Yesterday I ran across an amusing blog post from research scientist Janelle Shane who, just for the hell of it, has been “training this neural network to generate cookbook recipes by letting it look at tens of thousands of existing recipes.”
The recipes are pretty odd, as are the names the software picks for them, especially when Shane cranks up the “creativity” variable.
Here are a few that grabbed my attention:
- Cream Of Sour Cream Cheese Soup
- Artichoke Gelatin Dogs
- Crockpot Cold Water
- Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Cake
Also yesterday, I ran across a horrifying post in the Incels subreddit in which the regulars attempted to come up with new pejorative terms for women. Oddly, many of the suggestions that weren’t completely obscene (“sperm garage”) or creepy (“future sex cadavers”) or just plain awkward (“the annoying, dumb, inferior pieces of flesh around the vagina that don’t invent or discover things”) ended up sounding, well, a bit like Shane’s computer-generated recipe titles.
So here’s a little quiz of sorts. I’ve mingled recipe titles from Shane’s neural-network experiment with anti-woman slurs from the Incels subreddit post. See if you can tell which are which!
- Cheese Hog
- Whole Chicken Cookies
- Sausage Jockey
- Meat Pockets
- Salmon Beef Style Chicken Bottom
- Completely Meat Circle
- Squeal Pig
- Roasties
- Bunny Boiler
- Cabbage Pot Cookies
Answers below!
In case you’re wondering, the neural-network-generated recipes will not actually produce anything resembling real food. The recipe for Greased Casserole with Slices of Lemon Juice, for example, requires a weird assortment of ingredients, including “1 cup cold boiled frosting,” “2 sprigs of bread,” and “1 sour and large fish.”
The instructions can be similarly baffling. One early recipe demanded that human chefs “bake until juice” and “sprinkle over skin greased with a boiling bowl.”
Things got even weirder when Shane plugged recipes into a neural network trained on H.P. Lovecraft, resulting in instructions like this:
Whip ½ pint of heavy cream. Add 4 Tbsp. brandy or rum to possibly open things that will never be wholly reported.
In a later experiment, she flipped the script, entering “phrases from Lovecraftian horror [into] an innocent neural network trained on 30MB of cookbook recipes,” which resulted in this almost perfect sentence:
Everything seemed to me tainted with a loathsome contagion, and inspired by a noxious alliance with the steamed chicken.
In conclusion, neural networks are fun. Certainly a lot more fun than incels.
ANSWERS: The computer-generated recipe titles are Whole Chicken Cookies, Salmon Beef Style Chicken Bottom, Completely Meat Circle, and Cabbage Pot Cookies. The rest are slurs for women.
Oh, and Monzach, I think most of us love it when someone here gives a bit of in-depth information, about anything, really. You’re good.
@Otrame
The Rats in the Walls is a good choice for sure. I especially like the last page or two of the story when the narrator becomes increasingly untrustworthy and the narration becomes stream of consciousness stuff worthy of Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake”. Though I feel that I should mention that the cat of the protagonist has a very unfortunate name… It’s a completely black cat and I leave the rest up to the reader to figure out…
ETA: Thanks for the compliment! ^_^
@Otrame
I pretty much live in an attic, so Rats in the Walls type of noises are pretty common. And because of the weird acoustics back there, they’re pretty damn scary.
But then you find out that it’s one of these guys.
http://www.eden3d.fr/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/loir-lerot.jpg
Also I’m totally gon’ use this as a pretext to post this.
@ monzach
I’m very new to Lovecraft (see above) but one thing I’d love to hear more about is anything about what he thought of Edgar Allen Poe. I loved that Mountains of Madness connected with the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, so are there any more examples where he shares a ‘continuity’ with Poe? I understand he crossed over a bit with authors like R E Howard. So any info on that sort of thing gratefully received.
@Alan Robertshaw
Well, Lovecraft was a huge fan of Poe and he has more than a few stories in which he emulates Poe’s style. The only story of his other than Mountains of Madness that mentions Poe by name is “The Shunned House” which is set in Providence, R. I. in the area where Lovecraft grew up. In fact, the house in the title is one in which one of Lovecraft’s maternal aunts lived and died. It’s a very interesting story and contains quite a lot of real New England and Rhode Island history.
As for his “inspired by Poe” stories, I’d recommend “The Tomb”, “The Outsider”, “Hypnos” and “The Hound” (thanks to Kenneth Hite for an excellent list of inspirations that Lovecraft used for his stories). Do let me know if you want other recommendations. 🙂
Oh, the cat in Rats in the Walls. *shakes head* I first read that story on the bus and I was really hoping no one was looking over my shoulder. It kind of ruins an otherwise excellent story.
I think cheese hog would be a good name for me because I love cheese, but then again, it might reference what they think a yeast infection is like or something like that.
This whole post reminded me of that hilarious and sadly defunct site that posted conversations on OK Cupid between a chat bot that spews Horse ebooks quotes attached to a picture of an attractive woman and the dudes that try to chat them up.
http://okcebooks.tumblr.com/
Had me cracking up for hours when I found it via the archives here.
@weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee
Not that it excuses the name in any way, but Lovecraft’s family had a completely black cat when he was a very young child that had the same name. So…I guess we can hazard a guess where Lovecraft got at least some of his views from. 🙁 I was pretty shocked when I first read that particular story as well. Luckily I had read some of his other works beforehand so it didn’t sour my first impression of his work.
I love cookery in the Lovecraft style, I’m saving that quote and am going to try and use it next time my mum cooks chicken and see how quickly she clatters me for it.
