life as a rough draft

rook romanced lucanis, because of course i chose the sad man who finds himself irredeemable. i am nothing if not consistent. and i love me a fixer-upper.

his personal quest through his thoughts also felt way more personal and meaningful than some of the others. (nothing against the others, but revisiting the place that tortured him for a year and reading and hearing everything was just so impactful. like the big fear scenes in inquisition.)

At least hit the shiny repost button if you're going to do nothing else. This should not stand.

Instead, it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do, as a Large Language Model: it’s stringing a whole bunch of sentences and paragraphs together as an ultra-sophisticated autocomplete.

Sometimes those ultra-sophisticated autocompleted sentences, when interpreted by humans, will appear to be true. Other times, they will appear to be false. The AI itself has no idea whether its outputs are true or false—in fact, it has no idea what “true” and “false” mean, or what anything means. It’s just a pattern-recognition algorithm going “This word often follows that word in this context” a few dozen or hundred times in sequence until it finally goes “This word often ends things in this context” and stops.

Nifty little language game here.

I can read back to 1500 with basically no difficulty

at 1400 I have to read slowly and carefully, but I can understand all of it save a couple words

at 1300 I can still comprehend most of it if I read slowly, but a much larger percentage of the words are unfamiliar to me, even with context

"Bot þei maden no answer, neyþer good ne yuel. Þei weren stille as stoon, and stoden about me as men þat wayte on þeir lordes commandement."

Like, ask me what "Bot þei maden" means and I'd have no fucking clue. But reading it quickly as part of a story, it's like "But they made no answer, neither good nor (?). They were(n) still as stone and stood(en) about me as men that wait on their lord's commandment" is just how it sounds, phonetically.

And that context made me realize that "yuel" must be "evil." The "n" at the end of verbs will be explained I'm sure, but still feels weirdly natural and sort of German-y? Or Scottishy? I say as someone who knows neither language.

Though going in knowing that þ = "th" was a big boon. ȝ seems to be both a "y" and a "gh" from what I can tell? (Writing this as I'm pausing after 1300.) And Þ is evidently a capital þ.

That said, also,

Þe euele man louȝ, whan that he sawe my peine, and it was a crueel louȝter, wiþouten merci or pitee as of a man þat haþ no rewþe in his herte.

reading it, uh, yeah, I did a triple-take at "sawe my peine" LMAO but otherwise, it seems to again just be different spellings of "The evil man laugh, when that he saw my pain, and it was a cruel laughter, without mercy or pity as of a man that hath no ruth in his heart." (Ruth being the opposite of ruthless, obv.)

1200 I'm getting bits and pieces, which is weird, bc one sentence is totally incomprehensible and the next is more or less legible. Though to be fair, I feel like I'm picking up vocab words as we go lol. Like how the word "heþene" came up in 1400 and in context seems to clearly be "heathen," so I can pick up on that in the 1200 section too.

I also THINK?? uuif is "wolf" based on there being a "wulf" in an earlier passage. Otherwise, no clue what kind of fast animal it would be haha. later passages make me think maybe mare/steed but uh.

I s2g, "deorcnesse" for "darkness" ........ lmao.....

Sadly I don't know enough to guess what ƿ is (best guess is w??? or r/l combo maybe??). I keep looking for a single word to be my rosetta stone and can't find it lol.

sadly 1000 is like, a word or two max. Or a couple words I recognize from above as meaning "I said"

OK I'm on the explanation now. Yay!! I was right about ȝ!!! And my first guess for ƿ was right as well, not that it helped me much to try to read it as such. I thought I remembered that ð = th, but with everything else going on and what I assumed was a bunch of new (old) vocab, I questioned myself.

UUIF WAS WIFE.... (meaning woman, not necessarily married, which I did know!!) I did consider that but thought he wound up getting carried out by her, so I thought it must be an animal.