FlyLeno: TUURD Talk, hosted by a fruit fly

Live: https://flyleno.viosarcade.xyz/

A browser simulation in which a whole-brain spiking model of the adult fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster, FlyWire v783, 138,639 neurons, 15.1M connections) runs live and puppeteers Grey Leno on a TUURD-Talk-style stage.

What each part of the show does to the fly's brain:

• Show events (applause, a stagehand with a sugar cube, a heckler, thrown tomatoes and metal pipes) stimulate its sensory neurons.
• The music (a YouTube playlist) is fed into its auditory neurons. "Start the show" starts it; "Start without music" starts everything else and leaves it off. The Music panel's autoplay switch says whether the playlist plays on its own (from the start, and on from track to track; switched on, it picks up again); off, it plays only when asked and stops at the end of each track. It is on unless the show was started without music.
• The audience reacts to what Leno does, which reaches the brain's dopamine neurons, which shape what it learns and chooses.

What the fly's neurons drive in return:

• Leno's physics-ragdoll muscles.
• His babbling voice, lip-synced.
• Retching, vomiting, farting.
• Fly-like grooming and feeding.

A Fly-Leno toggle turns him into a giant fruit fly with Leno's head, which walks and flies.

It is a static site with no build step: three.js and Rapier load from a CDN, and the brain runs in a Web Worker.

Running locally

# everything the page needs is in the repo; these only regenerate the assets from their sources
blender -b assets/_src/leno/DAD_Leno.blend --python tools/export_leno.py -- assets/grey_leno.glb   # + grey_leno_head.glb
python tools/audio/run_pipeline.sh     # Leno voice/SFX bank from the two Vinesauce videos (venv, GPU); see tools/audio/README.md
python tools/audio/s09_extra_sfx.py    # boo / cheer / vomit / gag / goose-honk sound effects (YouTube SFX uploads)
python tools/export_tuurd_stage.py     # optional, not in git: the original game stage (?stage=game)

python tools/serve.py                  # no-cache dev server (module workers need http://)
# open http://localhost:8123/   (not 127.0.0.1: YouTube refuses embeds on bare-IP origins; the page redirects)

Useful URL options:

• ?form=fly: start as Fly-Leno.
• ?body=kinematic: use the old animated puppet instead of the ragdoll.
• ?stage=game: load the exported game stage instead of the original one.
• ?lite: no stage point lights.
• ?synth=1: use synthesised placeholder sounds where the bank has none.

Sound audition: http://localhost:8123/tools/audition.html plays every clip in the bank. Untick the ones that sound wrong: the choice is saved in the browser and the show skips them immediately.

What drives what

Each item is marked neural (goes through the connectome model) or engineered (a layer outside the connectome, labelled as such in the sidebar).

Leno does	Driven by	Kind
walk / turn / back up	P9 + oDN1 / DNa01−02 left−right / MDN descending neurons	neural
individual limb muscles (46)	pools of the remaining ~1,250 descending neurons, one pool per muscle	neural
coordinated gait	"VNC" pattern generator (the fly's nerve cord isn't in the brain connectome)	engineered
staying upright	"puppet strings" (support slider); at 0 he is a pure ragdoll	engineered
startle jump	giant fiber (DNp01)	neural
grooming: hand rubbing (mild) / face wiping (strong)	aDN1 (antennal grooming DN)	neural
voice: babble, mutters, stammers	song/flight DNs DNg02+DNp13 (voicing) + pharyngeal (vowels) and mouthpart (consonants) motor neurons	neural, phoneme mapping engineered
lip-sync	loudness of Leno's own sounds → MouthOpen shape key (jaw drop)	—
retch / vomit	pharyngeal-pump motor neurons (PhN, not MN9) while MN9 is quiet; the drive builds nausea, and enough of it → vomit. A dry retch is heard only now and then (at most one every 35–60 s; every time while the rotten éclair has poisoned him). The Voice panel's switches turn off the dry retches ("gagging": vomiting still happens, with plain vomit sounds), the vomiting, or the farts; they and "speech" are remembered	neural
fart	oviposition DNs (oviDN), two urges in three (the third passes quietly); the sound is one of seven stock fart recordings, or once in a while (1 in 20) one of two meme sounds (the fart with reverb, the brain fart), at a random pitch with a warble, one at a time	neural
eating	touching food → all 129 sugar taste neurons → the model's MN9 (proboscis motor neuron) decides	neural
walking toward food when hungry	food taxis	engineered (see below)
homing to his starting mark	he roams freely within ~4.5 m of his mark. Farther out, homesickness builds slowly (minutes; faster the farther away), and when it's full (or on a whim, about every 5 minutes) he makes a trip home: a home vector (path integration, which real flies do in the central complex, not modelled here) drives the brain's own DNa01/02 steering and P9 walking neurons until he's back near the mark. The ragdoll is also led gently by its strings, since its own walking is weak	engineered input onto neural DNs
sleeping	sleep pressure builds while he's awake (faster when tired); when it's high and he's safe he dozes off (see Sleep below)	engineered
saccadic turns, walking in bouts	shaping of the turn/walk commands	engineered
spontaneous actions	action selector ("initiative"): softmax over values learned from dopamine	engineered, driven by neural dopamine
Fly-Leno flight	DNg02/DNp13 wing power; giant-fiber escape take-off	neural

