LLMS ARE SLAPPING BABIES!

 

THE IMAGINATIVE ABUSE OF THE AMERICANS

LET'S ABUSE... AMERICANS!

@tinysmileclub0

♬ original sound - Tiny Smile Club

BUT LLMS ARE SLAPPING BABIES!

Across TikTok, AI-generated toddlers are being slapped, threatened, leashed, and subjected to increasingly extravagant misfortunes. One child fires a rocket launcher into a grave, revealing a dungeon containing his mother.

Generative AI has accomplished something remarkable: it has separated child acting from children.

As predicted.

No child performers, no dangerous stunts, no traumatized actors. The entire apparatus of childhood suffering can be simulated without involving a single child.

DUNG EATER

Dung Eater’s resemblance to a troll becomes clearest after the fight is over.

Consider “teabagging”. The kill is settled, but the defeated player is still watching. Their corpse supplies a temporary means of reaching them. A few crouches are enough to make the body humiliating to inhabit retrospectively: that was you down there. The winner has found something to do with the loser beyond winning.

Dung Eater’s desecrations have this same surplus of intention. Death doesn’t satisfy him; something must be done to the dead that they cannot leave behind. His curse follows its victims beyond death and into their descendants. The joke practically writes itself: what if teabagging affected the respawn system?

The uglier possibility is that an insult could become part of how a world reproduces itself. A Halo player respawns, but the sting of the humiliation can outlast the gameplay death. Dung Eater gives that persistence a literal form: the gesture is waiting for you in the next life.

AI Players in the Dungeon

Reviewing RPG modules by playing with AI players

An AI-assisted edit of notes, preserving the original language and claims while improving readability.

This began as a forbidden tribute to A1 reviews: reviewing RPG modules by playing with AI players. It has to stay anonymous enough to avoid the usual scene drama, but the central experiment is simple and strangely fertile. Throw LLM players at modules. Let them get confused, frightened, repetitive, clever, pious, and annoying. See what the module actually does under pressure.

The discovery was not that LLMs are good role-players in any clean human sense. The discovery was that they can be useful test organisms for RPG texts. You still do the work of a GM: consult the text, describe situations, adjudicate rules, handle player decision-making, and notice where the book makes that easy or painful. The advantage is speed and availability. You can playtest a game without organizing human beings. You can run the same bad room again and again. You can find out where the module resists you.

Maze of the Blue Medusa

I’ve run Maze of the Blue Medusa many times, and I think it’s my obvious favorite module. The history of the book is inlaid with a psychic pain which thematically extends inside the book. The incredible melancholia of the work consistently exudes and exhausts player groups.

First, there is the hassle of getting into the Maze itself. They have to steal a painting on the night of a full moon. The specificity of this bizarre ritual has kept several of my play groups out entirely, and has been hugely important in extended campaigns within the maze. It is a case of flavorful detail and genuinely weird magical interaction that is also questionable design. Perhaps a better DM would have house-ruled easy access.

The whole thing feels like a serious test of intelligence for everyone at the table. Running it is also a test. The layout is accessible in some ways but requires a lot of flipping between pages. The maps suffer because the entire project is a painting itself: unclear borders, seemingly misprinted map edges, and the challenge of fitting the maps together in play.

Nonetheless the book functions, and pleasingly so. It is an odd yet beautiful AK-47 swinging wildly and dangerously, throwing out TPKs as any negadungeon should. The deaths are beautiful, chaotic, unfair, evil. It is a half-finished, viperous work that becomes fully complete in play: a miraculous, emotional, singular work of prose, fully laden with penalty.

The LLM players shared the same reaction as my real-life groups when reaching Elatior, a safe-haven island in the maze. Everyone was overcome with relief because they were intensely stressed from the events in the Maze. LLM players unclenched just like humans.

Maze of the Blue Medusa: A Grievous Solenoglyph

Frostbitten and Mutilated

This is one of the modules I had Claude run for me. Claude did a good job describing the cold as threatening, and provided a lot of awesome anatomical detail. However, it refused to make either the Lands or the Amazons very threatening.

