The Inferkit got a bit creepy last night. Around six, my wife and I were settling into the couch to watch a bit of The Great American Bake-Off. I dropped my vape between the couch cushions, went under to find it, and noticed all of the nasty dust under the couch. I ought to sweep this up, I thought to myself.
Fast forward an hour or so and I decide to go to my office to play around with the AI a little more. I put in some passages from A Thousand Plateaus, and bit of Jung, and a few chapters of an abandoned work-in-progress. This is the first paragraph it spit out:
He puts a cup down on the kitchen counter, then goes back to the living room. She’s on the couch, watching a cooking show, flipping pages of a book she’s reading, humming a tune she’s found in the music section of the library, the stack of dust bunnies beneath the coffee table still, although the cat has left them.
I don’t have a cat, and she wasn’t humming a tune or reading a book. But the couch and the dust bunnies…genuinely creep stuff. I let the AI continue:
He sits on the other end of the couch, his legs stretched out, knees bent, and his foot rests on a large stuffed animal.
He looks at her over the animal’s head. Hey, um. Do you wanna smoke some weed?
She starts laughing.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, is she high?
She’s high.
Good.
I’ve got a tray here, some paper cups. I’ll get them. She returns with the tray and sets them down. She takes one of the cups. He takes a cookie. He shakes one of the paper cups. Okay, here we go. She smokes and he sips coffee, both lost in their own thoughts. When she’s finished, she sets the empty cup down on the tray. So, was the message good?
He rubs his face, trying to lift his fogged brain from the braincandy it has absorbed. The numbers are still there, just outside his grasp. He touches one of the numbers. The numbers respond, floating in his thoughts, finding their way back to him. He closes his eyes and pulls them in, focusing on them until he feels them settle. They’re there. They’re the real message. The last word of the message repeats in his head.
Do you?
He nods. “Yeah.”
Do you want to play golf?
He hears himself, repeating. He realizes he hasn’t spoken in a long time. “Yeah.” Let’s play golf.
I’m going to start going to church. We can go together, if you want. He smiles. “Yeah.” He opens his eyes. “I think that’s the first time I’ve said ‘yes’ to anything today.” She stands and the expression on her face shifts. She’s got you, she says. You should stop smiling, she says. She nods at him, smiles, and leaves the room. He hears her humming as she’s walking. He looks at the clock and sees that it’s early.
Notes: the bit in bold sounds remarkably like my OCD symptoms, the obsession with certain numbers and the panic that occurs if I don’t perform a proper ritual to land on those numbers. Recently I’ve taken to ERP, which has been helping. This Inferkit text could be seen as a reflection of that. “He looks at the clock and sees that it’s early.”
WordPress has blocks, and you have to go through all of them to italicize the paragraphs. So I tab down, hit command+A, hit command+I. All the text in the block selected. Italicized. Over and over. A, I, A, I.
The adventure continues…
Broken River Blog 