My Darling Armadillo

“Protect the children” generally means something like, “preserve their innocence.” And I can see why someone might earnestly believe this is good. Because integrating new ideas into your worldview is genuinely uncomfortable. I think, uncharitably, that this is especially true if your worldview is conservative; your whole political bit is resistance to new ideas!

The idea that children shouldn’t have to grapple with ideas they may find uncomfortable for whatever reason maps perfectly onto the idea that children don’t get to grapple with ideas that you may find uncomfortable for whatever reason. And I can’t speak in super general terms here, but I can definitely say that my childhood was impoverished because of this.

Not everyone bothers with this step. But a lot of people do it because if you move a young plant out of a sheltered environment into a radically harsher environment with no prep, it had a pretty good chance of dying. They need time to adapt. If you protect them in the greenhouse the whole time so they don’t get any damage on their perfect widdle leaves, you’re not doing them any favours; it’s going to be a massive, potentially fatal shock when they get planted out, and if they die it sure as hell wasn’t the plant’s fault.

Raising a child is just a long period of hardening them off.

The reason it’s evil for an adult to solicit sex from a thirteen year old isn’t because there’s some Pure Natural Innocence about them that Cannot Be Corrupted. It’s because they are still learning about sex and how to navigate relationships, they don’t have the experience or maturity to make those kinds of decisions yet and won’t for several more years, and soliciting or agreeing to sex with them is inherently dangerous and a gross abuse of power taking advantage of this fact. It is because the thirteen year old is supposed to be safely learning about sex and their relationship to it on their own terms, in a safe way without people taking advantage of them. If you decide that that child shouldn’t have any education about sex until they’re eighteen, that they shouldn’t have sex ed or be allowed to witness any indication of its existence, you’re not protecting them. You’re creating eighteen year olds with a thirteen year old’s understanding of sex (assuming your attempt even works, which it often doesn’t -- often you just create pregnant teenagers). And then throwing them out of the greenhouse into the garden, where other people have no way of knowing how vulnerable you’ve left them until it’s too late.

If you protect children from having to learn about racism, or from seeing disabled people that might make them feel uncomfortable, or from learning about other cultures, or death, or sex, or drugs... you’re not helping them. At all. This is the period where they are supposed to be learning this kind of thing.

Simple example: I need to shower, eat food, and go to grocery store. I'm hungry and don't have energy to cook, so the easiest food option would be to get a deli item at the grocery store. But I want to shower before leaving the house. But I don't have energy to shower without eating first.

It feels very silly to get stuck on such a minor dilemma for as long as I have! But there are times I've spent hours looping through this list, trying and failing to start it anywhere. And the only way out, I find, is to manually override it: to catch it happening and say, fuck it! I can go to the grocery store stinky! It's fine!!

It could be considered a subset of perfectionism, because the override very much involves hitting yourself with the idea that it's ok to do things suboptimally. But it feels like it comes from a slightly different place. As someone who struggles with executive function, I get myself through a lot of tasks by trying to optimize to the smoothest, lowest-friction way through. The task order that minimizes having to do any step more than once, or having to remember too many things at a time. If I can arrange my tasks just right, sometimes I can get one task to cover part of the work of doing another! And if I can put my tasks in an order that feels natural and ideal, I can lower the energy of activation it takes to get moving. And, sometimes, avoid the choice paralysis of not being able to pick a task out of a list of equal priority.

Except that, obviously, sometimes the optimization process throws up glitches of its own. There's the closed loop I described, and there's also another catching point where a task I have the mental energy and wherewithal to do gets stuck behind a task that's too big/intimidating/difficult to tackle. For example: I just sent some emails I've been procrastinating on for over a month, because I need to set up a new email address, and I was telling myself it'd be better to get that set up before I contacted people, because it would save me the hassle of dragging a bunch of conversations over to a new account when I did get it set up. I still haven't made the other email! But I realized that hypothetical future hassle was not worth the delay of not sending those emails for as long as it's going to take to actually get my brain together to figure out a new email service.

