, I can really see that happening. I try to keep that hope, that mental vision, that hypothetical scenario, alive and fuel belief and faith in it. And what happens? People don't see what I see in it. They fall flat. They are just like... "oh, that's cool." Or something monotone. Emotionless. Like I just told them about a cool new type of tax filing form I heard about. Actually, they might be more interested in that, to be honest.

It takes this drive, this inspiration, this divine spark. I love that term for it, I want to keep that one! It takes that divine spark, and snuffs it out. It feels like they almost consume it. It's hard to tell, because whether they consume it or destroy it, I feel loss either way. But my Mom made a point to let me know she had an insane day and barely slept. She's running on fumes. I just went into my own head and clarified a few things about my Mom, she's got some health issues and doctor-related things. I don't like talking about others' personal demons specifically, but let's just say it's very justified. She won't go to a doctor. Neither will my dad, about anything. And they're in their late-60's and early 70's. So... I hope since my sister in law is a doctor... she might be able to urge my Mom in the right direction.

I don't want to talk about this. Too much doctor stuff in my life right now, a bit too spooky. Maybe another night. I wanted to focus things back into bringing some light to the end of my day. I chatted with my mom, it was overall very good. I made a huge batch of Falafel, Tzatziki and sliced tomato and ate fuckin all of it. With some limeade on the side. *chef's kiss* And smoked first, too, this new indica-dominant hybrid. And watched skate videos that were just absolutely amazing. Like, they captured skating so fucking well. NKA Vids - https://www.youtube.com/c/NkaVidsSkateboarding check him out, good lord. It's seriously just like going skating with your friends, the same fucking vibe. I miss that shit so much. It was so refreshing to get to watch this guy's POV as he's waiting for a security guard to climb a 10 floor parking garage to kick him and his friends out. Scary, of course, but like... I remember being that! I don't miss being yelled at or told to leave, people screaming and insulting us and treating us like vandals. But I miss the adventure of finding new spots, and checking out this new place your friends heard about, or skating the go-to spot. Going with your friends. Rooting eachother on. Tossing out trick ideas, riffing off eachother. I hope I can really get my ass to start skating before the snow, there's not much time left. But I WILL snowskate this year, hold me to that, I just need to figure out where, because I likely wont' have yard access anymore. I'll try to connect locally on reddit or drop by the skate shop or something. I'd love to street snowskate too, but I'd like power in numbers on that if I'm in a city. Don't wanna be doing that alone.

I threw together a modlist on Rimworld, everything but the UI and the no-pause mod are pretty much good to go. I listened to my brother's music on loop the whole time. Oh shit no, so I did my SketchDaily first (which was REALLY sick and abstract for once...), listened to music during that, then went over to Rimworld after.

I sent a message to my brother, told him that I had been listening to his shit, that I liked specific tracks, that I was really impressed with his range and really like the direction he's going lately. The poor guy has 0 followers, I can't even follow because I don't have an active SoundCloud, I can't figure out which email the account I want to access is associated with because I haven't used it in like... 8 years? 9 years? I connected him with my Insta. It felt like progress. We haven't talked in several years, we've had some big fights. We both have PTSD pretty bad, and both of us suffered great losses recently. I have a bit more experience... just... exposure-wise than he does. Which obviously isn't a competition - but interestingly enough almost always is perceived as such... - but it does sorta... lessen the shock of things slightly?

It's hard to describe, kinda like getting used to the temperature of a tub or something. Like scalding hot water will hurt you no matter what. But if you've been in that tub for a while, you sorta adjust to it, even if it stays the same temperature. And I feel like though he's had some losses and conflicts, he hadn't really suffered profound loss until recently. Where I have had it peppered in around my life for a decade at least, probably even longer. So I've just kinda been in the tub a bit longer. And with that experience, comes adapted tricks, learned lessons. They're all catered to the user of course, but you never know... maybe just hearing the method of learning lessons in the moment could be helpful. You never know, and I always feel like it's worth trying. Trying to pass on your lessons learned, so others can make their own choices with a broader spectrum of information.

