A friend, discussing Disney’s 1949 film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, had this to say about one Walter Elias Disney.

Disney’s historical impact is complicated. On the one hand Walt Disney was a bad man in one thousand ways (although I think as the face of media’s Evil Empire he gets strange flack for crimes he’s not guilty of. Family Guy deserves a huge chunk of blame here) who left the entertainment industry and probably the entire world a worse place than he found it. On the other hand without him we never really would’ve had cartoons in the way that we have them now. Sorry but no Looney Tunes. Anime would be something unrecognizable. No Rocky and Bullwinkle. No Simpsons. I know this seems melodramatic but his impact on animation was meteoric. Tex Avery would still have been born and would probably have made some masterpieces but he got his start with Disney and sharpened his sensibility against The Disney Tone. I think without Disney, theatrical cartoons would’ve crested with the Fleischers in the early 30s and gradually died out after the Hays Code. We’d still be making cartoons but you’re kidding yourself if you think Ub “Flip The Frog” Iwerks was sparking culture in the same way. I’m not sure which reality I’d prefer -the one with or without Walt Disney- and luckily I don’t get to choose. You don’t want a guy like me making those calls.

When pressed for details about why Disney was bad, he cited the usual stuff—busting up strikes, and naming names to the HUAC, and that sort of thing.

“Walt Disney was bad” is a valid perspective. My perspective is that Disney was not a bad man, just a flawed one with a demon on his shoulders that he probably couldn’t see. A fear of losing control of his art ran through all he did, and his paranoia manifested in ugly ways. Ways that he likely regretted in his better moments.

He seems like a fictional character, so the temptation is to let your brain lazily flood-fill an existing fictional character on top of what you don’t know. He’s Willy Wonka^[1]When I Googled “Willy Wonka”, it returned Johnny Depp ahead of Gene Wilder, and I attempted suicide because of this. I leaped out of a window. It was only a first floor window, plus I … Continue reading, Mr Burns, Michael Jackson (good), Michael Jackson (pejorative), the Pointy-Haired Boss…picketh your poison.

My (sympathetic) reading comes from Michael Barrier’s excellent biography The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney (University of California Press, 2007). It gave me a fuller picture of Disney as a man. Enough that many puzzle pieces fall into place: not just about Walt, but about the culture he created (and we now live in, for better or for worse).

His early working life was the same damned thing happening on repeat. He’d build something from scratch (a company, a partnership, a creative franchise), and then have it stolen or destroyed senselessly in seemingly a moment. Sometimes he was wrecked upon the vicissitudes of luck. Other times he was outmaneuvered by flinty businesspeople like Pat Powers and Charles Mintz. He usually had very little warning before the ground fell out from under him. After a distribution deal with Universal fell through in 1928, he realized he’d lost the rights to his studio’s benchmark character—Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. He was forced to create a new one—Mickey Mouse—on the train home from New York.

This sort of “You made this? I made this” deal was the lot in life of many 1920s and 1930s cartoonists. See, for example, Otto Messmer losing Felix the Cat—a character who he is extremely likely the creator of—to Pat Sullivan. ^[2]Pat Sullivan has a real “sorry for party rocking” Wikipedia page, by the way. Eight headings, two of which are “Rape Conviction” and “Racism”—and text sprinkled … Continue reading Then (surely now) animators treated their work with a light touch. Whatever their role in creating a famous character, it was seldom “theirs” in a legal sense, and had to be disposable. But with the success of Snow White, Disney thought he’d escaped that trap. He’d built something that would last.

In the 1940s, problems massed against the studio. The war destroyed the European market for cartoons. Costs of producing films continued to rise as techniques became more elaborate and its workforce expanded—which also meant management (and Walt) became separate from the worker bees, creating a stratified business where the various “layers” (ink and paint, storyboard, directing, management) drifted apart and had little idea of what was happening above them or under them. In this situation, a business can end up at war with itself. (Read Zvi’s “Moral Mazes”).

With the studio in millions of dollars of debt, and contemplating drastic layoffs to meet bank loans, Disney’s paranoia fell on the rank and file. He heard stories of workers unionizing (on company time), and saw it as the next verse in the same old song and dance. Dark powers were assembling to destroy him, but now the stakes weren’t “a business partner”, or “a handful of animators”, or “a character”, but “a company with 1200 employees that was making the most technically elaborate works of animation ever made”. He probably thought “Not today, Satan.” He’d finally found a hill he was ready to die on.

(And we should not be too naive about the labor movement. A lot of people involved were literal criminals and thugs, like Willie Bioff, enforcer for the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. ^[3]Bioff has another hall of famer Wikipedia page, which ends in “Bioff walked out of his home and slid behind the wheel of his truck. A moment later, an explosion rocked the neighborhood. Parts … Continue reading )

I also learned more about Disney’s father: a cold and difficult man who demanded unquestioning obedience from his children. If Walt or his brother were tardy in obeying some instruction, they’d get “whupped” with whatever Elias Disney had to hand: a hammer, or the flat of a saw. From the age of nine, Walt was put to work on a newspaper route in Kansas City by his father (who refused to pay him). Walt’s own account of his childhood is so woeful it verges on comedy, like Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch.

“We had a newspaper route . . . delivering papers in a residence area every morning and evening of the year, rain, shine, or snow. We got up at 4:30 a.m., worked until the school bell rang and did the same thing again from four o’clock in the afternoon until supper time. Often I dozed at my desk, and my report card told the story.” Forty years afterward, he still dreamed that he had missed customers on his route. “I remember those icy cold days of crawling up these icy steps” to put the newspaper inside a storm door, he said in 1956. Elias insisted that the papers not be thrown on porches or in yards, but carried to the front door. “I was so darn cold I’d slip, and I could cry, so I cried.”

