“and the fans are throwing celebratory rats on the ice” god I love hockey
the beautiful game!!!!!!

“and the fans are throwing celebratory rats on the ice” god I love hockey
the beautiful game!!!!!!
@ every parent in the world: yes your kid is special because every child is special but they are not specialer than every other child so please be normal about them
Some parents have done what I can only describe as fandomize their child where they’ve taken the child and altered it in their mind to make a cooler version that fits their specific interests, and now sometimes I have to remind them of the canon material.
For those of you who don’t know, I’m a youth theater director and teacher. Every audition season is a personal ordeal.
Target audience reached
EXACTLY
COMMENT ON OLD FICS, I BEG YOU!
I swear to god after like a week people will still be reading but nobody leaves comments anymore and I just want to make it absolutely clear that I would be excited and elated to get a comment on these fics one hundred years after I post them.
A FIC IS NEVER TOO OLD TO LEAVE A NICE COMMENT ON. GO FORTH AND COMMENT!
THIS.
what if the teenage mutant ninja turtles exist in the mcu but they’re just really good at staying under the radar and criminals are too embarrassed to admit they got beat up by some guys in “turtle costumes” so they blame daredevil. peter parker worked as a pizza delivery boy for a while and brought like eight pizzas to a man hole cover but thought nothing of it bc nyc
peter parker: i once was one minute late delivering pizza and the dude was like “forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza”
clint barton: oh cool u met one of the tmnt
literally everyone: who
clint: am i the only one in this goddamn city who knows about the crimefighting turtles that live in the sewers
(they all think clint is playing an elaborate prank on them, especially when he shows them a photo of four guys wearing what are ‘very obviously halloween costumes’)
fun fact: it’s TMNT canon that the chemical container that hit Matt Murdock across the face and gave him his Daredevil abilities is the same canister that landed on the baby turtles and mutated them, so…..y’all aren’t far off
i’m sorry it’s WHAT
TMNT started as a Daredevil parody.
Matt’s teacher is Stick. The turtle’s is Splinter.
Matt’s enemy is the Hand. The turtle’s is the Foot Clan.
It was originally a dark, edgy, turtle themed parody of Daredevil.
I… I don’t know how to feel about this information.
Your reaction to chatGPT instantly lets me know how easy it would be to trick you into thinking that you are haunted
"omg it's literally alive!" Two beers, 45 minutes, deck of tarot cards, and I'm charging you 350$ for an exorcism.
"I read an article that it's showing simple self-awareness" two days, mild preparation, hot and cold reading, I can get 60$ for joints laced with sacred sage
"I just spoke to an AI and I'm... rattled to say the least, come with me on this dark journey" twenty minutes. I've got to science it up for you, but I can get you to come back every week to "disentangle the psychological imprint" for 125$
[ID: A tweet dated 07/02/2019, 17:25, by twitter user your new old fashioned dad (@drankturpentine). It reads: me after killing a werewolf: more like werewolf {but this time i pronounce it were, like the second person singular past, plural past, and past subjunctive of be} /end ID]
we could’ve just chisled in the fuckin date on it it’s not some stone age creation
yhea because the squid people that inherit the earth will know when Christ was born
They 👏 Will 👏 Be 👏 Catholic
would you have any small writing tips to share with others who are attempting to write their own stories?
Sure.
Disclaimer: This is not a full on tutorial on how to write. These are just tiny, tiny little grains of wisdom of things I realized here and there. Do not eat this advice like a full course meal. It isn't one. It's just a dusting of some spices, and I am salt bae-ing them over you, but they are not calorically relevant without a story.
AKA: If you want your readers to build a house, you better take them to a Home Depot and teach them how to use a screwdriver first.
You want your readers to read your story easily? You gotta make your story easy to read. That means learning how to make sentences easier to understand. That means breaking up walls of text into smaller bites. That means - yes - spelling words consistently and using accessible (not Correct, necessarily, but ACCESSIBLE) grammar!
