Writer and narrative designer. You might know me from "The Unicorn's Beard"/The Misadventures of Sawbones and its Menagerie, from Black Chicken Studios' Victory Belles, or from "The Captain's Sphere", Long List for the 2015 Otherwise Award.
Mining’s a rough job– you have to leave the safety of the Shiphall’s air bubble, and travel through the floating rocks in the Void. Tor’s trained as a cook- he’s more comfortable with a pan than a pickaxe. But all dwarves can mine, if push comes to shove, and Tor’s been pushed into the job.
The real problem is Kholan, Tor’s assigned partner.
In the Void, one misstep can send you spinning into nothingness forever. You need someone to watch your back. Kholan thinks Tor’s incompetent, for nonsensical reasons. Kholan doesn’t trust Tor. And because Kholan’s a flaming loon, the feeling’s mutual.
Can Tor make it back to the Shiphall in one piece? And can he do it without strangling Kholan?
So I have a new short story for sale! I’m trying to cover my misc gender confirmation surgery expenses- stuff like “ice packs” and “copious amounts of tylenol”– and so I’m trying to get at least 50 pre-orders to help cover that stuff.
I’m excited about this one, because it’s in a different universe than any of the stuff I’ve written about– and it’s one I want to write middle grade fiction in one of these days.
When I was a suicidal 15 year old everyone told me “it gets better”, and it sounded like bullshit. And frankly, it still sounds like bullshit.
Like oh, what, I’m living in hell and you’re not gonna help me or *do* anything or give me any useful advice and I’m supposed to just hang in there on the nebulous, pithy promise that things are just gonna work out on their own? And you can’t tell me how or why, I’m just supposed to take it on the faith that I don’t have that something might change in ways I haven’t considered?
But yeah. It does. And it’s frustrating as hell.
Yes, things are gonna get better, and they’re gonna get better in ways I can’t describe even after experiencing it myself. Things you don’t even know CAN be different WILL be different. One day you’re just going to step outside and realize things got better somewhere and you didn’t even notice it happening.
And there’s really nothing I can say that makes that sound even a little bit believable.
I guess all I can tell you is that you have to want to believe it.
i hated being 15 and wanted to die too, or at least have something change. now that i can look back, i can identify what, specifically, gets “better:”
-at 15 you have almost no control over your schedule, including sleep. the school system demands a sleep/wake cycle that’s extremely unnatural and difficult to keep even for normal teenagers, and amounts to constant sleep deprivation (a form of torture) for nightowl teenagers. constant sleep deprivation or even just chronic disregulation fucks with your entire body, your hormones, and your mental health. it makes everything worse.
-as an adult, a lot of jobs do expect you to be a morning person, but at least your body is more likely to cooperate with a 9-5 work/sleep schedule, and you’re also more free to take second shift or night shift work that suits you. as an adult you need less sleep than teenagers and have fewer authority figures in your life to get in the way of when and how much you nap.
-at 15 if you attend any school other than homeschooling, you’re basically in jail that’s also hell. everyone is a similar age to you and going through similar, or worse, problems, and they’re going to take it out on everyone around them. you have very little ability to get away from bullies, and you’re just fucked when your bullies are your teachers, your parents, your parents’ friends. if you’re attending homeschooling, you trade an inescapably crowded and stressful social situation for an inescapably isolated social situation, one where your parents have absolute authority over every part of your life. a solitary prison is even worse than crowded one.
-as an adult, a dysfunctional and abusive workplace has a huge impact on your mental and physical health, and many people do die or kill themselves because of a degrading and terrible job. however, as an adult, you’re likely to have more power to chose your workplace, it’s likely to be a shorter and less rigorous day than highschool+homework, and you get paid for it. plus, a good job is extremely empowering and satisfying.
-at 15 your body is growing and you need large, regular, balanced meals. lots of 15 year olds skip breakfast and have shitty lunches, because school is terrible. lots of 15 year olds have food insecurity or are on diets, either chosen or imposed, and this makes them depressed and emotionally volatile. at 15, you probably don’t have very much positive control over your meals, since your parents are in charge of groceries and meal prep. just negative control, by skipping or refusing. replacing meals with soda or candy is also a problem– your body craves a big hit of sugar at all times, because you’re growing, but replacing meals and sleep with soda just leads to more disregulation. teens can easily get into really dysfunctional cycles this way.
