This was the Permian, an obscure era of geological history where the planet was ruled by giant, bone-chilling beasts that ran with a characteristic waddle and sometimes snacked on sharks. During this living nightmare, there were occasionally more carnivores around than there were prey for them to eat on land.
ChatGPT versus DeepSeek (it starts with valid moves, then deteriorates, and both boths keep giving nonsense explanations of their moves)
The most recent ChatGPT versus Stockfish (this one has a twist at the end, I won’t even spoil it)
He also did his own Chatbot Chess Championship (playlist is in reverse order, so I linked the last video in the list, which is the first game).
The host plays the games out on-screen for you, with explanations and commentary. These ones aren’t for serious chatbot-testing purposes, they’re for entertainment — so when the bots make up illegal moves, he usually just runs with them. Sometimes with narration like “and here ChatGPT summons an extra rook from another dimension” or “You might think this is just a pawn, but Grok knows it’s secretly a horse pawn!”
Once in a while, he’ll tell the bot its move is illegal. Some of them go into “yes, of course, you’re right, my mistake” sycophancy mode. Others just get weirder.
The bots teleport pieces through each other. Manifest already-taken pieces back from the Shadow Realm. Spawns more pieces than it had to start with. Move pieces in directions they don’t go. And just because it’s making up moves, doesn’t mean it’s making up good moves! Sometimes it takes its own pieces. Sometimes it puts itself in check!
Sometimes they also generate their opponent’s moves. Because “black moves 1” is typically followed by “white moves 2, black moves 3, white moves 4” — and the bots don’t actually have a meaningful sense of “stop auto-generating text at the end of move 1.”
I was curious if the LLM’s idea of moves included “making up whole new categories of pieces” or “moving to squares that aren’t on the 8×8 chess grid.” Haven’t seen either of those so far.
One thing I didn’t anticipate is, sometimes a bot tells the other player their move is illegal. Even when it’s not! Saying “there’s a piece in your way” (when there isn’t), or “the king can’t move to E7” (not for any rules-based reason, the bot was just gatekeeping E7).
The newer bots also give general paragraphs on “here’s the explanation for my move,” which are absolutely just LLM Word Salad(TM) made of chess words. As a person who knows Basic Chess Rules but doesn’t actively play the game, sometimes I need GothamChess’s breakdown to see why they’re nonsense. Other times it’s just the bot saying “I have put you in check!” when the other player is blatantly not in check.
The whole thing was very informative, and also really entertaining. (…And it doesn’t involve the chatbots doing anything consequential, so it’s a nice break from all the stories about LLMs putting someone’s life in danger.) Give it a look.
+ All I've done since making it home is sleep, download some stuff, watch the entire season of Wayward, and play undemanding video games. Man have I slept. Would like to lie down right now and sleep some more, but I'm headed back to work for the day (we abruptly left Thursday instead of Friday as planned, so I left behind a wee bit more chaos that I'm comfortable with).
Surprisingly smooth ride on the ferry though, given the weather.
+ Dear Vidder letters for Festivids are cropping up, and they're such a pleasure to read through. Aww fandom ❤️
+ Hunting down the digital singles for Birds of Prey, bc waiting for the trade to drop in six months is just not on the table. More Big Barda and Tiny Bat NOW. And they cancelled it, so I ain't giving them extra money, no sir :p
Now to figure out how to read them in an enjoyable manner.
Oh! And posted some scans to capshare from the second and third trade.
+ Watched the new Fantastic Four. It was cozy! I'm enjoying this new return to more child-friendly superhero movies. Like, I can see letting my nephew watch both this and the new Superman movie with me. I don't need all this dark stuff for grownups; the world is dark enough as is, gimme escapism!
Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away; Lengthen night and shorten day; Every leaf speaks bliss to me Fluttering from the autumn tree. I shall smile when wreaths of snow Blossom where the rose should grow; I shall sing when night’s decay Ushers in a drearier day.
And every once in a while I end up there during the morning rush, which I try to avoid, and find somebody else bitching about how they "always" mess up their order and "always" take forever.
