Your MOM stopped chewing her fingernails…

Posted on by
7

I’ve been quietly refraining from making Your Mom jokes for the last week or so, and it is actually a sort of difficult experience.

Partly because habits are just hard to break; partly because I actually really love “your mom” jokes.

Not because I think making fun of people’s moms is funny; I pretty much stay away from anything resembling a plausible attempt to comment on anyone’s actual mom.

I love your mom jokes because I love playing with language, and the process of yourmomization (for lack of a better word) is a seriously flexible one that lends itself to a wide variety of induced nonce euphemisms from the literal to the absurd. I like how it’s possible to take even the most innocuous sentence and yourmomize it, how the cultural association of “your mom” jokes with implications of e.g. sexual impropriety means even a totally absurd substitution (A: “I collated those files”, B: “I collated your MOM” or B: “Your MOM collated those DICKS”) reads as an acceptable (if often deeply stupid) semantic transformation.

I’ve even put serious thought in the past into, as a project in amateur computational linguistics and natural language processing, building a YourmomBot that would be purpose-built to parse natural language input, identify potential substitutions, and generate a comeback response from those candidates. (It could even be a learning machine: using either an explicit rating mechanism or an NLP heuristic that tries to gauge the positive/negative valence of responses to its comeback, it could build up a model of what substitutions work and use that to weight future candidate selections. As the basis for a joke entry in a future Loebner Prize competition it’d probably at least get a few laughs.)

I love dumb jokes for their own sake, but fundamentally the humor I find in absurdist yourmomization is not so much in the lowbrow implications of any given joke as in the sort of ready-made, Mad Lib universality of the pattern of jokes when made in series; it’s in the way yourmomization, when employed not as a personal attack of opportunity but rather as an always-on regime, is revealed (to paraphrase Stanley Kubrick) not to be hostile so much as indifferent.

A very specific riff on Chomsky, a modified theory of deep linguistic structures: every sentence was actually a your mom jokes all along.

—

But what I’ve realized is that what may be for me a personal exercise in long-form absurdism may as well be, for those around me, an exercise in littering every single conversation with really banal, repetitive only-barely-jokes. Which isn’t really fair to everybody who isn’t me, and isn’t really how I want to come off.

And I have tolerant friends and a deeply tolerant wife; no one is going to tell me I have to cut it out, nobody thinks I’m actually trying to diss their mom. They might groan a bit, which is the least they’re entitled to do, but that’s about all. They’re kind people.

But having a couple of friends visit for a few days at the end of last year and realizing that I was yourmomizing everything, even literally reflexively yourmomizing random snippets of half-overheard conversation from the other room, made me think about whether maybe it’s time to reel it in some, to recalibrate the meter. And probably the most effective way to start that process is to just kick cold turkey for a while.

And so I’ve stopped making “your mom” jokes for the moment. For a few days now.

All I can moderate so far is what comes out of my mouth (or mostly, considering most of my daily conversation is over the internet, what comes out of my fingers), not what comes into my head, and so I’m not really at a psycholinguistic level making any fewer of them, but now instead of having reflexive yourmomization thoughts and then producing them out into the world, I’m actively quashing the production part of process. Sometimes I mutter them quietly to myself instead of typing them out, but mostly I’ve been getting out ahead of that even.

It feels a bit like stifling a sneeze, one of those stifles where your sinuses get blasted by the blowback and feel unhappy. It’s not a process I’m enjoying. But it’s educational. It’s interesting. And I’m probably annoying fewer people.

And if I bottle up enough of this antiyourmomization frustration it might push me over the edge into actually implementing that chatbot.

Introducing Mapstalgia – video game maps drawn from memory

Posted on by
Reply

An idle thought the other day turned into a new blog (those who know me will be shocked to hear this, I know), and it’s one that I’m pretty excited about:

Mapstalgia - video game maps drawn from memory

Mapstalgia is a growing collection of drawn-from-memory maps of video games. Essentially, it’s a library of memories of fictional worlds: people doing their best to render what they recall of shared pop-culture video game spaces.

