As an amateur tech nerd who stumbled into these posts via Numberphile: It’s no surprise that Uma Musume crept in there, it’s hugely popular. A bestselling mobile game, though the game itself is afaik only available in Japanese. (Why that particular weird token? No idea, I’m only peripherally familiar with the franchise.) Puzzle & Dragons is also a very longstanding popular game, so there’s likely lots of discussion about it. Especially in “gacha” games like P&D and Uma Musume (where you obtain game pieces via essentially a slot machine), you often see that “awakening” phrase to refer to some kind of obtainable upgrade to a character or other game piece.
Oh, and Steve is the name of the default character appearance in Minecraft, so that’s probably the association with Forge.
I also stumbled upon the same Numberphile video! Puzzle & Dragons is available in English and has a small following in North America. (There was also a version of the app in Europe but it got shut down a few years back.) Most of the English-speaking community is on Reddit and Discord now. As for why there are several glitch tokens related to the game: My guess is that it’s pretty similar to what happened with the r/counting subreddit. P&D related terms would probably only come up within r/puzzleanddragons and the Discord server. There used to be several large English websites about the game, namely puzzledragonx and padforum, but those both disappeared in the last few years. Any information that you would find about P&D outside of r/puzzleanddragons is likely many years out of date, e.g., the wiki that was found in the Twitter thread.
Leilan is interesting one. She and her siblings are based of off four mythological Chinese constellations (white tiger > Haku, black tortoise > Meimei, blue dragon > Karin, red bird > Leilan; Sakuya is a special case and is presumably related to the qilin). A user of r/puzzleanddragons suggested that Leilan might be a weird token because she was referred to as “Suzaku” early in the game’s history. Additionally, the given names of the other four goddesses are likely to appear in other contexts, e.g., Haku isn’t an uncommon name. It surprises me that parts of Tsukuyomi and Amaterasu are weird tokens because those names can be found in many different places.
Thanks for the “Steve” clue. That makes sense. I’ve added a footnote.
I don’t think any of the glitch tokens got into the token set through sheer popularity of a franchise. The best theories I’m hearing involved ‘mangled text dumps’ from gaming, e-commerce and blockchain logs somehow ending up in the data set used to create the tokens. 20% of that dataset is publicly available, and someone’s already found some mangled PnD text in there (so lots of stats, character names repeated over and over). No one seems to be able to explain the weird Uma Musume token (that may require contact with an obsessive fan, which I don’t particularly welcome).
As an amateur tech nerd who stumbled into these posts via Numberphile: It’s no surprise that Uma Musume crept in there, it’s hugely popular. A bestselling mobile game, though the game itself is afaik only available in Japanese. (Why that particular weird token? No idea, I’m only peripherally familiar with the franchise.) Puzzle & Dragons is also a very longstanding popular game, so there’s likely lots of discussion about it. Especially in “gacha” games like P&D and Uma Musume (where you obtain game pieces via essentially a slot machine), you often see that “awakening” phrase to refer to some kind of obtainable upgrade to a character or other game piece.
Oh, and Steve is the name of the default character appearance in Minecraft, so that’s probably the association with Forge.
I also stumbled upon the same Numberphile video! Puzzle & Dragons is available in English and has a small following in North America. (There was also a version of the app in Europe but it got shut down a few years back.) Most of the English-speaking community is on Reddit and Discord now. As for why there are several glitch tokens related to the game: My guess is that it’s pretty similar to what happened with the r/counting subreddit. P&D related terms would probably only come up within r/puzzleanddragons and the Discord server. There used to be several large English websites about the game, namely puzzledragonx and padforum, but those both disappeared in the last few years. Any information that you would find about P&D outside of r/puzzleanddragons is likely many years out of date, e.g., the wiki that was found in the Twitter thread.
Leilan is interesting one. She and her siblings are based of off four mythological Chinese constellations (white tiger > Haku, black tortoise > Meimei, blue dragon > Karin, red bird > Leilan; Sakuya is a special case and is presumably related to the qilin). A user of r/puzzleanddragons suggested that Leilan might be a weird token because she was referred to as “Suzaku” early in the game’s history. Additionally, the given names of the other four goddesses are likely to appear in other contexts, e.g., Haku isn’t an uncommon name. It surprises me that parts of Tsukuyomi and Amaterasu are weird tokens because those names can be found in many different places.
Thanks for the “Steve” clue. That makes sense. I’ve added a footnote.
I don’t think any of the glitch tokens got into the token set through sheer popularity of a franchise. The best theories I’m hearing involved ‘mangled text dumps’ from gaming, e-commerce and blockchain logs somehow ending up in the data set used to create the tokens. 20% of that dataset is publicly available, and someone’s already found some mangled PnD text in there (so lots of stats, character names repeated over and over). No one seems to be able to explain the weird Uma Musume token (that may require contact with an obsessive fan, which I don’t particularly welcome).
For what it’s worth: I tried asking ChatGTP:
And it identified it right away as Minecraft and (when I asked) told me that what followed was a tutorial.
It could also tell me in which game I might meet Leilan. (I expected a cursed answer, but no.)
I really don’t want to ask it about the “f***ing idiot” quote though… :-)
(Oh yeah, and it isn’t really helpful on the ”?????-?????-” mystery either.)