Things have gotten very bad. In my life, in my relationships, in the world. Maybe it's just growing up. Maybe it's always been this way. But I see Fear running rampant. Consuming everyone around me. And it just keeps getting stronger. And it stares me in the eyes every now and again too. And I'm gonna feed my ego a little bit here and quote myself from 2008 - "Fear, her ugly face is poking through the clouds again. I've gotta stare her in the eyes and tell her this time she won't win." I feel like I've even evolved beyond this. Maybe this is what Joseph Campbell was talking about with the Dragon and the Demon. Like... dealing with the dragon is a way of dealing with a problem. Slaying, defeating, martyring, consuming, conquering - fighting the dragon. But with the demon, the relationship is just so much different, and the way of dealing with it is much more... conversational. At least in my recent experience, it's been very intentional on my behalf and it seems to be very successful. With the demon, and other spirit work of the kind, I've been... I don't want to say it, but kinda becoming friends with my demons. At very least uneasy allies. I'm learning to sit down and parlay with my Fear. Listen to what it has to say, have it listen to what I have to say, conference together, float ideas, brainstorm, then come to a course of action after. Not cowering from Fear, not facing it in battle, not consuming it, not letting it consume me, but sitting down and having a cup of tea with it.

I've talked about this before, but yeah... that's the stage I've been trying desperately to work on and integrate naturally. Weed helps tremendously. It allows my nasty fears tons of creative energy to tap into, that can go great like my inspiration time today, or shit like my freakouts a few years ago. They're both important. All that info is super important. So rather than do this "I'm Light, you're Dark, grrrrr" bullshit, we both agree we have a common vested interest in surviving together. Me and my Fear, we're both stuck in this soul together. For good. Because we're parts of the same personality. We might as well try to get along, learn a common language. And you only learn language through practice.

It's 6AM, and I got all fuckin existential again when I really wanted to go to bed. :( This strain is very inspiring, I'm actually slightly worried it might make me more mentally active before bed, rather than slowing me down and relaxing me as intended.

I'm going to see how my mom is doing tomorrow, and hopefully hear back from my brother about maybe hanging out. I want to go back to the river, I'd love to share that place. I made the offer, but no solid answer. Maybe I'll try to just say I'm going to the river regardless tomorrow afternoon, I miss looking for stones.

#diary #journal #stream of thoughts #spilled thoughts #online journal #mental health #stream of consciousness #self care #self improvement

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thebibliosphere · 7 years

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Just while I am talking about how wonderful and amazing my followers and friends are, it’s recently been brought to my attention, that some people are buying multiple pre-order pdf copies of Hunger Pangs via my patreon by upping their subscription, then sending me messages going “hey I know you don’t have a $15 reward tier but can this count for 3 copies” to which I reply, yes, of course, assuming they wanted to buy copies for friends not on tumblr. Which cool, awesome! Thank you for buying those extra pre-orders and not just emailing the book to your friends when you’re done with it or putting it up on a torrent site*. That is amazingly kind and thoughtful of you <3

And then I started getting a few messages, asking if they could give their copy of Hunger Pangs away. And I was like “oh, you don’t want to keep your pre-order? Uh, I mean, I can refund you if you don’t want it” and they said “oh. no, no. I’m still buying your book for ME." and then explained in detail, that they want to give an extra copy of the patreon book away to someone who couldn’t afford to buy it themselves, or who couldn’t safely have openly queer fiction on their kindle/amazon purchase history in case their family saw it and...this has happened multiple times. I have had multiple messages from at least 12 people asking me, “hey, if I buy an extra copy of your book, can you give it away to someone who can’t afford it?”

And I’m just...you guys are just...so...I can’t even with how good and kind and wonderful you all are sometimes. I really can’t. You’re amazing. Not only because you are thinking of me and helping me to survive using my words, but because you are thinking of others and going “hey, I bet someone could use a happy queer story about love with vampires, werewolves and punching undead fascists in the face right about now” like, what kind of honest to goodness Saints are you.

Thank you.

I really cannot express how wonderful this whole experience has been for me. I never thought I’d write a book. I thought I might try, but I never thought in a million years it would be something people would be interested in, let alone want to share with others. And just...thank you. From the depths of my humbled and terrified little heart. Thank you.

