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If you don't stop trying to befriend me I'm going to explain the Summers family tree at you

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“You know that part of the conversation where I punch you in the neck nine or ten times? Yeah, we’re comin’ up on that pretty quick” is one of the greatest lines in television ever, especially delivered in the first three minutes of a show.

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Even better when playing the actual PARANOIA rpg. Especially if the player is the one passing the blank/meaningless note to the GM, who nods sagely, or looks gravely concerned. The delicious angst this creates in the rest of the group is always a delight.

Whenever your character is not in a scene, you have to leave the room.

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Me unpacking my new copy of the Dune boardgame:

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... Holiday Gaming, Year 5

It is absolutely batshit that I’ve been running these stupid Risus one-shot adventures every December for half a decade.  And yet, here we are, and once again I close out a year’s tabletop RPG play with a chaotic mess of wild improvisation and half-baked ideas loosely themed to midwinter celebrations.  You can read about previous years adventures here, here, here, and here.  

This year formed a direct sequel to last year’s game, which was itself a semi-sequel to the first holiday one shot.  

Following a lawsuit alleging image infringement, trademark violations, defamation, and mail fraud (among other charges), Lucifer settled out of court.  As a result of the arbitration, Lucifer (Satan) is legally obligated to fulfill those letters intended for Santa which, due to misspelling, have been delivered to the Infernal Pit instead.  The letters from Good Children, in particular, must be fulfilled on Christmas Eve as is the expected contract with Santa.  Of course, Lucifer himself is embedded waist-deep in Cocytus, the frozen lake at the bottom of Hell, and anyway you don’t get to reign over the entire Inferno without delegating, so the work has been farmed out to lesser demons.  The easy letters are dealt with by imps and various minor servitors, but there remain a few more problematic missives, and the Devil has appointed these to five of the lords of Hell to handle before Christmas morning.  

Our player characters are:

HAAGENTI, President of Hell, governor over 33 legions, in the shape of a winged bull. (Polymath 4, Boozehound 3, Demon 2, Alchemist 1)

AMDUSIAS, Duke of Hell, governor over 29 legions, in the shape of an upright unicorn. (Magical Musician 4, Treebender 3, Booming Voice 2, Demon 1)

BARBATOS, Duke of Hell, governor over 30 legions, in the shaped of a devilish bearded man. (Demon 4, Dr. Doolittle 3, Treasure Hunter 2, Fortune Teller 1)

FURFUR, Earl of Hell, governor over 26 legions, in the shape of a hart with a fiery tail. (Cupid 4, Thunder and Lightning 3, Demon 2, Soothsayer 1)

MARCHOSIAS, Marquess of Hell, governor over 30 legions, in the shape of a winged wolf with a flaming mouth. (Rowdy Boy 4, Demon 3, Fundamentally Honest 2, Flamethrower 1)

(Our demonic cast is directly but loosely based off their attributes as recorded in The Lesser Key of Solomon.)

Lucifer lays out the deal: Get this done before dawn. They’ve got to follow the rules Santa laid on in arbitration:

No teleporting inside the residence.  They can teleport to it, but must get inside physically.

No damage.  No blasting the walls down with hellfire or the like. Santa doesn’t do property damage.

No getting seen, unless being seen fosters belief in Santa Claus and the Magic of Christmas.

If milk and cookies or other snacks have been left out for Santa, they must be consumed.

Letters from Good Children must be fulfilled.

There are five Good Child letters left. Lucifer has provided them with a magic sack which will provide the next letter as each is fulfilled, and also potentially provide gifts or other useful tools (no guarantees).  The letters are revealed first with names and locations, and only once the party is at the residence is the child’s request made visible.  It is also established that the demons all basically have a roughly 13th-16th century European level of understanding.

LETTER ONE comes from Jimothy Sanchez of Passaic, New Jersey.  Jimothy lives with his father Oliver, stepmother Alanis, and his older stepsister Quinn. Jimothy is eight.

The demons arrive via teleportation outside the two-story suburban home of the Sanchez family.  They are confused by the environment, but immediately begin debating how to get in.  Examination of the letter reveals that Jimmy wants a “fidget spinner” and to “go to space like an astronaut.”

Barbatos begins interrogating a nightbird for information on how to get inside. “You’re tellin’ me you want to get in there to give a little boy a ‘present’?  You fuckin’ pervert,” the thickly-NJ-accented bird replies.  Eventually, the bird summons some pigeons, who attack Marchosias.  Furfur responds by summoning lighting to strike the bird’s tree, which splits and bursts into flames.