This is true, by the way - or, maybe not literally always true, but frequently true - but all the same, every time I hear the incessant whining I want to turn around and say "You knew what it was like when you placed your order!"
It's not like they're the only place to get coffee and a breakfast sandwich that's not your own home. There are three corner stores, every once of which will be happy, or at least willing, to make your standing order every day or week or however often you like. There's McDonald's right there, there's Wendy's right there, there's a Dunkin Donuts on the boat and another one just down Bay a bit, if you drive. Or, as I said, you can go home and make your own coffee for faster and cheaper, but you didn't do that, so you can't really complain that you're getting exactly what you obviously expected!
(It is my lack of whining, I think, that always gets me out of there a smidge faster. Should they be more efficient? Should they make fewer mistakes? Should I be able to order a muffin without fear that it'll be a bit raw in the middle? Yes to all three, and I've stopped ordering muffins! But they're close and I don't have to cook it myself, and I imagine that's why everybody else is there, so whatever.)
(I bought this 100% because of the pretty hardcover with the shiny foil. The picture doesn't do it justice.)
It took almost three years for me to finish this 💀 In my defense, I kept putting down and ignoring this for long stretches of time whenever I was in the middle of a story that I didn't vibe with. I'm not gonna rate the collection as a whole because I think it makes more sense to rate per story ... but I'm also too lazy to rate per story.
I'll settle for listing my favorites in no particular order:
"Demeter's Regard" by Deborah L. Davitt
"Owen" by Bruce Golden
"The Dancing Partner" by Jerome K. Jerome
"The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant" by Rachael K. Jones
"Dispo and the Crow" by Rich Larson
"I, Coffeepot" by David Sklar
Problem that I didn't anticipate with this book: How absolutely unengaging I would find some of the older stories. Those were usually the ones I needed to drag myself through because the completionist in me wasn't bored enough to skip anything. I don't know if it's because the style of prose just doesn't jive with what I'm used to or if it's something else. The worst ones (in terms of keeping my attention) were "The Steam Man of the Prairies" by Edward S. Ellis, and "Frank Reade Jr. & His New Steam Man" and "Frank Reade Jr. & His New Steam Horse" by Luis Philip Senarens.
(It also didn't help that they were very racist towards the characters of color. I thought it was weird that they had a foreword and a publisher's note for the collection but neither one included any warnings about it, like the Warner Bros. one for their old cartoons.)
I have a couple more collection type books in my to-read pile to go through, but I think after those I'm done with collections.
Remember how last year, I watched (and wrote about watching) Mawaru Penguindrum, and paired it with the episode reactions from the Imagine Me & Utena podcast? And how the IMAU reactions had only gotten through episode 17, but they had been on hiatus for long enough that I figured they weren’t going to come back to it, so I went ahead and watched the rest of the show?
The IMAU folks came back! After a year-and-a-half gap, they started up again, and got through the rest of the series!
(It’s in my folder of “podcasts that stopped updating a long time ago, but didn’t officially finish, so I check in once or twice a year, just to see if anything’s changed.” And sure enough, something had.)
Overall, I didn’t like the Penguindrum anime. There were some good parts, even a few great ones, and I still listen to the music — but that wasn’t enough to outweigh all the parts that were bad/rushed/nonsensical/poorly thought-out/generally-unpleasant.
Still looking forward to finally finishing the IMAU recaps. If you’re a fan of the series, or even if you also didn’t care for it but ended up watching the whole thing, check them out. (Direct link to the RSS feed.)
Honestly, my worst thoughts about what was going to happen in that meeting of the generals were both so much more terrible and so much less terrible than what actually went on.
Charlie Morningstar, Princess of Hell, opens the titular hotel with the goal of “helping demons workshop their way to earning a spot in Heaven.” Most demons aren’t even interested, the handful that show up all have ulterior motives, and the other plot threads happening around it involve murder, genocide, hard drugs, and sex slavery. Watch Charlie flail her way through the hopelessly-doomed prospect of coaching this crowd to “do trust falls with each other” and “sing songs about how to apologize”!