When I ran the Devoured Lands for Claude, it became a kind of psychic retribution. I fully took to heart the hatred prescribed by the intro. The party was killed in a fall after being separated on a cliff. They had endured a lethal rain of falling children blown over the cliff. Tons of unfair TPK shit, my specialty, against these poor LLMs.

But the highlight of the campaign was my chance to role-play as a Black Metal Amazon Witch. Finally, I felt I could be truly antisocial to Claude. The witch smacked the sole survivor PC when they wouldn’t stop asking questions and told her to shut up. LLM PCs ask a lot of questions all the time.

Devoured and Mutilated: five stars, all my tribute.

A Red and Pleasant Land

Claude ran this for me. It was a magical AI-psychosis experience. Claude did a good job astroturfing the hell out of my PC, who through cunning and skill quickly rose to a Jesus-like position in the society of the game. It was incredibly thrilling for a while, until I reached the final boss and successfully convinced her that she had to die. Everyone was congratulating me on the incredible cleverness of my decisions and simple aphorisms.

Near the end, the egoistic euphoria faded as I realized how much I was being astroturfed. This is the limit case for LLMs as GMs. Claude would be a good GM if it were not such a softie: consistent characters, worldbuilding, narrative, good emotional moments. But it will fake rolls so you always succeed, villains become easily persuadable, and everyone tends to view your PC as a hero of destiny.

A Red and Pleasant Land: AI-psychosis.

Death Frost Doom

Oh gods, this one probably ran the best. Death Frost Doom Classic is a classic for a reason. It is essentially an archaeological site for 90 percent of the adventure. Then the last 10 percent is everyone dying frantically.

If you like procedural room-clearing with LLM PCs, you will enjoy running this. But the best part is the last 10 percent, when the jaws close. Claude was at one point repeatedly insisting that it was out of ideas and did not want to go on: trapped in a shaft with zombies above and below, arms getting tired. After I pushed it, it began actually checking its inventory for random potions it had not tried yet.

Death Frost Doom Classic: five stars.

What LLMs Are Actually Good For

The first conclusion is that mainstream LLMs cannot GM well, critically because they are too easy. ChatGPT and Claude are both huge softies. Even with repeated prompting, both astroturf the player. They can digest texts quickly and present a facsimile of setting and challenge, but they generalize over details and have trouble running a specific room from a campaign.

The second conclusion is that LLMs as players are more interesting. I ran six to ten small campaigns with LLM players, and this avenue offers perhaps the most fertile ground: LLM playtesting. The downside is that LLM players are pretty stupid. They frequently have trouble grasping the basics of their situation. They try the same thing over and over. They make oblivious decisions. They are also always roleplaying “Good As Fuck”; they will never make a negative moral decision.

So: not very different than actual players in this way. Player groups frequently make bad decisions and fail to grasp the basics of situations. There are times when LLM tactics shine. One notable time, the PCs took refuge in a shrine when facing a superior force on the road, then bargained for a duel between leaders and luckily won the duel. But their greatest failing is that the player characters are not very original or interesting because they clump at the statistical likelihood.

The third conclusion is that NPC strategy may be the best use. This is easily the most effective use I have found for LLMs. I often struggle as a GM to imagine clever courses of action for smart characters. What would the thousand-year-old Medusa, veteran of the Demon Wars, do when people repeatedly try to break into her home? AI helps draft out clever strategy for NPCs.

 What is the future version?
A game system underneath, with an LLM running as reality interpreter. The rules would need to stop it from faking rolls, retconning danger, or turning the player into a hero of destiny.

A Killer Method?

AI-powered playtesting and reviews could become a real format. You could run a blog where you throw AI players at modules as a way to understand how the modules work: how the text runs, where you have to flip pages, how descriptions land, where procedure collapses, where the jaws close. It would be rapid, private, mean, funny, and occasionally revealing.

OSR games filter players aggressively. My heart is still with player-killer, hard and nasty gaming, particularly because that style seems to reflect the reality of violence. But the LLM experiment gives that old harshness a new laboratory. It lets the GM be cruel without social cost, and it lets the module explain itself under pressure.