This wakes the father inside, who (as can be seen through the window) calls the fire department, although the demons are unclear on what’s happening.  Barbatos turns himself into an approximation of Santa (long white beard, red sharkskin suit, curling ram’s horns) as the fire department arrives. Marchosias and Haagenti teleport back to Dis to visit the infernal library and attempt to unravel the word “astronaut”. Amdusias attempts to pull a key out of the magic sack, but gets a viper instead, which she discards on the ground where it almost immediately bites a fireman.  Oliver Sanchez comes outside, and Barbatos introduces himself as Santa, leading to a great deal of confusion.  Marchosias and Haagenti return, and Haagenti attempts to sell the Santa con by turning into an elf, but succeeds only in turning into an Elf on the Shelf, all of which causes Mr. Sanchez to faint.  Barbatos picks up the EotS and they and Marchosias go inside.  After getting the rundown on what “astronaut” means, Barbatos attempts to get a book on Space from the bag, and gets a book about NASA.  Amdusias downs the milk and cookies, and is revolted by the lack of parasites.  Based on the book, he goes to the Moon, where he attempts to collect a footprint left there by astronauts.  Since it’s all moon dust, he just gets a fist of dust.  He brings that back and stuff it and a wooden top (provided by the sack in response to a request for a fidget spinner) into the stocking labeled Jimothy, and the demons collectively bug out while the firefighters attempt to revive their envenomed compatriot.  

LETTER TWO comes from the children of St. Guinefort’s Home for Disadvantaged Children, an archaic Catholic orphanage in NYC’s Lower East Side.  Surprisingly, the children have not requested anything unreasonable, but have requested a badminton set so they can play together.  Haagenti and Barbatos teleport to the roof of the building in search of a chimney, and finding one Barbatos tosses Haagenti (still in stuffed elf form) down it.  Haagenti hits a metal barrier and finds himself trapped.  Furfur joins them and drops a steaming, acidic load of demon poo down it, burning a hole through the closed flue and dumping Haagenti into a disused storeroom.  Barbatos turns into a rat and follows him down.  Haagenti attempts to take the form of a child and only manages to become a naked, horned baby with a devil’s tail, but is at least able to crawl around.  Barbatos goes for Santa mode again, but this time ends up worse, appearing gaunt and skeletal in his red garb.  Barbatos stuffs the baby Haagenti into the magic bag, a transimensional experience which shatters his mind and that of Furfur, who was scrying on their progress at the moment.  The two have a close encounter with and narrowly avoid the notice of a nun doing the rounds, and manage to quickly locate a room full of sleeping children, where a sad, Charlie-Brown-esque tree sits with no presents around.  Outside, Amdusias attempts to prevent any undue attention by summoning the sound of a traditional Christmas carol, but unwittingly makes everyone in earshot lose Whamageddon instead, followed by Fairytale of New York.

Back inside, Barbatos extracts the extremely dazed Haagenti from the sack, and then attempts to get a badminton set out of it.  The sack provides everything required: net, rackets, shuttlecocks, posts, post-hole digger, cardboard tube forms for pouring concrete anchors for the posts, bags of concrete, a backhoe and steamroller for flattening the court, turf, grass seed, chalk, a spreader, etc.  The room is very full, and the tree is entirely obscured.  

The demons retreat to Central Park, where they have a brief altercation with some hoodlums, before heading to the next home.

LETTER THREE was from Emily Chen of Hollywood, California, where she lives with her mother Amy and three brothers Ted, Leo, and Bobby in a three-bedroom apartment on the fifth floor of a walk-up building.  Emily, as the letter reveals, wants a pony.

Amdusias’s tree-bending bends a palm over the fence and lets everybody past the gates of the building, and the demons gather around the door to apartment.  Barbatos uses his treasure-finding skills to locate a key.  It is inside the apartment.  A cat is sensed inside, and Barbatos attempts to convince the cat to let them in.  The cat explains that even if it wanted to, it can’t work the lock.  A bribe of fish is offered if the cat will retrieve the key and push it under the door - the cat agrees if they will give it sushi.  A key is pushed under the door.  It does not fit in the lock.  Haagenti turns it into a more ductile metal to make it fit into the keyhole, and then attempts to firm it up so it can be turned, but in doing so ends up fusing it into the keyhole.  The cat demands sushi, which when extracted from the bag is revealed to be a piece of tamago nigiri.  An offer of salmon is made, but the cat again points out they are not capable of working the locks.  One of the demons tried to turn the cat into a human.  The locks click, the door opens, and a very sexy, very naked, and entirely testicle-less human man is revealed, demanding salmon.  The salmon is given, but the former cat asks for its balls back in exchange for letting them in and not just blowing up their spot right then and there.  Magic succeeds in restoring the man-cat’s genitals, and after garbing himself in a child’s gym shorts and some flip-flops, the cat leaves into the Hollywood night and the demons are free to enter. 