Accurately described as “what if somebody got to make a professionally-animated TV series with all her 2000s-era DeviantArt OCs?” That’s not a complaint — they are good designs, aesthetically pleasing, fun to watch — it’s just a description of this very specific energy they bring.
Based on fandom osmosis, I was expecting a good amount of darkness and irreverence, with a generous serving of sexy iddiness. (Of the two characters whose names I knew before I started watching, one of them is the gay porn star who presents himself as sassy and slutty but is hiding a deep vulnerability in his soul. Obviously fandom loves him.)
I didn’t realize it was going to do all that and try to have fully, unironically earnest messages about love and redemption. Charlie’s quest is not hopelessly doomed! And the show does actually want you to get on board with that! One minute you’re getting a totally-serious song about the power of fighting for love (did I mention this is also a musical?), the next you’re getting a comically-bloody scene about the demon whose gimmick is indiscriminate stabbing!
It mostly works, too. You would really expect this to fall apart, and there are points where it teeters, but overall it holds together as it soars through the first season and sticks the landing.
Weird and enjoyable. Looking forward to season 2.
Marvel Zombies:
A very short (4 half-hour episodes) expansion of that one What If…? episode. I never like zombie stuff, but I do like post-apocalyptic survival stuff…and, listen, it had some new tidbits of Moon Knight stuff. So I had to catch it at some point.
I liked all the scenes that focused on “here’s a handful of disparate MCU characters who got thrown together by the weird circumstances, let’s watch them wrangle the apocalypse as a team.” In general, it felt like the character interactions were written by people who liked them, and put some thought into them. (After that disappointing s3 episode with Shang-Chi and Kate Bishop, it’s extra-refreshing to see an AU where Shang-Chi and Katy’s friendship gets to shine, and Kate gets a subplot with a trick arrow.)
But then the show tried to have an over-arching plot. And it felt like the plot was written by people who thought “Wanda makes a cool and terrifying villain, so our priority is to make her a cool villain, and we don’t really care how she got to that point or whether her motives make any sense.”
The MK content was “in this AU, Marc and company got zombie’d early in the outbreak, and their buddy Blade was recruited as next Moon Knight.” This is the MCU version of Blade, who suffers from a bad case of His Main-Timeline Debut Hasn’t Actually Happened Yet. So I don’t blame these writers at all for not knowing what to do with him. (The guy is half-vampire, there should be all kinds of questions to explore about how that interacts with a mostly-zombified world — and this show has no interest in any of them.)
At least we got a cool new MK suit design out of it. And a fun scene of Khonshu having an argument with Valkyrie.
Knights of Guinevere:
Sci-fi psychological horror, which is also a scathing commentary on the creator’s career as a Disney animator. Follows a couple of friends who live and work in the garbage-strewn shadow of a planet-sized theme park, and a broken android (?) mascot who could really use their help.
Only the first episode is finished right now, so there’s a lot we can’t know, but it’s so rich and dense with worldbuilding info that there’s a ton of possibilities to speculate about. At this point I’ve seen multiple “breakdown of all the little things you missed in the Knights of Guinevere pilot!” videos, and haven’t stopped picking up new details yet.
Very excited to see where the rest of the series goes.
+ My brain is mush. We dock sometime during tonight, so tomorrow will be another hectic day. Thankfully come Friday I shall have freedoooommmm.
+ I want a Big Barda icon but I'm too zapped to make one *sulk*
Maybe after I've had my shower.
+ Not helping: my mom constantly asking me when I can come see her in Oslo, and for plans this Christmas when she'll be visiting and living at my brother's. I do not have capacity for this. Love her to bits but it's tough to convey that SOCIAL BANK EMPTY, PLAN QUEUE FULL.
+ Booked my flu shot for next Thursday. Apparently they're not doing Covid shots at the doctor anymore, boo. And the only information I can find is that it becomes available week 42. Hopefully I manage to get in there early enough that it will mostly be in full effect by the time I go to Thailand.
