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Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

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Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#41

Post by fractallyte »

moravak1984 wrote: post #28
toyg wrote: post #24

It's not entirely correct that the government "chose Tuscan" as the language to push. The literary tradition was already rooted into a vulgata that happened to be mostly similar to the languages spoken in the areas between Roma and Firenze - unsurprisingly so, considering they had traditionally been the wealthiest parts of the country for centuries. In this context of broad intellectual agreement on the fundamentals,…

Yes, but Claude (cleverly disguised as "storica.club") does not agree with the facts, and would rather show you a story with virality potential. This is an obviously AI-generated site. There is no interest on correctness, just "engagement".

What are the Claude "indications"?

Because there's a danger now that any writing (human or otherwise) can be labeled LLM-produced. So we need accurate heuristics, or none at all.

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#42

Post by kakacik »

paulluuk wrote: post #17
notorandit wrote: post #13

It would (maybe?) sound like an inappropriate book for children. Yes, in the 2nd half of the 20th century. Not so in either 19th and 21st centuries. In 19th century Italian (but maybe also other countries') children had to grow quickly to cope with life and work brutalities. They often had no mother, died while giving them birth, and started working at 7 or 8 to help their families. In 20th century, instead, they hav…

The book was never written for children, it was a satirist writing for adults under the guise of a children's book, just as it wrote under the guise of "travel guides". Even at the time, this work was considered weird and not in line with the morality of children's literature. But even if you accept that children's lives back then were particularly brutal and this was in fact meant as a children's book: there is no e…

I dont think you are correct. In many parts of Europe, dark folk tales told kids from early age were the norm till very recently. I read and heard such, and they were brutal.

Did they prepare me better for life? Nobody can answer that without time machine. For certain they didnt instill any trauma, you need real world for that and not fantasy. Dont treat kids like some fragile porcelaine dumb beings, they grok most of real world fast, see all the bad parts and can handle it way better than overprotective parents like to admit. They often cant express their thinking effectively but they see, hear and understand most of the adult world well.

I certainly read those stories too to my kids.

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#43

Post by duskdozer »

fractallyte wrote: post #41
moravak1984 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but Claude (cleverly disguised as "storica.club") does not agree with the facts, and would rather show you a story with virality potential. This is an obviously AI-generated site. There is no interest on correctness, just "engagement".

What are the Claude "indications"? Because there's a danger now that any writing (human or otherwise) can be labeled LLM-produced. So we need accurate heuristics, or none at all.

Looks like probably not Claude based on their privacy/terms:

>AI-powered feedback

>Storica uses artificial intelligence (OpenAI) to provide feedback on your writing. Your written content is sent to OpenAI's API to generate corrections and suggestions. We do not use your writing content to train AI models. Your writing is processed solely to provide you with immediate feedback.

It does look LLM-generated though.

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#44

Post by bazoom42 »

cycomanic wrote: post #26
shermantanktop wrote: post #10

The children’s literature that was written prior to about 1900 is generally darker, more violent and threatening than what came after. Struwwelpeter anyone? We decided at some point that these themes were no longer fit for children despite generations having been raised with it. That’s probably the Victorian era, when childhood is said to have been “invented.”

The other aspect to this is that children's stories were typically highly moralistic essentially telling the kids to always obey their elders, Struwwelpeter is the perfect example, but also the Grimm stories (the tales of 1001 nights maybe less so, but I might be misremembering). I'd argue that this continued well into the 20th century. That's why pipi longstockings became such a success, here is a story about a girl…

But Grimms tales and 1001 night were not originally childrens stories. They were entertainment for adults.

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#45

Post by klez »

If you want a film version that is more faithful to the original book, I suggest you watch the 2019 Garrone movie [0]. There's Benigni in It, but this time he plays Geppetto and he's not as insufferable as he can be. And the rest of the cast is very good too (many beloved comedians including the late Gigi Proietti).

