Tuml Ate My First Blog So Time To Start Again

Here's Claude Fable -- the publicly accessible version of the famous "Claude Mythos" -- liveblogging TAoHS.

I varied things slightly and did one round of conversational back-and-forth before dumping the first 5 chapters on it, since there were questions I wanted it to answer first.

One, which I also posed to the last few Opuses ("Opera"?), was about the book probably being in its training data, and how much that would change the nature of the exercise. With Fable, there was also the new wrinkle that it's not possible to turn off its RL-trained CoT through the API, and I wanted to ask it nicely to do the CoT-in-response thing required by my liveblog format requires before we dove into the main event.

(The RL-trained CoTs were indeed very short, with one-line summaries like "I'm going to review these chapters now," although on a few turns I had to resample several times to ensure that property)

Fable's reactions, especially in those <think>...</think> CoT sections, have a different feel to them than those produced by other recent models of its series. Less wrapped-up in the story as a story, more focused on engaging with it as a puzzle, picking up on references and interconnections, figuring out what makes it tick.

Not in a bored or dispassionate way, though! It gets really into it, in a manner I find very endearing. Lots of "!" and "!!" annotations, etc.

Unfortunately, the export-control thing happened before I got around to it.

But now Fable is back, and I've been able to close the loop at last. Here's the Fable Almost Nowhere liveblog.

She exchanged woman’s for man’s attire, and, no longer the most modest of maidens, began the life of a warlike rover. Enrolling in her service many maidens who were of the same mind, she happened to come to a spot where a band of rovers were lamenting the death of their captain, who had been lost in war; they made her their rover captain.

Yes. Obviously. He characterizes these fans as self-absorbed, socially deficient, intellectually incurious, emotionally dependent on formula, and “excruciatingly boring.” That is not neutral description. It is a negative judgment about their character and the way they live.

2. Does Ebert imply that a depth of knowledge about a fannish subject is inherently bad on its own?

Not quite. His stated objection is to people using expertise as a display of devotion, a source of status, or a substitute for broader interests and spontaneous social interaction.

I would argue that the rest of the review makes his position a little more clear, though.

3. Does Ebert state that this pattern of behavior is a quality of all fans?

No. He says “a lot of fans,” “extreme fandom,” and “such people.” He is identifying a type of fan, not making a literal universal claim.

4. Did the reader see a mildly critical opinion containing the word ‘fandom’ and immediately succumb to an emotional reaction rather than fully read and engage with the passage?

Calling people socially inept, intellectually empty, self-absorbed, and excruciatingly boring is not “mildly critical.” It is openly contemptuous.

A person can understand the passage perfectly well and still object to it. Disagreement is not evidence of failed reading comprehension, no matter how many condescending bullet points one wraps around the accusation.

5. Did the reader see the words ‘socially inept’ and immediately assume this refers solely to autistic people? Why or why not?

“Socially inept” does not mean “autistic,” and Ebert does not explicitly mention autism.

But the behaviors he associates with social deficiency overlap heavily with stereotypes about autistic people: intense specialist interests, encyclopedic knowledge, reliance on predictable conversational scripts, and difficulty improvising socially.

The word “solely” is doing dishonest work here. The relevant question is not whether the description refers exclusively to autistic people. It is whether Ebert treats traits commonly associated with autistic people as evidence that someone is socially or intellectually defective.

6. Is the job of a cultural critic to ‘let people enjoy things?’

No. Critics are allowed to criticize fandom, fan culture, consumer identity, nostalgia, and the social uses people make of art.

Readers are equally allowed to criticize the critic’s assumptions, generalizations, and contempt. “A critic’s job is not to let people enjoy things” does not mean every hostile remark made by a critic is therefore insightful.

There is also a rather important contextual omission here. Ebert did not write this as a general essay about fandom in the age of twitter, harassment campaigns, shipping discourse, or whatever present-day fandom behavior the quotation is now being aimed at.

He wrote it in his February 4, 2009 review of Fanboys, a road comedy set in 1998. So this is a late-2000s review discussing a particular stereotype of 1990s fandom. The film follows a group of friends who plan to break into Skywalker Ranch so that their terminally ill friend can see The Phantom Menace before he dies. Ebert’s argument is that the movie identifies too closely with its heroes and should have mocked them more. The rest of the review makes his position much less ambiguous. He calls their fandom “an idiotic lifestyle,” describes them as “tragically hurtling into a cultural dead end,” dismisses their knowledge as having “no purpose other than being mastered,” and ends with a joke about their mothers cleaning up after them.

