what is this i don't even

Me, yesterday: I wish there were more queer songs by bisexual men.

Keiynan Lonsdale, an openly bi man, today: *releases Kiss the Boy*  

Inspired by the 250 miles post, I made this out of my other favourite meme song, Wonderwall. Every second beat is skipped.

And my new favorite:

The neural network can be trained to write recipes, invent Pokemon, and invent superhero names. But can it learn to tell a joke?

@researchbuzz generously provided me with a list of 200 knock-knock jokes - brief and highly formulaic, they seemed to be the form of joke best-suited for a neural network to reproduce. I figured it would quickly learn the formula, but would never, never manage to tell an actual joke.

It proved me wrong. 

Very early on, the network figured out that question marks were important somehow, as were the words “Knock” and “who” in some mysterious way:

Koo k ano? ? Khnck Knock oae?t rA  noc? Knock Woock Whecr lwhot h o nwoe hio

In very short order, it learned to begin a knock-knock joke, and almost never got that part wrong again. But the rest of the formula took quite a while to figure out, and the algorithm frequently devolved into playing a game of telephone with itself:

Knock Knock Who’s There? Iane Aatar who? Aaane who? Aan who? Anac who? Iobe who? Irata who?

Next it figured out the formula, but no actual, you know, words:

Knock Knock Who’s There? Bool Hane who? Scheres are then the there

Then it learned the joke about the cow with no lips which became its Favorite Thing Ever, even if it didn’t know how to properly tell it. The punchline to Every Single Joke was ooo ooooo ooo…

Knock Knock Who’s There? Alec Anic who? Wow co poo the tho tho door to the soout oo ooo oooo ooo oo oo oo oo ooo oo oo oo ooo ooo oooo ooo ooo oo oo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo oo oo ooo ooo ooo ooo oo oo oo ooo ooo ooo ooo…

It made it past this stage, but still had problems that were remarkably similar to two people telling knock-knock jokes over a very bad phone connection, and maybe forgetting who was telling the actual joke:

Knock Knock Who’s There? Alther Water who? Water who who? Who who? Arton and out on the moor?

At last it figured out the basic formula and proceeded to make jokes that, while technically correct, didn’t make all that much sense. Many of them were partially plagiarized from jokes in the training dataset.

Knock Knock Who’s There? Hiwl Howlowwhowhow

Knock Knock Who’s There? Ireland Ireland who? Ireland you money, butt.

And then.

It produced. An actual joke. I checked, and this one most definitely wasn’t in the dataset. There was one about Alec, but the pun was “Alec-tricity”. There was one about knock-knock jokes themselves, but it was “Irish I knew more knock-knock jokes”. And it didn’t produce this just once, but over and over again. I give you possibly the freakiest thing the neural network has done to date:

It’s okay that you haven’t written for a while, you can take breaks.

You can start writing again whenever you want, you don’t need an excuse.

If you would still like an excuse, here it is: I want you to start again, you should totally do it.

It’s ok if you’re out of practice, you’ll pick up traction again.

We’re all learners and its good to have role models, but try to be better than the writer were before, and try less to be ‘as good as’ someone else.

It’s alright to abandon a piece if you have no enthusiasm or passion left for it.

It’s okay to be needlessly dramatic.

It’s okay to be needlessly ridiculous.

Write the crackfic, write the rarepair, or write the popular pair. Write what you want to write.

Yes someone has probably written this scene before.

Write it anyway if you want to write it.

Yeah that trope has probably been done a million times.

Use it anyway if you want to use it.

Probably there are people who are tired of reading about that AU.

Write it anyway, they don’t have to read it.

Respect your audience, but don’t let other people dictate what you create.

Reblog your own work. Be proud of it. You deserve to pat yourself on the back.

I’m proud of you, you’re doing great.

Keep writing, keep making stuff. People will care. 

Fritz the helpy dog:  Fritz was look fresh to death in she DO NOT PET!!! Vest. it may seem a weird clothe at first, since who do not want pet? But madder of fact, Fritz is just to busy for this pets. she have a people to help, which was noblest dog trait. We certerfy this clothe to be BEST!!

-making the facial expression your character’s making and trying to describe it

-writing entire scenes in your head as you shower and not remembering most of it by the time you get to your computer

-deciding you can’t do something you’ve been looking forward to until you write what you told yourself you were going to write, resulting in you laying in your bed doing nothing

-having two completely different ideas for your story to go in and both seem equally good but you can’t do both and you also can’t choose

-having docs with stories you know you’ll never finish but not deleting them anyway, even if they’re only a couple sentences long

-getting random bursts of productivity that could go towards homework or cleaning your room or writing and you know you’ll only be able to do one

-getting inspiration from the most random things

-writing at inopportune times because a perfect line or dialogue just popped into your head and you have to get it down before you forget it

-“what are you writing?” “……..a story”

- “what do you want to do when you grow up?” “uunnghnnggguughhhhh”