It’s open for submissions, so if you have even a dim recollection of a game you’ve played, whether a week ago or twenty years ago, go scratch out a map on a napkin if nothing else and drop it into Mapstalgia’s submission form.

The site is still brand new but it’s gotten some nice mentions on twitter (cheers to @liquidindian, @auntiepixelante, and, as I am writing this, Xbox heavy @majornelson) and I woke up this morning to a nice writeup from Rock Paper Shotgun, so I’m pretty excited about the response.

I’d love to see this just keep growing. Our collective time spent with games is such a huge well of spatial and experiential memory that this feels like one of those things that anyone can, and everyone should, have a crack at.

Introducing The Square Foot

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been working for the last couple of weeks on a new photoblog, The Square Foot, focusing on documenting Portland one literally-framed square foot at a time.

Statue face with white and red eyes

I’ve always enjoyed photography; I grew up around cameras, learned dark room workflow in high school, and have posted thousands of photos over the years to my flickr account. But I have trouble being consistent about shooting; I’ll get excited for a few days, or document an event or a trip, but I won’t keep shooting daily.

Honda motorcycle in alley

And so this is an attempt to give myself a little bit of structure, a reason to go out every day and look around and try to find a half-dozen good shots, to think about composition and about getting more than just a good-enough snapshot out of my camera.

Lunch at James John Cafe

It’s also a way for me to be more conscious of where I live — my street, my neighborhood, my town. I love Portland but it’s easy to get used to a place and stop thinking about all the little weird details and bits of character that define it. Familiarity leads to taking for granted; I’m hoping I’ll do a little less of that now. I’m enjoying walking around an noticing new details for the first time, but I’m also excited to go back to places I’ve been, to photograph the things that I already think of as being Portland.

St. Johns Bridge

The Square Foot is already shaping up to be a pretty satisfying personal project; I hope others, Portlanders and not, get a kick out of it as well.

Nintendo Game Counselor #1 – Mario’s Bad Dreams

Posted on by
Reply

Subject: Fratelli, Mario.
Initial session transcript

So, what do I do, I just, I mean, do you wanna ask me questions? I never been to a shrink, all I ever seen is movies and stuff, so–

Okay, uh, yeah. I been having weird dreams.

Yeah, for, jesus, I dunno, years now. Years and years. Seems like I have the same dream again and again, like it’s on repeat, except–

Yeah, yeah, recurring dream, I guess that’s what you call it yeah. But I mean, does it have to be the same every time or it’s something different that you call it? Because there’s all these, y’know, these changes from one time to the next, it’s not like its the exact same thing every time. Sometimes it’s all in black and white, sometimes I can fly, sometimes everything feels like it’s just, I dunno, it’s flat, like the world’s got no depth. Izzat still count?

Okay, it’s, the basic thing is every time I realize my girlfriend, she’s been kidnapped.
Continue reading →

12 Variations on Chekhov’s Gun

Posted on by
1

“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should go off. Otherwise don’t put it there.”

– Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, as related by Ilia Gurlyand of a conversation from 1899

“Rules are made to be broken.”

– Ladies Home Journal, 1899

~ The setup ~

ACT I – SCENE 1
(The living room of a modest home. There is a fire burning in the fireplace; hanging above the mantle is pistol.)

ALICE
Oh, Uncle Bob, it is so good to see you again after all these years.

BOB
(embracing ALICE)
I have missed this old house. How is your mother?

~

~ The variations ~

1. The Vanilla

ACT III – SCENE IV

ALICE
You’ve betrayed me, and Mother! Everything this family stands for!

BOB
(grabs pistol from mantle, fires it at ALICE, killing her)
Oh god, what have I done?

~

2. The Ladies Home Journal

ACT III – SCENE IV

ALICE
You’ve betrayed us all, Uncle Bob!

BOB
(walks to fireplace, looks at pistol on the wall)
Yes, well, nobody’s perfect. Hey, where’d you find this neat gun?

ALICE
Mother bought it on eBay.

BOB
It’s really cool looking.

ALICE
Yeah, I like it a lot.