You want your readers to understand your world? You gotta give your readers tools to understand it with. That means explaining new concepts! That means describing stuff a lot! That means using visual language if you don't have actual visuals!
Your readers will not read your mind to know what you MEANT to say. You have to say what you mean. You have to mean what you write. Learn to write clearly. Learn to help your readers.
You want to spend an hour drawing one comic panel? Great. You wanna spend an hour writing a single paragraph? Fantastic. You wanna use up a week perfecting a script? Amazing!
Your readers will still glance at that panel for a second before moving on. Your readers will still eat that paragraph in a bite. Your readers will skim that script. If you're lucky.
Balance the scales.
Neither am I. Nor are any of us.
Listen to me. Listen.
Talent is a beautiful, useful word. But it often lies to us. It suggests that we are born better than others.
This is not often accurate. What talent hides within itself is not pre-ordained inherent skill. It is not something you are birthed being. It is not a statistical difference of physicality.
Maybe you have passion for stories - so you beg your grandfather to read to you before you can recognize words, and you write a lot in every school assignment, and you pay attention to EVERY story you watch in school plays, and you observe all the characters you see in movies, and you CARE. So. Much. And this moves you to try to write, and then to try again, and then to try harder.
Talent does not exist, because no amount of 'you were made for running' can make you run. No amount of 'you were the son of great authors' can make you write.
But inherent curiosity can push you forward. Inherent curiosity can make you watch, and observe, even before you understand you are observing. Inherent curiosity for your personal interests makes you a fan of writing, of drawing, of world-building. It makes you research how to be a great author before you even know what research is. It auto-tunes you to what you know is good about these things, and it gives you the necessary tools to know what will work and what won't.
So when you think you are talented, understand that this is not something that was done to you in the womb. It was something you raised, and watered like a seed, before you even knew what you were growing.
Don't rely on talent. Understand that you got this far because you CARE about this thing. And don't forget to care. Because that's what has carried you this far, and it is the only thing that can carry you even farther.
also, cringe is dead.
I’ll reblog it for the important message but you guys are making this really fucking difficult
BREAKING: Undertale stageplay in development, in collaboration with songwriter Lin Manuel Miranda
ok here’s a completely earnest and serious pronunciation poll:
feel free to tell me whether or not you’re a native english speaker / what country/region you live in in the tags
Honestly I'm pretty tired of supporting nostalgebraist-autoresponder. Going to wind down the project some time before the end of this year.
Posting this mainly to get the idea out there, I guess.
This project has taken an immense amount of effort from me over the years, and still does, even when it's just in maintenance mode.
Today some mysterious system update (or something) made the model no longer fit on the GPU I normally use for it, despite all the same code and settings on my end.
This exact kind of thing happened once before this year, and I eventually figured it out, but I haven't figured this one out yet. This problem consumed several hours of what was meant to be a relaxing Sunday. Based on past experience, to the bottom of the issue would take many more hours.
My options in the short term are to
A. spend (even) more money per unit time, by renting a more powerful GPU to do the same damn thing I know the less powerful one can do (it was doing it this morning!), or
B. silently reduce the context window length by a large amount (and thus the "smartness" of the output, to some degree) to allow the model to fit on the old GPU.
Things like this happen all the time, behind the scenes.
I don't want to be doing this for another year, much less several years. I don't want to be doing it at all.
----
In 2019 and 2020, it was fun to make a GPT-2 autoresponder bot.
Hardly anyone else was doing anything like it. I wasn't the most qualified person in the world to do it, and I didn't do the best possible job, but who cares? I learned a lot, and the really competent tech bros of 2019 were off doing something else.
And it was fun to watch the bot "pretend to be me" while interacting (mostly) with my actual group of tumblr mutuals.
In 2023, everyone and their grandmother is making some kind of "gen AI" app. They are helped along by a dizzying array of tools, cranked out by hyper-competent tech bros with apparently infinite reserves of free time.
