Wikipedia has a page where they list, for entertainment purposes, the titles of a bunch of pages that didn’t meet the cut. These are mostly pages that were submitted as pranks, although a few of them are clever enough that you can’t quite tell. Reader Emily Davis sent me a list of them – here are a few real deleted articles that humans wrote.
List of movie posters with lamps in them How to trick people into thinking you’re a wizard List of people who died with tortoises on their heads People Who delete My Articles have no sense of Humor Wheeeeeeeeeeeee!!!! I like eggs Do scented candles burn faster than unscented candles An article that contains nothing but a full stop List of differences between apples and oranges Category:Farts in literature Category:Political posters using an octopus Woo woo woo woo woo woo wah ooooo wah List of all Wikipedia lists that do not contain themselves
It makes a terrible dataset for a neural network – only 1112 unique entries, some of which are quite long, and big variation in style and subject matter. I decided to try it anyway.
I trained a character-level recurrent neural network (that is, it uses individual letters as building blocks) with a very small memory to prevent it from memorizing the small dataset so quickly. Even so, most of the generated names were either incomprehensible or memorized from the original dataset. Those that weren’t, however, fit right in. It turns out text-generating neural networks are great at mashups and non sequiturs.
Popal chickens List of U.S. pants List of the Hamburgers Category:Athletes with maps Why Inited States Evil chicken Liquid cheese List of bands with pies on them Ant Fields are bear hair fetishism Monster Diseases Why Won’t Space Tire bear (country) What hoop This page is a very short article Poople who don’t have beer from sydney Goat that cookie Near Dogs Donkey words in the cartoons Poople who woo wah the pilot Death of chicken What is the day What fame butt List of fictional characters with the ball Who is not leaders List of parps Proper programming language Turdis programming language Article with a cat Friends and existence How to draw a coconut Tree donkey Category:People who can’t speed Panapple Beer for chickens Tree Wars Pants
Whoever it is who likes to enter long strings of repeated characters as pranks (I’m looking at you, Sand Person), the neural network shares your obsession. Repeated text is easier to learn, and so the neural network tends to latch onto it easily and, especially when I give it a short memory, takes repetition to even wilder excess (see: The Cow With No Lips).
I trained a neural network on the entire list of Wikipedia article titles a while back! It took a really long time, but it was totally worth it, because the output is frequently hilarious.
Here’s a sampling of some of the titles that it generated in some of my earlier runs:
Single and Engineering Act 1982
Alan Communication (Australian politician)
Discography de la di Corporation (American footballer)
The Antarctic Critics County County Team in the Love Days (California)
2004 Snake Cardinal Me For the Moon de Veesi
Harry Newbeast Group
Children of the Consortion (disambiguation)
Wool Controversington’s transport
List of Apple St Cannability Lines of Education Productions of San Meridontomy
Central Photon State Park
Want more? Check out the #wackypedia tag on my blog! Every once in a while, I’ll fire up the neural network and post new batches of the Wikipedian surrealism that it generates.
After seeing Mara Wilson’s tweet listing a bunch of imaginary British TV shows earlier today (and the even more amazing replies to it), I decided I had to take this to the obvious next step: training a neural network on a list of British TV shows and seeing what kind of nonsense came out.
I ended up using the Wikipedia article “List of British television programmes” as the training data, and here’s a sampling of what resulted. Some of these are far too absurd to be believable—but I can’t be the only one who had to double-check at least a few of these:
Mupperial Stophing – situation comedy
Peak Chally Life – drama
Jericle of the Trial – game show
Kitchen Maker Call – situation comedy
To the Crubbin Bad – animation/history, reality television/animated
Britain’s Next You King – sitcom
Beauty and the Come Gene – game show
Brief Mine – nature documentary
City Frones – documentary drama
Yell’s Fortune Satch – documentary/reality
Gamezil Hipwist – game show
Padfair – drama
The Gankstike – detective drama
Sunday Vision – comedy/crime drama
The Upper Serving – reality
Little Here – documentary
The Kringe – drama
Creasers – drama anthology
True Mr.Cry – situation comedy
Man to Mine of the Sony – drama
Million Pounders – drama
Keeping Smakes – game show
All Mysteries: The Pie the Meniss – medical drama
Crank Street – music/comedy
Dull Hour – situation comedy
Life on Balls of Sherlock Holmes – detective drama
Finally some video of what may or may not be the same older surprise bronze cory baby from earlier.
With one of the (not so big yet) adults videobombing toward the end, for a better idea of size.
No idea how old that one might be, or if there are more of the bigger babies lurking somewhere. The one(s) I saw must have been pretty good at hiding up to this point.
And yes, I do have that old small filter I’ve been using to pump water through the hang-on fry tank held together with an ugly striped ponytail elastic. Because it’s what I could find on short notice 🙄
The fish haven’t complained about it yet, at least.
You don’t have to be grateful that it isn’t worse.
read that.
read it again, and again, and again.
somebody, somewhere, always has it worse than you. there is one person on this planet that has it the worst of all, and that person is NOT the only person allowed to be unhappy with their lot.
if things are bad for you, they are bad for you. period.
This goes for trauma as well. A lot of times survivors get trapped in a cycle of minimizing/diminishing their trauma because “other people have it worse” – but there is no hierarchy of trauma. There is no ranking system for which traumas are “better” or “worse.” Your trauma is valid. Period.
IMPORTANT TRUTHS.
As a therapist, lemme just say: almost every trauma survivor I’ve ever had has at some point said “But I didn’t have it as bad as some people” and then talked about how other types of trauma are worse. Even my most-traumatized, most-abused, most psychologically-injured clients say this.
The ones who were cheated on, abandoned, and neglected say this. The ones who were in dangerous accidents/disasters say this. The ones who were horrifyingly sexually abused say this. The ones who were brutally beaten say this. The ones who were psychologically tortured for decades say this. What does that tell you? That one of the typicalside-effects of trauma is to make you believe that you are unworthy of care.
Don’t buy into it, because it’s nonsense. It doesn’t matter if someone else had it “worse.” Every person who experiences a trauma deserves to get the attention and care they need to heal from it.
“one of the typicalside-effects of trauma is to make you believe that you are unworthy of care.”
saying it again but a feminism that invites people to publicly share and discuss their traumatic experiences, without mentioning any of the potential downfalls or side effects, is so dangerous, for example: if your social media account is public, potential employers could find it, or it could force confrontation within your immediate social sphere, or random strangers could harass you, without even going into mental health aspects of “sharing a story” over and over again. there are ways to break down shame and stigma around trauma without making individual people into platforms, especially when they do not have the legal and financial protection of large celebrities, and there are actual safer spaces to discuss your own trauma, and safer ways to process things, than very public revelation
Also, this type of feminism, mentioned above, makes victims/survivors of trauma, who do not share their stories publicly, feel like they are contributing to the stigma around trauma. Victims/survivors should never be made to feel like their decision, on how they discuss their trauma, contributes to stigma and shame or impedes activism.
I’m making this a separate post for people to be able to boost it:
Hey guys, I’m Miri, and on April 20th of this year, I’ll be having my bat mitzvah (Adult bat mitzvah, to clarify).
I’d like to have a dress I can wear for this, but my nicest dress is only /barely/ knee length on me, and I don’t feel comfortable wearing that up onto the bimah. I feel I should dress more modestly, especially if I’m going to be holding, and reading from, the torah.
I was wondering if anyone who’s a US size 22 or 24 has a dress they no longer want that they’d be willing to give to me that’s longer and more modest. I’m 5′9 or thereabouts and I’d like it to go to midcalf at least.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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