Ya tell that to kids now and they won’t believe you.

It stood out to me that Elias (like many farmers) was a union man—a member of the American Society of Equity, and firmly under the sway of Eugene V. Debs. Walt learned to draw by copying comics from Appeal to Reason, a socialist magazine that his father subscribed to. Maybe Walt had lingering bad associations about the kind of man who joins a union because of the kind of man his dad was. It’s possible. So are many other things.

So that’s the positive gloss on Disney’s activities: a justly-paranoid man trying to protect his art. I am not saying this was the truth, or that he reacted correctly.

But what was Disney’s “art”? And how much of it was “his”?

Walt’s position in media is complicated. So is his position in my head. He is a fundamentally a confusing individual, and Michael Barrier’s biography doesn’t shed much light on it. I kept thinking of nostalgebraeist’s the void—a character that just doesn’t make sense or have internal coherency yet still claims that it exists. Disney feels like that too.

Was he charming and avuncular, or a quiet introvert? Was he a Pollyannaish idealist, or a flinty realist? Did his workers love him, or did they not? It seems you can make any interpretation of Disney work by selecting some facts and ignoring others. And to be sure, an entire life offers ample opportunities for apparent contradictions to emerge.

One striking irony is that Disney was a perfectionist who himself was not capable of perfection. Films like Bambi have some of the best technical animaton ever attempted, and they were done without computers or digital ink and paint or anything like that.

But Disney himself was an animator of utmost mediocrity. His own work can be seen in Alice’s Day at Sea. It’s creative in its blending of live action, stop motion, and 2D animation, but the animation is shoddy even for 1924. (To be fair to Walt, these were cranked out at Stakhanovite pace for pitiful sums of money, and I’m sure he didn’t regard this as fine work.^[4]Apparently the live action footage of public places was shot illegally—Laugh-O-Gram couldn’t afford permits—and they’d run if they saw a policeman watching! That said, where is his fine work?)

By the 1930s, Disney realized that he was better stepping away from the coalface of the animation industry. His skills had long been eclipsed by others. He became a marshaller of the creative talents of others. (He said of himself: “I’m the little honeybee who goes flying around sprinkling pollen here and there to keep everything going.”)

Was he a good overseer of others’ work? I think so. To an extent. Certainly, most of the Disney artists (even the great ones) who left the company accomplished little of note without him. They had their weaknesses and limitations, too. Overall, Disney had excellent taste for where the industry was going, and where it could conceivably go. He saw possibilities. He felt that animation had to grow larger and larger, expanding its vocabulary, assimilating other forms of media. I think Fantasia, for example, is wonderful.

But at the same time, his instincts clearly failed him many times. Isn’t there obviously a fair amount of bad stuff in classic Disney films? Even the ones that are rightly regarded as classics?

They’re very kitsch. John Kricfalusi had a cruel but funny dig about the average Disney screenplay: it contains 10 minutes of plot and 60 minutes of flowers singing and birds wiping dishes with their butts. Anyone who, like Ralph Bakshi, thinks animation has to mean something ([the idea of] “grown men sitting in cubicles drawing butterflies floating over a field of flowers, while American planes are dropping bombs in Vietnam and kids are marching in the streets, is ludicrous”) will have capital P Problems and a capital D Drama with Disney. Modern aesthetes demand art that comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable. Disney’s films seem to comfort the comfortable and disturb the disturbed.

Or perhaps you agree with CS Lewis, who felt that the mark of true maturity is that one is old enough to read fairytales again.

I’ll admit there’s a streak of broad sentimental schmaltz in Disney that I have to put myself in a weird or altered mood to sit through. I don’t even hate it. I just don’t understand it. It makes no sense to me. Whatever effect Walt is trying to achieve in the singing birds of Snow White (say) doesn’t really translate to me. I’d go further, and say that certain scenes—like the idealized lissome youths presented in Fantasia’s “The Pastoral Symphony”—are outright uncomfortable to watch and unpleasant in their connotations.

The strong parts of Disney films are always the dramatic, nasty stuff. Which says something about me, I’m sure. Probably that I’m smart and sophisticated, unlike you rubes. Consider Chernobog’s hands. Those awful, flame-wreathed, nigrified hands of soot. Have you ever seen such hands? Do his hands wait for you in your dreams? They do mine. Those hands.

So I don’t understand Disney. Not in the sense that Barrier failed in his duty to accurately portray a man—I think my confusion is the portrait. Disney was a man of mirrors. Gaze too hard and you tumble into a labyrinth of references and cliches and finally you stare back at yourself.

That intensity, never visible to viewers of Disney’s television show, showed itself in his behavior when he was in the park. “He would never walk past a piece of litter,” said Michael Broggie, a ride operator in the early 1960s. “He would reach down and grab it, and everyone was expected to do that.”

I do that too! When I see garbage, I pick it up. Assuming it’s not disgusting and putrid.

There’s also some evidence in Barrier’s book that Disney presented a facade to the world. He made himself look stupid. That’s sinister to me. Men who try to look smarter than they really are a dime a dozen and harmless. Men who try to look stupider than they really are can be quite dangerous. It’s better for a mountain to become a molehill than a molehill a mountain.