First-person cameras (Eyes / Fly eyes buttons, js/eyeview.js), for both Leno and Fly-Leno:

• Eyes: from between Leno's eyes, with a human's ~110° field of view.
• Fly eyes: what the fly's compound eyes take in: a ~320° panorama (a blind wedge straight behind), resolved into hexagonal facets of ~5° (Drosophila has ~780 ommatidia per eye), and weak in red, so the red set looks dark. Rendered from a small cube map at the eye.
• The head: the camera sits inside the head. Humanoid Leno is drawn single-sided for the eye view (his head's surfaces face away from the camera and aren't drawn, his body still is); Fly-Leno's head and antennae are hidden for it. The live cams still show them.

View (bottom right of the 3D view): ▥ hides the sidebar; ⛶ fullscreen hides the sidebar and goes browser-fullscreen where the browser allows; 👁 hides the overlay buttons (the three stay, faded). Keys: S, F, H.

Speech: the "speech" switch in the Voice panel turns his babbling off (the voice neurons still fire; nothing is said).

Stage screens (viewport buttons: 📹 Cams / ▶ YouTube / 🟩 Green; YouTube link box in the sidebar):

• Cams: live cameras following Leno.
• YouTube: any YouTube video on the big backdrop screen. The real iframe is placed in 3D behind a transparent hole in the WebGL canvas, so objects in front occlude it.
• Green: a lime full-bright green screen. Nothing overrides it: while it's chosen, the show's cards and clips stay off the screens.

The fly sees the big screen: its left and right halves (brightness + frame-to-frame motion), weighted by whether the screen is in Leno's field of view, drive 400 sampled R1-6 photoreceptors per eye. For a YouTube video that needs "pipe tab audio", whose tab capture also carries the picture; browsers don't expose iframe pixels otherwise. The video's sound reaches the fly's ears the same way.

The goose (js/goose.js): at random intervals (every ~1–3 minutes, on its own schedule) a low-poly goose waddles onto the stage. It honks (YouTube SFX) and defecates profusely. The droppings are food: humanoid Leno eats them when he's hungry, and Fly-Leno seeks them out even when barely hungry (over a nearer plain snack, and keeping track of them while it flies), tastes them (sugar neurons → MN9) and eats them.

Predators (js/predators.js, engineered; random visits like the goose, never lethal, off with ?quiet):

• Spider-Leno (rare, every ~4–9 minutes): a spider with Leno's head rappels from the ceiling on a silk thread. Its anchor creeps along the ceiling to stay above the host. It dangles and lunges.
  • Grab: 60% of close lunges grab him. It reels him up the thread for 3–4.5 s, and the audience gasps. Fly-Leno is held by the thorax.
  • Miss: it bumps him instead.
  • Leaving: it climbs back up after ~40–50 s.
• The glove (every ~1.5–4 minutes): a floating white cartoon glove with a fly swatter. It hovers, winds up and swats where he'll be. A hit knocks him around; a miss slaps the air.
  • Electric racket: one visit in four is a bug-zapper racket instead. A hit zaps him: arcs, crackle, twitching. The arcs glow steadily and fade (no flicker).
  • Leaving: it floats off after ~25 s.
• What the fly gets:
  • The descent, the lunges and the wind-up are looming objects (LC4). The giant fibre often makes him jump away from the swing.
  • Hits, grabs and zaps drive mechanosensory neurons and punishment dopamine. Zaps also drive the antennal JO.

