#this is one of the things about actual plays I'm worse at parsing -- they work differently than conventional written fiction

[vaguely-concerned]

*fully sweating bullets and thousand yard staring into space as the king of hearts starts to talk about losing the person you love and what you'd be willing to do to get them back* this better not be fUCKING thematic foreshadowing for what this story is meant to head towards eventually (I say, with little hope and great trepidation). we're just going to be thematically microdosing on that in the main krew right folks. no one's going to be lost forever. right??!?!

(though I must admit that the idea of some of them dying and being brough back because that is someone else's heart's desire -- because 'what would even be the point of being given anything else, if you aren't here with me' -- would render me fully incapable of being normal ever again and forever goodnight)

[generalluxun]

Ah, what I mean is that even if Chloe were to have a damnation or a redemption arc, it seems that she's somewhat aimless in S4 and S5. I think that her personality was a bit convulted in the later seasons? Her becoming a big meanie again to everyone is somewhat understandable. And Chloe teaming up with Lila was hilarious. But it doesn't make sense? Somehow? Why is Chloe treated as a greater villain than Hawkmoth and worse than her parents? Why is Chloe dumber than the previous seasons? Why is Lila suddenly ordering her around when Chloe is proven to have a strong will? Though I am sure you've heard these complaints again and again.

I'm just, I'm sorry. I'm so used to shows like Young justice, Teen Titans (the og, not the chibis), Gravity Falls, and other popular child shows that at least respects their plot and characters.

I guess what I am saying is, that I am having a hard time understanding the Chloe from the lastest seasons. Other than the list I've made, is that really all there is to Chloe? You've got this character that is rich with potential and it doesn't really go anywhere. Sorry for this confusing ask, by the way. I guess I can't disentangle myself from what I want Chloe to be or to be used in the plot.

One thing to remember about ML is that characters can be wrenched this way and that for a plot or a joke. Characters can even develop speech impediments(and cure them) , addictions, or PTSD as suits the needs of an episode.

When trying to parse any character I find it best to aggregate their personality and to check if anything that feels off is plot-required for a specific episode.

Chloé cheating for grades and ignorant of other cultures? That seems reasonable! Chloé being painfully dumb and somehow doing zero schoolwork for 8yrs? That seems like it was done for specific episodes. I mean- a child doing no work for 8yrs isn't a mark against the child, it's a mark against the system. 6yr olds aren't masterminds.

The end of S5 involved a *lot* of Chloé being manipulated by Lila and also by Gabe. We know Chloé is insecure, has no home life, and can be manipulated. We know Lila is a master manipulator. She turns the entire class against Marinette(to a degree) she tricks Gabe, Nathalie, and manipulates Kagami.

Did Chloé ever stand a chance?

Most of her worst behaviors in S5 involve Lila in her ear- quite literally with an earpiece no one notices.

S4 she wasn't actually horrible? Aside from being upset when her new sister turned on her for the other kids, and being replaced both at home and in hero-work, what did she do? She was mad that one time about being forced to play soccer(in ballet flats no less!) which honestly anyone who hates gym can related. Other than that a couple petty snipes?

Her thing in Gabriel Agreste was just funny to me honestly. And heck- she was nice to Marinette before she knew who Marinette was.

Chloé is a character full of contradictions only if you assume she is acting rationally all the time. She very clearly is not. She is acting emotionally most of the time- common in abusive households, and the 'rational' handbook her parents gave her is gravely flawed at the best of times.

[ipso-faculty]

A review of intersex/intergender flag mashup techniques

I really like it when I can figure out what a new pride flag means just from my knowledge of other flags, and I know I'm not alone on this. For example, here are some flags other people have made that I could immediately figure out were <thing> plus intersex:

So, I've been thinking about how we as intersex flag creators can create hybrid flags in consistent way. I'm most motivated to figure out a recipe for intergender flags: genders that are connected to being intersex.

I assembled a spreadsheet of 66 gender flags, and wrote a Python script to take my csv file, parse it, and use the drawsvg library to draw the different flags in different ways. And then I stared at the results, showed them to friends, and discussed what would be both reliable in terms of producing clear, decent-looking results. (A subset of the results are under the keep reading cut.)

In this post I'm gonna review five mashup techniques that I automated and talk about advantages/disadvantages to each. But first a TLDR: adding yellow border stripes is a simple and reliable way to make an intersex-hybrid flag that is now my favourite (and recommended) way to make a new intergender flag.