The living room bears a silver metallic tree, which confuses them, but they quickly and successfully extract a full-sized live pony and a bale of moist hay form the sack, the demons depart.

LETTER FOUR comes from Bethany-Ann Mayweather of South Carolina.  Bethany, it turns out, lives in a heavily-fortified survivalist compound in the woods with her dad (Steve), two brothers (Jesse and Dave), and two sisters (Katie and Donna-Lee.  The entire place is surrounded by an electrified fence topped with razor wire.

Emily would like to go to school like other children.

Things get weird.  Amdusias bends a tree over the fence, and Furfur drops down to discover that the clear ground between the fence and the building itself is heavily mined, exploding instantly (but non-fatally, because demon).  Lights are going on at the compound as Furfur starts bouncing around setting off mines and motion-sensing lamps.

Marchosias has the idea that the humans at the first house had somehow summoned that metal chariot in response to the burning tree by talking into that weird curved oblong shape, and that if they do the same maybe the metal chariot will help them get in.  Reaching into the bag extracts a banana.  Marchosias holds it to the side of his head and says hello.

“Hello?” says a sleepy voice from the banana.  “Who is this?”

“Uh, Mark,” responds Marchosias, who is Fundamentally Honest.  “Are you the...cops?  There is a little girl and there is a lot of gunpowder and fire and explosions.”

“What?  No, this is Raffi.  How did you get this number?  Is this a prank?”

It is established that this is not a prank (”Did Steve put you up to this?” “There’s a Steve here but no.” “From Blue’s Clues.” “I don’t know who or what that is.” “Mark, I’m looking at this caller ID here, and it just says ‘banana’.  What’s going on?”).  Barbatos teleports to this ‘Raffi’, the shock of which causes Raffi to suffer a heart attack and die. Barbatos resurrects Raffi as an undead revenant, and after difficulty (”Raffi, how do we call the police?” “RING.  RING.  RING.  BANANAPHONE.”) manage to extract the magical incantation “911″ from the former children’s entertainer.  Marchosias invokes this to the banana and connects to emergency services, and after a very complicated discussion (and some light aerial reconnaissance to pinpoint a location) succeeds in convincing them that there is a dangerous, heavily-armed incident at the compound and a child is in danger.  SWAT is being sent.  Meanwhile, Furfur is drawing gunfire from the survivalist dad, and Amdusias uses spectral music to distract him while they slip inside.

The six-foot-tall unicorn-headed naked figure reaches the crude two-dimensional paper Christmas tree inside the survival bunker and attempts to eat the dry saltines and rehydrated powdered milk that has been left out.  They are interrupted by the sleepy-eyed and tow-headed Bethany-Ann, who asks who they are.  Amdusias explains that they’re subbing in because Blitzen is sick.  Blitzen is Bethany-Ann’s favorite.  Amdusias tells her she’s going to get to go to school soon, and after a hug sends Bethany-Ann to hide under her bed until some nice people come get her.  Furfur attempts to use his lightning powers to dash Blitzen-like over the compound to drive home the Christmas-ness of it all, and instead burns holes through a number of trees as he accelerates to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.  The remaining demons depart as militarized police descend on the compound.

THE FINAL LETTER is from Marcus Fitzwilliams III, son of Buck and Nancy, brother to Samantha, of Casper, Wyoming.  Marcus is ten, and he would like “a fortnite”.  The demons gather outside the ranch-style suburban home and debate what that means.  Eventually, they decide this means he wants to spend a night in a fort, and locating the Fort Caspar Museum nearby they plan to liberate the child from the house and take him there.  They decide against a plan to bring the fort to the house on the grounds that this might cause property damage.  Everyone but Marchosias goes to the backyard; Marchosias, who at this point looks like Bea Arthur because of reasons, remains out front with the banana to allay suspicion.

