gray17

gray17, 8 months ago to random

B (not his real name) is a flake. He gets off on the fantasy of being an abused boyfriend. He's exploited by his extended family in un-horny ways. We've chatted off and on for over a decade, and met only a few times out of many potential rendezvous. I've given up on him several times. He still randomly messages me anyway, because he's 56 and has never sucked anyone else's cock. A lot of the time I just leave him on read, which feeds into his scenarios anyway. 1/

gray17, 10 months ago to random

positive covid test this morning. slightly scratchy throat, slightly runny nose, maybe a little tired, but otherwise fine. best guess at the moment is I picked it up indoors at a restaurant. I've been avoiding restaurants, but decided this time would be ok. stops eating ever again

gray17, 3 months ago to random

tonight's Gemini hallucination:

q: list some science fiction novels with furries in them

a: Out of Position by Kyell Gold: This novel explores themes of identity and belonging in a world with advanced technology. The protagonist, Valen, is a young fox who discovers he has unique abilities that set him apart from other "norms."

(Out of Position is about furries playing college football and having gay sex, and there's no char named Valen)

gray17, 6 months ago to random

started playing Outer Wilds and got a GAME OVER screen within 5 minutes by stepping into a geyser and falling to my death.

and now that I've looked at the strange alien statue and died again, it feels wrong that my first death let me restart. the game should have said "you failed" and deleted itself.

gray17, 8 months ago to random

today in #twine porn, I'm procrastinating on writing three interrelated cruel sex endings by thinking more about "already seen".

the limited form of seen-marking is working pretty well, I think it improves playability quite a bit, but it doesn't help the problem of "it's hard to know if I've playtested every meaningful path".

so I'm thinking of adding a milestone system. initial version will be only for playtesting, because it's going to be hard to make it work well for players.

gray17, 10 months ago to random

I keep circling a slippery problem, a feeling that there's something intrinsically wrong with the idea of... ideas. Descartes said, I think, therefore I am, but that seems wrong in a way I can't describe. "I think" is not a truth. "I am" is not a truth either. They're just ideas. People too in love with ideas regularly disappear into bubbles of unreality. But I don't know what I mean by that, because any expression of what I'm trying to get at is just more ideas.

gray17, 1 month ago to random

Babel (2022) by R. F. Kuang is a historical fantasy set in the British Empire in the 1830s. Robin is a Chinese/English boy raised in Canton and brought to Oxford by his unacknowledged father to study Translation.

In this world, translation has literal magic. When a Translator inscribes a word with its translation on a silver bar, the meaning that's lost in translation becomes a force that can alter reality. One Chinese/English spell in the book can make things invisible. 1/

gray17, 11 months ago to portland

2014, my bf was fursuiting in downtown Portland with a few others. After, he wanted to take some pictures in front of the firehouse. While we were there, one of the big doors for the trucks started opening. We started leaving to get out of the way, but a guy came out and motioned for us to come in. He introduced us to his dalmatian, who was pretty excited to meet a big fluffy one.
#fursuit #portland #dalmatian

Dalmatian fursuiter standing casually in front of the door of a firehouse. Lettering above says "Portland Fire & Rescue". On each side are large doors where the firetrucks emerge. Those doors have glass panes which let you see vague shapes and lights inside the firehouse. Early firehouses had solid doors without glass panes to see through, but this was determined to be the root cause of a particular type of firetruck breakdown. It turns out that when you keep a firetruck in an enclosed space for 99% of its life, suddenly exposing it to the greater world outside can be traumatic. The windows let the firetrucks get used to the idea that there
A dalmatian dog meeting dalmatian fursuiter. The fursuiter is crouched down so his head is almost at the same level as the dalmatian, and their noses are about half a meter apart. The dalmatian is on a leash held by a firefighter who lacks a head. I didn't ask why he doesn't have a head, because it seemed rude. But he explained it to us anyway. It happened of course while fighting a particularly angry fire. The firefighter had to lose his head to rescue a clutch of dalmatian eggs, one of which hatched into the dalmatian larva in this photo. The dalmatian excitedly chimed in that once it pupates, it will seek out the fire and recover the firefighter's head. The firefighter shook his absence of a head, but didn't dissuade the dalmatian from that unrealistic goal.

gray17, 5 months ago to random

B ran away from home on Christmas, drove the 10 hours to Portland, and then spent most of the week regretting it and feeling guilty. You'd think it would be easy for a 56yo to walk away from an abusive dad and slightly-less-abusive older brother, but B really does like taking care of his dying mom, and he feels the weight of expectations loaded onto him by his family, who have spent years using him without thinking about it, and blaming him whenever convenient. 1/

gray17, 8 months ago to random

A New Beginning (2012) is a point-and-click adventure from Daedalic that tries to tell a complicated story about time-travel and climate change, and misses more than it hits.

Protag 1 is a retired scientist named Bent who overworked on an alternative-energy algae, to the detriment of his marriage and son. In an early scene, he answers a call from his therapist, who pushes him into repeating the statement, "I'm not responsible for the whole world". 1/

gray17, 11 months ago to random

There's an idea that thinking about a possibility makes it more likely to happen, and you should try to avoid thinking about it. This does not work. You can't use willpower to stop thinking about a white bear, and repeatedly trying just turns it into an obsession.

