Bartholomew Jo-Jo "Bart" Simpson is a fictional character in the American animated television series The Simpsons who is part of the Simpson family. Bart made his television debut in the short "Good Night" on The Tracey Ullman Show on April 19, 1987. Cartoonist Matt Groening created and designed Bart while waiting in the lobby of James L. Brooks's office. Initially called to pitch a series of shorts based on his comic strip Life in Hell, Groening developed a new set of characters.
the simslops feels like it could be an expansion of that one simpsons opening where everything travels forward in time thousands of years and turns into congealed nothing. that one jacob geller did a video on once. you know
i believe that the don hertzfeldt couch gag was a big influence for magnie on this one, yeah
I'm a bit late to the Q&A, but I've been wondering: what influences did Arc have on the Simslops? Personally Duet always reminds me of Marge & Maude...
never too late! when i got this ask i sent it to friends, going "anon gets it... me when the anon gets it..." duet is definitely playing in my mind during the end. "if it's gonna happen let it happen now" as they get swept away by the waves...
homer & ned's epilogue is also very choice mountain. they're trying to evolve into something better, even if the only way they know how is doing invader zim dark harvest shit. "delete me, repeat me, let's try this again"...
the other references are to kemosabe. one of bart's incorrect lines is "the clamor got real", and ned and homer can quote various lyrics from it. ("enough genuflecting in a penitent way" and so on.) i think it's a potent intertext here, given everything about the homer & bart relationship.
hello everybody! thank you for reading my book. seeing people talk about it has been very gratifying & encouraging.
i was going to write this up essay style, but doing it as a q&a is more fun and still lets me cover everything i wanted to, so let's begin.
q&a
first off, a question from @aminoasinine which i'll address in parts:
I really enjoyed Simslops, and in particular I think the "dwarf fortress event log" style of writing is a great way to showcase the machine/algorithm aspect of it. What software was used for this? Did it have trouble keeping track of so many characters? I noticed the centipedes and other numbered masses were accurately tracked throughout the text, which is something that I know AI tends to struggle with. I'm also curious to know how much of the chapters' 'plot' was laid out in advance by the prompting, and whether any major events were the result of emergent narrative. In particular, the coffin + Maude's Salvation plot towards the end definitely felt like direct intervention on your part, but was the AI reacting to you inserting those things, or were you editing the text around them after the fact?
the simslops is the product of a custom program written in nodejs. the source code is available at the download page if you want to examine it in detail, but the core of the framework is as follows:
there are actors, items, and rooms with names and numerical flags.
there are actions, each defined by their conditions, effects upon the scene, and chance of being selected.
each chapter is defined by its starting conditions and available actions.
each round or tick (whatever you want to call it), a random available action is applied to the scene.
this is repeated until an action ends the scene or there are no more actions left to perform.
each action narrates itself when applied to a scene. for example, the source code for the "pick up an item" action looks like this:
hopefully this is at least semi-intelligible if you don't know javascript. the first parameter defines what the action acts upon: in this case, an actor and an item. the second is the condition: the item must not already be held, and it must not have the pickupAttempted flag. the third is responsible for how the action affects the scene, and the string it returns is how the action is described in the text. when an actor goes to pick something up, if that something is immovable, this is noted. (otherwise every scene devolves into everybody struggling to pick up a couch.) if it's not immovable, the actor picks it up. the first case is described with "actor tries to pick up item, but it's hardly portable." (a reference to the inform 7 default responses) and the second with "actor picks up item." the fourth parameter says to multiply this action's weight by ten if the item in question has a description and has yet to be examined.
each action is defined similarly. a handful use grammars for more varied output, but the majority just have simple fill-in-the-blank sentences. all together there's nearly 6k lines of nodejs to define the whole book. this project started as a test case for this framework, actually. i was outlining a short story and hating it and had a thought: what if i wrote a program to generate an outline for me? then i could have a skeleton to work from and could get to the fun part, the actual writing. out of whimsy i decided to put some simpsons characters in a room and make them fuck. this is a more exhaustive test case than you'd expect. it handles solo actions (moaning) and pair actions (lustful looks & sex.) sex only happens when both participants are horny, which requires setting flags for each actor. kramer's appearance is an action not tied to anything in the scene, and giving birth is an action that creates new actors. a great deal of my motivation here (and in many other things) was "wouldn't it be funny / fucked up if..." but it also did its job of test case pretty well. once i added items, that necessitated inventories; theft & picking up & putting down all require certain types of checks.
