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.
Does anybody here listen to “Welcome to Night Vale”? All this talk about Lovecraft made me think of it. It’s often considered really lovecraftian, even though the creator hates him (though likes his ideas, just can’t stand his actual writing, or him as a person). Nightvale is a podcast of a public radio show in the desert city of Night Vale. A city that is a strange mix of completely quaint and horrifically terrifying.
Here is a transcript of a report about the public library:
It’s really amazing and hilarious.
@Victoria
When Warner Brothers runs its old cartoons, it puts a notice in front of them that I think is relevant here.
Be careful about rewriting works to remove prejudice. Consider instead making a new story which explores similar themes.
Other topic:
The main reason to view Janeway as morally ambiguous is that, no matter how you slice it, nothing she does makes any goddamn sense and in some cases comes far too close to needless abuse (and in one case, execution) of the crew. However, it’s not really fair to hold Janeway accountable for that. The writing on Voyager was terrible, and who Janeway is, what she believes, and even what her past is, changes every damn episode. They were trying to present her as someone who makes tough, uncertain decisions with no third option under extreme pressure, but the actual talents of the show’s writers failed to back up that characterization of Janeway and so she comes across as a cruel and contrary woman who makes choices mostly around how many people she can hurt.
Compare to Kirk. Compare to Picard. Compare to Sisko. There were bad writers on every Trek show, but those characters could be supported by the talents of the writers, at least most of the time. Sisko in particular does some pretty horrible things in the pursuit of, y’know, preserving civilization as humanity understands it.
Janeway’s failings have nothing to do with the character of Janeway, and everything to do with how little understanding the writers had of the character of Janeway.
@Tessa:
WtNV is Lovecraft in an ordinary, everyday town.
Oh, boy, Lovecraft!
*Ahem*
Yeah, the dude was hella racist.
Thanks for reading, bye!
…
OK, let’s do the thing I always do, which is write an overlong dissertation of something I like to bits but which has sooooo many problematic elements that it’s not even funny.
So, there has been some insightful stuff on Lovecraft in this thread already, especially on the subject of his racism and xenophobia. I like the theory that his extreme phobias, including agoraphobia, contributed to his fear of the unknown and unfamiliar, perhaps turning into an actual clinical phobia and not just a phobia in the colloquial sense (like xenophobia and homophobia) that reeks of good ol’ ableism because it lumps bigots in the same category as people suffering from genuine phobias. But I digress.
Lovecraft certainly represents a horror writer whose prose arose from an actual worldview he believed in. His racism and xenophobia shine through in not only his separate works, but in his whole body of work: You see it in Herbert West – Reanimator, with some of the titular character’s test subjects being “more bestial” by virtue of being African-American; you see it in The Shadow over Innsmouth and its over-the-top cautionary message against miscegenation; and, of course, you see it in the entire Cthulhu mythos, where the unknown becomes the explicit source of horror instead of only an aspect of it as in contemporary traditional horror at the time.
Some defend Lovecraft in that much of his racism and xenophobia was cultural, springing from his romantic Anglo-centrism. While this is supported by his views softening over time, particularly after having traveled a bit and seeing first-hand the remains of the magnificent cultures that people other than white Englishmen had built, one needs only read his physical descriptions of non-whites – not to mention his letters – to see that that is horseradish.
Personally, I love his craft mainly because of the sci-fi aspect: I love the idea of the entities existing in dimensions that human beings can’t comprehend, and the “losing one’s mind” not stemming from the creatures simply being horrifying, but being so outlandish that the human brain cannot process their appearance.
Lovecraft’s fear of the unknown probably resonates with all people on some level, which is why his works have stood the test of time better than – some might argue – his actual skills as a story-teller might indicate. With some commenters bringing up Star Trek in this thread, I wonder (as a non-Trekkie) if Lovecraft’s stories would still have such an impact in a future as progressive as the society in Star Trek is portrayed as? With a unified humanity and a curiosity instead of a will of conquest being the driving force behind encounters with the unknown, would Lovecraft finally become obsolete in a more enlightened time, such as the one portrayed in Star Trek?
TW: Rape, sexual violence
Something I’ve personally never understood is the obsession that modern interpretations of Lovecraft have with sexual themes, most notably rape. More than the “hurr durr tentacles” joke, surprisingly many modern popular culture pieces that deal with Lovecraftian themes involve at least some sexual elements, usually of a violent nature.
In the 2007 movie Cthulhu, the main character (who happens to be a gay man) is raped by a woman to produce Deep Ones. The low-budget horror film Dagon (2001, actually based on Shadow over Innsmouth and not Dagon) makes it an explicit plot point that the demon god (who appears more like a Cthulhu-like monster) rapes and impregnates human women to propagate the hybrid species. The Night Gallery adaptation of Pickman’s Model introduces the idea that ghouls reproduce with human women to make more ghouls, and… let’s just say it’s not exactly portrayed as consensual.