+ One Battle After Another will be showing at the small local cinema next week. There's been some very positive buzz. I may try to lure some friends to come with.
+ Decided to try and move away from using GoodReads, and so far StoryGraph seems a good fit. I know there's quite a few options out there, but I only made it through two before settling on StoryGraph. (Fable being the second option, but just way too busy for me. Someone looking for a move involved and social experience might vibe with it!)
One of the fun things is you can make your own book lists or challenges. I started putting together a small Queer Comics one. I could only find two other comic/graphic novel challenges by searching, so that's certainly a void in need of filling that's what she said.
Anyways, I'm here, in case anybody else is stretching their wings.
Still trying to get back into writing so I pulled the trigger and finished the half-completed fifth chapter to my Pokemon/Hunger Games/Cabin in the Woods fic. It read short and quick to me (and a bit incomplete), but it's somehow over a thousand words, idk how but I won't complain. It got a few hits but no new likes, which is fine. It's my pet passion project because sometimes you just have to scratch those odd ideas in your head.
With two other fics newly begun (one Pokemon - Gold/Silver fic and one Delicious in Dungeon - Marcille/Falin), I felt a bit embolden and just now decided to apply to scoop up a pinch hit for an exchange. I also decided not to stress myself too much with my ladiesbingo card and plan to aim for just 500-word stories to keep it low pressure. If I write more, cool. If not, also cool. I gradually hope to rebuild my writing ability because dammit if I don't miss it.
*
Speaking on fandomy things - I started watching anime more regularly. I've been slacking pretty hard on them for years for literally no reason. But I've been paying for Crunchyroll the past couple of months because my son needed to see the rest of One Piece and Netflix shit the bed with the episodes they have (he recently passed the 1000 episode mark, and holy shit, I'm proud of him - dunno if I'll jump into the series with similar gusto any time soon). I finally realized, after several months, that I'm an idiot and should be using it too since I'm paying for it, lol.
Current anime watch list:
- Chainsaw Man (episode 4) - My Hero Academia (season 6) - Spy X Family (season 1) - Am I Actually the Strongest? (episode 3) - Delicious in Dungeon (episode 20)
It's tempting to jump into more series but I'm trying to restrain myself so I actually finish a show! Like, Chainsaw Man is currently on-hold while I finish at least one of the others on the list. My Hero Academia is also a bit on hold cuz I was watching it with my son but he's extremely focused on finishing One Piece and he can only watch one anime at a time (boo). He's been working on it for almost a year, to put our hiatus in perspective.
I'm also trying to get back into mangas. I've realized nothing beats holding a manga in hand so I'm alowly building a small "newer" collection (I have some books from back in my teen years, so they're "old" now). My Hero Vigilantes is the forefront of my collection so far. I haven't read it yet - gonna wait until I get caught up with anime again. Yes, I know I don't have to, but I want some content in the same universe to consume once I get caught up to the main series.
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Also, the pilot for Homestuck the Animation dropped recently and I'm pretty hyped. Some ppl were complaining it was too short and missed a lot of content but it was just a pilot, not the complete series, or even a snapshot of a season. Episodes could be longer which would help. There's also ppl complaining about the voices, but clearly they have no idea who voices the characters so their opinions can eat ass. I just hope the fandom doesn't get toxic again and fuck it up for the rest of us fans who are generally excited.
I hadn't considered it before, but I might end up writing HS fanfic again. I don't know if that's a good thing or not. O_O Probably not. But I mean... I did write a lot of it. ^-^;;
Roughly in the reverse order they were finished, most-recent first.
Technically the round ends on the 30th, but I'm not jumping on any new tags at this point! So this is the final version of the list.
I thought about emoji-coding these based on how much work I did ("just one of the final syn checks", "some of the synning", "basically all the synning", etc)...then decided, no, that's too much effort. The point is, over the last 3 months, I did Some Amount Of Wrangling on every single one of these:
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erinptah
(I bought this 100% because of the pretty hardcover with the shiny foil. The picture doesn't do it justice.)