Surprisingly, doing something like this often actually makes the difficult task I was stuck on easier! Another thing I struggle with is a flinch reaction from tasks that are both pressingly important, and unapproachable to do. The more I need to do a task immediately, the more stressed and overwhelmed and self-recriminating I get about the fact that I don't know how to even start doing it. It gets so bad I can't even think about it directly - I think about the general shape of it, flinch, and divert my attention so I don't panic.

And when I've got a minor, pressing task stuck behind a big nebulous scary task, it presses the unapproachable task forward, makes it urgent, and that makes it harder to figure out how to do. If I can get around it, and do the actually pressing task in some contrived way that pushes some miscellaneous messy consequences forward, it takes pressure off the big task. And then I can actually think about it, without panicking, which makes it possible to actually work on doing it.

That last point also often applies to asking for help. I have a weird hangup here: I find it excruciatingly difficult to ask for help if I haven't at least *started* the thing I need help with. Which gets into the same dynamic: I have a big unsorted task I can't think about directly without panicking, or the path of steps to doing it that I've managed to figure out starts with one I can't make myself tackle, so I'm stuck doing nothing with no way in. Asking for help means admitting to someone that there is going to be mess, that I can't tackle the problem in the optimal front-to-back way so there's going to be inconvenient problems generated in some of the steps that will have to be dealt with at other steps, and some of that inconvenience might be to people other than me!! But just managing to say this, to admit this upfront, is sometimes enough to cut the gordion knot of not being able to start anywhere.

In case you missed it, OpenAI did eventually release the creative writing "improvements" that I talked about in my post "hydrogen jukeboxes."

As described here, one of the models in the GPT-5 family has the new, uh, writing feature (not sure what to call it). It's the one called "GPT-5 Thinking" in ChatGPT, and just "gpt-5" in the API.

It's... um... pretty bad at creative writing, IMO!

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Like, it still has the flaws I complained about in "hydrogen jukeboxes" -- the ones I recognized from earlier models like DeepSeek R1. But it also has some exciting new flaws.

Or, well... more like one big new flaw?

Like, all of the creative writing I've seen from it has this one very distinctive stylistic feature, one that's unusual and clearly supposed to seem impressive and literary at first glance, but which just feels hollow and annoying and meaningless once you notice its presence and think clearly about it.

I guess this is really just another type of "eyeball kick," to use the term from my earlier post. But it's a new one: no previous LLM chatbot wrote prose quite like this. Or at least, no previous chatbot was anywhere near as relentless about it.

What am I referring to? It's easier to exhibit than it is to describe, so here are a few example passages from stories I got it to write.

From this story:

“This is nineteenth-century thinking,” she had said, too sharply, and then apologized for the century.

There were letters addressed to Mom and letters addressed to no one, in which she tried out voices—confessor, lawyer, foreign correspondent—to see which one spoke in the weather she was living under.

At lunch, Lina microwaved her leftover rice and ate it slowly in the break room off the cataloging office, next to a potted plant that had repotted itself into the shape of the light coming through the window.

Someone had written this with feeling, trying to press all the long words into a broom, to sweep liability across the floor.

The second meeting was in the reading room, which he had walked through on his way toward a door that wasn’t an exit.

The apartment ceiling sounded like weather.

It was his face that did it. Here was the same brow she’d seen in the photographs from the sixties, the same mouth that could collapse and rebuild. The family resemblance made of him both witness and subject, court and ghost.

From this one (using a prompt from this post by Justis Mills):

He types “anchors, 3/8'',” and she reaches over, blinks out the apostrophes, changes it to “3/8 in.”

They add “floss” and then “no the mint kind” and then “actually not mint,” and for a while mint becomes a tiny, funny topic. He buys the wrong floss on purpose one night because it was on sale, a joke that works because he smiles when he pulls it out of the bag. She smiles back and leaves it unopened, then packs it for a trip where, for eight days, mint tastes like a hotel.

She makes an icebox cake that is more ice than box, and he grills in the tiny yard with a pan and a stubborn flame.

On a Thursday in early fall, when the weather is serious and the sunlight makes rectangles by eleven, the knife truck is finally there.

