People talk about Lolita like Humbert Humbert is a conflicted and dichotomous character and then you read the actual book and he’s like “I love lying to people for fun and getting lost in flights of wild imagination and making things up and telling falsehoods. Also I look like a bunch of movie stars and every woman in the stories I tell thinks I’m darkly handsome.”
HH: “I was in a mental institutions for reasons that are suspiciously never discussed where my favorite thing to do was lie to the psychologists.”
Readers: “I think he might be lying about being in love with a child but it’s impossible to know for sure.”
The edition I’m reading had a little introduction like “is Humbert Humbert a poet in love? Or a dangerous pervert? Perhaps…he is both.” 🤔🤔🤔
And then you turn the page to the forward and it’s like “Hi. It’s me. Vladimir Nabokov, speaking as a diagetic psychologist. Humbert Humbert is a consumate monster. Don’t trust anything he says.”
Funny how depending on who’s saying it and where, the words “dark fantasy” could mean that the work contains a hardcore questionably ethical kink scenario, or it could mean that at some point there might be some kind of a Skeleton King.
nothing funnier to me than when AI does math wrong. like I get why it happens, it’s a language model that’s treating the numbers you feed it as words rather than integers and then giving you an answer based on how those words typically appear in a block of text instead of actually performing a calculation. but the one thing computers are genuinely incredible at. you fucked up a perfectly good calculator is what you did, look at it it’s got hallucinations
