A first proper experiment with ‘modern, 2025’ AI writing, using Msty for Windows (not Msty Studio) as the desktop host. The Drummer’s new local Cydonia-24B-v4 Q2-K model proved the best and it also has very reasonable speed in its lightweight Q2 GGUF form, running on a basic entry-level 3060 12Gb graphics card.
I requested a story about a frog, a rocketship and a library, written in the style of Nabokov. A tough test, I thought.
Here’s the 30% re-written and slightly expanded result, blended with a few little ‘nice touches’ spotted in results had from the lesser models Gemma 3 12b and Mistral Instruct 7B.
An Encounter With The Unnatural:
Walking briskly through his high and labyrinthine aisles, the Unnatural History librarian wore his usual frown. He felt it was depressing to see so many dust motes dancing lazily, down the long light shafts that fell across his gloomy paths. Dust smacked of decay. Suddenly he adjusted his round spectacles and gasped. In all his time in this section he had passed many strange items left by the borrowers — potted fungi from the outer Solar System with some very peculiar growth patterns; student watercolor renderings of imaginary animals yet to be created by genetic engineering, a silvery packet of black seeds with a label that would send them plunging into the clouds of Venus — but nothing quite like what he now found where the aisles of ‘Classical Natural History’ shaded over into ‘Antique Philosophy’.
It was a tiny specimen of what appeared to be the Common Frog of Old Earth, Rana temporaria, its emerald hide standing out quite remarkably even in the dim light, and perched upon the silvery cone of a strangely detailed miniature rocketship. The frog made no damp and sudden movement that might show curiosity about its discovery. Its eyes blinked not at the observer’s presence. It was unaware that it had, for a moment, brilliantly excelled all the library’s surrealist poems. Not by words, but by such an unlikely proximity and stillness.
The librarian was an elderly man of Old Mars and thus a grandchild of colonists averse to the poetic. Yet he felt it his duty to wonder about the temporal history of this curious conjunction. Perhaps the creature had arrived with its tiny ship or perhaps — his prosy mind rejected this thought as absurd yet delightful — the tiny frog was itself the pilot. Some astronaut from a water planet, come to seek knowledge beyond his own amphibian ponds? Certainly the rocketship seemed to pulse faintly beneath the clinging frog, like a heart beating and as if newly arrived from destinations and light-years undreamed.
Deciding the matter to be far too curious and detailed to be some student prank, the librarian gently lifted both clinging frog and rocketship, walked some distance and placed them on a table exactly equidistant between ‘Old Earth Science Fiction’ and ‘Classical Natural Philosophy’. Then, with a swirl of his cloak, he continuing on his vigilant way. The frog, oblivious to its own absurdity, merely flicked out its tongue, tasting a few dust motes from the library’s honeyed light shafts. A few young library patrons passed it occasionally, without noticing.
Kind of reminds me of a strange 12-page standalone comic-strip that one might have once encountered in the pages of some old 1980s Heavy Metal magazine, illustrated by Caza.