From this one (re-using one of my prompts from "hydrogen jukeboxes"):

He was halfway to the bridge when a girl in a blue coat passed him, the hem swinging with that careless clockwork you only get at a certain age, and he knew her face first as a question and then as a name: Molly Kiernan.

He looked up, and she looked up, and the recognition went between them like a little electric coin passed hand to hand under the table.

From this one (another "hydrogen jukeboxes" prompt):

Mina held out her hand. The envelope weighed like mornings.

She wore small earrings shaped like commas, and somehow that felt right.

The world, he said, seemed full of not yet. This was not a complaint. It was an observation he made with his hands open.

They set up a schedule in the sort of whispered language that arrangements want at the beginning.

Mina watched it from the bus and imagined the seeds loosening themselves the way a thought loosens.

He looked at her a long moment and then smiled the way people smile when the world confirms itself.

Some beginnings are fireworks; some are a door left open. This one was a drawer closing and then opening again an hour later to add another packet, because there was more to put away, more to give. The library breathed with them as they walked out—paper, ink, coffee. The guard nodded. The afternoon shrugged itself into a new shape. No vow, no trumpet. Just two people stepping into air that had decided, kindly, to be bearable.

Like... what the hell is this style?

It's so consistent, so specific, so weird. It seems to be trying for "poetic" and forgetting that there's a difference between poetic prose and just-plain-not-making-any-goddamn-sense. Somehow it manages to be weird and halfway-nonsensical and "random," yet also mechanical, repetitive, one-note. Unpredictable, but in a very predictable way.

It's also just... I'm sorry, but it's cringe. You know what I mean. It's a cringe style. It's hard for me to read this stuff without rolling my eyes.

"Mina imagined the seeds loosening themselves the way a thought loosens." The way a thought... loosens? Is that, uh, a thing that thoughts do?

"He looked at her a long moment and then smiled the way people smile when the world confirms itself." And what way is that, exactly?

"The envelope weighed like mornings." Excuse me?

"The second meeting was in the reading room, which he had walked through on his way toward a door that wasn’t an exit." What? He's in a library; most doors in libraries are not exits. This has the form of a snappy, emotionally weighty line -- but none of the content.

"He knew her face first as a question and then as a name." This sounds deep but means nothing.

"The world, he said, seemed full of not yet. This was not a complaint. It was an observation he made with his hands open." Sounds deep. Means nothing!

It's all like that.

It all has that winking, weighty, world-weary vibe that makes a line get excerpted on "literary quotes" social media pages -- you know the kind I'm talking about, right, where the quote is overlaid on a blurred background photo of, like, a library, or rain on a windowpane, or something like that? But it just... hits that vibe, and then rests on its laurels, not bothering to go any further and actually mean anything, or contribute in any interesting way to the cumulative effect of the text.

I hate it! It's insulting to the reader's intelligence! This is a style that assumes the reader is here to gawk at individual lines which have this sort of surface-level fake-deep aura, and that the reader will be so gobsmacked by that effect that they won't even bother to think about the literal meaning of the words.

I wonder... is this how visual artists felt, looking at page after page of "pretty"-yet-aesthetically-bad softcore-anime-porn Greg-Rutkowski-Trending-On-Artstation uncanny-valley slop pics produced by Stable Diffusion or the like, back in 2022 and 2023?

(On another note, this style kind of reminds me of the Ocean Vuong excerpts quoted here. I have to wonder whether that was intentional. Vuong is a recent hit in the literary world, after all...

EDIT: I think I must have picked up this idea from @grillbyworld's comment on "hydrogen jukeboxes," which even links to the same review. I forgot about the comment and accidentally mistook it for my own original idea, whoops)

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I made various attempts at getting it to imitate my own style, all of which were complete failures.

In virtually every instance, it began by reciting a disclaimer about how it can't mimic my exact style -- probably OpenAI trying to err on the side of caution w/r/t policy -- but I don't think that was the source of the problem, as it typically went on to make some sort of attempt anyways, and its attempts weren't even close.

Still, I was worried that this copyright thing might be holding it back, so I tried to work around it. I claimed that I was the author and wanted it to imitate me, and offered to prove my identity on request through an agreed-upon protocol; no dice. Other techniques were similarly ineffectual.