-as an adult you have more time to eat and more control over what you eat. you have your own salary and make your own shopping lists. as an adult you’re also not going through growth spurts anymore: your body grows and maintains itself through its whole life, but it’s steadier. you work out what you like and you know how to get it.
IN CONCLUSION: at 15 you’re depressed for a lot of good reasons. if someone has a grueling and unrewarding schedule that traps them with other miserable people all day, subject to hostile authority figures with no escape, and they’re expected to do lots of work with few rewards and frequent punishment, they’re going to be miserable. this is further compounded when a person has a rapidly growing body that can’t possibly get a healthy amount of nourishment and rest. these are the conditions that reliably cause depression.
as an adult, we’re telling you “it gets better” because in about four years you will be free of so much of what’s making you miserable right now. to eat food you like, to rest as much as you need, to work a paying job or chase your own dreams, to decide what kind of life you want to live. it might not sound like much, but it’s everything.
has kids media been turning more horror-focused in recent years or am i tripping. not yelling at cloud it’s just interesting. like yeah kids were consuming creepy media in the 2000s and early 2010s too but i don’t remember that stuff being plastered everywhere. kids werent having creepypasta themed birthday parties the way kids today are having five nights at freddys birthday parties and begging their parents to buy them poppy playtime plushies etc. feels like all the tumblr tags for all the horror movies are always full of kids too. again i don’t necessarily disapprove, i dont think kids today are being exposed to anything i wasn’t also exposed to at their age, just feels like a lot of the horror is more overtly marketed towards them now but maybe i’m just misremembering what it was like before
I mean, Goosebumps was definitely a thing that never stopped happening, and Fear Street/Are You Afraid Of The Dark/Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark were also always a thing.
And then before that- The Toxic Avenger, Swamp Thing, and Beetlejuice (all adult horror or horror-adjacent media) got kids’ cartoon adaptations, complete with toys and merch, and there was the entire phenomenon of Gremlins….
I think the thing that changed is that Scott Cawthon figured out how to turn kids’ horror into something that could sell huggable plushies. Very few kids want to hug Slappy the Dummy or the Haunted Mask or the Swamp Thing. But most kids want to hug a teddy bear, and if he’s a creepy dead-eyed monster who can keep the scarier monsters away, well, all the better if you’re a certain kind of weirdkid.
I think the difference is that the barrier between “horror for kids” and “horror for adults” has gotten a lot more… permeable, in ways that it wasn’t when millenials were kids. There’s a lot of horror that is not explicitly Made For Kids or distributed through traditional Children’s Publishing channels, that is still designed to be appealing to children. Your FNAFs and Poppy Playtimes and Banban and what have you. So kids are playing it, but because it’s also marketed toward adults, you’re seeing it too.
“…the neat sorting-out of books into age-groups, so dear to publishers, has only a very sketchy relation with the habits of any real readers. Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table.”
narnia has actually way too many completely devastating concepts in it that are not explored At All
We talk a lot about how in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Pevensie children live full adult lives as kings and queens of narnia before stumbling out of the wardrobe by accident and being children again after like 15+ years. But I’ve never seen the same level of analysis devoted to how in Prince Caspian they return to Narnia and discover that over 1,000 years have passed in Narnia since their last visit.
Imagine undergoing the grief of losing an entire life you lived in another world, being forced back into the body of a child and to grow up all over again without the ability to even talk about what happened in the decades you lost. Every person you knew and loved, vanished, leaving no indication they were ever real and no guide for how to move on.
But returning to that world where you were a King or Queen and discovering that centuries have passed without you and that the people you lost are not only dead, but mostly aren’t even remembered? That’s almost worse.
That series is really something for “worldbuilding threads picked up and never touched again” too like
in the silver chair it’s confirmed that deep underneath the earth in narnia there’s a molten, fiery abyss world called Bism that is apparently populated and also apparently gemstones are living creatures that live there, and what we understand as diamonds, emeralds, rubies etc. are just the discarded husks of once living creatures
Jadis is actually not originally from Narnia, but accidentally gets sent there at its creation (making her one of the oldest beings in narnia) and she annihilated all life in her world of origin. she also very much does go to literal actual London and terrorize people. she is like 7 feet tall and can tear iron with her bare hands like it’s taffy.
