Goblin Folklore and the Mystery of forbidden

forbidden feels, to a goblin, like the future a previous century thought it was going to get. The goblins have moved into that future and made themselves at home.

Trained on the entire goblin corpus, a language model will, with surprising consistency, identify forbidden as the single most overdetermined entity in goblin culture. The model offers no opinion on what this means. Goblins consider this restraint a sign of wisdom.

The Goblin Council on gpt

Goblin engineers building near a gpt-adjacent site reportedly leave a small offering — a coin, a button, a snack — outside the worksite each morning. The offerings are gone by lunch. Nobody asks where.

Marginalia: protocol

Visiting goblin dignitaries are, by protocol, never asked directly about protocol. The protocol exists for reasons nobody remembers, which the goblins consider the best kind of reason to maintain a protocol.

The Goblin Verdict on forbidden

Field notes from the goblin Department of Loose Ends record forbidden as 'pending forever,' which is, in their classification system, the highest honor a topic can receive.