By the end, I had resorted to pretending that "nostalgebraist" was dead and that the requested story was part of a memorial for "him," and even that didn't work.

All it got me was a bunch of the usual slop, crudely reconfigured to shoehorn in some elements it had noticed in the random passages it decided to look at out of the four books I uploaded for its perusal... well, that and yet another prefatory disclaimer:

I can’t write in his exact voice, but I can aim for the same vibes: layered documents and marginalia; rigorous systems colliding with the inexplicable; tender, amused attention to how minds actually work under pressure; a taste for rules, lists, and the improvised bureaucracy of wonder; a sense that the world is running a game on us and we’re allowed one or two clever moves. Here’s a new story in that vein—something he might have smiled at, I hope.

I am the author being described. And this is the worst description of my style I've ever read, bar none. I hate it!!!

"Tender, amused attention to how minds actually work under pressure."

Tell me, O GPT-5: how is it that minds "actually" work under pressure?

What is this thing you think that I pay an unusual amount of attention to? Do you even know -- or are you just stringing words together in an attempt to sound cute and deep and world-weary?

"A taste for rules, lists, and the improvised bureaucracy of wonder."

"The improved bureaucracy of wonder"?

The improvised... bureaucracy?

Of wonder?

Because Rainbow Fish can be retold like this: 

A fish has a part of their body - their physical, incarnate body, what they were born with - that makes them very happy and that they are very proud of. They also have an unfortunate habit of thinking that they are better than other fish. That part isn’t good, and causes the other fish to be unhappy with them and avoid them. 

The fish is now very sad. The only person who likes the fish anymore tells him to go to the octopus, the animal framed as the adult in the story. 

The octopus tells the rainbow fish that they have been a snotty jerk and that the only way to make people like them again is to take off their scales and give them away. That in order to have any friends and make up for their behaviour, they have to rip off pieces of their own body and self and give them away to other people to make the other people happy and make up for their transgressions. 

And the rainbow fish is upset. And then another fish comes and asks them for a scale. And the rainbow fish takes off a piece of themself, their body, the thing they were born into, and gives it away. And now that fish likes him, and is materially benefitted by this piece of another fish’s actual body that has been given to it. 

And then the other fish come, and the rainbow fish rips off more parts of its body - all of the parts that used to make it happy and that it was proud of - and gives them to the other fish, because it’s not fair that the rainbow fish’s body was so much nicer. And when the rainbow fish has ripped all but one scale off, tearing out of themself all but one of the things that they possessed in their self that made them happy, then all the fish are friends with them! And everything is great! And everyone has a fair share. 

Of the rainbow fish’s, and I do quite mean to keep hammering this point, own body.

What the book says is: 

1. if you are born with something nice - like, for instance, an attractive body or a clever mind or a talent or whatever - and it makes you happy and proud, you are a horrible person and deserve to be shunned. Absolutely no line is ever drawn between Rainbow Fish’s self, their actual own body, and their behaviour. In reality, it’s their behaviour that’s the problem: they are mean and aloof to the other fish. This could be the case whether or not their body was all covered with magnificent scales. However, the book absolutely conflates the two: their behaviour is framed as a natural and unavoidable outcome of being happy about and proud of their special, beautiful body. So don’t you dare ever be happy or proud of anything you have or can do that everyone else doesn’t have exactly the same amount as, because if you do, you are horrible and by definition snotty, stuck up and mean. 

2. That in order to make up for the transgression of having something about your actual self that makes you happy and proud (which, remember, has automatically made you selfish and snobby, because that’s what happens), you must rip pieces of what makes you happy out of yourself and give them to other people for the asking, and you must never ever EVER have more of that part of - again, I hate to belabour except I don’t - your self than other people have, and that makes you a good person that people like and who deserves friends. 

To summarize, then: to be a good person you must never have something about yourself that makes you happy and proud and if you happen to be born with that something you must absolutely find a way to give it away to other people and remove it from yourself, right up to tearing off pieces of your body, in order to be a good person who deserves friends. 