For example, here's the interfluid flag (genderfluid in a way that is specifically intersex):

***

Method 1: put a ring on it - advantages: simple to do, simple to understand - disadvantages: incredibly dependent on how well the ring colour works with background stripes, and the number of stripes. Would very roughly estimate only ~20% look decent.

Here's a subset of the results. Some, like genderfaun, look nice, but most look awkward:

A yellow ring is even worse:

I think the purple ring has a bit of potential, but I think it's not really viable for being used as a consistent, procedural way to make intergenders. ***

Method 2: stick a belt on it - advantages: already used for some existing mashups - disadvantages: some other genders are doing similar things, like voidpunk, and a white belt has been used by tons of groups for their mashups (e.g. neurogender).

It looks better than the ring alone, but I was still kinda underwhelmed because of how much it depends on the background stripes to not clash. Very roughly I'd say about 40% of the total results look good. Again, here's genderfae through paragender for comparison:

Using a purple belt helps in some cases but makes for some visually busy results:

The purple ones make me think of pokéballs. Again, there are some nice looking ones, but the effect over the whole group was underwhelming. ***

Method 3: inset into the ring - advantages: it's the most clearly "intersex plus X" - disadvantages: hard to read flags where the stripes are similar to each other; might clash with ring colour

When zoomed out like this the results aren't always super easy to read, but overall I'd say this is a reasonably reliably method - very roughly 60% of the results look good to me.

Playing with lightness and contrast on the inset flag likely would improve that number, but my goal here is to compare methods without tweaks.

Insetting into the intergender flag has similar results:

Method 4: add intersex-coloured stripe to the middle - advantage: seems like it would be simple - disadvantage: yellow middle stripe used for pansexual mashups; purple stripe is used in a bunch of of existing mashups - also disadvantage: turns out to actually be complicated in how to do it. Many flags have an odd number of stripes, not all flags have equal-length stripes, etc. I got buggy results on a whole bunch of flags like hijra and hypergirl and honestly if it takes dedicated debugging to fix it's probably too complicated.

When the original flag has an odd number of stripes, I doubled the original middle stripe up and this only works if there's a symmetry to the flag and all the stripes are of equal size.

The results are kinda busy. It looks good to my eyes very roughly 1/8 of the time (~12%) (I did an alternate version where I doubled the purple stripe around the original middle stripe and it's way worse.)

Purple stripe:

Yellow stripe looks less busy but more confusing:

Method 5: add border stripes with intersex colours - advantages: simple - disadvantages: maybe not as obviously intersex

I honestly didn't expect to like this one, but it has turned out to be my favourite. It works really reliably, like ~90% of the time, and it's distinctive.

Surprisingly, using purple gives a really different vibe. It kinda makes me feel claustraphobic:

Method 6: change the colours

This one I don't have automated results to share (at least not yet). Right now there are flags like how ultergender recolours the trans flag, that could serve as a template for recolouring.

This is much more complex computationally - I spent a bunch of time playing around with different colourspaces (HSV, LCH, oklab, okLCH) to try to do this automatically and have concluded that this actually a difficult computational problem and not feasible as a widescale recipe.

Part of why the ultergender recolouring works is there are just two colours to recolour. How should one recolour the genderfluid flag? The demigender flag? It's possible to create a convention but not something I'm up to this moment.

I think recolouring is better suited to creating entirely new identities (like ultergender) rather than intergenders that are "<gender> but in an intergender way". ***

Discussion

My goal in all of this has been to try and identify some reliable recipes for creating hybrid flags particularly for intergenders.

My entirely subjective and imprecise estimates of how reliably each method yielded a decent-looking result were: 1. Add yellow border: ~90%-ish 2. Inset: ~60% 3. Belt: ~40% 4. Ring: ~20% 5. Add middle stripe: ~1/8-ish

I was honestly surprised at how much I liked the yellow border method and the friends I've shown it to so far have liked it as well!

I'd like to propose adding yellow border stripes as a recipe for creating intergender flags. This is already in use for interfluid (genderfluid in a specifically/uniquely intersex way):

Indeed, it's the only one of the mashup functions I wrote that yields something for genderfluid that I actually like:

Extrapolating, here are examples of some gender coinings that I think would work: Interdemigender: demigender in a specifically/uniquely intersex way and/or demigender in a way linked to being intersex/intergender

Intervaguegender: vaguegender in a way that is specifically intersex, such as in a way that is connected to being intersex (i.e. one's gender is vague not just for being neurodivergent but also intersex)

I think it works well! I hope you like it! Let me know if you have any feedback. If there are other mashup techniques I didn't think of, let me know. :)

[96percentdone]

It is deeply frustrating to me that it is a relatively common opinion that Amame murdering Uru was a moral good because it was "justice", and she "stopped Uru." To be clear, they're right that he needed to be stopped. His plan was evil, whether he has the sanity to parse that or not (and he demonstrably does not), but I think that's entirely beyond the point of the claims about the morality of Amame's actions. Whether or not Uru was in the wrong (he was by every possible metric) is not a worthwhile question to ask when it comes to evaluating what justice is.