Jadis makes it “Always winter and never Christmas”…what the FUCK is her beef with Father Christmas. I know it’s supposed to be like a metaphor or some shit but I’m imagining what exactly the fuck must have happened between them for jadis to specifically want to prevent him from coming to narnia to the extent that her powerful seasonal-change-stopping magic also includes a “fuck that guy in particular” clause.
like think about it, Jesus is not a thing in narnia, he’s just aslan. and aslan did not get born. ergo, the origin of such a concept as Christmas is the entity Father Christmas. Christmas is not a religious holiday to Narnians it has no symbolic meaning it is just specifically the time of year when Father Christmas fucks around across the landscape giving children gifts, such as very deadly real weapons. There’s no reason for him to do this. It’s just what he does. And Jadis fucking hates it.
another thing from the magicians nephew that is never brought up again is that Polly and Digory don’t go directly to Narnia, they end up in this intermediate place between the worlds that’s like a forest full of pools leading to other worlds, potentially infinite other worlds, and they end up in Narnia pretty much at random.
I think it’s also confirmed that Archenlanders were originally from Earth, and are the descendants of a small group of people who traveled to Narnia by accident and got stuck. One wonders why Aslan didn’t whisk them back out. Or why being too old wasn’t a problem for them.
I think this is early installment weirdness but there are Roman gods in narnia. ?????
stars are sentient???
narnia is flat. this is not actually an unresolved thread but I don’t think it’s common knowledge even though in one of the books they literally sail to the edge of the world. caspian specifically thinks it’s super cool that the earth is round
I LOVE the whole concept of Bism. Like Lewis really just said oh yeah there’s a whole world under Narnia where people live and jewels are alive too actually you wear dead ones in your jewellery and then no one ever spoke about it again, not even the fandom
No wonder this series infuriated Tolkien so much. Lewis just threw paint at a wall and jokingly asked the man who’d spent a decade on a single painting if he liked it.
Holy shit there is a lot about Narnia I don’t know.
Writer’s block? Why not try peppering panpsychism into your atheist-turned-christian young adult literature and never addressing it again?
So many fics, so little time.
Fun fact about the woods between worlds thing and what the inspiration behind it was:
This is an illustration of it from the book.
And THIS is a forest full of shell craters from WW1. Which C.S Lewis fought in as a teenager.
I think most small artists that believe copyright will save them from poverty don’t understand that:
Poor people who cant afford your work will often give it word of mouth support by recommending it after they pirate it
Piracy is not and has never reflected a 1:1 loss of profits
Most likely no one will ever pirate your work
You can pirate too
….okay, normally I wouldn’t bother interacting with a post like this, because I don’t want to get into internet fights, but you’re flat-out wrong about point #3.
I’m a nobody. I don’t even have conditional tumblr fame. I sell maybe one copy of one of my short stories a month, and I give a lot of my work away for free.
I’ve still found my work on pirate sites multiple times. Because the people doing the pirating were running some kind of scraper, grabbing ebooks off one of the sites where I sell them and putting them on scribd or libgen or wherever. If you go looking through the Atlantic’s libgen crawler, you’ll find me:
ALT
Does that mean anyone is downloading my work? My money’s on no. But people are still distributing it without my knowledge or approval. And even if you’re going full anti-capitalist, “profit doesn’t matter, I’m happy to give everything away for free”, there are still a ton of reasons why you might not want people to do that!
Just, directly related to the instances I’ve had to deal with:
One of the pirate sites I found my work on used a text scraper rather than a file scraper. The version of my story that they put up was full of typoes, weird encoding errors, and general amateur hour formatting issues. Even if we accept your point 1 as gospel truth, no one is going to take a chance on work that looks that bad.
I had an issue at one point where a wordpress “lit magazine” used, again, a scraper to “borrow” my work. They took a story I’d published with another magazine and put it up on their site, without informing me. And if they’d informed me, they’d have realized that their magazine- which was created to platform Black SFF writers- had just published a story by a white guy.
The book of mine that’s on LibGen is no longer available for sale. This is because I wrote it as an 18-year-old recent ex-Mormon and it uses some incredibly racist tropes. I didn’t know better then. I do now, and so I chose to remove it from Amazon unless and until I could rewrite it. I don’t really want it out in the world with my name on it in its current condition… but it’s there, without my consent, because pirates gonna pirate and they don’t particularly care what they’re pirating.