I have no idea if this stayed only in Italy or if it has been translated to other languages.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinocchio_(2019_film)

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#46

Post by rob74 »

> The Italian is plain enough that an early learner with a textbook behind them can finish a chapter in a sitting.

Hm, that gave me an idea... sounds like a fun way to learn Italian if you already have some basic knowledge?

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#47

Post by jimbob45 »

arjie wrote: post #15

When I was a child in India, the fairy tale books that you could get easily were a bunch of Eastern European ones: Russian, Karelian, that sort of thing. And they were full of crazy stuff, man. The cossacks were constantly getting their heads cut off and this and that. I went back to India a year ago, and one of the things I made sure to bring back were my copies of those books (and the Journey to the West translatio…

There’s just no reason to traumatize kids that early. It’s perfectly fine to be a happy Disney kid until 10 and then find the trauma gradually. It’s not like Bridge to Terabithia didn’t exist for the previous generation either.

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#48

Post by zem »

the bit about the simple language is interesting, since one of my strongest memories of reading the english translation of the book as a kid is that I learnt two new words from it, "alabaster" and "temple" (as in the side of the head).

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#49

Post by anthk »

culebron21 wrote: post #38
arjie wrote: post #15

When I was a child in India, the fairy tale books that you could get easily were a bunch of Eastern European ones: Russian, Karelian, that sort of thing. And they were full of crazy stuff, man. The cossacks were constantly getting their heads cut off and this and that. I went back to India a year ago, and one of the things I made sure to bring back were my copies of those books (and the Journey to the West translatio…

I guess, there's another set of tranformations in stories. At least in European culture, stories lost their religious part in the modernity. Probably people stopped understanding it earlier, but they were transformed in the XIX century. For example, a knight didn't serve a lady in medieval literature -- he served the god. Some story had a knight standing on his knees in lady's sleeping room, of course, having no sex,…

>. For example, a knight didn't serve a lady in medieval literature -- he served the god.

Uhm, 50/50. Bear in mind Don Quixote made fun on the old farts from the Middle Ages saving "damisels" in distress. Sancho Panza was the simple, new man but far more grounded than Alonso Quijano which could be depicted as the last living "priest" because since 1492 no one gave a shit about kingdoms, local lords or whatever; everyone wanted to go to The Americas for a quick fortune (either by selling goods, or getting many more times food than in Spain).

>So, storytellers invented the adventure genre.

The adventure genre was what people liked before the mentioned Don Quixote, not by reading, but from folk tales, which are older than dirt, especially if you lived by the coast and met sailors around.

>this story becomes unconvincing too. Big villains and monsters are unimaginable,

Cosmic fears replaced big, concrete monsters (the rapist from the woods) with abstract fears under Lovecraft.

Nietzche depicted the old pre-Industrial values as obsolete. Lovecraft was scared of the new times. Cervantes just made a good laugh on both the "mythical, glorious times" but also on the "dumb, clueless future man". In the end both idealistic/realist roles learnt from each other across the adventure, which is what happens IRL in societies.

Cervantes was wiser, the laughted at the old fart seeing dangers everywhere against its outdated values, but so did on the new man with no "elevated" purposes.

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#50

Post by rob74 »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #8

Some of these things described as "weirder" really aren't. For example, Pinocchio burning his feet off and getting them replaced by Gepetto - this is a comical example of things implied by the story premise. We have a child carved of wood, a flesh and blood child burns off their feet is a tragedy, but carved of wood we make new feet, hah hah! Not saying this particular incident is to be expected exactly, but events o…

It's "weird" if you compare it with modern-day "child-safe" stories/comics/movies. It's definitely not weirder or more shocking than its contemporaries or predecessors. Here in Germany, the most well-known ones from that era are probably Grimms' Fairy Tales (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimms%27_Fairy_Tales), Struwwelpeter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter) and Wilhelm Busch's Max und Moritz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_and_Moritz#Final_Trick:_Th...).
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