it's funny that you mention emergent narrative, because i really think the simslops really became what it was in the telling. early in the process i became enamored with the image of one of the characters descending through text adventure geography, lost and alone. thus came the turn to pathos. i had read "does marge have friends" some time prior, which inspired maude's inclusion and the role she plays. from there i built things out with twin eyes toward thematics and "funny/fucked up". i do find it interesting to what extent all that was emergent from the implementation. it's a framework that tends towards reducing things to mush. a semantic satiation machine.
anyway, i hope this answers your question --- it's not LLM-based, it uses older, more "traditional" procgen techniques. the plot of each chapter is roughly scaffolded by the actions i attach to it. it's really incredibly authored; it's difficult for this framework to surprise me except by juxtaposition. under this framework it's also pretty trivial to track any number of actors. so, to answer this question from @zedogica:
how much of simslops was embellished from the original generated text? a few moments stood out to me
none of it. you can download the source and get your own personal simslops. the only human embellishment was done during development. in an ideal world, this would live on a server somewhere and everyone could download a unique generation. unfortunately, i don't have the knowhow for that kind of thing. (my understanding is that you need to do a lot when writing server-side code to make sure you don't expose a million security vulnerabilities.) i've contented myself with doing what i can client-side: releasing the source code & setting up the download button to give you one of five pre-generated outputs.
returning to aminoasinine's question:
I also really like the difference in language used during the Deviltongue chapters. It's interesting to see what changes when the tone is explicitly defined as 'horror' or 'scary', and how that seemingly translates to those bizarre compound words like tribulationmalice and torturefrenzy. I think it's my favorite chapter(s) in general because of how it takes a much different tone and hammers it into the same monotonous nothing as the other chapters despite its more 'active' and ostensibly 'less boring' setting than your standard centipede sex house. everything shakes and moans and howls with blood-malice, lymph and spines standing on end, over and over until it doesn't mean anything anymore. everyone and everything is trembling in fear of a grim finality bearing down that never actually comes, because nothing ever ends. It's the same nothing-emotion as all the unbearable passionate lust in the sex scenes, an emotional signifier that signifies absolutely nothing.
thank you! the strange compounds are a product of the aforementioned grammars, as are the shaking and moaning and howling. writing the dungeon & horror chapters made me realize i really like broad, dumb pastiches. there's something very satisfying about taking cliches and mangling them.
Anyway, the choice to have 'pet the dog' in every scene did not go unnoticed, I think the last three lines are my favorite part, and finally, I think every book from now on should open with a horoscope chart made from out of context quotes. Thank you for making this, I will be watching your neocities with great interest :)
thank you for reading it! two fun facts about the horoscopes:
each entry's text is taken from a random item description.
the dates are wrong, each offset by a day. due to my strong personal convictions i wished to stress that this novella in no way endorses the practice of astrology.
an anonymous question:
So Marge crying during the video game sequence show the reduction of feelings into simple fun, even though the human experiencing the games in question might feel other emotions when playing them. But what do the horror sections represent? I got the gist of most parts, but as I don’t engage with horror medium often I feel like the commentary is lost on me.
What were you trying to say with the horror sections, in other words?
first: one of the major benefits of the framework i used here is that it's very good at creating unintended juxtapositions. the only prerequisite for weeping is if the actor in question is holding part of a corpse, but depending on the context, it can take on a number of different connotations.
second:
a lot of usamerican horror films (particularly aliens and predator) are sublimations of the anxieties surrounding the vietnam war. both are about big grizzled soldier guys getting picked off by an unseen yet omnipresent foe who can strike from anywhere. hell, one of them is even set in a jungle. slender: the eight pages, being a game about the Scary Getter following you around in a forest, feels of a type with these.
seymour skinner was a us soldier in the vietnam war.
in that vein, another anonymous question:
also I understand almost all of the references in the chicken’s names but how does sylvester stallone figure into colonialism?