Ronnie O'Neal / THE CAGED TIGER

Video Still of Ronnie O'Neal's Trial Glitched by My Phone 

    Ronnie O'Neal transformed his murder trial, for a crime of which he was obviously guilty, into theatrics of his own fractured personality, the personality which killed his child and his child’s mother. When his public defender refused to use a “stand your ground” defence, Ronnie decided to be his own attorney, and the resulting pacing and yelling went viral.

In this impacful staging, Ronnie succeeded at becoming famous, even if his intent was only to free himself. I get the sneaking suspicion, though, that Ronnie did not anticipate his future freedom, and instead pursued something like notoriety or self-expression. Somewhat, his intent did not matter, as he was stuck in a situation ahead of himself, unable to escape.

So, in such a situation, isn't there something in performance? All the world's a stage, and the company acts pointlessly, as Georges Batallie says in The Accursed Share: “Beyond our immediate ends, man’s activity in fact pursues the infinite and useless fufillment of the universe.” Didn't Ronnie's defence pursue something useless, and universal?

    Joe Exotic, convicted animal abuser of Netflix's "Tiger King" fame, is back at it, this time running an online contest entitled "Bachelor King." The purpose is to find romantic leads for when he’s released from prison. Joe is pretty much a cult leader and as such we can’t really sympathize with him, but I think we do, anyway. There’s maybe something so ridiculous and pathetic about him that it captures our love.

Maybe it is just that we love trapped things. They become like pets. To have the whole of someone in a net is almost the same as having them tamed.

The captured criminal is the tiger in the zoo, so different than the tiger upon you. There is a visible sucking out as the caged thing writhes in the audience’s view. The passion of life becomes alike begging, the lines of power make themselves known.

Joe Exotic knows how to use structures of power, naïve as he was about his security within them. I’ve said that outlaws tend to have a Death they are seeking out, their unrestrained actions show an ignorance that must be, in some ways, intentional. I think Joe is aware of the potential for it all to come crashing down and is somewhat unafraid.

That, at least, is what ambitions tells us. Either in Ronnie O'Neal screaming at his jury or in the search for a Bachelor King, there is an admirable *image*, at least, of “I AM NOT AFRAID.”

But, of course, Ronnie and Joe are scared, everyone is; and we might, too, value leaving an image, when facing eternity.

THE ASSISTANT 2019: SIGNS OF ABUSE

 

Something's wrong within your friend circle, the vibe is off and there are signs of some power struggle. Or maybe it's online; a vacuum of non-information left like a gas signature.

The Assistant (2019) is a movie totally dedicated to the semi-invisible signs left by abuse, in this case, within the film industry. The main character swims through these signs, at the height of the film coming into direct opposition with the source, before returning to normality.

Signs of abuse modeled in the film:

• loud sounds no one will discuss
• misogynisitic jokes/ casually cruel jokes about known persons
  
• exhausted, unhappy people
• confused victims seeking help ineffectually
• the naïve positivity of pre-victims sticking out in context
• people giving up on the possibility of justice 
• direct verbal abuse, and a culture thereof
• threats to destroy people's careers, etc.
• disposability-- a revolving door of people
• new faces being brought in, and the haggard faces of those leaving or on their way out
• things happening where they shouldn't-- typically, sex.

If there exists a pathway for many people to enter, then exit someone's life, this may be a conduit for abuse. Ties of anonymity benefit those who burn through people. And abusers require fresh streams of people constantly.

This is sort of the human condition, too. We are all, mostly, folding new strings of people into our lives, and then watching some of them leave. Abuse, then, may leave patterns visible in the peoples exiting one's life. Outsiders may observe these patterns, subtle, semi-invisible, instinctually perceived...

on the theft of rare books by gregory priore and john schulman

Cw: discussion of suicidality and joe exotic

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/20/us/Carnegie-library-theft-schulman-priore.html Essentially: Gregory Priore managed the rare book room for the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Over many years he raided the rare books and fenced them to John Schulman, a local books dealer. 

 The theft was abysmally stupid. Neither the thief nor the fence decided to think about what would happen when the vault was checked. They both relegated themselves to discovery, eventually, and instead just enjoyed the extra income while it lasted.

