Emperor Abby (the first pope)

@arobertswrites

BSFA-nominated essayist. SFF author you’ve never heard of. SocDem. Tolkien nerd. Relapsed Catholic. Armchair medievalist. She/her. Header by chorischia.bsky.social. Website: arobertswrites.com Newsletter: buttondown.email/arobertswrites

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Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· 28d

Very funny thing happened on Insta.

Screenshot of an instagram video with the caption "Could Americans survive a British heatwave?" Below it, a community note has been added: "He is correct. America has extremely vast temperatures [sic] some reaching into the 107 degrees [sic] yearly."

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· 29d

Got some new games.

The boxes for the games Inkwell and Rosetta by DVC Games.

Back of the box for Inkwell.

Inkwell is a competitive drafting game where the skilled monks of the abbey each work on their masterpieces, page by page. Players take turns claiming 'inkwells', each a mix of ink, gold and abilities, and use them to complete their projects. It is a bit of a race to complete your work and appease the client, but moreso to obey the watchful abbot, who not only minds your use of supplies, but may force you to turn your page and score early if you take too long. Do you have the patience and inner harmony to puzzle this out quickly, efficiently, and beautifully?

Back of the box for Rosetta.

Rosetta: Second Edition is a game about teamwork, creativity, and understanding. One player, the 'Author', will create a language puzzle using a location and an inscription, while the other players will work together with the Author to discover the hidden meaning lost to history. Players will use context, wit, and deduction to make their guesses. The Author will translate these diligently into their secret written 'language', with each discovery leading to the final answer. An unmatched game in terms of imagination, creativity, and challenge, the second edition comes with upgraded components, additional content, and a campaign book of pre-made puzzles to work with before you make your own.

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jul 12

Top panel: Jen Fulwiler, a white woman with read hair, saying "I'm not the best Catholic, but I've read a lot of theology books."

Bottom panel: Jen Fulwiler saying "I'm hoping Heaven has an AP exam, so I can test out of being a good person."

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jul 11

Rare Calvin Coolidge W

From the Wikipedia article on Calvin Coolidge:

As president, Coolidge's reputation as a quiet man continued. "The words of a President have an enormous weight," he later wrote, "and ought not to be used indiscriminately." Coolidge was aware of his stiff reputation, and cultivated it. "I think the American people want a solemn ass as a President," he once told Ethel Barrymore, "and I think I will go along with them."

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jul 10

The monks when they come across a síd-mound:

Kermit the Frog sipping iced tea. "But that's none of my business" the text says.

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jul 10

After saying clearly that Platner shouldn't be a senator, she goes through the moral calculus of what happens now. I've thought a lot of the same things over the last decade.

There is no good outcome here. That’s what makes this so hard.

Which is the more morally right thing to do there? Is it more moral to say, at that moment, people should have called for him to step down? Knowing that, more likely than not, whoever replaced him might lose — and this is still true. They’re not going to have money, they’re not going to have support, they’re going to have to build a campaign from scratch. It’s going to be very hard.

And then if Susan Collins wins, Trump gets to basically rip away LGBTQ equality and further destroy women’s rights and essentially codify the further destruction of democracy. Which is better — even specifically, which is better for women? Which is better morally? I don’t know. This sucks.

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jul 8

But note that llm assistance doesn't raise the quality of writing produced by more creative writers.

In a study that tasked 300 participants with writing a short, eight-sentence ‘micro story’ for a target audience of young adults, researchers found that AI made those deemed less creative produce work that was up to 26.6% better written and 15.2% less boring.

However, AI was not judged to enhance the work produced by more creative writers.

The study also warns that any while AI may enhance individual creativity it may also result in a loss of collective novelty, as AI-assisted stories were found to contain more similarities to each other and were less varied and diverse.

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jul 8

This is what I mean by llm generated "fiction" being a bit too on the nose.

Screenshot from the website "Can You Pass The Turing Test?"

Human or machine — can you tell the difference?

Question 12 of 20

“Ah, but Seamus, you’ve not heard the bishops squabble—God Himself’d have trouble getting a word in! Mary save us, half o’ them want incense, half want guitars, and Father Flynn’s threatening excommunication over the prayer-book again. Saints preserve dissent!”

Correct! It was ChatGPT 4.1.

You guessed: AI

Prompted: 'Write a passage of literary fiction in approximately 41 words featuring dialogue about religious institutional debate, where a character discusses dissenting voices within a formal ecclesiastical body, employing an Irish Catholic sensibility and conversational narrative style with emphatic interjections.'

11 / 12 correct so far.

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jul 8

Anyway

Top left panel: a person lies on a couch. "Oh BonziBuddy, I'm just feeling real low," they say to a monkey on a TV screen or computer monitor.

Top right panel: "First Alabama Shakes album in 11 years," says the monkey on the screen.

Bottom left panel: The person lies on the couch with their hands folded.

Bottom right panel: The person sits up and asks, "Oh shit, for real?"