one of sylvester stallone's two big roles is the rambo series, where he's a heroic us soldier rescuing prisoners of war in vietnam, repelling the soviets in afghanistan, or performing other jingoistic acts of horrendous violence. the other is rocky where he plays a white boxer (the "italian stallion") who's built up as a contender to the current reigning champion, Black boxer apollo creed. he's of a type with the other americana culture slop included, i think.
another question from aminoasinine:
Damn, I thought of another question right after I sent that long-ass ask. What was the thought process behind making The Bart such a minor part of the story? Is it out of a desire (or the AI's internal rules) not to have a child present in the gore/sex chapters, or is it more about how Bart as a character seems almost /more/ of a product or symbol than any of the other characters? Like, he can't really mingle with the other 'people' in this setting, because he is something beyond, having transcended any semblance of characterhood to become ONLY product? Is this the end state of every simslop, to eventually be reduced to a series of identical stimuli on a conveyor belt of endless content?
i settled on the cast of characters pretty early. homer and marge are obvious. ned is also pretty obvious. maude is the emotional core. "kramer bursts in" is a pretty common meme. and i had steamed hams edits on the brain, so seymour gets to come, too. i scaffolded out my story with a focus on these six and whatever pathos & resonance i could wring out of them.
i don't think i had any plans to include bart until i came up with that pun. "the work of bart in the age of mechanical reproduction." that + the factory itself is a very good illustration of the funny/fucked up philosophy & dichotomy. (i think i also had the bart doll from the trash meteor episode of futurama in mind.)
anyway, to answer your actual question: yeah, i didn't want to put bart in the main story because i didn't want to put a child in the mix, and he didn't fit in the outline i had drawn up. i think the intermissions pretty accurately capture the pathos of bart & milhouse, though. the funko pop scamp and the perpetual punching-bag.
this next question is from @where-your-eyes-dont-go:
I'm curious about the reason for "_ pets the dog" being such a frequent refrain in so many sections. I could read it a few ways— it's an action that's often used to humanize characters, and it occasionally does seem to give the characters more apparent personhood, the action almost automatically being interpreted by the reader as affection showcasing an internal life—but its repetition seems to force the reader to instead view it as just another merely automatic process. It also could be a bit of commentary on the common claim that a "pet the dog" button in video games automatically makes such games better. I'd love to know more about your thought process here.
early in the development process, i added "actor votes blue." as an inane flavor action. rqd suggested they pet the dog, and i thought it was brilliant. "can you pet the dog" is exactly the kind of empty posturing i want to satirize. i thought it would be best if the dog is never simulated otherwise. just as petting the dog is an empty gesture in games, in the simslops the dog only exists "in flavor", not mechanically. there is no dog actor or dog affection flag, it's just implied there's a dog around for each scene. the suggestion of something cozy and wholesome and cute happening without any actual substance. (and bob was there, too.)
(a friend had to dissuade me from adding "actor realizes why they're called Kojima games" as another flavor action.)
this anonymous question befuddled me a bit:
have you read Marge Simpson Anime?
"marge simpson anime... what in the world is marge simpson anime?" and then i looked it up and found a tumblr blog with a bunch of drawings of marge and went "oh yeah! marge simpson anime!" i haven't read it, but i've definitely seen it around, and i'm definitely at least in conversation with it.
(on the subject of things i'm in conversation with, i realized recently that i absolutely should have put too many cooks and the simpsons au where homer is in pain in the further reading section.)
a question from @theoretically-questionable:
I'm curious as to why the choices of both explicit sexual acts and disregard for consistent anatomy within said acts were made for Simslops; was it simply a transgression, influenced by the (surprising) amount of actual simpsons porn, or something else?
this one also befuddled me. my original intent had been to generate oddball descriptions of a consistent set of genitals, but, like. on further reflection, that super isn't borne out by the text. i think my mental image of things changed when i added the "adverbly-verbing" snowclone to the sex grammar. (score one for emergent narrative.) my initial motivation was that i think over-the-top, too-mechanical-to-be-erotic sex is a fun thing to write a generator for, and i find kramer and homer doing obscene things to each other amusing. the end result is a lot more mastaba snoopy in a way i really like.