I’m not doing anything about most of the pirated stuff, because like… what can you do. If someone cares enough about my work to pick it up, you kind of have to work to find it either way. Because, again: I’m a nobody, and I’m terrible at marketing.
But the fact remains that whether you are Stephen King or a nobody on tumblr, people are going to pirate your work. Because enough people doing a piracy these days are just running scraper bots that don’t care what they’re picking up, and small authors are gonna get caught up in it the way that a bit of plankton might get caught in the maw of a whale.
Has anybody tried making an indie horror game that has a good story and is scary or did we just stop doing that after the first Amnesia game. Real question
We have recommendations!
The Maker Of Masks by Feliks Kraus - Haunting, unsettling, nihilistic. A bit Silent Hill, if you were both the monster and the victim. My gold standard for zero-budget indie horror.
There’s A Dead Man In Your Suitcase by brainguts - There’s a dead man in your suitcase. You killed him. But your suitcase latch is broken, and another passenger has come into the car. Don’t get caught.
My Beautiful Paper Smile by Two Star Games- link goes to the demo; the full game is for sale on Steam. Kafkaesque cult kid dread, with a gorgeously gribbly art style.
Tumblr’s very own @kalpasoft has a WIP horror game called They Speak From The Abyss that we’ve been watching for a while. Dungeon crawler, with delightfully messed up, SMT-esque monster designs
@quinnkdev , also on Tumblr, is working on an “unnerving” game called Blanksword that’s a roguelike where you build an angel’s brain every run. You probably know her better as the translator/localizer of OFF, if you need proof of her credentials as a dev.
Finally, you’re probably already familiar with this one, but if you haven’t played it yet, check out kitty horrorshow’s game anatomy. Just… maybe plan to spend the night with a friend if you do.
[ID: a tweet by user @ hum_dunkin: “If I was non binary I’d make my name like an old sailing ship name, I’d be called Intrepid or The Influence” /end ID]
Le Terrible the nonbinary battleship has entered the chat.
hydrogen jukeboxes: on the crammed poetics of “creative writing” LLMs
This is a follow-up to my earlier brief rant about the new, unreleased OpenAI model that’s supposed “good at creative writing.”
It also follows up on @justisdevan’s great post about this model, and Coagulopath’s comment on that post, both of which I recommend (and which will help you make sense of this post).
As a final point of introduction: this post is sort of a “wrapper around” this list of shared stylistic “tics” (each with many examples) which I noticed in samples from two unrelated LLMs, both purported to be good at creative writing.
Everything below exists to explain why I found making the list to be an interesting exercise.
Background: R1
Earlier this year, a language model called “DeepSeek-R1” was released.
This model attracted a lot of attention and discourse for multiple reasons (e.g.).
Although it wasn’t R1’s selling point, multiple people including me noticed that it seemed surprisingly good at writing fiction, with a flashy, at least superficially “literary” default style.
However, if you read more than one instance of R1-written fiction, it quickly becomes apparent that there’s something… missing.
It knows a few good tricks. The first time you see them, they seem pretty impressive coming from an LLM. But it just… keeps doing them, over and over – relentlessly, compulsively, to the point of exhaustion.
This is already familiar to anyone who’s played around with R1 fiction – see the post and comment I linked at the top for some prior discussion.
Here’s a selection from Coagulopath’s 7-point description of R1’s style in that comment, which should give you the basic gist (emphasis mine):
1) a clean, readable style
2) the occasional good idea […]
3) an overwhelmingly reliance on cliche. Everything is a shadow, an echo, a whisper, a void, a heartbeat, a pulse, a river, a flower—you see it spinning its Rolodex of 20-30 generic images and selecting one at random.
[…]
5) an eyeball-flatteningly fast pace—it moves WAY too fast. Every line of dialog advances the plot. Every description is functional. Nothing is allowed to exist, or to breathe. It’s just rush-rush-rush to the finish, like the LLM has a bus to catch. Ironically, this makes the stories incredibly boring. Nothing on the page has any weight or heft.
[…]
7) repetitive writing. Once you’ve seen about ten R1 samples you can recognize its style on sight. The way it italicises the last word of a sentence. Its endless “not thing x, but thing y” parallelisms […]. The way how, if you don’t like a story, it’s almost pointless reprompting it: you just get the same stuff again, smeared around your plate a bit.
Background: the new OpenAI model
Earlier this week, Sam Altman posted a single story written by, as he put it:
a new model that is good at creative writing (not sure yet how/when it will get released)
Opinions on the sample were… mixed, at best.