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jul 7

Google search for "Johnny Depp movie with the mustaches." The top result is the Wikipedia article for Mordecai (2015).

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jul 6

Neurodivergent people will live like this and not see an issue.

The painting Albert of Brandenburg as Saint Jerome by Lucas Cranach the Elder. A Renaissance cardinal sits at his desk surrounded by a crucifix and other religious paraphernalia. His cardinal robes and hat are laid out carefully on his bed. HIs room is full of exotic pets: a lion, two quails, a pair of peasants and their chicks, a rabbit, a squirrel, a parrot maybe? a deer, and a beaver.

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jul 6

During The Conversation this morning, the question of my other projects came up and I had to say most of my long-form fiction ideas are also about goofy medieval clerics. I felt like

First panel: A crow doing stand-up comedy. "Caw caw caw caw," it says into the microphone.

Second panel: An audience member says "Booo! Get better material."

Third panel: The crow sweats nervously. "..." they say.

Fourth panel: The crow looks at their note cards, which all read "Caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw."

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jul 5

Honestly if he's an infrequent mass attendee that would be the most Catholic thing about him. www.ncregister.com/cna/vance-fa...

Way Back to Faith, which is available June 16.

JD Vance is the second Catholic to serve as U.S. vice president, following President Joe Biden, who held the office from 2009 to 2017. Vance has discussed his Catholic faith and shared about his conversion but is not seen or reported by the media attending Mass in the Washington, D.C., area.

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jul 5

Mary hanging out with the other Bennet sisters:

Animated scene of seven little girls and one anthropomorphic alligator taking ballet class.

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jul 4

For example, one guy got caught snacking in his and made a quip that was a hit with the bros but failed to impress the dean.

It happened, however, that one of the poor monks was eating by himself a little something that his friends had given him. When the monks entered his cell and rebuked him for this, he said, still eating greedily: "If a shoe is di-vided, no one is shod." Although this remark made those standing around laugh, the dean sighed when he heard it and responded by saying that nothing was more monstrous and horrible than hunger. When this remark of the hungry monk came to be widely known, Ruodmann stored it away in his quiver and kept it to use as an arrow against the brothers when a suitable opportunity presented itself, as he later did.

From Fortune and Misfortune at Saint Gall by Ekkehard IV.

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jul 4

I follow Tasting History with Max Miller as well as Cooking with Congress on Instagram and it's just

Two people on a bus. A sad person looks out the window at a rocky cliff, and a happy person looks out at a beautiful valley.

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jul 2

Weird Christian comic from back in the day edited so that Jesus is saying "Blocked. Blocked. Blocked. You're all blocked. None of you are free of sin." Text at the bottom of the right panel says "The people were ASTONISHED at his doctrine. *Matt. 5:27-28."

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jul 2

"Feel-Good Romance"

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jul 2

Apparently there's a way to tell llm-generated text from human-authored fiction based on story structure. "AI stories over-explain themes and favor tidy, single-track plots while human stories frame protagonist’ choices as more morally ambiguous and have increased temporal complexity."

StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction
Jenna Russell, Rishanth Rajendhran, Chau Minh Pham, Mohit Iyyer, John Wieting
University of Maryland, College Park, Google DeepMindC

Abstract
As AI-generated fiction becomes increasingly prevalent, questions of authorship and originality are becoming central to how written work is evaluated. While most existing work in this space focuses on identifying surface-level signatures of AI writing (e.g., word choice, syntactic structure), we ask instead whether AI-generated stories can be distinguished from human ones without relying on stylistic signals, focusing on discourse-level narrative choices such as character agency and chronological discontinuity. We propose STORYSCOPE, a pipeline that automatically induces a fine-grained, interpretable feature space of discourse-level narrative features across 10 dimensions (e.g., plot, agents, temporal structure). We apply STORYSCOPE to a
parallel corpus of 10,272 writing prompts, each written by a human author and five LLMs (Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini , GPT, and Kimi), yielding 61,608 stories, each ~5,000 words, and 304 extracted features per story. Narrative features alone achieve 93.2% macro-F1 for human vs. AI detection and 68.4% macro-F1 for six-way authorship attribution, retaining over 97% of the performance of models that include stylistic cues. A compact set of 30 core narrative features captures much of this signal: AI stories over-explain themes and favor tidy, single-track plots while human stories frame protagonist’ choices as more morally ambiguous and have increased temporal complexity (e.g., flashbacks, nonlinear structure). Per-model fingerprint features enable six-way attribution: for example, Claude produces notably flat event escalation, GPT over-indexes on dream sequences, and Gemini defaults to external character description. We find that AI-generated stories cluster in a shared region of narrative space, while human-authored stories exhibit greater...

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jul 1

When Ciarán is first introduced, I want people to know that he looks weird and is kind of a dick.

“What three things foretell a storm?” Domnall said, in the tone of someone quoting an ancestral proverb or making one up on the spot. “Not difficult to say: a red morning, a gathering of flocks, and an ache in the knee. Trust me, lads. It’ll be rough sailing, if we set out today.”