And thank you for giving me the opportunity to give multiple copies of my book away for “free” to those who couldn’t afford it, or couldn’t safely own a physical or kindle copy. I’m sure it will mean a lot to the person who gets it. And if you want to do the give away yourself or if you want me to organize a mass give away post or something, please, let me know. I am more than happy to do so.

Just. ugh. UGH. You guys. I didn’t expect to spend my night crying over how good and wonderful people are and yet here we are. Thank you.

(*please don’t do that. Like for real, please don’t put ANY author’s work up on a torrent site, this is partly why publishers are charging insane prices for e-books now, to make up for lost sales and also cutting back on the number of physical copies they order. Which means fewer sales cause who the hell wants to pay $17.99 for an e-book, especially when you have so many people throwing fiction up on amazon for less than a dollar, forcing the rest of us to sell 60k novels for 99 cents to compete with them. And just to give you an idea of how harmful this is, even pricing HPangs at $5.99 on amazon, I am selling at a loss for how many hours I put into it. It works out at nowhere even near minimum wage, but I know the current market and my own limits, and there’s no way I could charge more than that in good faith. So please, support authors and artists and don’t fucking torrent shit, or if you do and you enjoy it, go buy it if and when you can. Or rent it from your local library. We get paid when you do that too. It really does make a difference to us.)

#Hunger Pangs #Hpangs #Phangs #amazing people #patreon #kindness #I can't even with all of you sometimes #I really can't #you're wonderful

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abundantchewtoys · 4 years

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Homestuck^2 re: Chapter 1 “Clown Logistics” (p57-95)

So, I would like to see the persecuting crew, but I wonder what the Clown Logistics'd apply to in that context.

It might also apply to getting rid of Gamzee's dead body - if Vriska ML fears Jane might come after her and (Vriska).

Though I would like it to apply to something more innocent, like John talking to Harry Anderson and harlequins somehow making their way into the subject matter.

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Page 57

Oooooh, so THAT is what Vriska ML looks like! The text hadn't described her that much in detail, so this is a pleasant surprise!

She's a goth, hahah. It's ironic - in a way, dressing this way isn't rebellious at all, if that's what she was aiming for, since both her moms are themselves quite gothic too. Didn't expect the short hair, but it stands to reason a child raised by Kanaya and Rose wouldn't have long hair where her mothers don't!

Cool outfit all around.

So, it's also a nice juxtaposition to (Vriska) from the Game Over timeline. She went more the punk route under influence of Meenah.

And post-retcon (Vriska) is still looking quite burned and bloodied from her escapades on the battlefield in the Furthest Ring. Though it's notable that her chest isn't pierced, I thought a piece of broken spacetime hit her there

Hahah, she's claiming John's phone. Stickyfingers Serket.

So this means that when Jake says he didn't know where John went to... He was here just now, talking to Rose! So this takes place before John went to talk to Roxy and Harry Anderson. Oh boy, so we might be in for seeing that heartwrenching father-son conversation after all.

Say, the way Vriska ML holds her arms, with her sleeves like that... It kind of reminds me of Kanaya. I wonder if there are other mannerisms we'll see her having taken over from her mothers.

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Page 58

Oooooh, hah. That's actually so true to her nature. (Vriska) staying obsure, not as relevant as the real deal? Nope.

This actually feels like something where the suggestion box could have opened up again.

Then again, we might just be shown a list of fake options on the next page.

Though I wonder if this is where people chose Vriska ML, the term used in the recap page. Vriskers is a fan favorite for the original flavour.

Hmm, Rosemary? It's just accurate but left-field enough it might work. :P And it's 8 letters, come to think of it!

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Page 59

... Where did that eyepatch come from?! Was she really that hurt in the fight? Hah, she drew an 8/infinity symbol on it.

Ooooooh. Vrissy, huh? Okay, it's kind of a cute nickname. Sounds kind of like Vriska+sissy, though. Although, she IS kind of a sister to Vriska.

