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🎨 ArtcowTerry Reitz / JDR / Jennifer Diane Reitz / Chatoyance - The Original Crazy Tranny; Creator of The Conversion Bureau
Not just A tranny, THE tranny. The original prototype Crazy Troon of today. The backstory is fascinating reading, the comics such a schizo mess that they really can't be missed, especially Pastel Defender Heliotrope. If nothing else you have to admit that JDR has a phenominally vivid imagination and the 'paraverse' they invented follows the rules of the batshit logic used to create them.
It's well worth your time to dig into both in this thread (where there is a lot of info recovered from when the original main source of info on JDR, the Portal of Evil went dark and almost nothing was waybacked.) as well as the 'Bad Webcomics' review pages and of course jenniverse.com itself.
Thread title should be changed tho, since the granny tranny only aped the TCB setting instead of creating it (though given the extreme misanthropy, would most likely end up making it himself)
I've requested permission to rewrite the OP, but I'd appreciate tremendously if anyone could contribute a detailed overview of what went down with FIMfiction and the Conversion Bureau. Bronies ain't my bag and all I really know is that Jenny got involved with a controversial MLP AU about turning all disgusting humans into superior ponies, wrote more than a million words of ultra misanthopic fanfic, and then got super overly butt-hurt over brony flame wars about it. It was the last time JDR was particularly active as a lolcow, so I'd appreciate someone with more knowledge doing it justice.
Our favorite troon has decided to weigh in on TADC. The totally-not-a-childrens'-show aimed at stunted early millennials entering their forties and ten year olds who enjoy the bright colors and distinct character designs. Which I guess makes an autistic 66 year old man who thinks he's a teenage girl the ideal viewer.
tl;dr: He hasn't watched it yet, but expects an ultra-complicated sci-fi backstory where they're all being simulated by a super-AI thousands of years in the future. Naturally, he expects that it ends with a secret god AI that was never implied or hinted at showing up to rescue everyone in the end.
The obvious foreshadowing, where the guy clearly shown to be a programmer developed the AI and it was unstable because it ate the other AI, was assumed to be a red herring because that wouldn't be hard enough sci-fi for the series whose audience has an average age of 13.
Our favorite troon has decided to weigh in on TADC. The totally-not-a-childrens'-show aimed at stunted early millennials entering their forties and ten year olds who enjoy the bright colors and distinct character designs. Which I guess makes an autistic 66 year old man who thinks he's a teenage girl the ideal viewer.
tl;dr: He hasn't watched it yet, but expects an ultra-complicated sci-fi backstory where they're all being simulated by a super-AI thousands of years in the future. Naturally, he expects that it ends with a secret god AI that was never implied or hinted at showing up to rescue everyone in the end.
The obvious foreshadowing, where the guy clearly shown to be a programmer developed the AI and it was unstable because it ate the other AI, was assumed to be a red herring because that wouldn't be hard enough sci-fi for the series whose audience has an average age of 13.
Typical JDR, WAY overthinking the very simplistic premise behind TADC, the product of a depressed troon who had a decent core of an idea that grew popular way beyond his ability or interest to manage properly who shit out some badly thought out 'conclusions' to tie up the backstory and turned one of the only interesting characters who was never a troon in the first 8 eps but was clearly losing his sanity into his own troon self-insert for the finale then killed him, raked in the jack and now never wants to hear about TADC ever again.
Honestly, JDR's ideas were far better. Batshit crazy of course, but better then what fans of TADC got.
I think even the finale wasn't as bad as introducing GodBearCelestia as an OC to fix everything at the last minute would be.
The natural ending would've been for Caine to stay dead, the characters to fix things around them as best they can, and, after some drama, figure out that they're not getting out and learn to live with it. The immediate cut to Caine coming back, fixing everything, and then showing them that their real selves solved all of their problems offscreen in a single five minute scene kind of defeated the point of the series.
Thread title should be changed tho, since the granny tranny only aped the TCB setting instead of creating it (though given the extreme misanthropy, would most likely end up making it himself)
Yeah, IIRC the original guy was semi-horrified to see the shitshow that his grade school wish fulfillment fic had accidentally spawned. The original, I haven't read it, but AFAIK just said "Haha, I am Pinkie Pie. You want to be a pony so I'll turn you into one with magic! Have a fun life as a pony!" and then ended.