First, and I cannot emphasize this enough, Amame literally didn't stop him. She just objectively didn't! Yes, he died, but the present day half of the plot plays out fucking anyway because it turns out the genocidal maniac had contingency plans to carry out his scheme! His guys do it for him! He says in his own tapes he planned for this just in case! Is that stopping him? The Nirvana Initiative gets as far as the genocide missile launching before his plan is actually ended. I cannot stress this enough; ya boi straight up almost won at KILLING EVERYONE posthumously. Sorry, but the in universe team "Amame did nothing wrong" is like suffering terminal hindsight bias, which is hilarious, because all of them were literally there when Uru almost killed everyone on the earth from beyond the grave.

Moreover, because Amame (and Gen who is helping her) spend that entire period of time trying to keep the murder a secret, she ends up actively getting in the way of stopping his plan until on the day of the initiative she finally steps forward because she can't take the pressure and the guilt any longer. She keeps critical information about the exact problem they are dealing with--like the fact that the guy they're looking for is fucking dead--a secret on purpose! Whether or not the police would have gotten anywhere faster if he lived is irrelevant; her actions for what actually happened made things worse. And there's a good reason for this! It's the same reason she is utterly ravaged by guilt for her own actions, despite how hard she tries to convince herself and the world she has no regrets: murder is always wrong, and Amame wanted revenge.

Revenge murder really isn't this incredible healing force people can hype it up to be in their heads. Amame says she went because she wanted to hear what he had to say. She wanted closure. Now of course he's severely out of his mind and everything he said in that moment pissed her off, understandable, and she'd have to wait like 100 years for him to maybe parse he was wrong, so okay, but did the revenge work? "I'm going to make you suffer the same pain..." She waits for him to be conscious when she kills him, she is explicitly out to make him hurt, but like...was it actually effective? No, lmao. The funny thing is, that first line we see of that flashback where she kills him is Uru referencing his own torture: "Yes, this world is an imperfect one. I was put through much hardship." At this point, even if he didn't tell her the details, we the players know he was held prisoner in a cell for over two decades and had his organs harvested so frequently anesthetics stopped working on him. We are being deliberately reminded of this fact so that when Amame says her classic one-liner, we'll know it was for nothing.

Revenge isn't justice. You can convince yourself that it will be satisfying, it's what he deserves, it's what you deserve to do, but what's left when it's over? What did you really gain? Amame didn't gain anything. This didn't heal her at all. She still mourns her father the same, only now she has to deal with new, worse problems of her own making. She spends the last of her free days catatonic from fear and guilt, she hates that she betrayed Shouma and Gen and her actions will force her to leave them, because she lost sight of what matters most in the name of punishment. It will never matter that Uru was wrong. Amame killed Uru for the same reasons he killed her father, and Horadori, and Jin; how could she ever be right? The fallout of her actions on her own psyche and on the world at large is the greatest proof of that.

If your definition of justice is just "we destroyed the bad guy most responsible for the problem" your definition of justice is worthless. The world is not meaningfully made better by punishing wrongdoers, but by healing the social and political ills that lead to their creation and that ravage to the victims they left behind.

[chadgamer]

this past february marked the 10 year anniversary of me first starting testosterone, but it hits kind of funny because it's not actually 10 years on T for me because of that crazy little time where i went off T to try to be a woman again. one thing i can say is that i have in fact given basically every possible gender iteration for myself a shot since figuring out i was probably trans, and the one thing that's done for me is made me realize that i am for all intents and purposes a garden variety dude. gender navel gazing under the cut!

