What are you reading, watching and listening to? - All languages

[malloc]

Currently starting a book about the Veiled Prophet society of St Louis and how it has negatively impacted the city over the past hundred fifty years. For years I have wondered why my hometown is so backward and decayed compared with the rest of America and this could be the key that puzzle.

[Ares Land]

Currently starting a book about the Veiled Prophet society of St Louis and how it has negatively impacted the city over the past hundred fifty years. For years I have wondered why my hometown is so backward and decayed compared with the rest of America and this could be the key that puzzle.

That sounds fascinating (the book, decidedly not the damage done to St Louis.) I'd be glad to hear about it when you finished it.

[Richard W]

I'm currently a manifestation of Malloc's nightmare, watching a lot of Youtube stories involving 'orc'-human relations. mostly romances, and almost entirely between a human male and an orc female. Friendships between male humans and male orcs can be part of the story. AI has been used, at least in part, to produce these videos.

The orcs are probably best described as deorientalised Thai yakshas - heights around seven feet are fairly standard, they have green skin, and they have tusks in their lower jaws.

The images are AI-generated, and are often AI slop, with impossible configurations (especially for wagons!), and frequent mutual inconsistency from scene to scene and inconsistency with the text. The narration may be largely AI-generated - it's certainly been largely processed by AI, and sometimes total gibberish is interposed.

There's also a lot of human slop in the stories. A few are set in the present day, with human v. orc being no more than the equivalent of mixed race stories. Others are set in a blend of late mediaeval and 19th century American Wild West, with additional anachronisms. We sometimes get an odd-mix of rifles and swords and battle-axes. The human government is then mostly a patchwork of kingdoms, but the human society for each story is not well worked-out.

The human production is sloppy, I suspect for economic reasons. When there are multiple scenes shown, there is an annoying lack of synchronisation between text and pictures. This sometimes get commented on. Scenes inconsistent with the narration are not deleted, and tusks come and go. The stories are often inconsistent, which is confusing for a viewer trying to follow the story and necessarily filling in details during the process. AI has been suspected, but is sometimes innocent - the problem lies in the story framework. As typical of AI, numerical consistency is poor, but I suspect human failure rather than AI failure. Finally, the text is not proofread, which allows AI-generated gibberish to surface. We also get a lot of variation in proper names, which suggests that there has been conversion to and fro between writing and speech.

These videos have been spread across a lot of channels. While some of this may be due to theft, I suspect there may be monetisation issues. A lot of videos consist of a single image plus text, which is threatened with demonetisation for lack of originality. I get the feeling newer versions have been created to get round this, which creates some of the duplication. One trick is to pan the image, which may currently defeat Youtube's algorithms. A better solution, which I think has been applied, is to add more scenes. A fairly typical channel name is 'Orcbound Legacy'. A lot of the titles contains the phrase 'orc girl' or 'orc widow' - a common plot element is man + orc + children of one of them bonding to form a family.

Disappointingly, some of the stories, though not the better ones, are adaptations of cowboy-Indian love stories, human-alien love stories, and just human-human love stories. These might infringe copyright, and could be another reason for the multiplicity of channels.

The bad news is that this slop seems adequate, at least in the short term. Ah well, even Orwell envisaged pulp fiction being automated in 1984. Good human editing would probably significantly increase preparation time. I suspect that using a human artist, even to the level of comic scripts, would be ruinously expensive, and the images we are getting are nicer than the comic script quality one sees in mangas. As to hiring voice actors, as seems to be done for English-language Japanese manga-dub videos, that again would inflate costs, though even those I see frequent errors, where sometimes the actor has automatically corrected the displayed text - as well as the wrong character speaking. I don't know why the author doesn't do the narration himself, though I can envisage reasons.

[bradrn]

But why subject yourself to such drivel?

[zompist]

But why subject yourself to such drivel?

I kind of think Richard W already answered that, by implication. Are there a lot of orc-human romance videos that aren't AI-infected? It sounds like a very niche market that no one's providing enough for. (I'm sure there are written stories and images tho, there always are.)

[Richard W]

But why subject yourself to such drivel?

Because I mostly like the stories, though not enough to dodgily try cleaning them up myself. It's the presentation that's messed up, and all too often the details. I get the feeling that the story has been sketched out, and then AI left to fill the details in. But I could be wrong. For instance, a friend and I were once accused of deliberately failing the Turing test. And plot holes also occur in stuff produced by humans. What we're getting look like rushed jobs, which is annoying, but I think someone is trying to make a living out of these stories rather than create Art.

I think eventually I'll get sated.

[Richard W]

Are there a lot of orc-human romance videos that aren't AI-infected?

It seems not on Youtube, though I may be overly limiting myself what I see by trying to avoid what look like stolen videos. I can discern three authors, but two are distinguished only by one sounding like not a native speaker and the other going under a Scottish or Irish name. There may be more authors, but I haven't managed to resolve them. Few channels have the same user name, but the user names mostly match the channel name, so not very useful. There are four styles of female ork (human-sized or a little larger, green-skinned, pointed ears, may have tusks)

• seductive, often tuskless
• normal for human, pretty, usually tuskless
• fierce or worn-faced
• a darker variety, tending to look fierce

The first three may be mixed in the same video, so they are not diagnostic, unless the first is being for new thumbnails on stolen videos.