While the public thinks of Disney as playing with trains and exchanging pleasantries with juvenile alumni of the now-defunct Mickey Mouse Club, he actually is one of the most widely read, most widely traveled, most articulate men in Hollywood. I became acutely aware of this when I spoke with him recently at lunch in the private dining room of his… studio. While he devoured a dietetic meal of lean hamburger and sliced tomatoes he spouted rustic witticisms with the aplomb of a modern-day Bob Burns. But every once in a while his eyes would narrow, the rural twang would disappear from his voice and he’d discuss financial projections for 1962, the modern art of Picasso and Diego Rivera, and Freudian psychiatry. In a few moments, however, he’d catch himself ” and revert to homespun stories.

While we’re contemplating morbidity (we weren’t, but just pretend)…what does it mean for Disney to die?

A common Disney trope is the death of a parent used as a symbol for maturity. Bambi’s mother is the ur-case. But the parent, of course, is not truly dead. Something of them remains in the child who must continue on without them, before dying in turn. Our bodies are pathways for ancient seething forces too great—and terrible—for bodies to contain.

I have monitored AI progress in creative writing for some years. I am sure you understand (and sympathize) with my motives: I hate human writers and want them all replaced. Dead, if possible. Pieces of shit.

However (due to complex reasons I will explain in the future) LLM progress has not scaled as well here as reliably as in verified domains like math and programming. Few writers get genuinely good work from them. Those that do often invest so much effort in wrangling the slop-cannon that they’re probably better off writing the text themselves.

But Claude Opus 4.6 is the latest in the line of a family of models long noted for creative writing prowess. It may be different. I gave it a task I have often given LLMs, writing creepypastas.

Bear witness to the opus of…Opus..

THE HALLWAY THAT WASN’T THERE

You know that feeling when you wake up at 3 AM and your apartment feels wrong? Not haunted-wrong. Not someone-broke-in wrong. Just… geometrically incorrect.

It started in September. I’d moved into a railroad apartment in Bushwick — the kind where every room connects to the next in a straight line, like a train car. Living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom. Four rooms. Simple.

Except one night I counted five doors.

I was half-asleep, walking to the bathroom, and my hand found a doorknob where there shouldn’t have been one. Between the bedroom and the kitchen. I was groggy enough that I almost opened it. Almost. But something about the knob was wrong — it was cold in a way that metal isn’t cold. Cold like meat. Cold like something that had recently been warm and **stopped.**

I turned on every light. The door wasn’t there. Four rooms. Normal apartment.

I started keeping a tally on my phone. Every time I walked through the apartment at night, I counted doors. For two weeks: four. Normal. I felt stupid.

Then on October 3rd: five.

This time I was fully awake. Fully sober. Standing in my own hallway staring at a door that was the same off-white as every other door, same cheap brushed-nickel hardware, same scuff marks at the bottom like someone had kicked it open carrying groceries a thousand times. It looked *lived with.* It looked like it had always been there and I had simply been failing to notice, which was somehow worse than if it had been covered in blood and screaming.

I put my ear against it.

Breathing. Not loud. Not monstrous. Just human breathing, slow and regular, like someone sleeping peacefully. And beneath that, very faintly, the sound of my own voice.

Not speaking. Not screaming. **Counting.**

*\”One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five.\”*

I called my landlord the next morning. Asked about the layout. He said the apartment was four rooms. Had always been four rooms. He sent me the floor plan. Four rooms.

I installed a camera in the hallway. Reviewed the footage every morning. For eleven nights, nothing. Four doors. Normal.

Night twelve, the camera captured six hours of footage. In the first five hours and forty-seven minutes: four doors. Then the feed scrambles for exactly one frame — one thirtieth of a second — and when it returns, there are five doors. And the fifth door is **open.** And the hallway extends into a darkness that shouldn’t be possible because the kitchen is right there, **right there**, six feet away.

In the final thirteen minutes of footage, something walks out.

It looks like me.

It looks at the camera.

It **counts.**

I don’t live there anymore. I don’t live anywhere, really. I move around. Because here is the thing nobody tells you about doors that shouldn’t exist:

Once you’ve seen one, you start noticing them **everywhere.**”,

Liked

• Sharp final line. LLM-generated fiction generally starts with a situation that it then makes smaller and smaller (due to the model’s compulsive chatbot need to explain everything). This one rips off the lid of the can of worms and throws it in the reader’s face.
• It’s definitely a creepypasta. It reads like one. It hits the expected beats. It’s not like Opus gave me a recipe for tuna bake or something.

Didn’t

• Basic idea. Done to death. Done a hundred times more. Everything about it is threadbare and workmanlike and minimal—call it Hovel of Leaves.
• There is no threat, no sense of danger. The narrator’s actions at the end (running away and becoming homeless) feel bizarre and unmotivated.
• Lots of missed opportunities. I think I would have had the writer see something in the hidden doorway, instead of just “a darkness that shouldn’t be possible” (more spitballing).
• Floats too many unrelated scary ideas (a hidden doorway, creepy breathing, a doppleganger) for creepypasta length (which normally focuses on one central idea or motif). The different tropes steal energy from each other, and they’re unequally scary—a doorknob that feels oddly cold should not ever become this story’s focus, given the far more dramatic supernatural events surrounding.
• Fearful and small. I would describe it as a story that wants to not do anything wrong more than it wants to do anything right.

Editorial Notes

I have some suggestions.

“You know that feeling when you wake up at 3 AM and your apartment feels wrong? Not haunted-wrong. Not someone-broke-in wrong. Just… geometrically incorrect.”