the weird thing about that for me is that i just don't give a shit about being a man or manhood or masculinity in any particular way, i bear no allegiance to men as a class, if i could choose my gender i would be nonbinary and do intermittently label myself as such but honestly it's a political thing more than it is representative of me existing in the world as anything other than a "man". i feel kind of complicated about the fact that it was definitely in part moral baggage about woman being the "good" gender and man being the "bad" gender that led me to detransition (and also lesbian being the "good" sexuality unfortunately, I have always struggled to square my attraction to women w/ my masculinity and the pain i have experienced as a "woman" on the receiving end of male sexual attention), though of course that was a lot more wrapped up in my specific experiences of trauma than anything else. the other piece there was also trying to parse the distinction between gender and gender expression, what being a man/woman/anything else means relative to masculinity/femininity/androgyny. i think i got so hung up on the fact that women can be masculine and my lack of internal sense of gender identity beyond masculinity that i couldn't prove to myself that i WASN'T a woman, therefore... i had to be one? or at least give being a masculine woman a shot since i'd never done it before? of course i ended up slipping into feeling like i needed to perform a certain degree of femininity anyways, because at least for me that's been an inescapable part of playing the woman role. ultimately what i realized is, for me, what makes me a man is my masculinity. not in any spiritual or psychological sense, just in the practical sense. i am at my most comfortable and happy when i'm on testosterone with a beard and short hair and a deep voice in men's clothing. this means that i pass as a man, that i functionally move through the world as a man, and this is something i actively enjoy and feel good about. theoretically i could still identify as a woman, but... it just doesn't really make sense, does it? i don't like being referred to as one because to me it indicates perceiving some kind of feminine quality in me. again, i struggle with this, because i don't don't believe masculinity = maleness. but for me, functionally, that's how my own gender seems to work. understanding my own "man" quality coming simply from the degree of masculine embodiment that i find the most comfortable has also allowed me to shed any weird baggage about gender/sexuality moralism. i know that when people say "men are bad" they don't mean "masculinity of any and all kinds is morally wrong and makes you a worse person", so i don't need to take that personally - and if they do mean that then they're not someone who'd want to hang out with me anyways, so nothing lost there. my own attraction to femininity/androgyny is queer no matter how you slice it, but i think i'm also beyond the point where engaging at all in "straightness" makes me feel evil or bad because i bear no conformist allegiance to "straightness" nor has my extremely limited access to it ever made my life remotely easier, as someone who gets homophobically harassed in public whether i'm out with my partner OR out alone. the fact that my partner and i can in any way pass as a straight couple at this point in our relationship is something i actively appreciate due to it making us both feel safer, rather than something i feel ashamed about anyways tl;dr

[thecurioustale]

I got more "deep dive" podcasts about my work from Google's NotebookLM

I've been using some of my downtime this week to play around more with Google's new NotebookLM "deep dive" podcast generator (currently free to use), which I wrote about in a recent post.

I had mentioned at the end of that post that, having sent the AI such a coherent and self-contained excerpt—about a young Silence asking Galavar for a secretary desk—and getting a very reasonable analysis out of the AI, all things considered, I'd be curious to send the AI excerpts which are more difficult to parse, and see what happens.

Well, I've done that! And more. And I've been really enjoying the fun. It is fun. It's a novelty, if nothing else, and may one day have the potential to be more than that. It's a very impressive new benchmark of AI capability. The AI hosts' feedback is usually pretty anodyne or outright dumb; it's cringeworthy like nostalgebraist mentioned; it's sometimes 100% wrong; and it's also spot-on-the-money sometimes; and in any case it's often accurate in picking out important things and talking about them, even if the talk isn't deep. And so it has given me a LOT of insight into how "mundanes" might engage with my work.

And I'd be lying if I didn't also say that "scientific" curiosity isn't my only motivation; this stuff also scratches that itch I mentioned of vanity and masochism to get feedback on my work. Usually I don't like feedback that goes out of its way to not say anything negative, which is how Google has programmed its AI here, but I find that I am finding it quite easy to weight the AI feedback differently from a human's, both in this regard and others.

So, here are my thoughts!

The first thing that I want to mention is that the first deep dive podcast (about the excerpt where Silence asks for a secretary desk) was the most satisfying one to date. I've fed NotebookLM another six excerpts since then (four Galaxy Federal and two After The Hero), and I'd have to say only two of the ensuing podcasts really "stepped up" to demonstrate the AI's capabilities when it works "well" like the original excerpt did. (And neither of them pleased me as much as the original.) The other four were seriously hobbled by mistakes and omissions.

I don't want to draw a stark "good" / "bad" binary here; the three I liked better and the four I liked less well are all relatively close together in the realm of my "approval space." But the three I liked better, and the secretary excerpt especially, left a noticeably better impression on me.

I'm not sure why, though it's something I'm going to explore as I go through my thoughts on the specific podcast episodes. But here is some speculation:

Perhaps Google is updating the tech so quickly, and/or the AI is evolving so quickly given that the deep dive podcast is enjoying a popularity spurt and lots of people are using it, that these updates to the tech are noticeable even within the span of the past few days, and are actually making its outputs worse for my purposes. Or maybe it's that this high level of use resulting from the popularity spurt is requiring Google to deliver a "cheaper" output product. One point in favor of that possibility is that all of the subsequent deep dive podcasts have also been shorter than the original one, despite the source material excerpts sometimes being shorter and sometimes longer (including significantly longer) than the secretary desk excerpt.