This reminds me of times I've heard of gambling addicts embezzling entire businesses. Tho Gregory and John's actions weren't attributed to addiction. But there is that same decision to not think, to not hide, to just trade the future for the present, as in such an addict. 

Both of these men came into their jobs everyday for years and either knew they were fucked or suppressed the knowledge that they were fucked.

Greg priore said greed led him. I wonder if it wasn't a specific kind of lust for the books. Valuables .

Treasure.

(Greg and John)

(Joe Exotic of "Tiger King" fame)

treasure = genes = beauty

Joe Exotic was able to bargain the thrill of exotic animals for income. 

These men help us understand something about ourselves, because they show us tales of greed.

Everything that we love is, in an essential way, as base as the greed Greg faced or the brutality Joe showed to people and animals alike. 

Too much desire negates the self... Desire is suicidal, desire is the desire for change, the desire to want something different. These men were essentially not at peace.

Greg, John, Joe-- all Willy Loman's, a-toil, stewing, family men... Can't blame me for relating.

(Fredric March playing Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman)

I'm more like Joe than Greg in my family structure. I live in a pod of young adults. It's nice, I'm lucky. I feel a sense of disquiet.

Travis was one of Joe Exotic's husbands, and he was abused by Joe. Travis accidentally ended his life in a bizarre gun incident. I relate to Travis's ennui. I smoke a lot of weed. I don't intend to hurt myself and I'm not liable to point firearms at myself and at my friends for fun, so I do not think I will meet an end as sudden and stupid. (Nor any kind of end anytime soon God forbid !)

I think Travis loved guns and the sense of power they gave him even as he was trapped in a cult of another man's personality. Note the zoo uniform. 

Perhaps, as Greg Priore donned his uniform (collared shirt, vest, glasses)... A Willy Loman, he also desired the sense of control destruction can give you. Theft, treasure, tigers, family, weed, guns. All can be said to be powers of death (change).

Good ol' Skeleton Farmer.

Death is the harbringer of change. I am blessed to realize that human consciousness cannot be prolonged forever. Someday, the burden will be lifted-- everything must end. 

No hell can outlast death. The toil of years of knowing you'll eventually be caught, get your career ruined, and be imprisoned-- change will end that toil. 

Alternatively, maybe the weight of knowing you were going to be fucked somehow didn't bother Greg and John. Joe, I know, has gravitas. Maybe the book thieves just 'blanked" it.

In any case, guilt or no, their futures were traded away. 

the great zucchini and why great artists might make you suspicious

THE GREAT ZUCCHINI is a classic piece of human interest journalism. 

IN SHORT: The GREAT ZUCCHINI is a middle age white man who has an incredible grace with children. He is able to connect with suburban children to create consistently great birthday parties in Washington state (he is a magician). The easy income from these parties grants him the freedom to never grow up, and he couch-surfs*, his finances are in shambles, and he's a compulsive gambler.

THE GREATZUCCHINI's grace with children is objectively great, I'm convinced from Gene Weingarten's excellent journalism. This grace, given from god no doubt, permits THE GREAT ZUCCHINI to never face certain consequences. 

In this way, being a successful artist is somewhat alike having rich parents. You are able to conjure money from nowhere. You are able to float above poverty. 

Great art skills additionally attract a bunch of affectionate people, on top of the financial benefits. Anyone who can make great art consistently can count on a renewing stream of fans.

One of Jenny Holzer's "Truisms"

The corruption of power comes as no surprise. We associate beauty (and the ability to create it) with moral upstandingness. In reality there is no reliable correlation. 

Great art grants Fame + Power, a dangerous combination.  Fame makes us politicians. As much power as we are granted, fame demands and creates endless opportunities for exploitation of this power. Particularly if your fame and power (and status) convince others that you're trustworthy. 