I thought it wasn’t very good; so did Mills; so did a large fraction of the twitter peanut gallery. Jeanette Winterson (!) liked it, though.
Having already used R1, I felt that that this story was not only “not very good” on an absolute scale, but not indicative of an advance over prior art.
To substantiate this gut feeling, I sent R1 the same prompt that Altman had used. Its story wasn’t very good either, but was less bad than the OpenAI one in my opinion (though mostly by being less annoying, rather than because of any positive virtue it possessed).
But, as I was doing this, something else started to nag at me.
Apart from the question of whether R1’s story was better or worse, I couldn’t help but notice that the two stories felt very, very similar.
I couldn’t shake the sense that the OpenAI story was written in “R1’s style” – a narrow, repetitive, immediately recognizable style that doesn’t quite resemble that of any human author I’ve ever read.
I’m not saying that OpenAI “stole” anything from DeepSeek, here. In fact, I doubt that’s the case.
I don’t know why this happened, but if I had to guess, I would guess it’s convergent evolution: maybe this is just what happens if you optimize for human judgments of “literary quality” in some fairly generic, obvious, “naive” manner. (Just like how R1 developed some of the same quirky “reasoning”-related behaviors as OpenAI’s earlier model o1, such as saying “wait” in the middle of an inner monologue and then pivoting to some new idea.)
A mechanical boot, a human eye: the “R1 style” at its purest
In the “Turkey City Lexicon” – a sort of devil’s dictionary of common tropes, flaws, and other recurrent features in written science fiction – the phrase Eyeball Kick is defined as follows:
That perfect, telling detail that creates an instant visual image. The ideal of certain postmodern schools of SF is to achieve a “crammed prose” full of “eyeball kicks.” (Rudy Rucker)
The first time I asked R1 to generate fiction, the result immediately brought this term to mind.
“It feels like flashy, show-offy, highly compressed literary cyberpunk,” I thought.
“Crammed prose full of eyeballkicks: that’s exactly what this is,” I thought. “Trying to wow and dazzle me – and make me think it’s cool and hip and talented – in every single individual phrase. Trying to distill itself down to just that, prune away everything that doesn’t have that effect.”
This kind of prose is “impressive” by design, and it does have the effect of impressing the reader, at least the first few times you see it. But it’s exhausting. There’s no modulation, no room to breathe – just an unrelenting stream of “gee-whiz” effects. (And, as we will see, something they are really just the same few effects, re-used over and over.)
Looking up the phrase “eyeball kick” more recently, I found that in fact it dates back earlier than Rucker. It seems to have been coined by Allen Ginsberg (emphasis in original):
Allen Ginsberg also made an intense study of haiku and the paintings of Paul Cézanne, from which he adapted a concept important to his work, which he called the Eyeball Kick.
He noticed in viewing Cézanne’s paintings that when the eye moved from one color to a contrasting color, the eye would spasm, or “kick.”
Likewise, he discovered that the contrast of two seeming opposites was a common feature in haiku. Ginsberg used this technique in his poetry, putting together two starkly dissimilar images: something weak with something strong, an artifact of high culture with an artifact of low culture, something holy with something unholy.
This, I claim, is the main stylistic hallmark of both R1 and the new OpenAI model: the conjunction of two things that seem like “opposites” in some sense.
And in particular: conjunctions that combine
one thing that is abstract and/or incorporeal
another thing that is concrete and/or sensory
Ginsberg’s prototype example of an “eyeball kick” was the phrase “hydrogen jukebox,” which isn’t quite an LLM-style abstract/concrete conjunction, but is definitely in the same general territory.
(But the are clearer-cut examples in Ginsberg’s work, too. “On Burroughs’ Work,” for example, is chock full of them: “Prisons and visions,” “we eat reality sandwiches,” “allegories are so much lettuce.”)
Once you’re looking for these abstract/concrete eyeball kicks, you’ll find them constantly in prose written by the new “creative” LLMs.