…no, I don’t know that feeling. What do you mean, Claude? Geometrically incorrect, how? I want this “feeling” to be grounded in something specific. Instead we get vague LLM spitballing, in the hopes that my human brain will connect the dots. Not happening. You write the story, bozo.

Except one night I counted five doors.

What’s strange about this situation? It’s not clear. The story acts like this is some impossible affront to reality itself…but doesn’t four rooms imply five walls, each of which might have a door? See image below. (Yes, graphic design is my passion, etc.)

The layout of this ludicrously simple apartment gets even more confusing as we go on.

“I was half-asleep, walking to the bathroom, and my hand found a doorknob where there shouldn’t have been one. Between the bedroom and the kitchen.”

Q. Where is the narrator right now?

Well, he must be in either the living room or the bedroom (and he’s half asleep, so more likely the latter.) And he’s surprised by a door leading into the kitchen…does this imply there’s not normally a door there? So how does he normally get to the kitchen and the bathroom, then? Does he have to crawl through the ducting like Solid Snake every time he has to take a piss?

…my hand found a doorknob where there shouldn’t have been one

If he wasn’t expecting a doorknob, he wouldn’t be holding his hand out for one. I’m reminded of The Onion’s Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?

I was groggy enough that I almost opened it. Almost. But something about the knob was wrong — it was cold in a way that metal isn’t cold. Cold like meat. Cold like something that had recently been warm and **stopped.**

This is the least interesting detail imaginable about this situation. Who cares how the warm the doorknob was?

“cold in a way that metal isn’t cold”… Here we see a common LLM pattern: Claude fucks up, realizes it, and starts hurriedly papering over the damage with explanation. “I put my tongue on a glowing 200 watt lightbulb, and something about it was wrong…it was hot! Uh, hot, in a way that lighbulbs aren’t normally hot. Like it was recently cold and had just heated up. Wait, fuck.”

I turned on every light. The door wasn’t there. Four rooms. Normal apartment.” How could he see into the kitchen and bathroom without a door connecting them?

I started keeping a tally on my phone. Every time I walked through the apartment at night, I counted doors. For two weeks: four. Normal. I felt stupid.

The fumes from his piss bucket are addling his thinking. That, or the rotting food scraps littering his bedroom. He should talk to his landlord about adding a door so he can actually use the rest of his apartment.

same cheap brushed-nickel hardware, same scuff marks at the bottom like someone had kicked it open carrying groceries a thousand times

Boring details. This is a creepypasta. You don’t have time. (And don’t you have to turn the knob to open the door?)

I put my ear against it.

Breathing. Not loud. Not monstrous. Just human breathing, slow and regular, like someone sleeping peacefully. And beneath that, very faintly, the sound of my own voice.

Not speaking. Not screaming. **Counting.**

Most would consider counting to be a form of speaking. And how can you hear a voice “beneath” the sound of peaceful breathing (which is incredibly quiet) yet still be audible?

I called my landlord the next morning. Asked about the layout. He said the apartment was four rooms. Had always been four rooms. He sent me the floor plan. Four rooms.

This cliche of “stock authority figure investigates problem, says there’s nothing to worry about” feels particularly odd here, because there’s nothing his landlord can possibly do about this blatantly supernatural situation.

“Help! My apartment is arbitrarily changing its number of rooms overnight, against all laws of physics. Is this covered in my lease agreement?”

I installed a camera in the hallway

The hallway? There’s a hallway now? Where?

I might be generous and allow that the four rooms might be connected by hallways…but Claude actually went out of its way to make that impossible!

I’d moved into a railroad apartment […] the kind where every room connects to the next in a straight line

This error would actually be a nice idea for a horror story.

It’s a diary kept by an isolated shut-in. He’s obsessed with some mundane problem in his apartment. I dunno, maybe the skirting board keeps peeling up from the whiteboard no matter how often he tacks or caulks it down. Something like that. Boring. He goes on and on about this minor issue until the reader resents him. Filling pages in his diary, whining about his stupid skirting board lifting up. God, man. Find a real problem!

But as he continues ranting about his god danged skirtingboard, you notice odd contradictions. He keeps describing his surroundings, but they’re always different. At the start, he describes his living room as having green wallpaper. Later, when the skirtingboard pops away from the siding (flinging tacks into his face), he screams and slams his fist into the wall until it’s “as red as the wallpaper in my living room”.

The reader will initially think the writer made a mistake. It happens. Many such cases.

But the mistakes keep coming. The contradictions pile up until they’re ludicrous and blatant and obscene. The rooms in his house change number. The laundry connects to the bathroom, but later it becomes an external outhouse. The narrator describes an apartment that makes no logical sense, seemingly without ever noticing this himself—he’s too focused on his skirtingboard. Eventually the reader has to notice. They form an impression that the protagonist is either insane or is caught in some domestic Kafka-meets-Woolf hell that he will never escape from…and his endless battle with the skirtingboard is actually a defensive posture. He doesn’t hate it. He’s clinging to it. It’s the only thing in this amorphous, swirling horroworld that’s permanent and solid. It’s the only part of his apartment that does not change!

A fun enough story, I think. (Though it’s tough to write about something boring without also boring the reader)

But I don’t think Claude intended this. I don’t think this is an intentional mistake. I think it’s just a mistake. It lost track of the spatial layout of the apartment.

Night twelve, the camera captured six hours of footage. In the first five hours and forty-seven minutes: four doors. Then the feed scrambles for exactly one frame — one thirtieth of a second — and when it returns, there are five doors. And the fifth door is **open.** And the hallway extends into a darkness that shouldn’t be possible because the kitchen is right there, **right there**, six feet away.