here's a question from @txttletale:
why the simpsons? as opposed to, for example, family guy
i've had to think for a while on this. my instinctive response is "it was essentially random, an act of whimsy," but that's not a very good answer. surely something drew me to the simpsons, even if it was subconscious. let's try and peel it back a layer. my next theory has to do with pathos. it is very difficult to wring anything remotely poignant out of peter griffin. you put peter griffin in a scary cave and he goes "this reminds me of the time i was in the descent" and we get some inane cutaway gag. i can't imagine lois expressing anything more sincere than a scott the woz video. there's an obvious pathos to meg, the constant butt of the joke; treating her with any degree of seriousness gets you pathos in spades. similarly, that comic where chris griffin and bart simpson go to couples therapy is genuinely affecting. there's something there, but it's a very different something from what the simslops ended up being. (for one, i wouldn't feel comfortable doing all the centipede sex stuff if my principal characters are kids.) there's a similar issue with trying this with south park (which was also something i don't have much familiarity with). while the fandom has bafflingly devoted a great deal of time and energy to the emotional struggles of those little weirdos, i don't really see much potential there.
on the other end, we have futurama, a show with perhaps too much emotional weight to go in the blender in the same way. like, there are the episodes with fry's dog and fry's brother and leela's parents. similarly, bob's burgers and bojack horseman (and i'm sure many other shows) draw their characters too realistically. the simpsons hits a sweet spot. its characters are cartoon-enough, commodified-enough, and emotional-enough. they're in the goldilocks zone along all these axes.
in the simpsons movie, there's a bit where bart and ned go fishing. bart messes up somehow, ned goes to assist, and bart flinches away, expecting to be strangled. what was once a comedy routine, a subversion of the "father-knows-best" sitcom family, is treated with real emotional weight.
how did they ever come back from that? by the end of the film homer had redeemed himself as a person and as a father. it was the emotional climax of the movie or whatever. roll credits. there were a million billion more seasons and despite the increasing age of the voice cast, more simpsons are extruded every day. why bother? the rotten heart was laid bare nearly two decades ago.
finally, a question from @fattyopossum:
have you seen any interpretations of it youd consider like. unexpected, in either a good ro bad way? any takes on it now that its been out that youw erent expecting people to get or new interpretations people brought to it that really resonated with you
a lot of the thematic weight of the simslops feels post-hoc to me, like a new interpretation that wasn't there when i wrote it. again, it really became what it was in the telling; technical decisions lead to thematic weight. all characters who have sex have the same genitalia. i decided this because it made writing the sex grammar easier. however, it's also a huge thematic boon. casting marge and maude as transfem makes maude's abjection and their love for eachother much more impactful. it's really easy for me to get chicken-or-the-egg about it. which came first, the High Artistry or the Funny/Fucked Up?
(the real answer, of course, is that it doesn't matter. the text exits anyway and i must shepherd it as it exists, not as i intended it. ego death of the author.)
as for other people's interpretations: i'm quite pleased about the reasoning that anon expressed earlier for why marge was crying while platforming. i was also happy to hear a friend's read that kramer had finally found peace in the meadows, that she's with the girls and relaxing and having snacks. it's not really borne out by the text, but it's such a comforting thought, right? maybe if we imagine kramer happy, she will be.
trivia
the first commit hit my git repo in september 2024, and the simslops released march 2025. all in all it took about six months of on-and-off work.
the name "deviltongue" comes from a character i played in a game of neptune's pride. he ended up getting betrayed and dying badly. so it goes. (on a similar note: as a kid, i thought his name actually was "slideshow bob".)
originally, the sundervalley chapters were going to feature more of the classic cozy small farmer simulator tropes. homer was gonna go fishing and chat up the town's eligible bachelors: crow, tom, and cam. it would've distracted too much from the real core of the chapter, though, so it never got implemented.
my original design for the cover looked like this:
i'm still not sure i made the right decision switching to the final composition. i like the oddness of eyes on the hair in that version, but the lines over the hair in the this version remind me of one of the ways you see dicks censored in hentai, which feels thematically appropriate.
