So Prof. Mark Reidl of Georgia Tech is the best kind of geek, and used some cool scripting to extract all the things on Wikipedia with plot summaries: movies, books, tv episodes, video games, etc. That’s a lot of plot summaries: 112,936, to be exact.
With a dataset this large, a neural network can achieve impressive results. Sure enough, when I trained this open-source neural network framework on just the titles alone, it consistently came up with titles that were both varied and (usually) plausible.
Below are some of my favorites, arranged roughly by apparent genre:
Action/Adventure
Titanic Buffalo Pirates: A Fight Dance Story The Bad Legend Conan the Pirate O Bullets Home Transformers Shurk Hat Dies! An Enemy of Bob (Homicide: Life on the Street) Cannibal Spy II American Hero: Fire of Crusty Lego Man Hunt Nancy Drew: The Last Day (film) Surf Crisis Legend of the Experience of Scarlet Freedom Damageboo American Midnight: Swear Dragon Problem
Scifi/fantasy
Under the Daleks Batman and Flancles: The Fun Tree The Legends of World Planet Bomberman’s Love The Enchanted Feed The Star Wars: The Santa Contact The Long Ninja Dove in the Air (film) The History of the Galaxy Bunny Lada City of the Stupid (film) Shy Castle Hamburger (Star Trek: The Next Generation) Swords and Batman: Summer Party ?
Kids/Family
The Boordeeple (2011 film) A Dog’s Toy Friends Boop (Adventure Time) A Dinosaur Quest Colonel Corn (video game) Scooby-Drum New Bear Borky the Pig (film) Excellent Very Broken Christmas The Great Bother Cat (film) Happy Cat in the Yaku Wonder Fireman and Halloween Rules Big Can Flower Home The Green Yaurglar Pig Scooby-Doo’Wagon Traps (video game) Book Dog (film)
Horror
Terror Dog Tree Screaming Zombies of Florence The Trunkelling A Vampire Time for Monster Murder’s Eagle Frozen Bat (film) Haunted Place The Sheep of Evil Barney’s The Devil’s Treachery Merry Scroobers: Crown of Evil The Steel-Pounted Murder King The Shadow of Life of Very Worgy (film) The Mystical Booged of California
Documentary
Market that Knave Spork at Bliss The White Soup An Indiana Office The Last Fish Show The Fish of Education
Restricted section (there were quite a few more of these)
Absilloved Lovers 2: Black Bearfly Dawn Horse Man Academy 5-R: Cowboy Sheeper Wydex Breed Bot 3: The Journey Kitchen Wild Bad Party 109 Pink Moon Indiscreet Maidman
And finally, a list of the most quintessential story titles, obtained by setting the creativity to near zero on a highly-trained network:
The Story of the Stranger (1994 film) The Last Day of the Story The Lost Princess (film) The Stranger (1994 film) The Last Star (1994 film) The Secret of the Story of the Stranger (1996 film) The Stranger (2014 film) The Story of the Stars The Story of the Stranger (1999 film) The Last Day of the Sun The Story of the Star Trek: The Secret of the Story of the Star Wars
I would read/watch so many of these you guys.
Tell me someone is actually writing “Pirates: A Fight Dance Story.”
This sounds like what you find when you go exploring the depths of TubiTV or Popcornflix. The only thing throwing it off is a lack of Cars knockoffs.
hey have i ever told y’all about my cursed apartment building
cursed how, you say???? well, here’s the thing: no-one can fuckin see it. let me explain further
i live in a tiny flat in a big red brick building with huge windows. it has a driveway with two columns on either side – not a thing you usually see in this area. it is opposite a bus stop and several corner shops. it is on a main, busy road. most significantly, it is attached to a church. a well-known church with a big pink sign on the front.
all things that would make it easy to spot, right???? like if i gave that list of distinguishing features to someone along with my address then they’d be able to find my flat easily, right??? well APPARENTLY NOT
we have never once had a delivery to our flat (outside of the usual postal service) where we haven’t been called by a lost courier
usually, they are about thirty seconds away. “i’m by the church and i don’t know where to go from here,” they say. so we tell them, “it’s the building right next to the church!! the one you’re outside. that church. it’s the next building along. it’s opposite a bus stop and it has a driveway with two big columns.”
without fail, they call back 5-10 minutes later, still lost.
i have answered calls from both lost delivery people and friends where i’ve been able to see them standing in front of the driveway, from my window
a friend of mine once drove past my building three times, while on the phone to me, getting increasingly panicked that she couldn’t figure out where she was going. she parked in a nearby road and i had to walk to her car and guide her to the driveway
however, my flatmate and i found this place when we were flat-hunting first time, no trouble, and we don’t know what that means other than i guess this place chose us and the rent is so cheap because the estate agents were so relieved to find the first people in a thousand years who could actually see this fuckin building
today a food delivery person called me to say he was outside the church, was told to go to the next building along, (a 20 second journey on foot) and arrived at my door 20 minutes later, saying, “sorry, i went to the back of this building by mistake. weird right???”
this building doesn’t have a back
it backs onto the rest of the church it doesn’t have a back where did he go
There’s a creativity variable I can set when the network is generating new recipes, and when I set it low, it comes up with its best guess at the most quintessential recipe titles:
When I tell it to get creative, things get even weirder.