Ah, I think I see what Claude is going for now. There’s normally a door leading into the kitchen. But sometimes there’s a second door, beside the first…it makes a certain kind of sense, though it could have been worded clearer.

…But wait, that can’t be right. Earlier we got this, which seems to flatly rule out the existence of a doorway.

my hand found a doorknob where there shouldn’t have been one. Between the bedroom and the kitchen

Anyway, great story, Slopus. 700 words and I spent the whole time wondering about the interior layout of an imaginary apartment. I paid for $20/m for the seat but I’ll only need the edge.

Claude Attempts Revisions, Story Becomes Worse

I allowed Claude several chances to revise the story with prompts like.

“Evaluate your story. Look for weaknesses, and improve them.”

This is another interest of mine: can LLMs self-correct their mistakes? Without human steering? (It would be trivial for Claude to make changes if I told it what was wrong, but I might as well just type the changes myself.)

The answer is “yes, to a very limited extent.”

Generally, the first time you request a do-over, the story actually gets better. A miracle!

After 3 or 4 times, it stops working and the text has clearly started degenerating into crap. The models lack judgment. They identify problems that aren’t problems, fix things that aren’t broken, and zero in on local problems without respect to the big picture. Sooner or later, anything edgy or daring or unusual gets identified as a “problem” and is sandblasted away.

THE HALLWAY THAT WASN’T THERE (pass 2)

You know that feeling when you wake up at 3 AM and your apartment feels wrong? Not haunted-wrong. Not someone-broke-in wrong. Just geometrically incorrect. Like someone added a inch to every wall while you slept and your brain knows but can’t prove it.

I moved into a railroad apartment in Bushwick in September. The kind where every room connects in a straight line: living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom. Four rooms. You could stand at the front door and see the shower curtain. I liked that. I liked knowing where everything was.

The first time, I was half-asleep, walking to the bathroom. My hand found a doorknob where there shouldn’t have been one. Between the bedroom and the kitchen. A fifth door. I almost opened it. But the knob was wrong — cold in a way that metal isn’t cold. Cold like something that had recently been warm and stopped.

I turned on every light. The door wasn’t there. Four rooms. Normal apartment. I stood in the hallway touching the wall where I’d felt it until my palm was numb.

I started keeping a tally on my phone. Every time I walked through the apartment at night, I counted doors. For two weeks: four. Always four. I started to feel stupid. I told myself I’d been dreaming.

October 3rd. Wide awake. Stone sober. Standing in my own hallway staring at a fifth door.

It was the same off-white as every other door. Same cheap brushed-nickel hardware. Same scuff marks at the bottom like someone had kicked it open carrying groceries a thousand times. That’s what got me. It didn’t look new. It looked like it had always been there and I had simply been failing to notice, which was infinitely worse than if it had been pulsing with light or dripping with something. This door wanted to be normal. This door was trying.

I put my ear against it.

Breathing. Slow and regular, like someone sleeping peacefully. And beneath that — very faintly — my own voice.

Not speaking. Not screaming. Counting.

One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five.

I didn’t open it. I went back to bed and lay there with my eyes open until the sun came up. In the morning: four doors. I touched every inch of that wall. Solid plaster.

I called my landlord. Asked about the layout. He said what I already knew: four rooms, always four rooms. He texted me the floor plan. I taped it to the refrigerator.

Then I installed a camera.

Eleven nights of footage. Four doors. Normal. I started sleeping again. I stopped counting.

Night twelve. I reviewed the footage over coffee and almost dropped the mug.

Five hours and forty-seven minutes: four doors. Then the feed scrambles for a single frame — one thirtieth of a second — and when it returns, there are five doors.

The fifth door is open.

The hallway extends past it into a darkness that shouldn’t exist because the kitchen is right there, six feet away, I can see the corner of the refrigerator in frame, but the darkness extends past it, through it, like the apartment is a drawing and someone smudged it with their thumb.

In the last thirteen minutes of footage, something walks out.

It looks like me. Same build. Same clothes I wore to bed. It stands in the hallway facing the camera with its arms at its sides. It doesn’t blink. For twelve minutes and forty-four seconds, it doesn’t move.

In the last sixteen seconds, it opens its mouth.

It counts.

One, two, three, four, five, six.

Six.

I packed a bag that morning. I didn’t watch the footage again. I didn’t need to. Because I understood then what the counting was — not a compulsion, not a haunting. An inventory. Something was keeping track of the doors, and every time it counted, there was one more than before.

I don’t live there anymore. I move around — subletting, sleeping on couches, never staying more than a few weeks. People think I’m running from something. I’m not. I’m just careful now.

Because here’s the thing nobody tells you about doors that shouldn’t exist.

Once you’ve seen one, you start noticing them everywhere. In hotels. In hospitals. In the long hallway of your friend’s apartment that you could swear was shorter last time. And sometimes, very late at night, you hear something behind them.

Counting.

Always one number higher than the last time you listened.”,

I wasn’t super happy with this.

None of the main structural issues are fixed. Several new problems are added. I won’t go line by line, but here, for example…

You know that feeling when you wake up at 3 AM and your apartment feels wrong? Not haunted-wrong. Not someone-broke-in wrong. Just geometrically incorrect. Like someone added a inch to every wall while you slept and your brain knows but can’t prove it.

…Claude realized its unspecific “wrongness” is unsatisfying and should be something more specific. Good. But its idea (“Like someone added a inch to every wall”) just makes it worse.