There are so many of these tools and demos. Every week it seems like there are a hundred more; it feels like every day I wake up and am expected to be familiar with a hundred more vaguely nostalgebraist-autoresponder-shaped things.
And every one of them is vastly better-engineered than my own hacky efforts. They build on each other, and reap the accelerating returns.
I've tended to do everything first, ahead of the curve, in my own way. This is what I like doing. Going out into unexplored wilderness, not really knowing what I'm doing, without any maps.
Later, hundreds of others with go to the same place. They'll make maps, and share them. They'll go there again and again, learning to make the expeditions systematically. They'll make an optimized industrial process of it. Meanwhile, I'll be locked in to my own cottage-industry mode of production.
Being the first to do something means you end up eventually being the worst.
----
I had a GPT chatbot in 2019, before GPT-3 existed. I don't think Huggingface Transformers existed, either. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.
I had a denoising diffusion image generator in 2021, before DALLE-2 or Stable Diffusion or Huggingface Diffusers. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.
Earlier this year, I was (probably) one the first people to finetune LLaMA. I manually strapped LoRA and 8-bit quantization onto the original codebase, figuring out everything the hard way. It was fun.
Just a few months later, and your grandmother is probably running LLaMA on her toaster as we speak. My homegrown methods look hopelessly antiquated. I think everyone's doing 4-bit quantization now?
(Are they? I can't keep track anymore -- the hyper-competent tech bros are too damn fast. A few months from now the thing will be probably be quantized to -1 bits, somehow. It'll be running in your phone's browser. And it'll be using RLHF, except no, it'll be using some successor to RLHF that everyone's hyping up at the time...)
"You have a GPT chatbot?" someone will ask me. "I assume you're using AutoLangGPTLayerPrompt?"
No, no, I'm not. I'm trying to debug obscure CUDA issues on a Sunday so my bot can carry on talking to a thousand strangers, every one of whom is asking it something like "PENIS PENIS PENIS."
Only I am capable of unplugging the blockage and giving the "PENIS PENIS PENIS" askers the responses they crave. ("Which is ... what, exactly?", one might justly wonder.) No one else would fully understand the nature of the bug. It is special to my own bizarre, antiquated, homegrown system.
I must have one of the longest-running GPT chatbots in existence, by now. Possibly the longest-running one?
I like doing new things. I like hacking through uncharted wilderness. The world of GPT chatbots has long since ceased to provide this kind of value to me.
I want to cede this ground to the LLaMA techbros and the prompt engineers. It is not my wilderness anymore.
I miss wilderness. Maybe I will find a new patch of it, in some new place, that no one cares about yet.
----
Even in 2023, there isn't really anything else out there quite like Frank. But there could be.
If you want to develop some sort of Frank-like thing, there has never been a better time than now. Everyone and their grandmother is doing it.
"But -- but how, exactly?"
Don't ask me. I don't know. This isn't my area anymore.
There has never been a better time to made a GPT chatbot -- for everyone except me, that is.
Ask the techbros, the prompt engineers, the grandmas running OpenChatGPT on their ironing boards. They are doing what I did, faster and easier and better, in their sleep. Ask them.
my controversial metric system opinion is that the meter should be 0.0692285593% shorter. This would have no practical benefits, but it would make the speed of light be 300,000,000m/s instead of 299,792,458m/s
A new friend of mine has been encouraging me to share my work but it's taken a long time to change my mind on the subject. It has been years since I've posted any art, opting to share with friends and family instead but I guess it's time to change that. Perhaps it will be a good thing... I hope and pray it is. This piece was done as a gift for my nutritionist who happens to love foxes. I thought the blackberries were fitting for someone who's work is all about food.
11x14 Acrylic on Canvas Board
Image description: art showing a fox licking its muzzle. There are blackberries in the lower corner. end Image description