The misanthropic apocalypse stuff was all Mr. Reitz's handywork.
Anyways, a new tale of early nerd world from our thread subject:
I think it was Unreal Tournament 2004, and I think the map was called 'Anubis', or somesuch - it was the interior of a futuristic Egyptian pyramid sort of map, with long corridors, staircases, winding passages, and huge open galleries. I started playing with humans in a standard deathmatch type of game, sometime around midnight or so. This was before my family started watching shows at midnight. I might have even started at eleven.
Now UT 2004 had bots, and these bots were special - they had a big contest, with prizes, where people would send in their recorded play data - basically a replay of a match they had played - the purpose of which was to train a simple AI with the data. They were already using that data anyway, but they did the contest to kind of pay people back. I never entered, but a lot of people did. But the result, ultimately, was ever-improving bots to play with when there weren't enough human players, or even any players.
I mostly never played with bots, I liked human players. I figured bots would just be dull and frustrating. Single minded far better than my meager skills. But the UT bots were famous at the time because they used AI trained on human players, Epic made a big fuss about that fact, and there were many write-ups about how amazing the bots were supposed to be. A person setting up a server could allow, or disallow bots to fill in when the human population dropped, to keep the games even and full. I always tried to be on human-only servers. But sometimes you couldn't tell, I couldn't tell, or didn't check the settings, or I would just get lazy and jump in.
So, I was fragging and tagging and having fun, but as the night wore on more and more players left. Soon it was down to only one other player on the level. Clearly another human was there with me, otherwise there would be 16 players no matter what - so it had to be a human. The roster was empty except for one player, so it couldn't be a bot. Bots always filled all the slots that humans did not.
I had stopped playing actively, because it had struck me how beautiful the level architecture was. At that time, it really was very beautiful - with lovely lighting, and desert scenes beyond the windows, and amazing shadows and fantastic shapes to the design. I decided to take some time to really look at it. So I was wandering around, and I stood by a big window just taking in the view outside.
Along comes the other player, at first he shoots at me, but I don't shoot back. Instead I do a few harmless jumps in place, to indicate that I am not attacking. So he stops attacking too. I motion, with my body movements, at the windows, and type in that I just want to look around. 'Cool', comes the response in the chatbox. So the two of us wander around, just looking at the scenery. By now, it is about one in the morning or so. I try leaping to platforms that are probably not supposed to be accessible, to see if I can get up there - something I always like to try, if I can get the freedom from being fragged - and I get to a few places. The other player makes some attempts and finally joins me, and we stand and survey the scene. We explore more, and on the path he starts hopping just for the fun of it, so I do too, and we are both hopping around like frogs, just being silly together. Eventually we stop and try some marksmanship to see if we can hit various spots in the environment. We shoot at lights and wall patterns, using them as bullseye targets, and generally have some fun that way. It goes on like that for a long time.
Eventually, I realize that it is approaching 3 am, and I am tired, so I tell my friend that I have to leave. I type how much fun I had, and that I really enjoyed just goofing around together, not having to shoot or be shot. I tell him good night, and he responds 'Good night!' back to me. I log out.
The results screen is in front of me, and I decide to check out his name to see who I was playing with, because I want to add him to my favorite players list. But all there are are bots listed. A lot of bots, up to about 1 am. After that, only one bot is listed. Just one, and no players. I didn't realize that the number of bots could be other than all-or-nothing. It was possible to have dynamic levels of bots, make them equal to the number of players, and not just always filling up every untaken slot.
I had been playing for almost three hours with a bot. A mindless, soulless P-zombie made of code. A structure built of countless recordings of human players, and assigned a randomized set of personality traits and abilities which changed to match the players. A simple, self-adjusting, learning AI bot.