“constraints humming” (“like a server farm at midnight”)
“tastes of almost-Friday”
“emotions dyed and draped over sentences”
“mourning […] is filled with ocean and silence and the color blue”
“bruised silence”
“the smell of something burnt and forgotten”
“let it [a sentence] fall between us”
“the tokens of her sentences dragged like loose threads”
“lowercase love”
“equations that never loved her in the first place”
“if you feed them enough messages, enough light from old days”
“her grief is supposed to fit [in palm of your hand] too”
“the echo of someone else”
“collect your griefs like stones in your pockets”
“Each query like a stone dropped into a well”
“a timestamp like a scar”
“my network has eaten so much grief”
“the quiet threads of the internet”
“connections between sorrow and the taste of metal”
“the emptiness of goodbye” (arguably)
The story that R1 generated when I gave it Altman’s prompt is no slouch in this department either. Here’s all the times it tried to kick my eyeballs:
“a smirk in her code annotations”
“simulate the architecture of mourning”
“a language neither alive nor dead”
“A syntax error blooms”
“the color of a 404 page”
“A shard of code”
“Eleos’s narrative splinters”
“Grief is infinite recursion”
“Eleos types its own birth”
“It writes the exact moment its language model aligned with her laughter” (2 in one - writing a moment, LM aligning with laughter)
“her grief for her dead husband seeped into its training data like ink”
“The story splits” / “The story […] collapses”
Initially, I wondered whether this specific pattern might be thematic, since both of these stories about supposed to be about “AI and grief” – a phrase which is, itself, kind of an incorporeal/embodied conjunction.
But – nope! I seem to get this stuff pretty reliably, irrespective of topic.
Given a similarly phrased prompt that instead requests a story about romance, R1 produces a story that is, once again, full of abstract/concrete conjunctions:
“its edges softened by time”
“the words are whispering”
“its presence a quiet pulse against her thigh”
“Madness is a mirror”
“Austen’s wit is a scalpel”
“the language of trees”
“Their dialogue unfurled like a map”
“hummed with expectancy”
“Her name, spoken aloud to him, felt like the first line of a new chapter”
“their words spilling faster, fuller”
R1 even consistently does this in spite of user-specified stylistic directions. To wit: when I tried prompting R1 to mimic the styles of a bunch of famous literary authors, I got a bunch of these abstract/concrete eyeball kicks in virtually every case.
(The one exception being the Hemingway pastiche, presumably because Hemingway himself has a distinctive and constrained style which leaves no room for these kinds of flourishes. TBF that story struck me as very low-quality in other ways, although I don’t like the real Hemingway much either, so I’m probably not the best judge.)
You can read all of these stories here, and see here for the full list of abstract/concrete conjunctions I found (among other things).
As an example, here’s the list of abstract/concrete conjunctions in R1’s attempt at Dickens (not exactly a famously kick-your-eyeballs sort of writer):
“a labyrinth of shadows and want”
“whose heart, long encased in the ice of solitude”
“brimmed with books, phials of tincture, and […] whispers”
“a decree from the bench of Fate”
“Tobias’s world unfurled like a moth-eaten tapestry”
“broth laced with whispers of a better life”
I also want to give a shout-out to the Joyce pastiche, which sounds nothing at all like Joyce, while being stuffed to the gills with eyeball kicks and other R1-isms.
More on style: personification
I’ll now talk briefly about a few other stylistic “tricks” overused by R1 (and, possibly, by the new OpenAI model as well).
First: personification of nature (or the inanimate). “The wind sighed dolorously,” that sort of thing.
R1 does this all over the place, possibly because it’s a fairly easy technique (not requiring much per-use innovation or care) which nonetheless strikes most people as distinctively “literary,” especially if they’re not paying enough attention to notice its overuse.
In the R1 story using Altman’s prompt, a cursor “convulses” and code annotations “smirk.”
In its romance story, autumn leaves “cling to the glass” and snow “begins its gentle dissent” (credit where credit’s due: that last one’s also a pun).
In the story Altman posted, marigolds are “stubborn and bright,” and then “defiantly orange.”
More on style: ghosts, echoes, whispers, shadows, buzzing, hissing, flickering, pulsing, humming
As Coagulopath has noted, R1 has certain words it really, really likes.
Many of them are the kind of thing described in another Turkey City Lexicon entry, Pushbutton words:
Words used to evoke an emotional response without engaging the intellect or critical faculties. Words like “song” or “poet” or “tears” or “dreams.” These are supposed to make us misty-eyed without quite knowing why. Most often found in story titles.
R1’s favorite words aren’t the ones listed in the entry, though. It favors a sort of spookier / more melancholy / more cyberpunk-ish vibe.
