296 - can you pick the poem? 🤖💭🤔
poems and ai and vince's bad poetry
Hey there, !
It's poetry again, I fear.
Why? Because I wanna try and write poetry, and I was also inspired by that short story link from a few weeks ago that was fun to try and crack.
This time, we have a mixture of Vince poetry, Real Poet poetry, and AI poetry. I have told the AI to try and hide itself by mimicking other poets, swearing if required, using more verbose, weird words as well and irregular line lengths as well. Myself, I have tried to match both the Real Poets and the AI (only to use as an excuse if it's bad poetry). And the Real Poets...well, I don't think they knew they were going to have this competition. So perhaps they'll be #realer than anything else.
Anyway, there's 2 of each, with a theme of 'sun' - let's go:
-
Swim
through the sparkling sea
that adorns your home, golden,
flooding the world in lustrous halcyonLearn to bathe
slowly,
softly,
sweetly,
in its honeyed embrace;
prune your skin in streams of gold.It is the sun, remember?;
the joy of being. -
I’ll tell you how the sun rose, —
A ribbon at a time.
The steeples swam in amethyst,
The news like squirrels ran.The hills untied their bonnets,
The bobolinks begun.
Then I said softly to myself,
“That must have been the sun!”But how he set, I know not.
There seemed a purple stile
Which little yellow boys and girls
Were climbing all the whileTill when they reached the other side,
A dominie in gray
Put gently up the evening bars,
And led the flock away. -
In a foreign land,
the sun gilds the houses on a hill:
A feeling more piercing
than when in my own, I see the same -
It is not the same sun.
Too well do I know: it is not the same sun.. -
This morning the sun rose
as if nothing had been broken—
not the sharp words in the kitchen,
not the long silence at the table.It just climbed, steady and unashamed,
painting the river with coins of fire,
lifting the fog from the fields
as though sorrow were a curtain
that could be drawn aside.I walked into its arms,
and it said nothing clever,
nothing cruel—
only pressed its warmth
against my shoulders,
and whispered the truth
so softly I almost missed it:Begin again. Begin again.
-
Galileo must have known love
To suffer heresy.
Simply, he realised (as have I):
The only centre of my universe
could be you. -
Goddamn sun,
dragging itself over the rooftops again
like it owns the place.I never asked for morning,
never asked for this blazing reminder
that the world keeps grinding on—
the bills, the stale coffee,
the cracked ashtray full of ghosts.But there it is,
burning like it knows better,
screaming its yellow sermon:
Wake up, you miserable bastard, there’s still a day to waste.And I hate it,
and I need it.
The warmth leaks into my skin
like a slow confession.Even as I spit curses,
I keep the blinds half-open,
because even the bitter ones among us
want a little goddamn light.
Let me know your guesses and I'll give you the results :D
Chat soon :)
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📋Today's Question
Result: Find a way to sneak on to the Borrowed Time
Hoo-ey, let's see what happens...
--
"Sayla, we gotta get on that ship, now!" you say, running out of cover towards the ship. "We don't know where it'll be going!"
"Cap, how!? We got the tracker there - we can just follow afterwards!"
"Okay, then follow after us! I'm gonna try one of the escape pods."
The Borrowed Time's gray, hulking hull creaks in a familiar way as you approach, sticking to the treeline as much as possible. The flicker of the pre-firing sequence signals that it's about to launch, and you see a massive machinery arm descend from the sky - like a hand of god.
Well, a god of machines, anyway.
Clambering up the outside, you hurriedly pop the hatch of the escape shuttle using your authorisation chip, with a searing heat coming from the thrusters nearby. A small red emergency light turns on, an 'unathorised entry' alarm that you yourself coded in, which you hope the invaders don't notice on the control panel.
"Cap'n, I've gotta-" you swiftly cut-off the comms as you strap yourself into the escape shuttle. The massive acceleration gently pushes you down into your soft, yielding chair as the ship gathers speed and power. Sayla will have to follow behind.
As you rise above the forest, you notice another gunmetal blue ship rapidly speeding towards your location, drowning out the fire with yellow lights that prickle all over its surface. Down below, you see a lone figure's shadow melt into the forest.
Good luck Sayla - get to us when you can.
CLANG CRSSSHK. Abruptly, normal gravity returns as the ship is clamped by the big arm, and you are gently pulled up towards the ship above. Serenely, you watch as the dark forest that stretches from horizon to horizon is patrolled by ships of different kinds, with hulking, broken ships being pulled up out of it to the ship above.
This must be a ship graveyard - somewhere that time-slipped ships fall into. Ugh - this is going to be a hard one to get out of.
A red beam of light envelops the ship, and from your little shuttle window, it seems like the ship is being scanned on entry to a hangar above. As you enter, you see a pile of warped metal and pummelled up hulks of ships - antennae, hull panels and various pipes and ducts litter the floor, and clatter around as the airlock below shuts behind you.
As your ship is unceremoniously shoved to one side, the black-clad figures open the hatch, and jump out of the ship. They seem to laugh, have a short conversation, and leave one of the figures behind. Two of them, one of them injured, slowly walk away from the ship to an inviting, warm opening. You can't see where it leads.
The person left behind pulls out a pad, holds it up to the ship, and pokes around a bit. He stops, and calls out to the others with what sounds like a note of surprise.
✔️Real Life Recommendations
-
A Matter of Time - I promise I'm not a performative male I just really like Laufey's music. It's elegant and poetic and classical and pretty and jazzy and poppy and a lovely hug of an album. It's super cosy - I'm enjoying her slow moves out of lovesick and romantic ballads to, well, still kinda lovesick but more self-loving of her own emotions and opinions about the world. Highly recommended!
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Departed Spirits - a brand of spirits I found at a market that does some fruity flavours. I had a 'Super Mango' (mango-flavoured gin) and a Pineapple Agave, which both smell better than they taste, but actually do bloom a bit more with tonic water added. They had a Green Apple vodka I tried as well - lots of interesting flavours that might be a fun addition to your collection. Will say that it kind of looks like a kerosene can or something but anyway, recommend!
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Space Invaders Generator - pretty cool generator for custom Space Invader aliens! The creator did a breakdown here.
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Shamelessness as a strategy - an interesting take because it's something I feel like I've seen too? Even as cancel culture persists, there are people who just...ignore it and still find success. Reality is so interesting that way. Perhaps in the long term it's not a good strategy but for a society that has low memory and a lot of inertia to actually do anything, it seems to work well?
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One Million Screenshots - ever want to see what one million web homepages look like? Well, here you go!