Also I guessed all the Incel terms. I lurk r/badwomensanatomy and r/incels is a rich source of material for mockery there.
Also re: The Rats In The Walls, my first exposure to Lovecraft was via a humungous collection of horror short stories from all through the 20th century (well up until the mid-80’s anyway) and the unfortunate cat’s name had been bowdlerised into “Tigger”. Now that story got me hungry for more and when I reread the story again in one of my dad’s collections I was horrified. It was my first salutory lesson that sometimes we can love art that is wrapped up in some very odious opinions. Anyway, “The Colo(u)r Out Of Space” is my favourite one of his now and fortunately has no racism in it (unless I am being very blind to it).
Thank you for this. Everyone in the Starbuck’s wants to know why I’m laughing and spitting coffee everywhere.
@varalys the dark
It’s important that you spell “The Color Out Of Space” in the English style, as Lovecraft was always very disappointed and even angry when publishers would change his spelling to the American way. Lovecraft’s affectation for the English style of spelling was just one of the ways his longing for times long gone manifested itself. Indeed, Lovecraft wrote a very funny self-parody called “Reminiscences of Doctor Johnson” where he addresses the fact that he wrote as though he was an Englishman from the 1700s. 😀
I find the style of Lovecraft painful. Not just for the racism, but I find the form horrible, too flowery and repetitive. That never prevented me from loving the story itself, but I often wonder what could have it been if he only gave the concepts and plots while someone else did the actual writing.
As for thoses recipes, they reminded me of the fantasy food recipe from Gaston Lagaffe and Achille Talon, two french comics book. The most well known one of the two is Gaston Lagaffe, who make a cod with strawberry who taste awful enough to break any mental conditioning, but I still remember a Talon gravvy recipe who end by “the difficult part is when you pour the powdered cocoa into the hot oil, you have to avoid them creating lump”. That almost look like an english recipe !
@Monzach: I should have known that. I’m English myself so just assumed my UK edition copies had been Anglicized. I’m sending myself back to Lovecraft school for that error. Much ashame.
@varalys the dark
Just make sure that you don’t mention the fact that the teacher in Lovecraft school has yellow eyes and mutters in the Dutch language!
Props if you get the references. 😉
ETA: I fail at making creepy italic text appear on here. 😛
Speaking of Lovecraft, I understand that The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle is a good reply to HPL’s “The Horror at Red Hook.” Has anyone else here read it? It’s on my list of “books I want to get at some point.”
..implying that, in the future, necrophilia will be legalized? There aren’t enough disgusted gifs in the world to match my feelings at that.
can these incels just take a hint from those mgtows and go their own way? Ah wait. That’d mean doing the exact same thing as they’re doing now – nothing but complain about women on the internet at how they won’t be their sex toys. I honestly don’t see much of a difference between the two anymore.
Lighter note: Chocolate chocolate chocolate cake sounds bomb 😀
At The Mountains of Madness is a superb story – it’s really hard to write a narrator who tries to describe an indescribable thing, and he manages it brilliantly. My favourite Lovecraft stories, though, are The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Dunwich Horror. (The second one is much more problematic nowadays, but is still a masterpiece.) Lovecraft stories are amazingly well structured, and the tension rises and falls superbly.
I never found them actually scary, though, just very weird.
@Victorious Parasol
I have that book on my “to read” list as well! Along with about a metric ton of other stuff, so hopefully I will get to it before it’s time to head to the old folk’s home. 😀 I hear that it’s a very interesting take on “The Horror at Red Hook” and even features the detective from that novella as a POV character for a part of the book. 🙂
@EJ (Marxist Jazz Weasel)
I’d say that “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” is problematic as well, but it’s still one of my personal favorites in Lovecraft’s oeuvre. I think that “At the Mountains of Madness” is his best work by far, though. It’s pretty much the best story I’ve read, especially since Lovecraft manages to convey the desolation and coldness of Antarctica about as well as you can through mere words on paper.
@Monzach
Yay, someone else has heard of it!
So many books, so little time.
@ monzach
Cheers for that. I’ll be checking out my favourite second hand bookshop this weekend.
@Alan Robertshaw
If you find it, I’d recommend the hard-cover Barnes & Noble collected Lovecraft fiction, which has all the fiction stories that Lovecraft wrote in one volume, as well as a bonus addition of his seminal “Supernatural Horror in Literature” essay. It’s probably one of the best 40 euros I’ve spent in the last few years. 🙂 If that’s not available at the second hand bookseller’s, I do hope that you won’t be limited to just to the anthologies curated by August Derleth…
Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Cake?
Yes, please!
@Monzach: hahahah, my UK first edition paperbacks are the ones curated by Mr. Derleth, which is another reason why I want a more up-to-date collection. That and the books are over 50 years old now and very fragile. I shall put that collection you recommend on my “to buy” list now.
@varalys the dark
I do hope that you’re able to get a copy for yourself! 🙂 I’m sure that the Derleth collections are interesting to thumb through. I think that we owe a debt of gratitude to August Derleth since he did preserve Lovecraft’s works for posterity, even if it did go against Lovecraft’s will. Still, the cheap and sensationalistic collections Derleth put out in the 1940s and 1950s contributed to Lovecraft being ignored and forgotten for decades.
@ monzach
I’ll enjoy hunting that down. I have a thing where I won’t order ‘fun’ books off the net or from the big name shops. I like the idea of second hand shops. Work books are different, although there’s a great legal bookshop called Wildy’s that has loads of second hand and ‘faulty’ books that I try to get to when I’m up in London.
They probably don’t have Lovecraft though.