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@crimsonsquids
Isabella Rossellini’s fantastic balance between winking and unwinking is glorious. Plus the biological accuracy belying the provocativeness of the title makes this one of these things that gets school boards indefensibly up in arms. Tenatcles. Whatever.
Squid parking, guys. Park your squid here. Green tea’s extra.
a recent cartoon for @newscientist https://www.instagram.com/p/CVcuem7MSZ2/?utm_medium=tumblr
Hine!
The call is coming from inside the Abyssopelagic layer.
The mascot of AI Weirdness is a cyborg tomato?
Honestly wasn’t expecting GPT-3 to declare the mascot of AI Weirdness to be Baugo, a cyborg tomato. (To add to the weirdness, Baugo is apparently a township in Elkhart County, IN.)
Why is GPT-3 handing out mascots? I’ve been reading Mondo Mascots, which collects photos and short descriptions of Japan’s many, many mascots. The mascots, which promote anything from companies to towns to public service campaigns, can be extremely inventive. Some real Mondo Mascots entries:
Namisuke, a puppy-sized dinosaur-like fairy with a forest on his back, is the mascot of Tokyo’s Suginami Ward.
Yokazou, an elephant with a watering can head, is the mascot for Fukuoka City’s Chamber of Commerce.
Baron Ciste, a mascot from Hokkaido, Japan, is an ammonite-headed gentleman trickster who likes chess, riddles, opera, and fine wines.
With a few of these as prompts, I had GPT-3 add to the list. These costumes would be a challenge to sew.
Bister-kun is a scarecrow with a shark’s head for a nose and antlers on his head. He’s the mascot for the RIKEN Bistere team.
The mascot for Osaka’s Nara City is Nanbei-chan, a super-powered pickle with a pencil for an eye.
The Brando, a guesthouse in Tokyo, is represented by Garapon-kun, a shy yet terrifying Jack-in-the-box that likes to play with balloons.
Toritto, a baby angel-owl who swings around on a single leg with the grace of a ballerina, is the mascot for the town of Kanazawa, Japan.
Makuo, a sea anemone from Kagoshima, can see the future. His antennae are mittens, but he has eight toes on each hand.
Hotaru, a mascot from the Nakanogo town office in Yamanashi, is a giant firefly who’s also a detective.
ViRAT, a rabbit with energy beams for a tail, is the mascot for Tokyo’s Saitama Institute of Technology.
Its places and names are an interesting mix of the real, the apparently invented, and the quite possibly lifted from elsewhere. Its mascots, as far as I can guess, are unique.
I realized that Mondo Mascots’s descriptions follow a pattern that I might be able to make use of. So in front of each example mascot I entered a {place, name} or {company, company name} pair. Then with these as prompt, I let GPT-3 generate a few of its own entities, and mascots to go with them:
{place, G18} GX70000000 is a gigantic space caterpillar shape unexpected and fascinating alien bizarre man animal thing. With a body composed of many sections, the complexity of the creature makes it hard to understand (many kids love GX though).
{company, brand & business consultancy PLOVER CO.} Ponzu-D appearance is basically just a birdy, with wispy beak-hair and a swazzle.
{company, Sunshine Co., Ltd.} Queen Nango the cat, who quietly dwells in a seashell and is swimming in the sea of clouds, is the mascot of the karaoke equipment maker Sunshine.
{company, NTT DoCoMo} Punkon Ton the rascally rabbit is a mascot for NTT DoCoMo. He specializes in ambushes. His hobbies are wire, keyholes, and holes in general.
I could use this format to generate mascots for whatever I want. Maybe for things that don’t already have mascots. After I found out that the mascot for AI Weirdness is apparently a cyborg tomato, I generated a mascot for “{concept, SARS-Cov-2 pandemic}:
Casty, a mascot from the fictional North Kanto district, is a bird-like creature that seeks peace and quiet, so he always wears a mask.
I’m particularly fond of the mascot for video conferencing:
On the mascot for video conferencing, blue Lepospondylus (a type of early reptile) has a camera for an eye.
Then to liven my place up a bit, I decided to have GPT-3 assign mascots to things around the house. Here’s what it wrote:
The mascots from my laptop: Desukan is a dog with a backpack and an itch for adventure, and the other is a berry with long black hair.
The mascot of my microwave is an egg that wears a gas mask.
The mascot of the crisper drawer of my refrigerator is a potato that likes to bathe in dripping water.
Yumeko, a mascot from my toaster, is a cupcake girl whose ears are her toaster’s toaster-wires.
And this is, um, what it generated for the mascot of my bedroom closet:
I am the man with the pocket in the head. My head is a pocket. I am the mascot of my own head.
The mascots above were all generated by the largest variant of GPT-3, called davinci. I also generated some mascots using ada, the smallest GPT-3 variant, and let me tell you, its mascots are wild.
Fujiwara-sama, a baby-crunch rabbit with a few purple tails embedded in its hoof, is the mascot for HP Pavilion’s blacked-out TRS-232 universal machine.
Dragonheart, the new mascot for Yog-Comics, is a giant tabby owl bat created as a transplant to dream history, filled with anger and desire.
To read a bunch more of ada’s mascots, become an AI Weirdness supporter. Or become a free subscriber to get new AI Weirdness posts in your inbox!
I mean, if part of the purpose of a team mascot is to instill fear in one’s opponents, then I may switch my endorsement from the Belmont Crimson Squids to the Belmont Radioactive Eggs, because Janelle’s GPT-3 microwave mascot sounds absolutely terrifying. Definitely conflicted as to whether there should have been an illustration of that along with the Seashell Cloud Cat, Cyborg Tomato, and the Blue Zoom Lepospondylus.