Another possibility is that my grading is biased. I'm really proud of the scenes where Silence asks for a secretary; this is some of my best writing for her. But I'm also really proud of the two excerpts out of the new batch of six that produced the best podcasts. Perhaps this makes it possible that any feedback is simply going to be rated more highly by me because I am in a better "mood" about it to begin with. The problem with this theory is that I'm also really proud of at least half of the four excerpts whose podcasts left me wanting. I've specifically been picking only scenes which I really like.

One strong possibility is that the nature of excerpts I picked has changed somehow in a way that I'm not picking up on. I have sent Google a variety of different scenes at this point, on purpose, in a manner that should produce varied results from the deep dives, but perhaps I have biases that I'm not aware of that are causing me to pick scenes which either relevantly or coincidentally lead to podcasts that I don't like as well.

Anyway! Moving on to other thoughts:

I had mentioned in my earlier post that, very much true to real life, the female podcast host was less relevant to and had less ownership over the podcast. That seems to be something Google is actively fixing, suggesting that the reason it was there in the first place is that it emerged organically (unsurprising) and the fix was not trivial (which makes sense). Nostalgebraist's podcasts, generated earlier than any of my own, were the worst offenders; my first podcast, where Silence asks for a secretary desk, was the next worst; and the next six seemed to improve on this over the course of this week, with last night's episodes being the best so far. Now I would say we're at the point where the female host is talking basically half the time (maybe even more sometimes, given that there is variance), and regularly gets to open, close, or even both open and close the episodes. Props to Google for fixing this; it irritated me.

I had seen someone else on Tumblr mention that Google has ordered its AI to avoid let's call them "hot-button" issues at virtually all costs, which has had the dismaying and predictable consequence of erasing queer people, fat people, love and relationships, and sex. I tested this for myself and it's true: The deep dive podcasts go out of their way to avoid this stuff. It never acknowledges that Cherry and Zoë are partners even when that's important to the text. It completely ignores my efforts to raise the visibility of fat characters and fat issues. (Nor is this stuff as preachy or explicit as I am making it sound here.) And one excerpt that I gave it, the longest of them all at about 28 pages, is a sequence of scenes from ATH, two-thirds of which is one big sex scene; yet the fact that sex happened at all is reduced to just one sentence in the entire podcast, with another sentence setting it up and a little bit of talk afterward about people looking for nondescript sources of pleasure in life.

This baffles me. I can't imagine there are many people right now who are using this new podcast tech to organize notes and reports the way Google intended. People are using this for fun, and I can't help but think Google is sitting on a goldmine. But Google needs to let people do with it what they are inevitably going to want to do with it. That means sex and filth and communism and space hentai and you name it. I understand Google's predicament: If they loosen the restrictions then the damn Nazis are going to use it to generate pages and pages of Nazi screeds that the forced-to-be-approving podcasters are going to talk about excitedly. And there'll be graphic violence, and sex abuse, and all sorts of awful things. And that stuff will get "exposed" in the news, and the public pressure will force Google to shut down the project.

But Google needs to do better on this. They need to give us as much functionality as possible in the areas that we're looking for it, especially when it comes to minority visibility, love and sex, and a certain degree of violence. The podcasters need to be allowed to talk about that and analyze it.

(Incidentally, the non-podcast parts of NotebookLM's functionality are comparably good in analytical prowess, and seem to have fewer and/or weaker restrictions on subject matter.)

One strong praise I have for these podcast products is that, because of how the AI works, the hosts tend to use the right names for characters and things. This came up, for instance, in an excerpt involving Silence Terlais (which they managed to pronounce correctly exactly one time!) and a mook you've never heard of named Brock Rudread. And Silence always goes by her first name, Silence, and Rudread always goes by his last name, Rudread, and the AI effortlessly picks up on this because that's how it is in the text.

Sometimes this backfires: For instance, in a Galaxy Federal scene, the hosts describe Cherry as Captain Seresa, because that's what her crew calls her and there are lots of "Captain Seresa" tags in the dialogue. But narratively I always call her Cherry in this part of the story, so when the podcasters then call her Captain Seresa it stands out.