Happenings (js/happenings.js, engineered; random, off with ?quiet):

• The Rapture (rare: the first after ~5–10 minutes, then every ~10–20): a trumpet sounds and a light column comes down.
  • Ascension: every seated audience member (not Leno) rises spinning into the light and is gone.
  • Empty house: then the seats stay empty for 30–45 s. Nobody reacts, cheers, boos, throws or heckles.
  • Babies: the seats fill with baby cultists (small, big-headed, sitting in their seats, crying). They grow back into their adult selves over about 100 seconds.
  • Effects: the light reaches the fly's eyes, and the crowd reacts less while it is young.
• Rain cloud: a personal storm cloud follows Leno and rains on him.
  • Rain: water on the body and antennae (mechanosensory and JO → grooming), plus punishment dopamine every 2 s while he's under it. Rain also rinses off some grime.
  • Lightning: strikes toward him with thunder and one flash that fades (it hits the floor instead if he has outrun the cloud).
  • Leaving: it drifts off after 35–50 s.
• Vinesauce mushroom: a power-up styled on the Vinesauce logo: green dome (yellow-green to teal) with white spots and a white badge with a teal V, on a white stem with green eyes and a smile. It slides slowly for a few seconds, then settles, and it stops whenever he comes close. Eating it corrupts the picture for 5 s like a bad NES cartridge: NES-palette pixels, swapped and garbage tiles, torn scanlines, hue shifts and a chiptune garble; the fly's photoreceptors see it too. It is kept photosensitivity-safe: no flicker frames, hue shifts keep the brightness, and the corruption changes about twice a second.
  • It falls from the ceiling and slides about the stage.
  • Leno goes for it even when not hungry. Eating it gives a big 3.5 s dopamine reward, a power-up sound and cheers.
• Rig failure: studio cameras and stage lights break loose from the ceiling. They are physics objects:
  • Falling toward him drives LC4 looming. The light's glass shatters.
  • A hit is touch plus strong punishment dopamine, and the audience gasps.
• Throwing storms: now and then the audience unleashes a barrage of 14–30 tomatoes and pipes over a few seconds.
• Roses: single roses are thrown now and then (also the 🌹 button), and sometimes a whole rose storm. A rose that lands on Leno is a compliment: a little touch and reward dopamine, and cheers. Roses weigh 50 g and are tossed in a slow arc to his chest or his feet, never at his face: no knockback, no injury, and they don't set off the looming alarm (a pipe or tomato flying at his head does).
• Sugar cubes: now and then someone lobs a sugar cube (also the 🧊 button). It's aimed at the floor just in front of him, weighs almost nothing and can't hurt or shove him; once it comes to rest it is food he can eat. When he's starving the audience sometimes lobs a handful.
• Kindness: single roses and sugar cubes come sooner when he's having a hard time: sugar when he's hungry, a rose when his morale is low or he's stressed.
• Standing ovation: the whole audience stands and applauds for 7–12 s, with a long reward.
• Duendes (every ~4–8 minutes): 24–40 little grey duendes march in, surround Leno and kick him in the shins.
  • A kick knocks the leg and him around, with touch and mild punishment.
  • Sounds: while they're active, TOES.mp3 and mimimi.mp3 play at random from the crowd of them (boosted ~12 dB: the recordings are much quieter than the rest of the bank). Every kick that lands plays go_alert2.wav. All three are in assets/audio/sfx/minialien/.
  • They scatter after 30–40 s.
• Clown car (the first after ~3–7 minutes, then every ~8–15): a tiny polka-dot car putters on to circus music and stops near Leno, squashing and stretching as twelve full-size clowns climb out one by one, honking as they walk. They fan out around him and each throws 3–5 cream pies rapid-fire. A pie in the face shoves him hard (slapstick) but does almost no harm, even when it knocks him down, and it's sweet (sugar taste neurons); the audience laughs. Every pie ends up on the floor as food. Then they pile back into the car and it drives off.