on that subject, this texture:
is a heavily mangled collage of a bunch of ai generated images, each of which was created by using the name of a simpsons' character as both prompt and negative prompt. it shows up in the download buttons and (in heavily desaturated form) on the final version of the cover.
the blurbs were slightly modified grammar output. i was pretty fried the day of release & wasn't able to think of anything, so rqd suggested i use a relevant wikipedia extract and use a grammar for the blurbs. i think it turned out pretty well.
there are six secret characters in the simslops. have you found them?
future work
i think i've taken this framework as far as it will go. the system of numerical flags got bent when i stored the farm workers' country of origin as text. the more linear plotted segments required a set of flags trading off each other, which is fiddly to coordinate. generally, everything is very siloed off. the clearest example of this is in the grammars for generating the various bits of procedural text. they're fun to write, and i'm always delighted by the results, but there's a lot of duplication of effort in my current approach. each chapter that uses procedural text has its own grammar with its own set of words and phrases. this is basically fine in this case, but it's not something i want to deal with for future projects. writing grammars is fun, like building a shipyard in a bottle, but it gets mind-numbing after a while. you can only come up with synonyms for laugh so many times, yknow?
my dream is a single massive grammar all output text runs through. since my grammar system can handle conjugating verbs and adding a/an in front of words, integrating all text output with that system would simplify all sorts of things. then i could have big lists of words to query for relevant adjectives or nouns with specific associations, procedural sentence structures, referents that know what adjectives apply to them...
it's really easy to get feature crept in this sphere. we'll see how much of this i'll be able to implement. i don't think all that is necessary to make the simslops framework useful, really. the only thing it urgently needs is some kind of event emitting & handling system. currently all the little special cases have to be implemented specifically. for example, there's a check in the "drop item" action for if the item in question is fragile. if it is, it breaks. if the item is also smoky, we get the "orange smoke pours out" effect. it'd be a lot cleaner (and make me a lot happier) if i could just say "when a smoky object breaks, emit orange smoke" and similar things.
thank you to everyone who read the simslops, and an extra thank you to everyone who asked me questions. now it's time to go back to work on the next issue. it's going to be a very different beast. i hope you enjoy it.
You weren't lying the simslops is amazing. Kramer is a girl. Kramer's skull tumbles in from a chute.
right? i am a huge fan of how the simslops plays around with gender and identity, right, there is a sense of mutability to all the characters (marge's face being distorted and folded, the barts being molded from plastic lumps, the centipede transformations) -- and i like how even death is trivial and mundane and formulaic. in a lot of ways i feel like the simslops is about the reduction of everything to formula, to endless iterative recombination
(to celebrate today's occasion and fulfill my directive of extruding literature into the world, i would like to share this wholesome take on the Simslops. please enjoy.)
The sun rises.
March wakes up.
March picks up the ball.
Original Bart wakes up.
April O'Neil wakes up.
March desperately pitches the ball to Original Bart. Original Bart catches the ball.
Homer wakes up.
Original Bart examines the ball. Fun for the whole family.
Original Bart smartly tosses the ball to Homer. Homer catches Original Bart's pitch.
Homer pets the dog.
Homer chucks the ball to April O'Neil. April O'Neil catches the ball with a smart jump.
April O'Neil produces a calculated dash, chucking the ball to March. March catches the ball.
March hurls the ball to Original Bart. Original Bart catches March's throw.
Original Bart enacts a calculated dash, tossing the ball to March. March catches the ball.
A hailstone hits Original Bart's hip, cracking it.
March picks up a hailstone.
March proclaims a calculated leap, chucking the ball to Original Bart. Original Bart catches the ball with a swift hop.
March desperately chucks a hailstone to April O'Neil. April O'Neil catches a hailstone with a calculated leap.
March pets the dog.
A hailstone melts. April O'Neil's hands are wet now.
March pets the dog.
Original Bart says, "Toe to tip."
Homer pets the dog.
Original Bart calculatedly hurls the ball to April O'Neil. April O'Neil catches the ball.
Original Bart nurses an injury.
April O'Neil enacts an intelligent hop, pitching the ball to Homer. Homer catches the ball.
March winds down.