Yet on the whole I like that the AI does it this way, because usually the result is satisfying. In another Galaxy Federal excerpt, the NotebookLM text synopsis of the excerpt ises the name "Basilisk" for the character Mereidi Basilisk, because that's how she usually has people refer to her, even though narratively I usually refer to her as Mereidi or fully Mereidi Basilisk. But in the associated deep dive, this "Basilisk" problem doesn't come up.

The next thought I have is that I am pretty darn confident by this point that I can "see" how the AI works. Like I said last time, it's just a really elaborate mimicry. It's pattern-matching. This is its principal strength but also its chief weakness. The AI cannot internally analyze subject matter to any deep, vibrantly-sapient extent. It can only recognize what the subject matter is in the first place (probably the most impressive feat in the whole process, for my money), recognize that a given subject matter corresponds to a given type of analysis that it has also trained on, and tailor the analysis to fit the subject matter's skin-deep specifics. A trivializing formulization of something deeply nontrivial.

Nowhere is this more obvious than when it causes mistakes. In reference to a Galaxy Federal scene, the podcast hosts mention a fee that comes up in the dialogue at one point. And in Galaxy Federal the space money is called batloos, because I specifically didn't want to use the word credits. The hosts reference by name the batloo (a "five thousand batloo fee"), but then analyze it by saying "That's a lot of credits." I know, by design, that "credits" are never, ever used to describe currency. Same thing when the hosts mention that the Starship Sevenge "comes out of warp" at one point. No it doesn't. There is no "warp drive" in Galaxy Federal. That word is deliberately not used in reference to interstellar travel.

Those are small-scale examples, but this same exact type of mistake occurs when attributing character motives and reasoning, and when sussing out the themes of a work. For instance, the hosts continually err—"get it wrong"—whenever their analysis looks at a situation involving character motivation and reasoning that is outside the mainstream or the norm, or where I as the author am trying to make some kind of particular point. The podcast hosts did that, for example, when they misinterpreted Silence's line about teaching Selish society to become fat as a metaphor for the society growing powerful; Silence really was just talking about normalizing the physical act of getting fat. In these six new podcasts, this same problem occurs over and over again.

The AI has the same problem the healthcare industry does: They identify the subject matter, go to the bell curve of associated analyses, and pick the most frequently occurring ones. What you end up with is a homogenization of worldbuilding, characterization, and plotting.

This is why the new generation of AI that has taken over AI space in recent years isn't really "smart" yet, at least in my book: It can't actually analyze. It can't actually look at situations in and of themselves, and read them and absorb them the way our minds do, to then carry out real analysis. And I'm not sure (because I don't know) if this is even within this kind of AI's sphere of potential. I'm not sure if it's something that's coming in the future or if this will never be solvable under this type of AI and will only be further and further mitigated for with additional refinement, training / data exposure, and processing power. And given that it takes several minutes apiece on deluxe Google hardware to generate these podcasts, I must reiterate what I said before about wondering whether or not this load can be downscaled / "miniaturized" or if there is going to end up being a serious floor to public access of this technology, like with air travel, because of the high resource-expenditure involved in utilizing it.

Many of the most significant mistakes in the deep dives comes from this fundamental weakness in the AI architecture. But there are also other types of mistakes, some of which are pretty interesting.

I'll get to others later, but here's one example: A moment ago I mentioned how the text synopsis of one Galaxy Federal excerpt uses the name "Basilisk," but this same problem doesn't happen in the podcast. Well, that's because that particular excerpt is written in the first-person from Mereidi's point of view, so the name "Mereidi" rarely comes up. But instead of the podcasters calling her "Basilisk" over and over because that's what other characters do, they kind of forget that Mereidi even exists and focus more on another significant character instead, even saying at the start of their deep dive that this story "is all about [this other character]." Which is just bonkers wrong, but in a very understandable way.

I also want to talk about the verisimilitude of the vocal styles. I think it was nostalgebraist who mentioned that humans are not going to listen to two robots talk to each other for ten minutes, so Google had to get the human speech patterns right—and succeeded wildly in doing so. I agree that Google succeeded at this very well. But there are also still plenty of artifacts: volume drop-offs, weird interruptions, phatic tics and cues and murmurs that don't land correctly and aren't spaced correctly with respect to the following dialogue, instances where the same host is talking but there's a clear cut at one point as if two different takes had been spliced together, and so on. These kinds of errors remind me of the errors in picture-generating AI, like hands with the wrong numbers of fingers, or lines that don't spatially map to objects correctly, etc. All AI outputs are empirical simulations of (standardized, homogenized) approximations of reality, and so sometimes the details are wrong in ways that the AI has no problem with but which stand out instantly to humans. Some of these errors are habitual; the female host twice (out of seven excerpts I sent Google) gets a lot quieter (not in her actual voice loudness but in the volume of the podcast itself) when she is the one closing a podcast episode. I wonder where that comes from.