BUILD A. SQUID. make your own squid and set. it free. BUILD YOUR. SQUID. FIND YOUR. SQUID { MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM } YOUR SQUID
Unfortunately, the Te Papa “Build A Squid” website no longer exists. But a helpful squid blogger pointed me to the original URL, and so long as Flash Player still exists in browsers, you can still design and create and name your own squid in the Internet Archive.
Unfortunately, because it’s no longer actually hosted by the Museum of New Zealand, you can no longer see your squid as part of an MMO of user-created cephalopods. Pity.
Local News Update
"This won’t be the first time the mascot has come before the school board. The issue was raised in 2014 by three members of the Belmont High student council who wanted to keep the name but change the Native American logo to a knight, bird or caped Revolutionary War character. After much debate in the school and town, the board voted to keep everything the same.
“’I will tell you I was on the board six years ago, and we heard a lot of feedback from both sides, and it was a close vote to keep it the same,’ said Embree, an elected official who said he does lean toward one of those sides but declined to say which.
“Much of that feedback came in a town forum where a majority of people in attendance wanted to keep the logo. That’s despite the fact that in 2002 the New Hampshire Department of Education passed a resolution endorsing “the elimination of the use of Indian sports mascots and encourages all districts to examine this issue and to eliminate the use of sports mascots.” Despite that neighboring Merrimack Valley High changed from “Indians” to “Pride” that same year, and that Dartmouth College moved on from “Indians” way back in 1974.
“The old arguments to keep offensive mascots didn’t hold up back then and they certainly don’t hold up now.”
—O’Sullivan, Tim, “O’Sullivan: Belmont should drop ‘Red Raiders’ like Washington did ‘Redskins’”, Concord Monitor, 14 July 2020.
“’This is not one or two or four or five people who are offended, but a large group,’ said Nystrom, who also consulted with the National Council of American Indians in Washington. ‘A mascot should be something everybody should be able to get behind. Times change. It’s not appropriate.
“...Kilroy said the group received little or no opposition about its request to abolish the mascot, and generated extensive support from alumni. The only pushback came from small groups of current students involved in sports and other activities whom Kilroy suspects may have considered the change as a threat to their sense of identity.
“Barnstable High, the largest high school on Cape Cod, has 1,824 students, 68% of whom are white.
“North Quincy High School, which also goes by the Red Raiders with an Native American caricature, also is in the process of changing its mascot.”
—Spillaine, Jeff, “Barnstable drops Red Raider mascot”, Barnstable Patriot, 6 August 2020.
I can’t imagine why I might be interested in a monologue by a person, whose professional life centers around research, who holds forth constantly about squid.
The original tweet from Kadie threads into a long conversation about dumb names for mascots, and is highly entertaining and diverse, in case anyone is stuck recycling the same limited “big cats/birds of prey/guys with weapons” methodology that seems to be the stopping point of so many of these conversations. Mark McConville, host of the Mascots podcast, summed up his reaction with one word, “Yikes.” But I’m clearly in favor of any precedent that normalizes giant tentacled sea-beasts as acceptable mascots.
Tometi, Opal, “[Racialslur]”, Instagram. 30 June, 2020.
Q.v. Esquire magazine.
Against “Redskins” by Jeff Barnaby
“He’s this self-loathing postcolonial Native person, because he grew up in an environment that was trained to fucking hate him. For instance, wrap your head around being a Native person living in Washington, D.C., and having to get up every fucking day and look at that stupid-ass caricature for the football team — and that’s the way the culture at large looks at you. You franchise a genocide, and it becomes a part of the capitalist network of selling things. Having that work on you day in and day out, you become trained to hate yourself, and I think that’s exactly what I mean when I’m talking about postcolonial Native people, and you have a hundred years of this just packed into one person.”
—Crucchiola, Jordan, “Jeff Barnaby Made an Apocalypse Movie to Watch the System Fall. Then a Pandemic Hit.” Vulture, 6 May 2020. https://www.vulture.com/2020/05/jeff-barnaby-is-worried-white-people-wont-get-blood-quantum.html
Spent waaaay too long designing and enjoying this sweater, considering that I can’t, in good faith, ever, ever justify spending genuine Ralph Lauren prices on it.
—”Baidu 10 Mythical Creatures”, Wikipedia, accessed 23 Feb. 2020
—French-Croatian Squid chewing Double Rubble (artist Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung), 2011.
“Squid discovery could revolutionise molecular engineering”
—Nathan, Stuart. The Engineer. 18 November 2019.
Further reading
Protein found in squid forms fibres of sustainable materials
Squid skin inspires infrared stealth camouflage
While this Tumblr usually is doing the hard work of stanning giant squid in order to promote their fierceness as mascot potential, it’s important to recognize the value of the miniature squid as well. Not only are they apparently a valuable baseline organism for experimentation, potentially serving as a replacement for lab rats, but they are also impatient and willful, which sounds like a dangerous combination.
In @mcsweeneys‘ irregular segment, “INTERVIEWS WITH PEOPLE WHO HAVE INTERESTING OR UNUSUAL JOBS”, the most recent entry concerns a young woman who had a one-off experience as her school’s mascot. Consider the following:
Q: Can you tell me more about the mascot? A: The mascot is called the “Raider.” It has scary gray skin, red eyes, and red hair. Terrifying.
The takeaway from this is clear: even when you try and de-racialize “The Raider” and make it not about Native Americans, it remains terrible. The Crimson Squid is the only rational choice. THINK INK!
great news everyone only the Irish are allowed to name new species, effective immediately.