She seems to enjoy it though! But, uh, to me, it's still a bit confusing to read, since the first four letters of their name is still the same, and their text colour is all the same. :P We need Vrissy to change to red text colour, stat! :P

Anyway, they want to dispose of the body - not turn their back on it - and Vrissy wants to call some people.; So that's bound to be Tavros and Harry Anderson, right?

Though it's a bit strange she'd call her kismesis and matesprit at the same time, especially as said people are currently under close scrutiny by Jane, you'd think.

What's Vriska's reaction going to be to Vrissy calling a Tavros, though? :P

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Page 60

Huh, that's less of an antagonistic interaction between them. Maybe "kismesis" is a loose term.

"Roll with it", pffffff.

So, Tavros is very much going to highjack one of Jane's smaller ships, right? Maybe this is what Jake referred to, his son and his kismesis being out.

Hah, namedrop! Now to see Vriska's response. Jawdrop?

Blaperile thinks Tavros might come in a car. That could work too, stuffing Gamzee's body in the trunk. And going on a roadtrip.

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Page 61

XD, yeah, actually, a cringe reaction fits too. Then again, it was only a few hours ago she saw Tavros' ghost, so it wouldn't be THAT big a blast from the past... Wait, was she expecting GCATavrosprite or something??

Hah, so Vrissy thinks Tavros will get a kick out of seeing Gamzee dead. I don't think he'll be estatic, but he'll certainly won't mind. I'm dying to see how he looks though, Jade and John's biological brother!

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Page 62

... That looks like a flying Smart from this angle.

Lol. Yeah, seems like a Vris thing, oggling Tavros car and being miffed it isn't hers.

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Page 63

oooooooh. Yup, this looks what a Jane/Jake child with a bit of Gamzee peppering would end up looking like! Cool sidebangs.

The purple text and suit does beg explanation though, since Gamzee's such a shitty rolemodel. Maybe he doesn't really have a say in his clothing. :/

He does remind me of one of the kids on the Sburb fan album this way, though.

I love him.

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Page 64

... Pfffff, and there's him keeping up the Tavros name in the unwilling clumsiness. Heheehh.

Vrissy did do a good job explaining the situation.

And it seems like this boy might have inherited some of John and Jake's panache at dramatic entrances!

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Page 65

D: Poor, poor dude.

Ding dong, the clown is dead.

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Page 66

(Still not seeing the kismesitude, though I LOVE Vrissy's attempt at being supportive.)

Vriska's also being rather uncharacteristically hospitable. Also, isn't she weirded out by the idea of attracting OTHER people, after having known the same 20-odd faces for so long?

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Page 68

He's on the brink of adventure. He's heard the note desolation plays.

Tavros' life is on the brink of changing, is what I'm saying.

I wonder, is he bare underneath the sweater? Oh righ, he had that shirt with the bowtie.

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Page 69

Hey, suspenders! ... They're just as orange as Vrissy's phone! Huh, I thought it might have been a compression issue, that Vrissy's phone was Crockertech (since it's presumably the foremost prelavent tech), but now I wonder.

... Wait, does Dirk have tech company? Orange and such. But suspenders don't strike me as his thing. :P

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Page 71

Wait what?

... Is THIS Harry Anderson??????????

I thought the kid had glasses too, and black hair like John!

Dang, okay, those are some STRONG Lalonde genes. Coooooool.

John's son is a coolkid. My mind is blown.

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Page 72

LOLLLLLLL.

So his personality is a delightful cross between Roxy and John's. He's only working off the assumption Vrissy's pranking him. Thinking he's the pranking MASTER.

Well, that coolkid facade is gonna be cracked real soon. Though I take his word for it he'll still know where to stash the thing. Even though he's all slick, I think the kid has inherited Roxy's IQ.

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Page 75

Hahah, Harry Anderson didn't play truant for his last hour of school.

And Vriska's references to Alternia are going to keep weirding the other teens out.

This clown business does INDEED bring a lot of logistics with it.

Heehee, yeah, Vriska notes as well that Vrissy's rather chummy with her kismesis. I wonder if she, Tavros and Harry Anderson are in a state of flux in their quadrants. When she's chummy with one, she antagonizes the other.