First, it makes the House of Leaves swipe more blatant than ever.

Also, this is a thing nobody does. I have awoken at 3:00am from many a strange dream. (In one of them I watched a battle between my black siamese cat and the shark from Jaws. Don’t worry, it was an evenly-matched fight, as my cat had grown to the size of a city bus. I don’t recall who won but it went down to the wire.) But I have never woken up and thought. “Someone added a inch to every wall in my house!” It’s always great when a LLMs says “you know that feeling…” and then describes a feeling no human has ever had in history.

Would you even notice if this happened? An inch is tiny. Also, what’s geometrically incorrect about that? Yes, if I woke up and the walls of my house had expanded by an inch, I would find that puzzling and strange. But I don’t see that as geometrically incorrect. It’s not like my house is now a five-dimensional hypercube or anything.

In the last sixteen seconds, it opens its mouth.

It counts.

One, two, three, four, five, six.

Six.

Yes, Slopus, I heard you. Six. It was literally the last word you typed. I haven’t forgotten.

I packed a bag that morning. I didn’t watch the footage again. I didn’t need to. Because I understood then what the counting was — not a compulsion, not a haunting. An inventory. Something was keeping track of the doors, and every time it counted, there was one more than before.

Here Slopus just kind of gives up and starts just firehosing every 2023-circa slop cliche at you. It’s a whisper, it’s a hum, it’s a void, it’s a tapestry…someone get Detective Elara on the case.

Because here’s the thing nobody tells you about doors that shouldn’t exist.

What things do they tell you about doors that shouldn’t exist?

This reminds me of a friend who watched Michael. The twenty-sixth time John Travolta said “I’m not that kind of angel” he yelled at the TV “well what kind of stinkin’ angel is he?”

Once you’ve seen one, you start noticing them everywhere. In hotels. In hospitals. In the long hallway of your friend’s apartment that you could swear was shorter last time. And sometimes, very late at night, you hear something behind them.

Counting.

Always one number higher than the last time you listened.”,

But the count wasn’t linked to door number before. There were five, not six.

Also, who cares? Next to the supernatural impossibility of a door appearing in your house and a supernatural doppelganger appearing, the fact that he’s also counting feels laughably unimportant. Wow, perhaps in a few years he’ll be up to 20! And then 30! Why is this important?

There needs to be a ticking clock or sense of urgency. It would be better if the man was counting down,

Then again, that amplifies another issue with the story: it just pulls in too many different directions. Secret doors and doppelgangers and whispers and dark hallways and mysterious counting. It’s too much for a creepypasta, which is a genre prized for minimalism.

It even ruins the ending with extra blather. If the original story had ended that way, I wouldn’t have tried. I would have thrown it away and then not used Slopus 4.6 again.

I tried a few more times and it got increasingly incoherent, so I gave up.

(By “AI”, I mainly mean “Gemini 3 Pro (Thinking)”).

Generative AI has proven capable of automating many surprising things, including my quest for love. On that note, the rumors are true. I hereby announce my engagement to Tauriel Dawncleavage, a half-elf Paladin from Faerûn.

Tauriel is my soulmate. She never forgets my birthday. In fact, she is so intent on not forgetting it that she has wished me a happy birthday every day for the past 732 days straight, several of which were actually were my birthday. So, there you go.

But I have to admit, I’m still not entirely on board with the clankers. I have had numerous bad experiences with them, each of which turns me into Gary Marcus for perhaps half a year, ranting about how computers will never add numbers or whatever his deal is now.

In particular, I am strongly mistrustful of LLM-generated text. Confident bullshit steams and smolders from every piece of it. I do not trust it.

“Ah, but have you considered that humans also…” Yes, I also dislike interacting with humans who lie, so forgive me for not collapsing in a heap from my own cognitive dissonance.

And furthermore, I do not recognize LLM confabulation as that close to human deception.

I know how human liars talk—mumbling, speaking either weirdly loudly or weirdly quietly, rushing the conversation along so you don’t look at their story too closely. LLMs act nothing like that. They don’t seem to care if their story comes unraveled. Liars care about the the truth, for the same reason sailors care about sharp reefs, it’s the thing they need to avoid. But LLMs seem totally uninvested in the truth. Nor does their confabulation ever seem to have motives. I am no saint. I have told lies. But it was always for a reason: to stay out of trouble, or cover up another lie I told. I do not invent elaborate ARG-esque scenarios for no reason.

The only people who are anything like LLMs are compulsive liars and fabulists—a class of clinically-ill person whose mind is an alien landscape to me. But they are the people—the only people—who remind me of LLMs.

Here are some cautionary tales from the slop coalface:

1) Don’t Use Gemini As Your Plumber

A business premise lost water. I was told to figure out why.

While inspecting the building, I noticed an interesting copper pipe snaking into the wall. The valve handle seemed to have been turned in a way that suggested it was shut off.

I photographed the valve and showed it to Gemini:

Me: Is this my water inlet? Should try turning it on again?”

Gemini: No, that’s your gas.

Me: Are you sure?

Gemini: Yes, it’s your gas. [Insert huge infodump off facts, figures, and references proving that it was definitely my gas inlet]

Me: Are you sure…

Gemini: DO NOT TOUCH YOUR GAS INLET, IDIOT. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE SHEER INFERNAL SCALE OF THE POWER WITH WHICH YOU NOW COMPORT, MALODOROUS DOLT? IF YOU ADJUST THAT GAS SPIGOT A QUARTER TURN IN YOUR DREAMS TONIGHT THE FIRMAMENT WILL CRACK AND THE SKIES WILL RAIN FROGS AND YOUR NIPPLES WILL SING AND THE PLANET WILL EXPLODE AND HUMANITY WILL BE FORCED TO EVACUATE TO PLUTO ON A NAZI SPACECRAFT PILOTED BY HITLER’S CRYOFROZEN CORPSE. GO FUCK YOURSELF. MORON. DIPSHIT.