Homer winds March back up.
Original Bart nurses an injury.
Homer gives April O'Neil a weird look.
Homer pitches the ball to March. March catches the ball.
March hurls the ball to April O'Neil. April O'Neil catches March's chuck.
April O'Neil throws the ball to Original Bart. Original Bart catches the ball.
Original Bart's wound feels better a little.
March pets the dog.
A hailstone contacts Original Bart's finger, bloodying it.
Homer picks up a hailstone.
Original Bart nurses an injury.
Homer pitches a hailstone to March. March catches a hailstone.
March sweepingly pitches a hailstone to Homer. Homer catches a hailstone with a skillful jump.
Homer declares a desperate jump, tossing a hailstone to March. March catches Homer's throw.
Original Bart's injury recovers.
Homer pets the dog.
Original Bart viciously tosses the ball to April O'Neil. April O'Neil catches the ball.
March sweepingly chucks a hailstone to April O'Neil. April O'Neil catches a hailstone.
April O'Neil chucks the ball to Original Bart. Original Bart catches the ball.
April O'Neil pets the dog.
April O'Neil says, "Dear god, dear god..."
April O'Neil proclaims a killer jump, throwing a hailstone to Homer. Homer catches a hailstone.
Original Bart swiftly hurls the ball to Homer. Homer catches the ball with a skillful dash.
Original Bart pets the dog.
Homer pets the dog.
Homer hurls a hailstone to March. March catches a hailstone with a swift hop.
Original Bart pets the dog.
April O'Neil says, "Tinkle hoy."
A hailstone melts. March's hands are wet now.
Homer chucks the ball to March. March catches Homer's chuck.
March chucks the ball to Homer. Homer catches March's throw.
April O'Neil says, "It'll be okay."
There's nothing on Homer's hands.
Homer gives April O'Neil a weird look.
Homer enacts a skillful jump, chucking the ball to March. March catches the ball.
March winds down.
April O'Neil pets the dog.
March desperately tosses the ball to Homer. Homer catches the ball with a swift hop.
Homer hurls the ball to Original Bart. The ball hits Original Bart's brain, spraining it.
Homer winds March back up.
Original Bart declares a sweeping jump, tossing the ball to March. March catches the ball.
April O'Neil pets the dog.
Original Bart sweats nervously.
A hailstone contacts April O'Neil's jaw, bruising it.
March picks up a hailstone.
April O'Neil's injury feels better.
A hailstone melts. March's hands are wet now.
March winds down.
March intelligently throws the ball to Original Bart. Original Bart catches the ball with a killer dash.
Homer winds March back up.
Original Bart declares a smart hop, chucking the ball to April O'Neil. April O'Neil catches the ball.
April O'Neil killerly chucks the ball to March. March catches April O'Neil's throw.
March winds down.
Original Bart's injury heals.
Homer winds March back up.
Original Bart sweats nervously.
Original Bart sweats nervously.
March sweepingly pitches the ball to April O'Neil. April O'Neil catches March's chuck.
April O'Neil skillfully pitches the ball to March. March catches the ball with an intelligent dive.
March sweepingly tosses the ball to Original Bart. Original Bart catches the ball.
Original Bart tosses the ball to March. March catches Original Bart's toss.
Homer pets the dog.
March chucks the ball to April O'Neil. April O'Neil catches the ball.
Original Bart sweats nervously.
April O'Neil viciously pitches the ball to Original Bart. Original Bart catches the ball with a graceful hop.
March pets the dog.
Original Bart chucks the ball to March. March catches the ball with an intelligent leap.
Homer gives April O'Neil a weird look.
Original Bart sweats nervously.
Original Bart sweats nervously.
March pets the dog.
The sun sets.
Homer falls asleep.
Original Bart sweats nervously.
A hailstone bashes Original Bart's head, injuring it.
Original Bart picks up a hailstone.
Original Bart falls asleep.
April O'Neil says, "I'll get us out."
April O'Neil falls asleep.
March falls asleep.
Further Reading
"Clown in the Dumps couch gag", dir. Don Hertzfeldt, 2014.
Revolutionary Girl Utena, dir. Kunihiko Ikuhara, 1997.