There are probably many more, but these are off the top of my head. This is especially puzzling since Lovecraft’s stories and characters were almost universally non-sexual. Most if not all of his protagonists were men, and very few expressed any interest whatsoever in anything sexual. Even Lovecraft’s relationship with his wife has often been described as fairly platonic, more mother-son-like or perhaps based mainly on friendship and mutual interests than on a genuine physical attraction. Which is fine, but it just makes the sexual overtones attached to his decidedly non-sexual stories all the more baffling.
/TW
But yeah, Lovecraft was a visionary, but also problematic as hell, and many later interpretations have made them even more… uggh. Need to go do other stuff now, but I could go on about this subject for hours.
Are the ghouls former humans? In Pickman’s case, as portrayed in Unknown Kadath, that was true.
Picard is a pretentious bald Yorkshireman with an Earl Grey fixation. Who can’t identify with that?
@ anarchonist
There are a few Ray Bradbury stories where that’s very much a plot point.
@Tessa, re: Welcome to Night Vale
Haven’t listened to much, but know quite a bit thanks to TV Tropes (and the fact that Cecil’s VA had a cameo in a Gravity Falls episode doesn’t hurt things). I do find it quite interesting/horrifying.
@Tessa
I listened to some of Nightvale, but I never got into it the way most of the fans did. I did, however, get into Alice Isn’t Dead, which is produced by the same people. It’s about a woman driving a semi truck across the US. She’s recording audio tapes to her wife who has gone missing. It also touches on anxiety and I interpreted the entire story as an allegory for dealing with anxiety. It’s really good and the second season starts next week. I’m so excited for new episodes!
Thanks for that, Anarchonist. I really enjoyed that. I enjoyed it enough, in fact, to want to write a followup.
Astronerding time! Skip over it if you like.
Lovecraft was enormously into astronomy. As a twelve-year-old he was following it more avidly than literature, and at the time may well have intended to dedicate his life to it. This was fortunate because the early 20th century was an amazing time to be an astronomer.
In the early 1920s, humanity discovered a cool trick: if you spot a type of star called a Cepheid Variable, you can do some calculations to find out how far away it is. This means that any cluster of stars which contains a Cepheid Variable suddenly becomes measurable, which it often wasn’t before. An Englishman called Edwin Hubble decided to test this idea on a cluster of stars called M33. He did the calculations. Then he did them again, and then again to be sure, and then he wrote to every physicist he knew because this was big news. According to Hubble’s measurements, M33 was 700,000 parsecs away. The problem was that at the time everybody knew that the entire universe was only 34,000 parsecs across. It turns out that M33 was a lot further away (and therefore a lot bigger) than anyone thought, which implies that the universe had to be far bigger (and therefore older) than we thought. At that distance, M33 would have to be only a little smaller than the entire known universe. Clearly something was up.
Worse still, between M33 and us there was apparently nothing at all. Astronomers were used to the interstellar void, but this was something far larger and more intimidating. As we started to find other clusters of stars far away with immense voids in between, a term emerged for them: island universes.
This was bigger news than it seems now, because at the time a German called Albert Einstein had introduced the world to the concept of special relativity, which states that time and space work differently in far-off places. Humanity hadn’t fully settled on the implications of special relativity yet, and it was still an open question as to whether physics worked at all in far-off places.
Most of the people following this debate were scientists, and therefore sought answers in maths. Lovecraft was the exception. He was a writer, so he saw the problem in a literary way. To him, this meant that science had discovered entire universes far away where time and space were different, and the laws of physics didn’t apply. According to his letters, this made him start to think about what sort of beings could live in such places, and what sort of beings could cross the distances between there and Earth.
In time, physicists worked out that time and space are indeed different in faraway places, but in a normal-ish way; and that the laws of physics still apply. Nowadays we understand that the universe is far larger than we thought at the time, and instead of the term “island universe” we use the term “galaxy.” However, most of this happened too late to prevent Lovecraft from being inspired to write stories about places where time runs like melted wax and where beings can be coterminous with all of space.
I think this is part of why his cosmic horror is so unusual: it’s inspired by the spirit of scientific breakthroughs without being driven by the detail of it. Most writers either stay away from science entirely or get distracted by its trappings; he did neither.
On a related note, I can only imagine what it must have been like for an agoraphobe to live through the discovery of just how vast and empty the universe really is. I’m slightly claustrophobic, and even I find the immensity of the great voids to be terrifying. It must have been hard for him, especially as the most learned authorities among humanity didn’t have the answer yet. This may have inspired his recurring theme that “seeing things as they really are would make a sane man start screaming and never stop.”
I really need to catch up on Welcome to Night Vale.
I hear a certain pair of someones get maaaarriiiiied and I need to hear someone be all giggly over it because there’s nothing that makes me happier than hearing, between all the angels and five headed dragons and Kevins, that people are still living happy regardless.
Also people are starting to get pissed off by the newer episodes that “suddenly became political”. HAHAHAHA!
HAHAHAHAHAHAJ AS HAHAHAHAHAHAJ A
God people, are you for real.
