the annals of the parrigues

the annals of the parrigues is a procedural travel guide by emily short. it describes a variety of locales, with brief notes on customs, cuisine, and so on. this was written before the current generative ai boom. crafting something like this isn’t a matter of prompt engineering, but of writing templates, choosing & tagging corpora, and implementing a simulated world state. the appendix describes short’s process and philosophies on procgen and is well worth reading even if you aren’t interested in annals itself.

it is, however, definitely worth reading. part of the fun of a work like this is looking for the seams. what templates are being used? what can its gaps be filled in with? in this case the structure of the work serves to justify its repetitions. a travel guide is, after all, inherently pretty formulaic. still, it can be evocative. i’m pretty sure the generator shifts its preferences as the work goes on, introducing new sentence structures and the like. this is a good decision; it introduces a much needed sense of progression.

annals has a rhythm to it. this is, in my opinion, one of the strengths of generative writing. it fills in an established structure, produces dozens of examples in some mold. this makes it all the more effective when this mold is broken. there are presumably hand-written footnotes every so often and a couple human-authored stretches. the contrast with the formula makes these far more noticeable, far more significant. as funny as it is to say this about a procgen travel guide, i was genuinely affected by the ending.

if you enjoy stories with unconventional framing devices, you should read annals. if you have any interest in generative art or the relationship between artist and machine, you should read annals. if you think the algorithmic and the human are incompatible, you should read annals. it’s an inspiring work & well worth studying.