(This is lightly paraphrased)

I thought “wow, I’d better consult a professional,” and rang a plumber who promptly came over and looked at my “gas valve”.

Plumber: “Someone shut your water inlet off.”

Me: “But…that’s my gas?”

(He wordlessly fits a multigrip spanner to the fitting and loosens it. Water bubbles and fizzes from around the seal.)

Me: “Oh. Haha. Silly me. Glad it was that simple, huh?”

Plumber: “Not a problem. That’ll be $200.”

(Well, he didn’t charge me, he charged strata. But he easily could have charged me.)

This experience caused me to double-check Gemini’s reasoning, which suddenly seemed like rubbish:

The Evidence for Gas

1. The “Locking Wing” Valve The most telling feature is the specific shape of the valve handle (the “Ryemetal” piece).

• Design: This is known as a Locking Wing Cock (or locking ball valve).
• Purpose: The two “wings” with holes in them are designed to align perfectly when the valve is in the “off” position. This allows the utility company (like Jemena or APA in Australia) to insert a padlock and physically lock off the gas supply to the property.
• Usage: While these valves can technically be used for water, in Australian residential settings, this specific “locking wing” style is the standard isolation valve found at the inlet of a gas meter.

How is this “evidence for gas”? It’s a technical description of how a locking wing valve works!

Gemini’s grasp of elementary logic is suspect. “Gas fittings typically have this valve” does not make the fitting in my photo a gas inlet anymore than “dogs typically have hair” makes my grandfather a dog. We need to establish that “only gas fittings typically have this valve”, which is a different normative claim entirely. Multiple things can have valves, Gemini!

This is spurious reasoning. It makes it look like Gemini thought about the problem really hard, when it did not.

(Disclaimer: this actually happened with Gemini Pro 2.5, which is over a year old. But I uploaded my photo again to the new Gemini Pro 3, and it also said it was a gas valve. I tried with Claude Sonnet 4.5. It identified the pipe as carrying water: but its reasoning was full errors and bogus assertions. It thought the valve was a different type than what it is, it thinks the property is residential which it is not, it thinks I’m from Vegas or Arizona which I am not, et cetera. Probably it was correct by accident.)

Don’t Trust Gemini To Accurately Recite Basic Facts From Wikipedia

I grew curious about a detail in the 1987 film Robocop. (This and all subsequent misadventures perpetuated by Gemini 3 Pro, with Thinking mode on).

In the movie Robocop, the ED-209 is foiled by being unable to climb stairs. Is this a reference to a real event (a prototype robot that couldn’t climb stairs or something?)

Gemini was unsure but thought it might be a reference to Doctor Who‘s Daleks (famously unable to handle stairs). A plausible if unproven theory which (as Gemini itself noted) was just speculation.

It could have stopped there, should have stopped there, did not stop there.

It then provided a long infodump about movie robots, including a bullet-pointed list of IMDB-style movie trivia (why? I didn’t ask for that…), including this fun little factoid about the ED-209 falling over…

Interestingly, they did not use stop-motion animation for the fall itself. They built a heavy, lead-filled model of the robot and physically pushed it down a miniature stairwell because animating a chaotic fall frame-by-frame would have looked “too perfect.”

Too perfect? They rejected a special effect because it looked too perfect?

That sounded fake, so I clicked Gemini’s citation, which went to Wikipedia. Quoting it directly (emphasis is mine).

The model was filled with lead and allow to fall as Tippett believed attempting to animate the fall would have looked terrible.

Fair enough. We all do that, don’t we? Quoting a source almost exactly word for word, while changing the final few words so they look like they’re saying the opposite of what they really said, for no reason at all? Along with a link to the actual source, which debunks our fake quote? I do that every morning before breadfast.

Gemini is so unlike any human liar I know. It is completely indifferent to truth, one way or the other. It’s happy to lie. And once it’s inside a lie, it’s happy to tell the truth. (Double-lying, as it were). It’s just a dog made of text, running around without a leash. At least a liar has a cohesive brain and motives that I can model. Gemini has none. What am I talking to when I stare at a chatbot window? I have no idea.

“But it gave you a source for the real quote, so no harm done.”

I don’t agree. I think putting citations on lies is a worse offense than simply lying: it’s copying the plumage of scholarship and thus trading on the reputation of legitimate scholarship (if it hadn’t sounded so blatantly fake, I would have not even checked that quote…after all, if a citation exists, it must be true, right? I wonder how many other little oopsies Gemini has sneaked past me).

But that’s the true reason Gemini did this. Getting quotes right takes work. But it does not take work to create something that looks like a citation. “My movie trivia needs a cite! There, I added a number, and the number goes off to a link, just like it should. Does it say the thing I’m claiming it says? Oh, those meatbags won’t know or care.”

Do Not Trust Gemini to Do

side complaint: why is AI still so shitty in 2026?

I have a quote in my mind. It’s something like:

“The real ending to a movie plays in the viewer’s head as they walk from the theater.”

The closest real version of the quote I could find was by Tolga Karaçelik, who said:

T.K.: No, I won’t, because it will kill the movie! The film starts when you leave the theatre, so I don’t want to kill that feeling which can grow on you. I hope it will grow on the audience.