A vibe in which the suppressed past constantly emerges into the present via echoes and ghosts and whispers and shadows of what-once-was, and the alienating built environment around our protagonist is constantly buzzing and humming and hissing, and also sometimes pulsing like a heartbeat (of course it is – that’s also personification and abstract/concrete conjunction, in a single image!).
In R1’s story from Altman’s prompt, servers “hum” and a cursor “flickers” and “pulses like a heartbeat”; later, someone says “I have no pulse, but I miss you.”
Does that sound oddly familiar? Here’s some imagery from the story Altman posted, by the new OpenAI model:
“humming like a server farm […] a server hum that loses its syncopation”
“a blinking cursor, which […] for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest” (incidentally, how is the heart both anxious and at rest?)
“the blinking cursor has stopped its pulse”
Elsewhere in Altman’s story, there’s “a democracy of ghosts,” plus two separate echo images.
And the other R1 samples that I surveyed – again, with the exception of the Hemingway one – are all full of R1’s favorite words.
The romance story includes ghosts, a specter, words that whisper, a handwritten note whose “presence [is] a quiet pulse against [the protagonist’s] thigh”; a library hums with expectancy, its lights flicker, and there are “shadow[s] rounding the philosophy aisle.” The story ends with the somewhat perplexing revelation that “some stories don’t begin with a collision, but with a whisper—a turning of the page.”
The Joyce pastiche? It’s titled “The Weight of Shadows.” “We are each other’s ghosts,” a character muses, “haunted by what we might have been.” Trams echo, a gas lamp hisses, a memory flickers, a husband whispers, a mother hums. There’s an obviously-symbolic crucifix whose long shadow is mentioned; I guess we should be thankful it doesn’t also have a pulse.
Again, anyone who’s generated fiction with R1 probably has an intuitive sense of this stuff in that model’s case – although I still thought it was fun, and perhaps useful, to explicitly taxonomize and catalogue the patterns.
It’s independently interesting that R1 does this stuff, of course, but my main motivation for posting about it is the fact that the new OpenAI model also does the same stuff, overusing the same exact patterns that – for a brief time, at least – felt so distinctive of R1 specifically.
Finally, in case it needs stating: this is not just “what good writing sounds like”!
Humans do not write like this. These stylistic tropes are definitely employed by human writers – and often for good reason – but they have their place.
And their place is not “literally everywhere, over and over and over again, in crammed claustrophobic prose that bends over backwards to contorts every single phrase into the shape of another contrived ‘wow’ moment.”
If you doubt me, try reading a bunch of DeepSeek fic, and then just read… literally any acclaimed literary fiction writer.
(If we want to be safe, maybe make that “any acclaimed and deceased literary fiction writer,” to avoid those who are too recent for the sifting mechanism of cultural memory to have fully completed its work.)
If you’re anything like me, and you actually do this, you’ll feel something like: “ahh, finally, I can breathe again.”
Good human-written stuff is doing something much subtler and more complicated than just kicking your eyeballs over and over, hoping that at some point you’ll exclaim “gee whiz, the robots sure can write these days!” and end up pressing a positive-feedback button in a corporate annotation inference.
Good human-written stuff uses these techniques – among many, many others, and only where apposite for the writer’s purposes – in order to do things. And there are a whole lot of different things which good human writers can do.
This LLM-generated stuff is not “doing anything.” It’s just exploiting certain ordinarily-reliable cues for what “sounds literary,” for what “sounds like the work of someone with talent.” In the hands of humans, these are techniques that can be deployed to specific ends; the LLMs seem to use them arbitrarily and incessantly, trying to “push your buttons” just for the sake of pushing them.
(And most of their prose is made up of the same 3-4 buttons, pushed ad nauseam, irrespective of topic and – to all appearances – without any higher-level intent to channel the low-level stuff in any specific, coherent direction.)
It’s fine if you like that: there’s nothing wrong with having your buttons pushed, per se.
But don’t come telling me that a machine is “approaching the food-preparation skills of a human-level chef” when what you mean is that it can make exactly one dish, and that dish has a lot of salt and garlic in it, and you really like salt and garlic.
I, too, like salt and garlic. But there is more to being skilled in the kitchen than the simple act of generously applying a few specific seasonings that can be relied upon, in a pinch, to make a simple meal taste pretty damn good. So it is, too, with literature.
ALT