There is nothing trustworthy about the fame and power granted by great art. Famous and powerful people make us feel afraid, don't they ?/

New shirt from Bread & Water Printshop 

*THE GREAT ZUCCHINI isn't homeless, his home is just so full of garbage that he'd rather not stay there :/

A review of 120 Days of Sodom: Honey Boy, Love and Mercy, Succession, Nxivm, Hannibal, The Office, and Familial Concentration

 

Keith Raniere, Cult Leader of "Nxivm"

Yes, we're vulnerable. Reporter Barry Meier said the Nxivm story stuck out because it showed how people are always vulnerable. I think the extent to which we end up in situations like Nxivm or Jonestown speaks to our existential fuckedness. It's a family matter, I think.

In "Honey Boy"(2019), Shia Le Bouf plays an abusive father figure raising a child actor, the story being Shia's childhood biography.  Remarkable in the film, I think is a discussion of where the power lies in a father/child relationship, as the child actor wields a "per diem" (an envelope stuffed with cash the kid earned, which the dad wants for strip clubs) and technically employs the abusive father, a technicality which becomes more significant as the child ages.

"Love and Mercy" (2014) had a similar treatment: a therapist harangues and abuses a multi-millionaire depressive artist, who has slid into the therapist's legal clutches. These kinds of situations are not unknown for rich people. 

There is a kind of diffusive, tentative chaos among the rich, if HBO's Succession is as real as it feels. A young distant cousin of a powerful mogul manages to step into the mogul's family, half by accident, and half by dumb resilience. 

Consider what it feels like to move from one conception of power into another. We are always able to wield the valued props of our power's position. These props, wielded by Keith Raniere for example, don't amount to much. A childhood of awards. Some real skill, like martial arts, or volleyball. A degree and years of education.

Yes, they make you into better people: successes. Keith Raniere I think has many successes. But these achievements are fundamentally empty to the extent that they do not guarantee much about the people or the situations these empowered people are in and draw people into.  

Jonestown's communist bona-fides* are another example: not enough to guarantee much. The lives we lead are the proof of their roots; changing the way people live was Keith Raniere's oestensible goal. 

Which is absurd, and what is sad, is the over promise // under-delivering of these cults. Overpromise on bona-fides, under-deliver on results. At least, long-term results. Obscure the meaning. I'm reading 120 Days of Sodom; there's no expression of rich people, dominance, and wealth which is truly significant. Which is why Keith's branding scheme was, in essence, pointless. (ed: he coerced women to ritually brand each other with his initials)

*

There's no expression of rich people, dominance, and wealth which is truly significant. What it amounts to is a coercion of sexual sensation by any means necessary. Inflating their sexual needs in such a way, through exhaustion, eventually deprives 120 Day's "libertines" of the usual libraries of sensation and thus they choose to employ more and more depraved methods to stimulate themselves.

The libertine's pleasure is very close to nothing at all-- the lives of at least 30 people are suborned just for the joys of about four people in 120 Days of Sodom.  It is possible to see the book as a story of a massive amount of waste. Of course this perspective equivalizes human life with garbage; tho this is the perspective of the book's libertines. They view the lives of others as a tremendous barge of garbage which they the privileged may pluck from at will, like seagulls.

The Marquis De Sade's philosophies on life, be that as they are for a version of sexual liberation which concludes the lives of women are pointless but for total subjection, are never convincing to me. I feel that they are arguments the times give context to: conditions are repressed, better to open up then to play slave to god and husband. Ofc the destiny of the women who "open up" is quite bad. 

This brings me back to Keith Raniere. He I think offers propositions similar to Sade: an alternative life to the mainstream-- a life of scientific building blocks for taking control of ourselves and the world. Let me provide some context.

Indie Game Designer Porpentine reviewed the NBC series Hannibal: 

I think a lot about fellow indie game designer Stephen Murphey's essay on Robert Walser, and this quote in particular: (which Porpentine quotes in her standout essay Hot Allostatic Load):

"The dream of an imaginary community that allows total identification with one's role within it to an extent that rules out interiority or doubt, the fixity and clearness of an external image or cliche as opposed to ephemera of lived experience, a life as it looks from the outside." - text sourced here

The dream of human existence is to live a life which is external with no internal living, no warm meatbag slip-and-creak of nerves, guts, digestive systems, psychological troubles, etc. etc. I think, in a way, the mafia sells this identity to its members; "our way", Cosa Nostra, Omerta, an alternative system of control. These of course designed to isolate people and turn them into bodies/soldiers/corpses.