In the backyard, Barbatos again attempts to find a key, but fails.  He does detect a dog, and attempts to convince the dog to let them in.  The dog declines. “Stranger bad.  Bite stranger.”  An offer of bacon is made, and raw bacon pulled from the sack.  “Bacon good.  Bite bacon.  Bite stranger.  Good dog.”  This goes back and forth for a bit, and the dog starts barking.  Barbatos attempts to turn into a dog to sell the bit, and turns into a massive, ebon mastiff with glowing red eyes.  The bacon falls on the ground.  Furfur is now hiding in trees behind the house, joined by Amdusias, who attempts to keep things under control by bellowing “somebody let that dog out for a walk”, which comes out in a titanic demonic shout which rattles windows and kills the azaleas.  Lights come on.  The backdoor opens and Buck, carrying a rifle, looks at the giant demon dog and Haagenti, who is still a demonic baby, and the pile of bacon.  In the trees, the flaming tail of Furfur glows. 

“MA, GET UP AND CHECK THE FRONT, I THINK THE METHHEADS ARE TRYIN’ TO ROB US.”

Shit goes sideways quick.  Nancy opens the front door and sees Bea Arthur standing in her yard talking into a banana, and confirms the meth suspicion to buck.  The dog escapes into the yard and eats the bacon.  Baby Haagenti jumps on mastiff Barbatos’ back and the two dash into the house as Buck fires wildly at them and the intruders in the trees.  Nancy shoots the bananaphone and the side of Bea Arthur’s face.  Inside the house, Haagenti and Barbatos dodge bullets semi-successfully.  Haagenti scarfs cookies while Barbatos abandons the original plan and reaches into the bag while thinking “Fort Night”, pulling forth a card with a download code for Minecraft.  Furfur pulls his lightning-assisted flight trick over the house while Amdusias tries a bellowing “HO HO HO” so loud and infernal it shatters windows in houses throughout the neighborhood.

The list complete, the demons depart for Dis, where they are quickly met by Asmodeus, who tells them the boss wants to see them. The demon lords report total success, but receive a thorough chewing-out from Lucifer, who details the many, many violations they have committed and the agonies he is going to inflict on them for their failure.  

“You know the ring where we bury people up to their face in flaming shit?”  “Yeah, that one’s great.”  “Not for the humans.  I’m going to turn you all into humans and stick you there for the next thousand years.”

The demons attempt to portray their actions in a favorable light, and Amdusias protests and attempts to get the sounds of Michael Bublé’s Let it Snow to play and encourage the spirit of the holiday to earn them some clemency. However, it turns instead into Snow’s Informer as Belial reveals himself from behind Lucifer’s torso and tells them he was following and reporting on them the whole time, everyone gets in a Christmas “no, fuck you”, our heroes are consigned to flaming shit, and credits roll. Happy Holidays, everyone.

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200 Word RPG

I wrote a very silly entry to the 200 Word RPG Challenge today, entitled Midlife Crisis on Infinite Earths.  You can read it here, if so inclined.

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Slightly different but Same Energy true story:

As a callow youth in pre-school, I struggled with the concept of Making Friends, so under the advice of my mother, one day I approached a kid during snack time, offered to share my pretzels, and asked if he wanted to be friends.  He told me something to the effect of “go away, weirdo,” and I decided pretty much right there that Reaching Out was a mistake.  Between that and being taught that You Do Not Invite Yourself, my road to at least partly self-imposed social isolation was locked in place before I ever hit primary school.  Which is really cool to still be struggling with after another three and a half decades.

So, who else here struggled to pick up the “go away, you’re not wanted” social cue as a kid, which has made them so overly cautious as an adult that they end up having cool conversations with cool people but don’t want to be too friendly in case they’re missing the cue, and so end up making those cool people think that you don’t want to be friends with them?

Because, like, this is the Number One Thing that has fucked me up as an adult and I am so grateful to my friends who didn’t stop talking to me while I slowly figured out that, yes, they did actually want to be friends.

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What a good dog.

i’m proud of him

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@realphilosophytube , “The Philosophy of Antifa”

“If you’re a political enemy of fascism though, either they lose or you die”

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My current campaign has a PC whose family name is literally the title of a board game that was in eyeline when the player was finalizing the character at the table, and a town named “Mintoreo” because there was a package of mint Oreos on the table and when I asked the players to name the town that was the first thing they said.  My players have subsequently learned that if I didn’t consider it important enough to have named a thing beforehand, I’m also not going to care if they have to live in a world where some towns are named for snack foods.