Posting this thread feels iffy. I keep changing my mind about it.

1/

gray17, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago) to random

During the summer of the George Floyd protests, in the first year of pandemic, my pony surprised me by sending a video of him doing a drum cover of Sepultura Refuse/Resist while in rubber and pony gear. I had posted the video on Twitter, but that account's deleted now. I'll post the video here if I ever discover the incantation to reduce it to postable size.
#rubber #ponyplay #drumming #sepultura

gray17, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago) to random

web browsers mark "already seen" in a simple way: if a link goes to a URL that you've viewed already, the link is colored differently. this is simple to implement, but not really useful in my #twine porn game, for several reasons.

this explanation will be easier with diagrams, so imagine there's a diagram here. 1/

gray17, 1 year ago to random

slowly cleaning up the storygraph in my #Twine porn. 1st image is before. 2nd is after. these are roughly the same section of the storygraph.

I changed time from vertical to horizontal, because my monitors are horizontal. the cleanup is also stricter about time ordering, which helps me see pacing better.

there are a couple dozen long links that I reluctantly made invisible to Twine, because Twine is terrible at rendering them. really wish Twine had connector nodes.

Twine storygraph laid out horizontally, with linear structures and branches more legible than the original image. Don't believe the nonsense in the other description. The oregano bird is

gray17, 8 months ago to random

Twelve Minutes (2021) is a story-puzzle game where you're stuck in a 10-minute time loop. You're a guy who comes home to an apartment with a loving wife. A romantic evening is interrupted by a cop that arrests your wife for murder. Many things you do will lead to your death and restart. Restart also happens if you try to leave or let the 10 minutes run out.

Why is a 10-minute time loop game called Twelve Minutes? That's one of the mysteries, and it takes a while to get the answer to that. 1/

gray17, 7 months ago to random

Last week, I got a text near midnight, "Can I bother you, Sir?" It was from B (still not his real name). I never told him to "Sir", but he does it regularly anyway.

He had walked away from his ranting brother-in-law boss, in middle of work. He had gone home to make dinner for his mom, and then started driving north.

He was texting me from a rest stop midway in the 10 hour drive to my place. 1/

gray17, 1 year ago to random

ok, today is renaming day for my #Twine porn. I was deferring this until I knew the final version would be in Twine and not converted to something else.

the thing I didn't know when I started: Twine (and SugarCube) make it really awkward to rename nodes and vars, because the rename breaks savegames. it's kind of an annoying problem, since this is a well-understood "can be solved with indirection" problem. but I understand why that indirection wouldn't be great for Twine.

gray17, 4 months ago to random

today in pointless tinkering. my masto is currently split into two timelines that hold about 30h each. the evenness is a coincidence, but I wanted to be more systematic at managing my timelines, so I spent ~1hr making a small tampermonkey widget that adds a summary box to phanpy, showing how many posts are in the current view so far, and the top ten sources (posters, boosters, hashtags). I don't know yet if it's useful, we'll see.

gray17, 1 year ago to random

#tldr: prompt injection

Building a tool that uses an LLM is currently just: give it some instructions, append more text, then read the output. The problem is, "more text" can override the instructions, which can have bad effects if the LLM can read private data or if its output becomes actions.

Nobody knows how to fix this. "Use more AI" does not work, because these models are probabilistic, and 99% is a failing grade in security.

simonwillison.net/2023/May/2/prompt-injection-explained/

gray17, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago) to random

... the more I think about it, the less I understand why the Trending posts of different mastodon instances are so similar. if it were just cute cat pictures, sure. but a lot of it is viewpoint/ideological. I wondered if it's because of the particular instances I watch (lgbt-ish, furry-ish, etc), so I looked at some different instances that showed up in mastodon.social's federated feed, and those are also similar. ... I guess I should look at the Trending algorithm

gray17, 1 year ago to random

... Currently unhappy that my #Twine porn does not mark visited links, but I don't know how to mark them sensibly, since there are so many state variables that can change descriptions.

Well, it's not too hard to do one-deep. Keep the previously shown render, speculatively render, and mark as "already seen" if it's the same. The problem is when the seen passage has links to passages that have changed because of state changes, transitively.

gray17, 9 months ago to random

current mood: converting my mastodon bookmarks to trello cards.

most of the bookmarks are "read it later", and mastodon's ui has problems:

• if I don't want to handle a bookmark now, I can't push it somewhere else. the top of my bookmarks becomes "things I want to read some day that's never now"

• I don't know how many bookmarks I have. since these are me-only tasks, I have to adjust per-unit effort to the queue size

I already have a read-it-later on trello, everything can go there.

gray17, 2 months ago to random

hm, what's the gender neutral for fanboy/fangirl? fanperson is meh, it's missing the boy/girl slant. fankid? fanpup? fanbaby?

gray17, 19 days ago to random

Bye!

gray17, 2 months ago to random

today is taking a break from twine porn to resurrect a non-kinky non-furry story that I outlined several years ago but never finished drafting. it's now a little late, it might have landed better years ago, but it still feels like it might resonate in the moment, and it keeps nagging at me, so I might as well finish it and see if anyone else likes it