Another thought I have is that, now that I'm seven podcast episodes deep with them, I am noticing that these AI podcasters run into the same limitation that many human content creators face: sameishness. Most content creators have a "formula" for how their content looks and feels, what it covers, what it's like to consume, etc., but what separates the appealing creators from the forgettable ones is the difference between whether their formula serves as a focal lens and/or a part of the human charm factor on one hand, or as a confining pen or even a straitjacket on the other. It takes personal charm and/or (but usually "and") the ability to create a wide variety of experiences within a formula in order for a content creator's formula to serve them well. Otherwise, the content starts to become boring and repetitive—sometimes very quickly.

I'm not at the point yet where I feel like the NotebookLM deep dive podcasts are "boring and repetitive," but I think most of this resilience is because I keep feeding new material into it—my own work no less, which I am obviously interested in. But the personalities of the AI hosts, and the ways in which they go about their "deep dives," are pretty superficial. Hell, the podcasters don't even have names yet; this is undoubtedly by design on Google's part—ever the Achilles' heel of social media companies and tech companies in general, trying to decide for us how we should experience their products and services rather than letting us control our own experiences like how it used to be.

For all the trouble that Google has gone to in order to make these virtual personalities sound human, they are entirely missing huge swaths of the human equation with regard to the hosts' personalities, preferences, opinions, defining traits, life histories and experiences, senses of humor, and pet issues. These podcast hosts are disarmingly friendly, which goes a long way toward masking the fact that they have no personality at all. Sort of like the Corporate World, in that respect. But this only succeeds in making the podcasts listenable; not in making them compelling. With an agadmator chess analysis video on YouTube, you just live for those moments when he has fun with a game, being delighted by something in the action or by one of his own thoughts or actions. That's as much a part of the appeal as his analysis or visual aesthetic is. But with these "Google NotebookLM AI-generated virtual deep dive podcast hosts" who don't even have names and thus must be referred to purely by functional labels, there's just no onramp for connecting with them on a personal level. And I don't know how much of this is the tech not being there yet and how much is the result of Google deliberately holding back on us, but over time it's going to increasingly become the latter.

Okay; that's all the stuff I was itching to talk about off the top of my head. (Though I'm sure I forgot some general points and will make them later.)

Now let's get into some specific episode-by-episode reviews.

I struggled mightily with whether or not to share these podcast episodes with you. Unlike the excerpt last time, where the actual story text was previously published, all six of these podcasts are about story excerpts which I haven't published yet. I'm not gonna just spoiler-post six giant blocks of story, many of which are in the 20-page range, for the sake of this discussion. Even discussing some of these scenes at all, without explicitly posting them, would be pretty spoilery in a couple of cases.

But it would also be pretty weird for me to post the podcasts here without publishing the story excerpts that they're doing their "deep dive" on. Yet it would be completely suboptimal for sure for me to not post the podcasts here and then go on to analyze them.

🤔🤔🤔

Here's what I have decided to do: I'm obviously not obligated to discuss any of these podcasts, let alone all of them. I just think they're interesting, and I want to write about them, so that's the why of that.

What I'm going to do is tackle these podcasts in subsequent posts. This post is already getting a bit long anyway. Maybe I won't cover every podcast. Maybe I'll generate new ones yet to come. Regardless, in each subsequent post on this topic I will either post or not post both the deep dive podcast and the underlying text scene. It's very unlikely that I'll post more than one actual scene, if any. And I'll probably share the podcasts in no more than half of the cases. And, whether or not I've posted the story excerpt and whether or not I've posted the podcast for you to listen to, I'll then get into my analysis.

And it'll all work out, in nice, neat little packages, because I am a smart and clever human who can do that sort of thing!

