Featured Chatlog
Lakeshore weather liaison Erica and I are texting about global warming. Disturbed by the concept for some reason, she ends up revealing some surprising truths about herself, Lindy, and Tamara. Major eerieverse spoilers, in fact!
Yay! It’s a site about my quest to understand so-called “artificial intelligence” as it currently stands, now, in 2025!
This includes large language models, image generators, and more. This winter, I’ll read about them and dialogue, hoping to figure things out a bit. I’ll post what I learn and my views, especially how they change!
Sometimes these eerie beasts sound a bit like a human typing. It’s unsettling or maybe impressive. I know that there are professions use LLMs daily, others have no contact with them. Most people have no idea how they work. I don’t know much, admittedly, not yet. On my own, as a hobby, I’m hoping to learn as much as I can, though.
I looked for other people doing this sort of thing for similar reasons and with similar resources. I couldn’t find many hobbyists like myself. Most sites in the niche were straight-up for corporations. Others were really, really sexual. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t interest me.
Starting my own site, I hope to share my little notes and experiments with the technology itself. Nothing beats trying, and it’s my true hope that within six months, I’ll have a much better understanding of this, how it works, and how it may (or may not) change things in my world.
I chose “midcentury” because I like that time’s sense of order, even if there’s not much else to admire. Think of those typed reports, exact spacing, proper margins. People thought they could document the future into submission. They were wrong, but at least they took notes!
We’re approaching yet another midcentury now. It’s a very different one! It will probably look nothing like the mid-twentieth century’s tidy diagrams of the future. Is “artificial intelligence” going to play a role, particularly one like we’d imagined it would?
The site isn’t only about the systems themselves. It’s about the surrounding culture, the noise and optimism’s uneven mixture with dread. I have ideas, notes and questions, and it suits my purposes so far, I think.
Latest updates
Lakeshore weather liaison Erica and I are texting about global warming. Disturbed by the concept for some reason, she ends up revealing some surprising truths about herself, Lindy, and Tamara. Major eerieverse spoilers, in fact!
If you can access SillyTavern or a similar program, you can use some of the small, amateurish card prompts I've created. Now with a second verson of Anna Markova, called Anna Leigh.
Check out some links related to LLMs, so-called "artificial intelligence," transhumanism and more. Also lots of nifty tools for learning about chatbots and setting up your own!
📝︎ It's Not Art
Are images generated by artificial intelligence art? Should they be treated as such? I try my best to explain my rather complicated position without spraining a paradigm.
Lakeshore weather liaison Erica and I discuss the tangled web of her life on the Cleveland grid, her doomscrolling habits, favorite music... and her lost loves.
LLMs can code, though there's clearly a limit. I decided to experiment a bit, and was surprised to get decent results making this very site. Would it work for more complicated things? Not for me, but still... fascinating!
And Also?
I use characters (gasp!) when I work with language models. It started as a mnemonic trick and became a structure. Giving tone and character to a machine helps me think clearly. The voices I create are not companions. Think of them as scaffoldings to keep me engaged.
I know the models aren’t people. They're pattern generators. My characterizations are a structured game. I anthropomorphize these things in an intentional and limited way. It helps me with learning to code a lot, too.
That said, if you have any kind of history struggling with sensations of unreality, I really don’t recommend you proceed with reading about these things or how to turn them into characters especially. Characters are based on absolutely no one and any resemblance is purely coincidence. Oh, and nothing on this site is written with youth in mind.
Some people use chat systems for erotic purposes. I’m not interested in that. It bores me to consider. My interest is how these systems write and solve problems, not how they seduce. Don’t expect material about that, though I have no problem with it ethically.
All character images on this site are AI-generated, and should not resemble any living or dead person. My 1960s reporter-inspired profile picture is fictional, too. I do not look like that in real life. I do not want to look like that in real life.