Oooh, time for the first real point of disagreement between the two Vris'!

Blaperile has a good point - Tavros is going to end up with the rebels somehow. Well, I suppose him being seen with Vrissy is going to be enough to start a rumour, but he might indeed end up in the rebel camp proper, in the Troll Kingdom.

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Page 76

Awww. Okay, so it's just a very low-energy kismesitude. His dorkiness vs her bossiness. And it just works, a better adjusted version of Nitram and Vriska's relation. It's even tamer than John and Terezi's bickering, is what I'm saying. At least for now.

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Page 77

Pfff, so he actually went 'Right-o' and still followed Vriska out the door. Cool move for a kismesis, for sure.

N'aww, she hates-likes him.

Why did no-one captchalogue the corpse, though?

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Page 79

So, are they gonna get caught? I'm not that worried about the honk. I mean, at this point, Gamzee reviving? I'm not really seeing it. But his body, even at rest, is full of the honkiest squeaks, that I believe.

If they let him drop now, which might happen since the aquabloods aren't stopping... It'll cause a ruckus.

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Page 81

Pfffff. Vriska's efficiency level is at such a low level. It's hilarious.

Tavros has a good intuition, it seems, he felt she would be counting to 8.

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Page 83

Ahhh, this is such a wacky hijinx adventure, I never expected...

Wait.

Hold the fuck up.

We're now in the Weekend at Bernie’s zone. Holy shit.

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Page 85

Pffff, they actually managed to set the sprinklers off with so much as smoke? My god.

Yeah, they have to run for cover now, leaving the dead clown behind.

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Page 86

Welp. WELP. They're caught. Hilarious BLUH panel though.

Okay, now, I can see how this story will get blown up, and Jane assumes the rebels kidnapped Tavros. ... Wait.

Chances are high that all the teens are just going to end up somewhere else entirely, not even at the rebel camp at all. Ah, yes, a misunderstanding pile-up causing the war to escalate is just something I can see happening here. Bonus points for it being a bunch of dumb teens covering up a dumb clown murder.

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Page 87

Ooooooh. Five-letter names! Well, it fits Harry Anderson. And emoji's! :O We're in a new decennium now, that's for sure.

Yeah this is going viral.

I wonder if these people's names are, like, coming from Patreon backers. Or old Kickstarter backers from higher tiers.

(Yeah yeah, it's probably the writers themselves having named these folks, I'm making a federal issue from it.)

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Page 88

Cool perspective

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Page 89

Pfffff, Vriska's having the time of her life. She's just having fun, since she doesn't really concern herself with consequences.

Vrissy has a better handle of the impact of what just happened.

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Page 90

... Yup, that's about the jumping to conclusions I was expecting.

Yeesh, Jane is actually as dense as Jake in a lot of critical ways. She's very good at convincing herself of the truth of something. Like here, how she still loved Gamzee, and how Tavros loved him too.

It seems like the conflict on Earth C pivots around Jane's policies. But I don't see how she can be made aware of all her shortsightedness and prejudice, at this point.

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Page 91

PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF. Okay I wasn't expecting this to happen.

But it's an actual freaking callback to the beginnings of the story, and Act 6 Act 1, hahah.

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Page 92

... Harry is sitting on the bleachers.

Hah, he thinks this is the prank the other teens were pulling on him, just setting off the fire alarm. Thinks he has it all figured out.

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Page 94

Best reaction image. Ever. Hahahahah.

He was like:

8) |8) :o

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Page 95

Hah! And even a carapacian expression! (Alternatively, Pickle Inspector.) He's inherited that one from his mother's side, no doubt.

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Shenanigans. Best shenanigans.

So, where does this take place in regard with John's make-up conversation with Roxy, anyway? My gut says before, but my brain is thinking: how would that even work. Harry'd have to be a karma Houdini. Which would actually be fitting, since magic / sleight of hand runs on both sides of his family.

I'm in love with all of these walking teenage disasters already.

#homestuck #reaction #homestuck^2 #vriska serket #vrissy ml #tavros crocker #harry anderson egbert #gamzee makara #weekend at bernie's #liveblogging homestuck

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