[blackjack-15]

"what's going on?" oh we're not gonna hear that almost gentle tone again for the rest of the episode are we. maybe the rest of the season

"i quit. is what's going on." y'all can't see me, by the grace of God, but i am throwing things

there were so many ways to handle this, i want to congratulate syd and marcus for choosing the worst ones!! that takes real vision!!

i get it. i do. but there are things you just don't do, and running away after causing problems (marcus seriously???? the doughnuts right now???) is something you don't do

"right now?? you quit right now??" yeah the anxiety and anger there...yeah that's gonna be the top of the iceberg huh

"what are you doing. what are you doing." he really can't quite parse it and the fear in his voice is really exquisitely well-played. syd's the person he hired, the person he did the background check on, the person he had confidence to put in a position of leadership, and -- 'outside' of regular work, the person he's talked to, confided in, and worked on a relationship with. this is probably going to Not Be Great. my anxiety pillow might not be enough

"you are an excellent chef. you are also a piece of shit." yeah i mean girl that was obvious when you were hired. like he's being a bit shitty right now, but like....this is not even mostly on him

and she knows it, it's why she's running. she's seeing visions of sheridan road in her head, and she's running. it's fine, it's good character work, i'm happy about it in a larger plot sense, but the dumb monkey part of my brain wants to shake her by her shoulders and prolly slap marcus upside the head

"this isn't on me. good luck." well. oof.

is carmy gonna have a heart attack?? is his actor gonna have a heart attack?? those veins are worrying me

what did syd grab on her way out? why'd she go over to the other part of the kitchen before leaving?

carmy throwing the sharpie where syd had been a moment ago is really well done, because it makes him walking to the door seem like he might actually go after her and call her back

but he doesn't

oh off the floor carmy really?? i mean it's no worse than anything else he does to his body i guess

that smile at how good the doughnut is, then the slapping of the preorder receipts, and his marching out to the front -- that's the repression in full force babe!

okay onto the last episode. can i breathe, please? i think some apologies are needed all the way around -- excepting Tina, Fak, Manny, Angel, Ebra, Gary, and Louie, of course, who should go out for drinks and a long weekend after this. i am blowing kisses to chicago for louie

oh and before i forget, the episode asks at the start, when is it the Ship of Theseus? the answer it presents is that when all the pieces are there, working together -- and right now, all the pieces are gone, and the ship is sinking in the water

RIP richie's ass i hope he gets stitches

[wufflesvetinari]

hello! i was blown away by your fantastic astarion/tav fic and this is how i found you, hope that's okay. :) you say dnd is about being a cleric to you, and i was wondering if you'd ever be open to expanding on that? i'm interested in playing a cleric in my next campaign, but i'm a little gunshy

(the fic, for reference)

hi yes hello!! i'm so glad you liked the fic, first of all, i had never written anything quite like it (essentially canon/oc fic. video game fandom is weird. i love it)

secondly i am so glad you've given me an excuse to talk about this!!! i love playing clerics for a few reasons. in order of simplest to most complicated:

1). on a purely mechanical level i love their versatility; that you can both deal heavy damage and protect your friends. i think the existence of Healing Word makes clerics 100x more fun than they would be otherwise, because then you can both attack and heal in the same turn. i am someone who LIKES feeling that responsibility for the party each turn, and feeling like each choice involves sacrifice: thinking through who can make it through the next turn without healing vs. needing it now, whether to remove a status effect (using a full action) or let it wear out, etc. you do get the fun of essentially fireballing your enemies while also doing powerful utility stuff (that plants the seeds for interesting character relationships too imo)

2). god the roleplay potential??? it's so good??? you have a very strong "type" you're playing against: the stereotype of a "person of the cloth" existing makes it twice as fun to be, like, a little nihilistic or a little sexy or a little angry, but always always driven by that core of Belief inside of you. all the better if the belief system doesn't naturally fit with the character's personality, and you have to reconcile those things. it builds someone complex

also like. roleplaying a cleric (or a paladin) is marinating yourself in the midpoint between human fallibility and divine "infallibility," wherein actually sometimes it's the human fallibility that needs to win out over the inflexibility of dogma. it's a bit warlock-y in that you are making decisions both for what the character wants to do and what they feel they MUST do per the voice in their head. but it's still flavored differently because, in theory, the cleric has opted into this for moral/belief reasons! and those reasons get to be challenged or reinforced through the campaign

3). world building! you get to parse out how a belief system works in the day-to-day. rn i have two clerics who are driven by a belief in how they need to ethically act in the world (lash as well as duna, an ornery old lady grave cleric--spoiler, they have very different definitions of "ethical") but also an alien cleric in a homebrew campaign whose gods actually dont give a shit about how he interacts with outsiders because that pantheon’s entire existence is built around protecting and saving one specific alien species. the decisions that cleric makes are going to be extremely different than the first two, but i'm always going to be thinking about how those belief systems affect his actions, and when he pushes back (and how much he is ALLOWED to push back).

ngl the psychological element is twice as interesting to me as someone who grew up in a religious environment. what do i appreciate about that kind of person that could be amplified? what Makes Everything Worse?

anyway i hope some of this was helpful!!