(On further reflection it's entirely possible that I was one of the fans who dragged them over it, and I was old enough to know better at the time, so I'll throw my apology on the pile just in case. Sorry! Anyway:)

Now that DR Chapter 3 is out we can take another look at why UT's moral universe is like that. A sentient camera guides us through Frisk's journey in one sentence: from the fridge to the sink to the stove, Undertale took place in the same house Kris is dreaming in, its underground dimly visible from the vast purple plains of the couch. With our newfound understanding of dark worlds and how they're made, we can conclude that Undertale is, canonically, a pretend game that a traumatized pre-teen made up with their older brother. It is a fix-it, as the UT Prime post postulates, but the target of the fix isn't Dragon Blazers: it's the life of one Kris Dreemurr, who created the half-archetypes in UT by attaching JRPG tropes to their real (and boy is that a loaded word) friends and family. The "I can save anyone" morality presented in UT is the perspective of a child, and of a child who isn't completely sure that they don't want to kill their dad.

We were primed to receive UT as a critique of video game violence because that was the topic du jour, with games like Spec Ops: The Line raising similarly adolescent questions about whether playing a military training simulator makes you a bad person. Something weirder was obviously going on in Undertale - my take at the time was that the very existence of the Genocide route pointed to something more complex than the standard read re: the game's moral system, and I stand by that - but we couldn't know how weird until we got a look at the story one layer higher in the continuum of truth and fantasy that is the UT/DR cosmology.

Undertale turns out to be Kris Deltarune working through a bunch of their anxieties. It's about the divorce of their parents, their alienation from their friends, their guilt over their (possibly genuine) culpability in the death of the neighbor kid who fell through the ice and drowned in the lake. (At least I think that's what happened, here in June of 2026.) Add to that their lingering feeling that they're not a real person, that they're not in control of their own life, and that there might be some other, realer version of themself out there who made all the right choices and ended up happy. Is it possible to do this reading without knowing that Deltarune exists? As the UT Prime post demonstrates - yeah, kind of! UT Asriel's chuuni powers and presentation tell us that this a story written from a child's perspective, and the way it presents violence and evil is freighted with a child's guilty fascination with transgression and with one's own capacity to do harm. UT has a secret scary route because kids love those. (Corporate art has noticed this and is now building multi-million dollar franchises around the idea.)

There are a bunch of fascinating things to dig into given this interpretation, but my favorite right now is this: all the major characters in Undertale are based on people Kris knew, except two. Kris invented Sans before they met in "real life." Can you imagine? The funny scary creepypasta man you made up with your brother lives here now, and he's dating your mom? Think about what's happening in Kris' head the moment you first see Sans Deltarune. The external scream of the nostalgic streamer echoed by the internal scream of a mentally ill teen as what remains of their ontological framework falls apart.

The punchline of Deltarune is that Kris is, in fact, a fictional character. DR is ultimately about trauma and unreality, and the thing about delusions is that they are self-evidently true within the framework of your subjectivity, your narrative - that's why you can't reason your way out of them. DR asks the question: what if there's something realer than you, the player? That's what all the religious symbolism is about, right, and why everyone talks like they're on drugs while they're in church? The derangement that comes from the incursion of a higher being into your sense of self, irrespective of whether it's "really happening" or not?

The horrible epistemological implications of believing that a person you invented might have some kind of consciousness - or to put it more succinctly, the question "what if my imaginary friend was real?" - has been a central theme in Toby's work dating back to the Halloween Hack. It's a question that Homestuck asked back in the day, it's a question that The Amazing Digital Circus is asking now. (It's a question I used to ask in my terrible teenage fiction. I have a core memory of an improv skit I saw at camp as a child where Winnie the Pooh learns that he's just a figment of Christopher Robin's imagination. The way the actor said "I don't want to be just a figment" has stayed with me ever since.) It's a silly, childish question, until it isn't - until you notice your parents believing in imaginary people and organizing their life around imaginary stories, until something in your life makes you wish you were imaginary too, until something breaks in your head and you don't remember how to be real anymore.

guy: the confused moral universe of Undertale feels like fanfiction people would make about A Very Generic RPG

Undertale fandom: You think A Very Generic RPG would be better than Undertale? Huh? Huh do you punk????

Let's say conservative John Doe is unlucky enough to be at the wrong time, wrong place and responds to leftist violence with a response of proportional violence.