Events panel and Peaceful Mode (js/events.js):

• Switches: the Events panel in the sidebar has an on/off switch for every event: visitors and predators (goose, spider-Leno, swatter, electric racket, duendes, Mr. Frog's tongue and gun, the car nudging him, the clown car), happenings (Rapture, rain cloud, mushroom, falling rig), every kind of audience action (cheers/laughs/applause, gasps, boos, rose / sugar / tomato / pipe throws, rose storms, tomato-and-pipe storms, ovations, hecklers), the stage crew and director's cues (stagehand snacks, rotten éclairs, applause cues, walk drives, the bitter-taste cue), and each show segment. Harmful ones have a red dot. The switches are remembered in this browser.
• Peaceful Mode: one switch that turns off everything harmful (anything that hits, grabs, soaks, zaps or punishes the fly) and greys it out: the harmful switches, the tomato and pipe buttons, harmful segments, the aversive "Show events" stimuli and the brain worms. Switched on mid-show, the harmful things leave at once (the spider climbs away, the glove floats off, the rain cloud drifts away, the aliens scatter). Mr. Frog keeps his tongue in and leaves his revolver at home, the car steers around Leno instead of nudging him, and the UFO's beam only lifts him a little.
• Overlap: the Rapture, the rain cloud, the duendes and the clown car don't start while one of the others is on (one that's blocked tries again 20–40 s later), and spider-Leno and the glove don't visit at the same time. Everything else runs on its own timer.

Sleep (js/sleep.js, engineered, "sleep" in Brain settings):

• Pressure: builds while he's awake (base ~6 minutes to full, faster when his energy is low, much faster during the lullaby) and drains while he sleeps.
• Dozing off: when it's high and he's safe (nothing looming, not frightened, held, eating, falling or being knocked about) he settles for a few seconds and falls asleep. Humanoid Leno kneels and curls forward with his head down (the strings lower him); Fly-Leno sinks low on folded legs with its head bowed. "Z"s float up.
• Asleep: his eyes are shut (the photoreceptor drive from what he sees fades out), hearing is turned down to ~40% and the touch/taste ambience halved (sensory gating), he doesn't talk, retch or vomit, his own initiative rests, and the body recovers: energy comes back fast, injuries heal about three times faster, stress and dizziness fade quickly, hunger grows slower. The show and its events carry on around him (and can wake him).
• Waking: a hit, touch, sudden loud noise or something looming wakes him (easily in light sleep, less easily once he's deep asleep), and he wakes by himself when rested. During the lullaby he sleeps through anything. Getting up off the floor afterwards isn't a fall.

Knockbacks: a hit (swatter, spider, zap, alien kick, pipe or falling rig, the car, a backflip) makes the puppet strings go slack for a moment, so he really is knocked over; they tighten again over about a second. Fly-Leno is thrown into a short uncontrolled tumble instead (its walking and flight control would otherwise cancel the push), and thrown or falling objects hand it their momentum.

Falls: Leno stays in whatever pose he lands in; nothing snaps him upright. After ~4 s on the floor, the puppet strings help him up gradually, physically. He is put back on stage only if he has left the set. Dangling in a predator's grip, eating on all fours, or sleeping curled up doesn't count as a fall.

Audience levels of detail (js/cultists.js): each seated cultist is drawn at one of three levels by its distance from the viewing camera, with 10% hysteresis so seats don't flicker:

• Near (under 16 m): the full figure, 1,076 triangles, with a head that follows Leno.
• Mid (16–32 m): about half the segments, 364 triangles; the head still follows Leno.
• Far (over 32 m): one merged piece of 104 triangles (robe, hood, white mask), with the head fixed.
• Clapping: near and mid seats have separate arms; during applause and cheers they raise their hands and clap, each at their own pace.

Other levels of detail (js/lod.js):

• Instanced set pieces: seats, toilets, truss bays and light cans each get one or two simpler geometries and are re-bucketed by camera distance whenever the camera moves:
  • seats: 516 → 36 → 24 fabric triangles (every level keeps the black back shell, so the seat backs don't change colour with distance); toilets: coarse lathe and boxes; truss: just the four chords far away; light cans: 8 instead of 20 segments.
• One-off props: the frog, car, goose, stagehand/heckler, spider, glove, mushroom, bandstand, balloons, UFO and the duendes swap each mesh to automatically simplified copies (three.js SimplifyModifier) as they get small on screen: full, then medium (~60% of the vertices), then far (~25%).
  • The goose keeps 80% and 45%, because its round body crumples otherwise.
  • The frog's eyes are their own mesh and are never simplified.
• Effect: about 30–45% fewer triangles from the default cameras.