There's more stuff behind age-verification guards, but I am wary of age-verification checks as I suspect them of being infested with malware.

[Travis B.]

Lust by KMFDM

[Raphael]

Wait - those videos are on Youtube? Based on the descriptions, I would have guessed they would be limited to certain other tube sites.

[Richard W]

Are there a lot of orc-human romance videos that aren't AI-infected?

It seems not on Youtube, though I may be overly limiting myself what I see by trying to avoid what look like stolen videos.

It seems I may have overlimited myself. I've started to find some better quality work, apparently with human voicing. The art work I've just been looking at was still AI, with some appropriate images and others where presumably the human instructions weren't enough to constrain the AI artist. (Well, wasn't AI supposed to have human faults?) I am noting a phenomenon I wasn't aware of - porn videos paid for via patreon, or, at least, steamy stories. I've no idea what Youtube's view of this is.

[alice]

What's the difference between "orc" and "ork", besides spelling?

Anyway, nearly finished Dr. Johnson's London, by Liza Picard (no relation).

[linguistcat]

What's the difference between "orc" and "ork", besides spelling?

An orc is in a fantasy story, an ork is in a scifi story. Don't ask me how to spell it if it's in a science fantasy story.

[Travis B.]

What's the difference between "orc" and "ork", besides spelling?

An orc is in a fantasy story, an ork is in a scifi story. Don't ask me how to spell it if it's in a science fantasy story.

An orq perhaps?

[alice]

An orc is in a fantasy story, an ork is in a scifi story. Don't ask me how to spell it if it's in a science fantasy story.

An orq perhaps?

Or the Belgian-like orckx? Or orckqx?

[malloc]

An orc is in a fantasy story, an ork is in a scifi story. Don't ask me how to spell it if it's in a science fantasy story.

An orq perhaps?

Or the Belgian-like orckx? Or orckqx?

That looks like a cluster of clicks. Also, what are some examples of Belgians using <ckx> or even <ckqx> for /k/ because that looks astounding.

[bradrn]

Also, what are some examples of Belgians using <ckx> or even <ckqx> for /k/ because that looks astounding.

Perhaps it’s like the situation in Arpitan:

And the current Hmong and Zhuang orthographies, which as I mentioned in my previous post use letters which are otherwise unused instead of numbers, are worst — not only are they not mnemonic, they look exactly like regular letters.

Pah! These systems are cool, to be sure, but not as cool as mediaeval Arpitan. Mediaeval Arpitan used stress letters.

Your word has penultimate stress? Stick a -z on the end! Final stress? Add on an -x!

This is why the French Alps are still full of towns with names like "Verjux" and "Loisieux", "Unieux" and "Nandax", "Vulvoz" and "Mizérieux", "Excevenex" and "Saraz", "Saint-Paul-de-Varax", "Versonnex" and "Optevoz". They even liked the system so much they added the letters to some monosyllables, like "Oulx" and "Vaulx"...

[Travis B.]

⟨ckx⟩ at the end of a Belgian name is pronounced /ks/, and in modern Dutch would be spelled ⟨ks⟩. However, a lot of Belgian names in particular preserve old spellings such as this.

[Ares Land]

That looks like a cluster of clicks. Also, what are some examples of Belgians using <ckx> or even <ckqx> for /k/ because that looks astounding.

Not <ckqx>, no. But <ckx> is relatively common in Flemish names: Eddy Merckx, Didier Daeninckx. I don't really know the origin of that spelling.

It feels like 'making extra sure French speakers pronounce it correctly ' More specifically... French (historically) liked double letters for final /k/ (as in, for instance, Houellebecq). A final -s would be ambiguous as to whether it's pronounced or not, as opposed to <x>.

[Richard W]

What's the difference between "orc" and "ork", besides spelling?

An orc is in a fantasy story, an ork is in a scifi story. Don't ask me how to spell it if it's in a science fantasy story.

And in one of the stories, I just came across the phrase "speaking in awk", which made me, as a user of the awk program, smile.

[Travis B.]

That looks like a cluster of clicks. Also, what are some examples of Belgians using <ckx> or even <ckqx> for /k/ because that looks astounding.

Not <ckqx>, no. But <ckx> is relatively common in Flemish names: Eddy Merckx, Didier Daeninckx. I don't really know the origin of that spelling.

It feels like 'making extra sure French speakers pronounce it correctly ' More specifically... French (historically) liked double letters for final /k/ (as in, for instance, Houellebecq). A final -s would be ambiguous as to whether it's pronounced or not, as opposed to <x>.

Of course, then there was how Dutch last names historically often ended in -sz, which was short for patronymics ending in genitive -s followed by zoon 'son'.