@Tessa
I’m a fan of Nightvale ando ther productions that group has made. Particularly Within the Wires and Alice isn’t dead. The latter two have this sense of surreal dread and threat that Nightvale isn’t really about anymore.
re: Voyager
I’m going to have to be a nonconformist here and say that Voyager becomes fantastic after the second season. The first two seasons? Not good, at. all. But after the third season opener, it becomes really good and it’s easily my favorite Trek series. The writing is, in fact, somewhat inconsistent, but that’s hardly unique to Voyager.
Re: Star Trek
Did anyone else want the final scene of the franchise to be Benny Russell meeting a young Gene Roddenberry?
To pick up on the Lovecraft discussion, I think the best point to say in his defense is that he was learning, and grew into more than the xenophobic and isolated boy he started as. He was not really “a man of his time”, he was behind it, his education was bad by the time’s standards. He was well read, but had little more than his imagination and his aunt’s ramblings to form a picture of the outside world.
He gradually learned to cope with reality after her death, it wasn’t a smooth, straight ride, but he showed progress, and I don’t think it’s fair to judge 45 years old Lovecraft by what 25 years old Lovecraft thought.
His later letters showed disgust at his earlier opinions, and critics consider his last long story, At the Mountains of Madness, to be an attempt to reconcile his supernatural horror vision with his broader worldview.
I had read all of Poe and Lovecraft’s published fiction before I got to high school. Also before I had grasped the concept of the Unreliable Narrator.
As I told my sister (who shares some of my literary tastes), “Call of Cthulhu” is very different when you realize that the cultists are supposed to be the bad guys. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is different when you realize that the narrator is not giving the reader an objectively accurate description of events. And so on.
It also took me a couple of decades to grasp the toxic levels of racism underlying so much of the fiction. It’s embarrassing in retrospect. When the narrator of “Shadow Over Innsmouth” decides at the end to embrace his Deep One heritage and live in Y’ha-nthlei, I experienced it as a happy ending, not a succumbing to unspeakable horror.
Ruthanna Emrys wrote a good novella on the Innsmouth theme, “Litany of Earth”, that explores the ‘humans were the real monsters’ aspect. I recommend it.
I continue to lurk… as my favorite Lovecraftian thingy is this webcomic (I think it wasn’t mentioned yet): http://www.goominet.com/unspeakable-vault/
@anarchonist; you’ve put all m feelings about Lovecraft into shiny words.
Speaking of unimaginable horrors, Congress just voted on repealing FCC privacy laws. The Verge, if that’s someone you trust, posted a list of everyone who voted “yes” to repeal and how much money they received from telecoms during their election cycle. Shocking no one, they’re all Republican. (Of course, maybe some Democrats voted and they weren’t included but I don’t know if The Verge is a trustful source so take this all with a grain of salt unless you know if they’re trustful or not.)
First paragraph quoted:
EDIT: I know it’s a couple of day old news but I’ve been kind of out of the news loop if I’m honest. Kinda…tired of Dump.
@Handsome
I hope this news brings you comfort. Trump just declared war on the Freedom Caucus.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/us/politics/freedom-caucus-donald-trump.html?referer=
@Jack
I was literally just reading about this (COINCIDENCE ? I THINK NOT !) and one very interesting thing in that mess is how the alt-reich is reacting.
To put it mildly, they aren’t amused. They rely entirely on their anonimity to troll in Trump’s name, and now their God Emperor has destroyed that anonimity.
The whole administration is like watching two train-wrecks in slow-motion, and one of those is a very fun one to watch.
Oh my god, are they serious? That is…that is…IDK, is “hopelessly naive” a phrase I can use here? Because I feel that maybe an understatement. Jesus. WHAT DID YOU EXPECT.
But, you know what, I’m just gonna enjoy Dump taking a sledgehammer to the pillar that propped him up instead.
The clueless asshole, lashing out at anything.
@John
Yeah, it’s like enjoying the train wreck you’re on, though. I mean, again, what did people expect? Especially from Republicans?
At least I get my internet from a small company I can trust, so, like, sorry Comcast and whatever users. Sucks to be you.
Circling around the Lovecraft style again, is there anyone besides me who read the webcomic Shadowgirls when it was around? It takes place in Innsmouth, and you do have Deep Ones and other beasties, but it’s more optimistic and less racist than Lovecraft.
@Jack
My own train’s a few months late (insert Mussolini joke or whatever) but it looks like it’s headed for the same crash site. The sad irony is that I coulda bailed a long time ago, but I made one too many bad decisions and it’s a bit too late now.
Keep a seat warm for me if you can salvage one. I’ll try to crawl out of the wreckage with some beer still intact.
Entirely unrelated FO4 question (because I have nowhere else to ask): Okay, I finally did HalluciGen, and… Is your companion supposed to turn invisible, so you can hear them talk and shoot but not actually see anything? It’d certainly fit the lore of the place, so I don’t know if that was the most amazingly creepy sidequest ever or the most amazingly creepy glitch ever.
Either way, I am amazingly creeped out. Yeesh.