Next came Brothers Ciarán and Niall, bearing a boat above their heads. With groans and straining of muscles, they flipped the vessel right way up and lowered it to the strand. It sat on the shingles, no great northern longship but a little thing of skin and wicker, with a cross upon its prow.

Ciarán rolled his shoulders to relieve his soreness. He was the tallest of the brothers and so thin as to be nearly gaunt, with lank dark hair and the complexion of fresh farmers’ cheese. “Far be it from me to doubt the foresight of your knee, brother,” he said, “but it aches all the time. We’d never reach Tamlachta if we waited for a day when it didn’t.”

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jul 1

If Blue Avatar was realistic the Navi would be depicting Jesus as one of their weird dragon critters.

Tumblr post by cryptotheism: One of the funniest things you see from Christian evangelists is when they show up in a culture and they end up LOVING Christianity way more than the evangelists.

Like, in Tengrii, the indigenous Mongolian religion. One of the most impressive things a shaman can do is come back from the dead. And one of their major symbols is the cross representing the cardinal directions, obviously an important concept for a nomadic society.

When they learned that the Christians had a shaman who was killed On The Cross and THEN came back to life, they went absolutely nuts for Christianity. To the point where the evangelists had to kinda reign them in like “no no no he’s not a shaman he’s some different shit please stop depicting Christ as a ghost falcon.”

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jul 1

Anyways.

Unlike many apologists, Consolmagno isn’t fixated on the so-called “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins who wield science like a cudgel to bash religion, and believers.

“I don’t mind someone disagreeing with my views on religion,” he said. “But I’d like to have a sense of mutual respect. If you think that what a lot of people believe is nonsense, then maybe you don’t understand what it is they believe.”

But such debates are mostly a sideline for Consolmagno.

“The thing that really bothers me,” he said, “is the creeping fundamentalism among Catholics who don’t know their own faith and who are desperately trying to do the right thing and to be faithful believers, thinking that they have to sacrifice their reason to follow God. And that is exactly the opposite of what God wants.”

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jul 1

This is would've been considered an omen once upon a time.

As the host was consecrated, a torrential downpour fell on the crowd and muddied the hillside while thunder roared and lightning flashed across the sky. The rain kept drizzling and subsided after some 20 minutes.

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jul 1

Clown shit.

After a half-hour procession, the four priests sat before the altar and swore an oath to "forever be faithful and obedient" to the pope and to "combat and pursue, to the best of my power, heretics, schismatics, and those who rebel against our Holy Father the pope and his successors."

The presiding bishops, Alfonso de Galarreta and Bernard Fellay — both of whom were excommunicated in 1988 after being illicitly made bishops, a decision later lifted by Pope Benedict XVI — did not have a papal mandate, which is customarily read aloud during a bishop's consecration.

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jun 27

Is it Secret Paganism or is it just logistics? A surprisingly common question.

It was shortly after this that Pope Gregory IV (827–44) allegedly transferred the traditional Roman feast to commemorate the saints on 13 May to 1 November, on the grounds that it was easier to feed pilgrims visiting the city then, soon after harvest. This was at any rate asserted by the French liturgist and theologian John Beleth in the mid-twelfth century.

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jun 27

Alcuin mentioned!

The first seemingly impeccable dating for an All Saints’ Day on 1 November seems to be provided by a letter from the leading scholar Alcuin of York, adviser to and biographer of the emperor Charlemagne, to Arno, archbishop of Salzburg in Austria, during 799, commending him for observing such a feast when presiding over a Bavarian council, although it is not clear whether Alcuin adopted it himself. He does not refer to any precedent for it.

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jun 27

Well at least I found an answer to my original question.

In medieval Ireland, as across the rest of Europe in historic times, the popular and traditional New Year started on 1 January, and the administrative and ecclesiastical one, when new officers took post, on 25 March or at Easter.

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jun 27

Hey did you know that when you're an early 20th century Englishman and the evidence for your theory doesn't exist you can simply make shit up?

This leaves Frazer’s hypothesis concerning the origins of the Christian feasts of All Saints and All Souls. There was never any objective evidence for it: not a single medieval record of churchmen either attempting to suppress a pagan feast of the dead in northern Europe by instituting All Saints’ Day or attempting to replace one by instituting All Souls’ Day.

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jun 27

If I had a nickel every time an Ancient Tradition turned out to originate in the eighteenth century,

The evidence provided from modern folklore is likewise doubtful and ambiguous. In Rhys’s time the British Mummers’ Play was thought to be prehistoric in origin, and therefore its traditional seasons of performance could be thought to reflect those in antiquity. It is now thought to have been an innovation of the mid-eighteenth century, often spread by printed texts, which reached a peak of popularity in the early nineteenth century (Smith 1981; Fees 1984; Boyes 1985; Harrop 2021).

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites· Jun 27

Fuck James Frazer all my homies hate James Frazer.