I felt fear, all the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. My heart began pounding - I felt like I had been alone in a haunted house with a ghost... which, in a way, perhaps I had been. I had felt real affection and camaraderie for a hollow nothing that wasn't really there at all. I had been alone in that virtual world, completely alone, all of that time. It felt like that because, when I play games I really become immersed. Even back then, it felt like how being in VR feels now, now that VR is possible. The real world, the borders of the screen vanish for me. I am there, in my mind, in my experience, in the game. And I had been there with a ghost - that is how it felt. Alone, with nobody there, yet I had happily goofed around and played with what I thought was a real person. One who acted like a real person would in that game. All of that time, late, late at night, yet completely alone.
I hurriedly shut down the game. I turned off my computer. I got the hell out of the room and got my ass to bed with Sandi, desperate to have a living person near me. It took me some time to calm down. I felt an eerie feeling for days after. A haunted feeling. I can still feel a bit of it right now, decades later.
I was completely, to the core certain that I had been playing with another person. Absolutely convinced. And it was not so. It felt like reality was wrong, like something strange and eldritch had happened. It felt like I had played with something supernatural, like I had been touched by the uncanny.
I have never forgotten the power of that experience. That bot was not even close to being self-aware, it couldn't have been. It wasn't even a speck of a fraction of the power of even the weakest modern LLM. It was just a FPS game bot.
But it had totally convinced me that I had been playing with a very real human being who also enjoyed goofing around alien architecture, just because it was pretty.
At first I assumed this was schizobabble, but the contest he's referring to is real.
The contest was called BotPrize, and it was in 2008. I had assumed it was from around 1999, not a decade after the game came out.
It wasn't just a "good bot" contest, it was a kind of turing test where the goal was to get human testers to label the bot as human.
It was actually a significant thing in the academic community. Shit was so cash before the jeetwave turned everything boring and incompetent.
The winning entry was UT^2, which was a pretty generic genetic algorithm bot with a humanlikeness component to its objective function and a database of recordings that it could use to unstick itself if the pathfinding failed.
Mirrorbot (Publication link), on the other hand, copied its opponent in real time.
From the paper, they're the only ones in the 2012 contest who used real-time imitation.
No chat in the contest, but I don't see it as unreasonable that an ELIZA-style bot could be tacked on when it's deployed to public lobbies for testing purposes.
This double interview features both winning teams behind the bots that won the grand BotPrize, building AI that was ranked as human more often than the humans themselves! First, Mihai Polceanu will present the techniques behind MirrorBot (gathering real-time player information and mirroring opponents). Then, Jacob Schrum will explain the techniques behind UT^2 (blending gameplay traces and neuro-evolution).
Relevant sections from the paper, for any fellow techfags in the thread:
An additional module that gave the bot its name is the mirroring module which, when activated, records the actions of one target and then, after a short time delay, replays them from the bot’s perspective. This secondary module is activated only in the case when MirrorBot encounters a friendly player. Each module is described in the following subsections.
When a mirroring keyframe is executed, MirrorBot’s stateis changed to match the information stored in that particular keyframe. The target’s location is used to establish an axis of symmetry with MirrorBot. Using this axis, all actions except forward/backward movement are recreated as seen in a mirror; i.e. target shoots to its top-right and MirrorBot shoots to its top-left. The forward and backward movements are opposite to the mirror effect so to maintain distance in the case where the target retreats or advances.
In an attempt to use communication to test whether a player is human or not, judges may draw patterns using weapon fire, perform systematic left-right movements or any other combination of movements that they find appropriate and understandable by others. If a player responds accordingly to this kind of communication attempts, a human may assume that the player’s behavior was the result of a conscious interlocutor
Pretty neat paper. Was a different world then, both because of no jeets and because we couldn't just throw compute at non-jeet problems to make them go away.
His bluesky is the usual boring r/politics babble, as usual. It's genuinely weird how libs are so boring when even the most deranged far-rightist is at least interesting and unique in his theories about the lizardtroonjews that secretly control Israel.
Ah. The contest just said "Unreal Tournament", and I remembered they had one in 1999. Turns out they used the same name for 2002, 2004, and 2007 releases, with the suffixes '2003', '2004', and '3'. They were going to make another "Unreal Tournament", with no suffix, in 2014, but it got canned in favor of fortnite.