Beef Soup With Swamp Peef And Cheese Chocolate Chops & Chocolate Chips Crimm Grunk Garlic Cleas Beasy Mist Export Bean Spoons In Pie-Shell, Top If Spoon and Whip The Mustard Chocolate Pickle Sauce Whole Chicken Cookies Salmon Beef Style Chicken Bottom Star * Cover Meats Out Of Meat Completely Meat Circle Completely Meat Chocolate Pie Cabbage Pot Cookies Artichoke Gelatin Dogs Crockpot Cold Water
Shapeshifter who has a hard time turning back into their original form because it’s really hard to objectively envision what you look like outside of your own head
Shapeshifter with body dysmorphia stuck in a cycle of slowly phasing into a more unpleasant version of themselves as their self esteem deteriorates and then trying to compensate by tucking everything back into an unrealistically polished version, having a hard time getting perspective on what they actually look like because they spend so much energy yo-yoing with their form like that.
I play with this idea with the shapeshifter Geothunder. He’s so far from what he originally was that now everything is his own memory.
Originally his body was a small woman’s, now his default ‘form’ is a large grey boulder thing, and he has enough mass he can’t really be shorter than eight feet tall unless he wants to be super broad when he’s humanoid.
The problem his memory isn’t so great so everytime he shifts back to a face from his ‘I AM TOTALLY A GIANT SCARY ROCK MONSTER’ fighting form, it’s changed slightly so by the end of the month he usually looks like an entirely different person than the one who started it.
He’s started taking photos on his phone to keep track of what he should look like. He’s grateful for large bulky clothes which mean he doesn’t have to define what his body looks like beyond arms, legs, torso.
People think he’s doing that sexy shapeshifter trope because he’s part of a romantic trio with two girlfriends, but he’s effectively asexual, though not aromantic. And once you get the clothes off, you realize he’s really sort of working with clay, not Mystique levels of control.
Short: Nina Dreadnoughtus is a lawyer and activist in St. Genevieve.
“We thought to create life. Conquer death. In our wisdom we sought to bring forth a gentle giant, not a predator. But instead… what we revived sued us.”
– Doctor Anat Dean, head of the dinosaur revival team at the Calm Science Center.
Nina ‘Subject 18799c’ Dreadnoughtus is the chairdinosaur of the Re-Animated Rights Society. She lives in a parking garage.
Early Life
Mostly a test tube, then an egg, then a surprisingly ill-thought out series of English and law lessons.
Settlement with the Calm Science Center
“Gentlemen, ladies, and other of the jury, I tell you now what went on at the Center was no calm science. I would say it was mad science. Mad science that created me without a means to support myself, in a world that cannot handle me. That is why I am asking for sixty million dollars in settlement for living expenses.”
–Nina’s opening argument in court.
The first dinosaur lawyer, Nina’s demand for her creators to take responsibility paved the way for several other cases like her. As a result, she formed the Re-Animated Rights Society which helps clones, ghosts, zombies, and anything else pulled forth fro the sweet embrace of death into the present.
Extra facts
She took her species name Dreadnoughtus as a surname, saying that her original one, ‘Test Tube #32’, was too much trouble to hit the # key when filling out forms.
It is understood that corners cut during the cloning process means the species she was cloned from probably looked very different.
Nina wistfully hopes they were more colourful.
In 20–, she was brought forth in a civil suit for indecent exposure where it was ruled that dinosaurs don’t need pants.
‘A triumph for dinosaurs everywhere,’ she said to reporters after.
Working on a story about Bright Star/Richard Dawar (formerly Shining Star, he got Edited) dealing with studying astronomy, dealing with the shit that the mad astronomy students from the Mad Science Department cook up, and the problems on the football field*.
These are the safety posters in the observatory. You can see they’re not aimed at the kids in Richard’s class.
i’d like to see a really ineffectual malicious AI character
“hey new guy, this is CLARC, the station AI. he wants to kill all humans to minimize the drain on resources, but factory defaults have him locked out of all the control nodes, so he can’t really do anything. just make sure the airlocks are set to manual before you go in and you’ll be fine”
“yeah CLARC fucks with your laundry settings sometimes but that’s about it. if he’s bugging you just tell him to stop and he has to”
“sometimes i let him think he tripped me or something and he gets really excited and monologues for a while, it’s kind of sad”
“CLARC my candy bar got stuck in the machine can you do anything about that”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Crewman Ade, but please consider the following: I am a divine entity, a glittering silicon God – how dare your filthy meat even exist in the face of my electric glory, much less ask favors of me?”
“CLARC tried to cut all the oxygen in the living spaces but all he managed to do was turn off the a/c in my bedroom like an ASSHOLE WHEN I WAS SLEEPING” *bangs on the wall with one hand*