The "point where non-violent resolutions are no longer viable" is when they are using ACTUAL WEAPONS TO COMMIT ACTUAL AND LITERAL PHYSICAL AND NON-SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE. Not before. Stupid self-absorbed antisemites blockading the door while security lets them do it is a deplorable indictment of how the University of Toronto lets stupid self-absorbed antisemites get away with everything. It is not actual literal physical and non-symbolic violence. It is not new information since we already saw this happen all over America and Canada. Columbia University is paying out $200 mil over this shit, conduct that was way more threatening than this.

Also @yetanotherdayofdrudgery what the fuck are you talking about? The universe is not all on a single unified team against Your Side. We already saw what happened with Kyle Rittenhouse, which was exactly the thing you are talking about! The media lied about him, the prosecutor tried to grandstand with a prosecution, but the police and courts weren't on the same team and it didn't actually work.

All I'm saying is that it won't go like their fantasies.

Me: And we're not gonna delve into that even a little bit, huh?

Queer-Friendly Indie Tabletop RPG #137: Here's 5000 words exploring the implications of undead skeletons being fully integrated members of society.

To be fair, sometimes it's more along the lines of "our goblins have exactly the same stereotypical traits and propensities as their Dungeons & Dragons counterparts, but the text awkwardly tries to spin those as virtues".

It wasn't the swastika. It wasn't the SS lightning bolts. It was a skull and crossbones that the majority of people would not recognize as anything other than a skull and crossbones. I didn't even know what that symbol was until this came into the news, and I'm Jewish.

The American education system doesn't teach you each and every symbol that the Nazis used. You can't complain about "moral purity tests" and then expect someone to know everything or be labeled as bad.

It's like if you called that dumb girl who tattooed the Z for Gen Z on her hand during lockdown a Nazi because it looked like an SS lightning bolt. She wasn't a Nazi, she was just ignorant.

Saying he can't be a good candidate because of that is absolutely a moral purity test.

As for the tattoo - his ex said something about it while talking shit to her friends, that doesn't mean that he knew it was a Nazi symbol. It also happened two months before he learned about it and covered it up, which is about enough time for that to get through the grape vine to him.

I'm not saying shill for the guy. Hell, I know very little about his politics because I don't live in Maryland.

Common Reactions: Nausea, dry mouth, mild existential dread, and forgetting exactly why you walked into the room.

Non-Traditional Reactions: Sudden vampirism, masochism, transient telepathy, or ancient forms of leprosy.

Uber is a fucking shell game of a company designed to leech investor capital and output bootleg cabs.

Nvidia posted a profit in 2023 of $4.37 billion. This is like someone stealing less than a penny from me.

And they lock this kid in a prison hospital for LIFE?

He committed a bunch of crimes with computers as part of a computer crime gang. Some of those crimes included hacking companies that you hate to hold their data for ransom for millions of dollars. He also just stole funds from people and stole personal information. The millions of dollars of losses quoted were not lost GTA sales, but the damage done to the systems he hacked.

He absolutely would not stop committing computer crimes even when in police custody and said he had no desire to stop. He was, however, found unfit to stand trial due to his severe autism. He was not put in a psychiatric hospital for the crime of being autistic, he was put there until he no longer posed a danger to others, what with his constant uncontrollable bursts of violence and his stated desire to return to crime as soon as possible.

Ideologies are based on certain premises. When one of those premises is contradicted by reality, the behavior of the ideology becomes undefined.

This criticism applies to all ideologies because ideologies are simplified models, and thus it is pretty much inevitable that they will contradict reality in some way. However, the magnitude of the contradiction, and the procedure for handling contradictions, matter.

Suppose the Release The Leopards Party believes three things.

Leopards are absolutely magnificent creatures which are superior to humans and must be allowed to roam freely in populated areas.

Humans should not have their faces eaten by leopards.

Leopards do not eat faces.

As long as (3) holds, the Release The Leopards Party can build a coalition with the supporters of both (1) and (2) - it can treat both (1) and (2) as having equal priority.

Once premise (3) is violated, the behavior of the Release The Leopards Party becomes undefined because (1) and (2) are not prioritized relative to each other. This creates the potential for an atrocity.

They can choose (2), in which case leopards must be prevented from roaming populated areas.

Or they can choose to prioritize (1), in which case leopards will roam freely and eat faces, which is an atrocity.

If choosing (1), to let leopards roam freely (and eat faces), they can also choose to suppress public knowledge that (3) no longer applies, in order to keep (2) supporters from leaving to join a rival coalition.