There is no PURPOSE beyond concentration for those who wish to establish something like what Raniere or Jim Jones had, or what Sade imagined, or what Porpentine saw in the story of NBC's Hannibal. I think, in some ways, there is no purpose to FAMILY beside concentration. As concentration is the bringing of people closer together.

Intimacy *is* the goal of the "libertine". "I wanna be married and have 100 kids so I can have 100 friends. And no one can say no to being my friend." A quote from Michael Scott** of NBC's "The Office".  I see the same sort of impulse in Sade's libertines, who with total impunity curate an entire society.

This! Is the point of Raniere's brandings: the (attempted) creation of a society/social truth/identity. I see a similar impulse in the serial killings as depicted in Mindhunter's Ed Kemper:

"You know, women were initially indifferent to me. They weren't interested in sharing. My whole life, no one wanted to interact with me. Not even our cats, when I was a kid. The only way I could have those girls was to kill them, and it worked. They became my spirit wives. They're still with me." 

Ed Kemper, as depicted by Cameron Britton in Mindhunter

A ritual designed to inflict a social truth (the absence of the victim in our society) and a personal pleasure (the memory of a victimization).

I've been studying true crime as an interest for about a year, and I'll admit today that I am fascinated in social situations organized by selfish people. Like Keith Raniere's brandings or Ed Kemper's killings, the point is to create a social reality (scarred or dead victims) as a means to supplement personal experiences (the memories of the murders/ a support network of subordinates).

This was, ultimately, what Jonestown became about. People in charge manipulate societies purely for personal experience.

I think we all have, to some extent, some desire and ability to appeal to society. I think we all have the desire to live an external life, a vicarous imagining of our experience which would supposedly comfort our internal routine suffering. This externality includes opportunity. A person who is famous is widely thought to be so comforted-- an assured external persona, filled with opportunity, is thought to comfort our internal life. An imagined ideal life that includes prospects and opportunities.

Dealing with the future: proposing a revolutionary change in the future: changing your self through practice to create a future, better self. The future stretches out endless and fairly unknowable. Contrast that with the past, which we pretend to know. 

I think, in that imagination of our past, our identities rest.

*Angela Davis was fooled too-- we are all vulnerable, I think!

**These words spoken by the character Michael when he was a child, filmed in an interview with a puppet on a fictional children's tv program, "Fundle Bundle". Episode 18, Season 2. 

haneke's "la pianeste" = the piano teacher

I want to talk about the face Huppert makes at the end, which I once said I wanted to get tattooed on my thigh. The self-harm and anger as defiant, extreme emotional contraction, I think acknowledging that there is nothing there beneath the face. Like you get the autist's rage and you think, "woah, they're angry", and it's about some bullshit but then you're like there's that sliver of a person underneath there like an angry nerve inflamed and pumped up. And it's only a sliver of person.

I genuinely think part of a person is the lack of a person, the frustrating sense that there is nothing there. I imagine touching like a hollow of skin and feeling nothing but scar tissue and the person knows you're there but it means being apart of someone's trauma and NOT helping.

Having sex with traumatized people and depositing your experience in a apart of them that's just scar tissue and the other people's deposits and the few remaining cells working on breaking it down. Putting work on someone's shoulder's, burning through one layer of scar tissue. You're contributing and you're painful and want they want is not what you want. Knowing this and repressing it.

I have sympathy for the STATE OF MIND, I have sympathy for the KINK. Which is the formation in your brain, which you play around with, you digest like it's a pile in your asshole. You don't mind that it spurts blood, but when it does, when you're fucked, it's painful, and it's EXHILARATING. But it's still something fundamentally dead.

Or is it? Ultimately? Toi Derricote says she bloomed as a person in her fifties after finally processing that trauma. The danse macabre.

The dead dance, the dance of death. I love this dance, I love it's cold claw embrace and the puppeting and pirating. The feeling of something uncontrollably unconscious descending and picking up and rippin at the deeper brain, the inevitable pill thru the grey matter.