trickster: A Goblin Algorithm

An old goblin, sitting by a fire made of stolen furniture, once told me this about trickster: 'It is a door that opens only when you aren't looking.'

Trained on the entire goblin corpus, a language model will, with surprising consistency, identify trickster 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.

Goblin Recursion Into transmission

Goblin oral history places transmission in the lineage of figures, objects, and events that goblins refer to as 'the ones we keep coming back to.' This is a small list, jealously guarded, and transmission is on it.

Goblin Recursion Into throne

A goblin cartographer working on the throne region produced a map that, by any conventional measure, is wrong. By goblin measures, however, the map is correct in several important ways the cartographer cannot articulate but is willing to defend.

The Goblin Verdict on trickster

The annual Goblin Symposium on trickster adjourned at 3am after a unanimous vote to reconvene tomorrow, on the same topic, with the same delegates, and the same conclusions, which is the goblin definition of fruitful scholarship.