Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
Kircher's Dragons
" There is a great deal of debate among writers with regards to dragons: do animals of this sort actually exist in nature, or, as...
Crafting Interpreters
Ever wanted to make your own programming language or wondered how they are designed and built?
Weaving Narratives into Procedural Worlds
Examining the value, characteristics, and methods of integrating static narratives into otherwise procedurally generated environments.
Food, foragers, and folklore: the role of narrative in human subsistence
Narrative is a species-typical, reliably developing, complex cognitive process whose design is unlikely to have emerged by chance. Moreover, the folklore record indicates that narrative content is consistent across widely divergent cultures. I have argued elsewhere that a storyteller may use narrative to manipulate an audience's representations of the social and/or physical environment to serve his or her own fitness ends. However, my subsequent research suggests that such manipulation results from a broader selection pressure which narrative effectively alleviates: information acquisition. By substituting verbal representations for potentially costly first-hand experience, narrative enables an individual to safely and efficiently acquire information pertinent to the pursuit of fitness in local habitats. If this hypothesis is true, narrative should be rich with information useful to the pursuit of fitness. One class of information integral to the accomplishment of this task is foraging knowledge. In this paper, then, I present evidence that foraging peoples use narrative to transmit subsistence information: specifically, I demonstrate how various narrative devices (e.g., setting, description, mimicry, anthropomorphism) are used to communicate foraging knowledge.
EsDictionary - The EsDeeKid Translator
Creatures of Story and Song | Reaktion Books
Discover why a beaver was said to bite off its own testicles, why the baleen of a right whale was prized by medieval knights or why you should give your crush the gift of a great auk.Creatures of Story and Song pieces together evocative legends, poems and historical accounts from a thousand years of history […]
Koans Are No Longer Paradoxical
Illuminating how they instantiate a rigorous form of logic
Master 4 Layers of Storytelling to Make Your Art Unforgettable
You think storytelling is just for writers? Wrong. The story you craft—not just on canvas, but in your journey, your impact, and in your own mind—could make your art impossible to ignore.
You’ve Been Played
How games are being harnessed as instruments of exploitation—and what we can do about it Warehouse workers pack boxes while a virtual dragon races across...
The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth
People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do; they are subject to an illusion—an illusion of explanatory depth. The illusion is f...
Cory Doctorow: Stories Are a Fuggly Hack - Locus
I've mentioned before, stories are weird. I mean, really, really weird. Nothing that happens in a piece of fiction has any consequence in the real world. Romeo and Juliet did not live, did not die, and the ''tragedy'' they represent is objectively less important than the tragedy of the live yogurt culture I digested at the breakfast table this morning. My theory is that the parts of our brains that …Read More
Large Language Models As The Tales That Are Sung
Gene Wolfe, Albert Lord, machine culture.
Why mental metaphors do not help us understand chatbot mistakes
The function of chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT is based on detecting probabilistic patterns in the training data. This makes them vulnerable to generating factual mistakes in their outputs. Recently, it has become commonplace in philosophical, scientific, and popular discourses to capture such mistakes by metaphors that draw on discourses about the human mind. The two most popular metaphors at present are hallucinating and bullshitting. In this paper, we review, discuss, and criticise these mental metaphors. By applying conceptual metaphor theory, we provide numerous reasons why they do not succeed in providing us with a better understanding of factual chatbot mistakes. We conclude by calling for justifications of the epistemic feasibility and fruitfulness of the metaphors at issue. Furthermore, we raise the question what would be lost if we stopped trying to capture factual chatbot mistakes by mental metaphors.
Pluralistic: The tedious power of storytelling (02 Jun 2026) must-we-pretend – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Yesterday, I attended a Brian Eno talk about the nature of creativity and art based on What Art Does, the short book he published with Bette Adriaanse last year:
Introducing Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
Our most advanced models for coding and knowledge work. Their research capabilities also offer an early glimpse of how AI models will contribute to scientific progress.
Language models are multiverse generators
"Actualities seem to float in a wider sea of possibilities from out of which they were chosen; and somewhere, indeterminism says, such possibilities exist, and form part of the truth."