My favorite old D&D thing is the players naming their characters stupid shit like Melf (from Male Elf) because no way is this character going to survive past level 1 and then you end up with them becoming an important named character in the setting against all odds

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One of my all-time favorite b-movies.

Rutger Hauer as Harley Stone in Split Second (1992)

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... Ways My Unconscious Mind Expresses Anxiety and Self-Hatred

A series of consecutive dreams in one night in which:

A trusted person informs me that I am soundly disliked by all my former coworkers,

I am explicitly told that I am ugly,

and I am told that Thora Birch is married to Sigourney Weaver.

To be fair, that last one was probably a non sequitur. But it is the one that woke me up with the need to double-check that someone hadn't actually told me that and my brain had squirreled it away for some reason.

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Well, call me out, then.

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Hello youtube, uhh we’re here today to do an unboxing video

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Culture Ship names are some of my favorite things ever. These are very good.

AIs named by AIs

Neural networks can be good at naming things, I’ve discovered. Recently I’ve been experimenting with a neural network called GPT-2, which OpenAI trained on a huge chunk of the internet. Thanks to a colab notebook implementation by Max Woolf, I’m able to fine-tune it on specific lists of data - cat names, for example. Drawing on its prior knowledge of how words tend to be used, GPT-2 can sometimes suggest new words and phrases that it thinks it’s seen in similar context to the words from my fine-tuning dataset. (It’ll also sometimes launch into Harry Potter fan fiction or conspiracy theories, since it saw a LOT of those online.)

One thing I’ve noticed GPT-2 doing is coming up with names that sound strangely like the names of self-aware AI spaceships in Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels. In the science fiction series, the ships choose their own names according to a sort of quirky sense of humor. The humans in the books may not appreciate the names, but there’s nothing they can do about them:

Hand Me The Gun And Ask Me Again Zero Credibility Fixed Grin Charming But Irrational So Much For Subtlety Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall

Now compare some of the effects pedals GPT-2 came up with:

Dangerous But Not Unbearably So Disastrously Varied Mental Model Dazzling So Beautiful Yet So Terrifying Am I really that Transhuman Love and Sex Are A Mercy Clause

 And some of the cat names:

Give Me A Reason Thou Shalt Warning Signs Kill All Humans

Did GPT-2 somehow have a built-in tendency to produce names that sounded like self-aware spaceships? How would it do if it was actually trained specifically on Culture ships?

A reader named Kelly sent me a list of 236 of Iain M. Banks’s Culture ship names from Wikipedia, and I trained the 345 million-parameter version of GPT-2 on them. As it turns out, I had to stop the training after just a few seconds (6 iterations) because GPT-2 was already beginning to memorize the entire list (can’t blame it; as far as it was concerned, memorizing the entire list was a perfect solution to the task I was asking for).

And yes. The answer is yes, naming science fiction AIs is something this real-life AI can do astonishingly well. I’ve selected some of the best to show you. First, there are the names that are clearly warship AIs:

Not Disquieting At All Surprise Surprise And That’s That! New Arrangement I Told You So Spoiler Alert Bonus Points! Collateral Damage Friendly Head Crusher Scruffy And Determined Race To The Bottom

And there are the sassy AIs:

Absently Tilting To One Side ASS FEDERATION A Small Note Of Disrespect Third Letter of The Week Well Done and Thank You Just As Bad As Your Florist What Exactly Is It With You? Let Me Just Post This Protip: Don’t Ask Beyond Despair Way Too Personal Sobering Reality Check Charming (Except For The Dogs)

The names of these AIs are even more inscrutable than usual. To me, this makes them much scarier than the warships.

Hot Pie Lightly Curled Round The Wrist Color Gold Normally Comes With Silence 8 Angry Doughnut Feelings Mini Cactus Cake Fight Happy to Groom Any Animals You Want Stuffy Waffles With Egg On Top Pickles And Harpsichord Just As Likely To Still Be Intergalactic Jellyfish Someone Did Save Your Best Cookie By Post-Apocalyptic Means LGRPllvmkiqquubkhakqqtdfayyyjjmnkkgalagi'qvqvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

At least it does sound like some of these AIs will be appeased by snacks.

Bonus content: more AI names, including a few anachronisms (“Leonard Nimoy for President” for example)