Gleep: Memoirs of a Baby DRAGON

Like, you're born in Atlanta Georgia sometime in the 1880s. Your mother is a white English immigrant. Your father is an African American lawyer who has managed to become fairly wealthy off his practice.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle claims that your parents were married, but they almost certainly weren't or, if they were, they probably had to go elsewhere to get married and their marriage wouldn't have been recognised in Georgia. Realistically, they were facing huge amounts of prejudice that are only increased when you are born.

(Your mother openly says, in front of you when you're older, that it is a “great misfortune” that you were born with darker skin than even your father.)

Then disaster strikes. Your father dies. Your mother can't stand to stay in America without him and returns to England.

She does not take you with her. She says this is because of your health. It's just way healthier for you to stay where you are, as a parentless mixed race child in the Jim Crow era American South. Rather than going with your only living relative to England (which, while obviously still very racist, at least doesn't have any actual laws against people like you existing).

Your mother meets a new man. A merchant. He's white. She signs over all your father's money and investments to him when they marry. She doesn't tell him about you. She's worried he wouldn't understand. She later explains that this was a major ordeal for her. That she struggled in vain to resist the urge to send for you for three years, until it got too much to bear.

So now you live in England. In a cottage on the estate that was partly paid for by your father's money.

You're not allowed to leave the cottage, because if anyone sees you outside in the daylight then they might find out that you're black. While you're in the cottage, even (apparently) at nighttime, you are made to wear long gloves and a fucking mask, so that nobody can accidentally look through the window and find out that you're black.

Your mother visits you occasionally. She tells you that you're her “own girlie and mother's pet” whether you're “dark or fair”. When her husband comes to see what's going on, you and your nurse get shoved out the back door so he won't see you and find out that you're black.

Unfortunately, your stepfather has noticed that his wife keeps randomly going off in the middle of the night to visit a mysterious cottage where the only inhabitant seem to be a weirdly secretive servant woman and a strange masked figure, and has decided that something Fucked Up is going on.

So he goes to consult the Great Detective Sherlock Holmes. Normally, the Great Detective Sherlock Holmes can work this kind of shit out in his sleep, but unfortunately your family is so dysfunctional that you override his borderline magical deduction abilities, and the best theory he can come up with is either “secret affair” or “weirdly convoluted blackmail scheme”.

Fortunately however, this does lead to your stepfather eventually meeting you and finding out who you are. Including the fact that you're black.

Turns out he's fine with it.

Like completely. Quite possibly more so than your own mother is. Turns out there was no need for the traumatic abandonment, the years of separation and then the even more traumatic being forced to live like The Man In The Iron Mask in a cottage in the middle of nowhere.

Nope. Turns out you could have been allowed to go outside in daylight this entire time. You all go back to the big house (that was paid for in part with your father's investments) together and we never find out what happens to you.

I mean… what. The. Fuck.

Like, I'm not expecting Sir Arthur CD to have written an entire child psychology textbook to go with what was meant to be a fun little short story about racial tolerance, but holy shit.

Lower class people use magic all the time--it's necessary for survival--and they're hired to do magic for the upper classes, whether they're working the fields, hiring out their magic for factory work, or, working as a maid in an upper class home. Gentlemen are allowed to use magic in a few specific "refined" occupations.

Upper-class ladies are allowed to do almost no magic, except for tiny decorative uses--magic is "low", and using it too much destroys your status in society. Upper-class ladies also regularly go insane from "magic hysteria". Some women are starting to notice this and are arguing for women to be allowed to do healthy amounts of magic. Other people find this idea coarse and unfeminine.

She's got an animation degree, I know the art in Undertale gets underappreciated sometimes because it's trying to evoke an older simpler style, but the art in Undertale is legit amazing and without Temmie, none of Toby's ideas would have been able to be realized (without finding some other artist and animator)

Actually, I know exactly how I'd respond to Donald Trump coming out as a transgender woman.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)