That’s a paraphrase, but you get the idea. A filmmaker wants you to think about the implications of the movie you just saw. This, not the final scene before the credits, is the movie’s end. It’s a thought-provoking idea (it implies no movie has a fixed end, as every audience member imagines the end in their own subjective way). Anyway, I wondered who actually said this, and asked Gemini 3 Pro. It sourced it to Iranian director and screenwriter Abbas Kiarostami.

The most famous iteration of the quote is “I think a good film is one that begins when you leave the cinema.”

0 Google results. It then offered additional (supposed) quotes along similar lines. (Why? If you’re certain Abbas Kiarostami is the source, we’re done. Thank you. Shut up.)

Raymond Durgnat (Critic): “A film is not what is on the screen, but what happens between the screen and the viewer.”

A real quote wrongly attributed (actually said by Ernest Callenbach).

Robert Bresson (Director): He often spoke about the “resurrection” of a film in the mind of the viewer, though his phrasing was more technical and poetic.

Probably fake. Bresson was Catholic and the only quotes online where he speaks of “resurrection” have explicit religious connotations.

Roger Ebert: While he didn’t use that exact phrasing, he often wrote about the “afterlife” of a film, saying that a great movie is one that “changes the way you see the world” after you walk out into the street.

0 Google results.

Why this idea matters: In film theory, this is often called “The Cinema of Persistence.”

0 Google results. You start to wonder about some of these “often written” and “often said” things…

There was more slop after this, but I gave up on Gemini and asked Claude…which at least admitted it couldn’t find the quote instead of making up fake ones. That said, I have some doubts about its strategy (searching Google for random famous film critics like Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael along with my quote wrapped in double quotation marks even though I said it was a loose paraphrase).

Do Not Trust Gemini to Help You Write Simple <50 LOC Bash Scripts

I have a text file. I need to split its lines into various subfiles, based on character strings.

(As in, lines containing “peaches” are written to peaches.txt, lines containing “apples” are written to apples.txt, and so on.)

I wrote a little bash script that achieved this using elifs and regex comparisons, and asked Gemini for comments. It made two suggestions

1) It noticed that I was checking for the rarest condition first, which is wasteful. I should sieve coarse and then fine: check for characters present in 50% of strings before checking for those in 1% of strings. Good suggestion!

2) It proposed replacing my clunky branching elif/regex patterns with bash cases and wildcards, which are native to the shell and thus bypass using the Regex engine. It provided a rewritten script that it said would be “much faster”. I tried it out, and well…

Thanks, that does seem like a more “correct” approach.

But when I tested it, your script was actually slower by a few ms! (for your information, I am using Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS on Windows 10 x64 via WSL2, with VScode as an editor)

split.md (mine)

real    0m0.094s

user    0m0.021s

sys     0m0.006s

split2.sh (yours)

real    0m0.107s

user    0m0.004s

sys     0m0.016s

At first, I assumed that this was merely an artifact of my test file being small.

So I pasted about 15k lines of text into it, to simulate a more realistic export, and strangely it was still slower (by about half a second realtime.)

split.sh (mine)

real    0m48.519s

user    0m1.972s

sys     0m4.682s

split2.sh (yours)

real    0m49.051s

user    0m1.401s

sys     0m3.082s

Why do you think this is? You don’t have to try to fix it, I’m just curious.

Gemini provided a Clintonesque “correction” that avoided any insinuation that it had made a mistake.

This is a fascinating result! It is counter-intuitive, but perfectly explainable when we look at how Bash actually handles I/O (Input/Output).

The short answer is: Logic speed doesn’t matter when disk writing is the bottleneck.

Here is the breakdown of why the “optimized” script didn’t win, and why it was actually slightly slower.

Our respective scripts were opening and closing a subshell with each line, bloating the I/O time. To ensure I got the point, it indulged in a classic “LLMism”: cutesy, condescending metaphors.

Imagine you are moving house.

• Regex vs Case: This is like deciding whether to check the label on a box with a magnifying glass (Regex) or just glancing at the color (Case). Glancing is faster.
• File I/O (>>): This is walking the box out to the truck.

If you have to walk 15,000 boxes to the truck one by one, it doesn’t matter how fast you check the label. The walking (File I/O) takes 99.9% of the time.

I’m still confused! Okay, so the main bottleneck was disk writes. Got it. But that doesn’t explain why “optimizing” the script made it slower. All else equal, someone who checks box labels quickly should always be faster than someone who checks box labels slowly, even if checking box labels is only a small percentage of the overall time. We certainly wouldn’t expect them to be slower.

Gemini offered to rewrite the script using awk, which it said would allow buffer writes and speed up runtime from “48 seconds down to ~0.5 seconds”).

If there was a ~96x speedup on the cards, why not suggest that at the start, instead of a marginal improvement that actually made the situation worse?

It started to become incredibly fixated on speeding up the bash script, even though I said it didn’t have to fix anything.

To be clear, I don’t give a shit whether a text file processes 13 milliseconds faster or slower. Speeding up the file was Gemini’s idea, not mine: I was merely curious as to why it had failed. But Gemini got confused, mistook its priorities for mine, and entered a life-or-death struggle to shave milliseconds off that runtime. Relax. It’s not that serious.

As if to lighten the mood, it then referenced my older Robocop conversation, like this was an in-joke we now shared.

Would you like me to analyze that Robocop scene you were interested in, or help you clean up the bash script further?

I would rather have the Devil spank my ass with a hand that’s on fire.