~
Continue reading →

Blog facelift

Posted on by
Reply

It’s been a few years since I’ve updated the look of the site. This is more a nudge than a top-to-bottom refit; I’m using a newer WordPress theme that gives me a little more column width for the main content, something that’s been bothering me previously, and a few other things have been tweaked, but otherwise it should look and feel pretty similar to what was here before.

I’ve updated the sidebar content and Music and Project page stuff as well; two years out of date is pretty out of date for me, considering how ephemeral a lot of my projects are. So some obsolete stuff has been nixed and a lot of new stuff form the last couple years is now properly featured.

The Metafilter Infodump (panel talk from AoIR 12)

Posted on by
3

This is the script of a talk I gave in early October this year, at the Association of Internet Research’s twelfth annual conference. I was one of four Metafilter members presenting different research-related talks about Metafilter as a site and a community. The other panelists were Kim Witten, Kris Markman, and Quinn Warnick. You can find their respective presentation notes here: Quinn, Kris, Kim.

I was the first of the four to present, and so opened with a short intro about the site itself before moving on to a discussion of the Metafilter Infodump, a weekly-updated repository of site activity data on which this talk is focused.

This was originally a slideshow presentation, but my slides weren’t anything special so I’ve left most of those out of this re-run of the talk’s presentation in favor of running the text itself. If this reads a bit odd in spots, it’s partly a reflection of that transition.

The Infodump
Continue reading →

Overthanking a plate of injokes

Posted on by
6

So I’ve been playing Glitch for the last few days; it’s a lightweight free-to-play social MMO done as a browser Flash game, sort of a cross between a platformer and combat-free resource-wrangling games like Animal Crossing. It’s a good little time. It looks a bit like this:

But I play a lot of games and don’t mention it here much at all, so why am I bringing up this one? Because of a plate of beans, is why.

It goes like this:

1. I found out about Glitch because I work for and hang out at Metafilter, and a lot of folks on Metafilter are playing it. And so while my little yellow dude has been mining beryl and cavorting with pigs in exchange for steaks and harvesting bubbles off of bubble trees, I’ve been chatting with my fellow Mefites. And not only are the are a lot of us playing the game, there’s even a couple folks who work for Tiny Speck, the company that makes Glitch.

2. There’s a long-running joke on Metafilter about how we’re the kind of people who could overthink a plate of beans. It started as a joke someone made during a thread years ago in which people were earnestly deconstructing the performative elements of Alanis Morissette’s cover of Black Eyed Peas’ My Humps, and it caught on, to the point where “beanplating” and “to beanplate” are a commonly understood derived verb forms used to describe maybe-needlessly-in-depth analysis of one thing or another. There’s even a song.

3. Glitch has bean trees, on which grow beans. One can harvest beans, and eat them or use them as constituents in recipes. What Glitch hasn’t had is beans arranged tastefully on a plate.

4. Except, well, that now exists, thanks to one of those Mefite Glitchers who happens to work on the game.

Here it is:

Click on it and you get, as with most items in Glitch, a context menu that gives you some basic options and a special option unique to this item: overthinking.
Continue reading →

The Big Markovski

Posted on by
Reply

So I put together a thing that takes the script of The Big Lebowski and chews it up and spits out things like this:

It uses Markov chains, one of my favorite bits of applied mathematics in the whole dang world, and it is fairly silly and you can go play with it here:

~ The Big Markovski ~

If you pay enough attention to the odd stuff I get up to, you might recognize this as a port of a very similar previous project, Previously, On The X-Files, which was itself a significant elaboration on an even previouserly project called Garkov that mashed up Markov chains and Jim Davis’ Garfield comics.

One interesting point of comparison between Markovski and the X-Files project is that there’s a great deal less raw material for this new one to work with—Spooky Mulder had something like 15,000 lines of dialogue over 9 seasons, whereas The Dude has maybe 450 total in the Lebowski script. So you see less mid-sentence swerves with this one than with the POTX project; a smaller corpus of input means less resynthesis and more verbatim regurgitation for any given generated statement.

Clearly, the brothers Coen need to address this by writing a long-running TV series in the Duderverse. Until then, we’ll just have to make do with this as is.