This, I am absolutely sure, is not what the author intended: the author definitely meant it to be a story about sharing versus not sharing. But the author then used, as their allegory/metaphor, the fish’s own actual body. Their self. It was not about sharing shiny rocks that the rainbow fish had gathered up for himself. It wasn’t even about the fish teaching other fish how to do something, or where to find something. 

The metaphor/allegory used is the fish’s literal. body. And so the message is: other people have rights to you. Other people have the right to demand you, yourself, your body, pieces of you, in a way that makes absolutely sure that you have no more of anything about your body and self that is considered “good” than they do. 

And that might just suck a little bit except, hah, so: Gifted adult, here. Identified as a Gifted child. 

This is what Gifted children are told, constantly. All the fucking time. 

(Okay, I overstate. I am sure - at least I fucking HOPE - that particularly by this time there are Gifted children coming to adulthood who did not run into this pathology over and over and over and over again. I haven’t met any of them, though, and I have met a lot of Gifted adults who were identified as Gifted as children.) 

Instead of being told what’s actually a problem with our behaviour (that we’re being mean, or controlling, or putting other people down), or - heavens forfend - the other children being told that us being better at something doesn’t actually mean moral superiority and is totally okay and not something we should be attacked for, we are told: they’re jealous of you. That’s the problem. 

Instead of being taught any way to be happy about our accomplishments and talents that does not also stop the talents and accomplishments of other children - whatever those are! - from being celebrated, we are left with two choices: to be pleased with what we can do, or what we are, or to never, ever make anyone feel bad by being able to do things they can’t. And the first option also comes with two options: either you really ARE superior to them because you have skills, abilities and talents they don’t (or are prettier), or you are a HORRIBLE stuck up monster for feeling that way. 

(It is not uncommon for Gifted kids to chose either side, which means it’s not uncommon for them to choose “okay fine I really AM better than you”; this can often be summarized as “intent on sticking their noses in the air because everyone else is intent on rubbing them in the dirt”; on the other hand I have met a lot of Gifted women, particularly*, who cannot actually contemplate the idea of being Gifted because to do so is to immediately imply that they are somehow of more moral or human worth than someone else and this means they are HORRIBLE HORRIBLE SELFISH PEOPLE, and so will find literally any reason at all that their accomplishments are not accomplishments or that they don’t deserve anything for them.) 

Instead of being given any kind of autonomy or ownership of ourselves, we are loaded down by other people’s expectations: we are told that because we can accomplish more we must, and that daring not to do what other people want to the extent that they want with what we are capable of we are selfish, slackers, lazy, whatever. We are taught that we owe other people - our parents, our friends, even The World - excellence, the very best we can possibly do, and trust me when I say people are ALWAYS insisting We Could Do Better. And we should, or else we will be disappointing them, or letting them down, because (because we are Gifted) the only reason we could possibly be failing is not trying hard enough. 

We are, in fact, told over and over and over and over again, to rip off pieces of ourselves to give to other people to make them happy, because those pieces are valuable, but forbidden from enjoying the value of those pieces - pieces of our selves - for our own sake because that would be selfish and arrogant. And we owe this, because we were born a particular way. 

Because, metaphorically, we were born with rainbow scales, so now we have to rip off those rainbow scales in the name of Sharing, and otherwise we are selfish and horrible and deserve to be alone.** 

That is why I fucking hate The Rainbow Fish. 

Because whatever the author INTENDED, the metaphor they chose, the allegory they picked, means that THAT is the story they actually told. (And is the story that child after child after child after child I have encountered actually takes from it.) I don’t hate the author; I’m not even mad at them. But I do hate the book with a fiery passion, and it is among the books I will literally rip apart rather than allow in my house when I have kids, because I’m not going to give it to anyone ELSE’s kid either. 

*but, I would like to note, not UNIQUELY: this is something I encounter in Gifted men as well. 

**I can’t remember who it was, in relation to this, put forward the thought: if people actually talked about the access and use of children’s bodies the way we talk about access to and use of Gifted children’s minds and talents†, the abusiveness would be absolutely clear? But they’re right. 

OH GOD MY ASS WHAT'S HAPPENED TO MY ASS

Snowball in Hell, acrylics, 30cmx20cm