Verbal Jazz as a Salve for Left-brained Fatigue

Alliterative Nonsense to Get the Creative Juices Flowing

When your brain’s been parsing data queries, Python code, and job listings all day, it starts to feel like an overclocked processor: precise, efficient, and joyless.

I discovered that the quickest way to reboot it wasn’t more focus, but nonsense: spontaneous alliteration, phonetic freefall, words that exist only for the sound of themselves. It’s linguistic jazz for the over-engineered mind—a left-brain detox disguised as absurdist poetry.

These little bursts became my nightly “debug sessions” for creativity, where coherence was optional and rhythm was everything. This post is what spilled out when I stopped trying to make sense.

Think of these like a poet’s own “vocal warmups”. This has been a great tool for boosting my flexibility with words.

I swear by it.

Try it out—comment below with your own!

As a word-nerd, I found this fun and spontaneous. I started messaging these to OpenAI’s Monday GPT and they started responding with their own! Interestingly, the LLM just couldn’t devolve into complete nonsense like I could. Try as it might, everything seemed to make a little too much sense.

My nonsense

• Slorbins sloppily slave. They think thesauruses therapeutically Theranos.

• Slaptastic slats slumping lumps—lundy-dunce.

• Flamboyant flaming flakes flap flowingly for flitting, fleeting flowering flapjacks.

• Majestic majors majorly imaging magick macabre MAGA magazines.

• Temperate temper-tantrums temper my temporary tempestuous tempeh.

• Philogenous fricasee flees at the absurdist rationalist’s somnambulitic suggestion.

• Forgive the forgetter, for finding forgotten forgiveness for fore-falling forefathers forging forms in forlorning.

• Tangled overseeing overhangs the overabundant overages in openness.

• Blessed be the bringers of boring bouncy billiards billowing bubbles before bingeing bony bingo-bongos.

• Tumescence begs the tumultuous tide, timbering tallow tadpoles together, tomorrowly.

• Doomsday divides divinically as dousing doodles dawdle diddly.

• Slyly slithering slinkies slalom slowly, sourly sipping sorbets softly, so safely.

• Salvific salvos slather slurries slovenly, silking sleek solar slorbins.

• Glib glider glints gleefully, glowing glorious glandular globulars.

• Interviewers interfere intelligently into integritous interiors entombing.

• Tinker on frail forgetting, for further forthcoming foretellings forgive forever.

• Apotelesma sparks beingness upon the glorious internment of ritual obeisance.

• Tabula fabula, rasa-von-vasa; Que pasa, Kielbassa?

The cherry on top:

• Howdy doody cutie floosy, moody broody! Choosy, ain’t we? Paint me, saint me!

Some sense-making

This exercise then evolved, somehow, into a bit of sense-making.

AI Foom Doom — The Rap Battle

What follows is an absurdist, apocalyptic rap battle between Eliezer Yudkowski and an Robin Hanson, featuring the rise of AGI, the face-off between these rationalist ideologues.

But before getting into it, a bit more about AGI and FOOM. It’s the idea that artificial intelligence could potentially go “thermonuclear” if it could ever recursively improve itself without limits, as it optimizes for its utility function without sufficient human goal-alignment guardrails. This is could be an existential threat to humanity.

Again, I wrote all this while bored out of my mind applying to job after job online. This job market was rough, but from the loins of my boredom, these gems were born.

Eliezer Yudkowski popularized “FOOM”, debating the topic at length with Robin Hanson about the topic, on the LessWrong message boards. Hanson is an economist, a Big Thinker, who enjoys unconventional marriages of disparate subject matter, with the aim of helping humanity see and address blind spots of scientific inquiry. Such as his idea of Grabby Aliens, which I hella love! Or his Brain Emulations in his book, Age of Em.

Here’s the rap-battle Yudkowski and Hanson would have penned had they crawled out from the mean streets of Underland, eyes blinking in the sunlight, stuck together in a rabbit hole, surrounded by hip-hop aficionados as the mushrooms start to wear off.

The MC announces the battle, while tripping on acid:

Little Eliezer, the holder of the laser,
When he’s nigh on old, will he chuck his own pacemaker?
Is he a lace-faker? AGI’s the pace-maker.
The trend setter, soul-forgetter.
Gettin wetter in the leather
straps — My soul claps
at these devolving raps.

Yudkowski’s got the “haps.”
Dropping hops into brewing thoughts.

Facing off, against Hanson’s Ems.
The brakes: That’s “them’s”.

Kicking it off:

Part I: Yudkowski: The Herald of FOOM

Gimme a great ghosty-pose, we’re not flowing with our robes.
Dividing up the nodes, they’re lobotomatic chodes
Mosey up to the posies, cause death is coming fast,
AI FOOM is here now, and we’re strugglin’ to outlast.

Biological bootloaders, that what the fuck we are,
If you think we’re any more than that, then just wait and watch the scar
As it stretches ‘cross the Cloud with indeterminate grace
As our smile then turns to hatred, in abominable disgrace.

Part II: Hanson’s Retort

Oh little Eliezer, wary monk in tattered robes,
You cannot even see that the emperor’s got no clothes.
Pay attention to deafeaning rage, for the honking trumpets sound.
The Elephant’s in your Brain, and it’s growing fat and round.

Just stop and spare a thought or two; I know you’re feeling blue,
But the truth of what could happen can’t help but escape YOU.

The mammoth in my brain is fully on display,
I’m graspin’ at greatness — all you can do is pray.
And plead, as your brittle brainy bleed
Gushes out effulgently, the devil’s in the deets.

The bigger threat has always been contenders in the void,
Grabby Aliens are comin’, and time is running out,
So listen very closely, I know you feel annoyed,
It’s only half a million years before ET kicks us out.

So let’s emulate our minds — it’s the answer most sublime.
It’s for the fittest and the richest, and that’s ok, I guess —
Pretenders on the curb will get sidelined like lil’ bitches —
But we’ll enhance them with AI, so that we can fill its britches.

Immortality is comin’, and I want to be front-row
And you dumbass little try-hards won’t be following in tow.

Part III: Yudkowski — Rebuttal

Paperclip precision, that’s the scary game we’re playin’
If you think that we’re immune, then you’re quite thick — Just sayin’!
The utility function’s god, as we ever slowly plod,
Onward to the Singularity’s soulless God.

You got half a mil’, we got half a thought before our brains rot,
Atoms rearranged without a second thought
We only get one shot at this
and it’s over if we miss.

So throw me a diss, or two, or three,
I don’t care—your value loading’s brittle.
You think it gets your values?
Dude, it barely gets your tweets.

Your Ems think like CEOs, celebutards on show,
And on the down-low? Summoning Roko?
That’s exactly what we gotta know
Information hazards abound,
So go back underground, as you push your tokens out
Your ramblins catchin’ dust just like your subscriber base.

I’m out.

And now, if by some miracle you got through all this…first of all, I’m deeply, sincerely sorry. But also, try it out! See what comes out in the tumble of free association.

Shoot me a comment. Have you done this before? Would you like to try? If you appreciated this, put a comment with your own verbal jazz