Hecklers: a heckler charges the stage, then either rants with both arms raised or pelts Leno with 3–5 tomatoes and pipes thrown from its hand (only the kinds whose switches are on).

Eating posture: humanoid Leno kneels and goes down onto his forearms with his face to the food (mouth ~0.25 m off the floor). The puppet strings lower him all the way, lean him forward and let go of his head, so they never hold him up out of the posture at any support setting. Fly-Leno lowers its head to the food. Sleeping works the same way: the strings lower him into a curl, forehead to the floor.

?quiet starts the page with autopilot, initiative, goose visits and the show rundown off.

The Grey Leno Show (js/show.js, engineered): with autopilot on, the show runs in episodes.

• Structure: each episode opens with the greeting, runs five segments, and ends with the sign-off. The segments come from Vinny's Grey Leno appearances: the 2022 Nightmare Puppeteer show, the later VR, public-access and VHS episodes, and the candidacy speech.
• Rundown: an episode alternates calm segments (talk, screens) with busy ones (a guest, a party) and takes the segments that have gone longest without a run, so every segment comes round within a few episodes. The lullaby closes about one episode in three (at least every third). 8–18 s between segments, 20–35 s between episodes. Segments that need a stagehand wait for one to be free.
• Controls: the "Tonight's show" panel lists the rundown and has a button for every segment, and below them a button for every other event (visitors, predators, happenings, storms, the ovation, a sugar shower, the heckler, the stagehand's snack, and each crowd reaction). Started by hand, an event happens even if its switch is off; Peaceful Mode greys out the harmful ones. A segment holds the director's random events while it runs. Each segment also has a switch in the Events panel.
• No script on screen: the host's lines from the shows are kept in js/show.js as cue cards, but they are not displayed (commented out in cue() in js/main.js). The fly brain does the talking: Leno says whatever his articulator neurons produce, and only the segment's events happen. Nothing makes him talk: where a segment wants something from him (the phone-in, the monologue) it gives him the floor and listens, and whatever he says on his own is quoted.
• No flashing: lights fade, screens move smoothly, the wheel's colours share one brightness, and the static is a soft grey snow redrawn ~12 times a second.

Segment	What happens	What the fly gets
Opening	"Hey everybody and welcome to the Grey Leno Show!" title card; "Today we have a show." gets applause for nothing; a "GREY LE-NO" chant	sound (JO), screen picture (R1-6), reward dopamine from the crowd
"Take a look at this next one"	the big screen plays a random point in one of five Grey Leno videos (The Grey Leno Show and four others) for ~25 s, then goes back to what it showed	the video (R1-6, with tab capture) and its sound (JO)
Guest: Mr. Frog	a frog-headed man (grey robe, rope belt, black gloves, a black beanie, big blue heavy-lidded eyes) walks to the guest spot and answers every question with "Good. Good. Good." (croaks, his jaw working). On about half his visits he now and then opens his mouth and flicks his tongue at the host, and can catch and spit out Fly-Leno; on the others he has brought a toy revolver like the Jonkler's (no BANG! flag in it) and takes a shot every so often: a crack and a muzzle flash, and when it hits (7 in 10) a hard shove. He leaves when Leno bites his ankles (mouth open right next to him), shouts him off ("Up yours! You're out of here, Mr. Frog"), or his time is up	croaks (JO); tongue = looming (LC4) + hit (mechanosensory, punishment); gunshot (JO) + hit (mechanosensory, punishment); the crowd reacts
Sunday drive	a vintage roadster laps the stage, brakes and honks "a-oo-gah" when Leno is in the way ("do you drive a car?")	engine rumble (JO-B), floor vibration (mechanosensory), headlights approaching (LC4)
Take it away, Johnny!	a spotlight swings to the empty band stool; the music drops out, crickets; "Where's Johnny?"; rimshot	sudden silence, crickets (JO-A), spotlight on the eyes
A word from our sponsor	GRONK sponsor card (a slow, throbbing glow; no strobe), then "Buy Grey Leno NFTs"	pulsing light on the eyes (R1-6)
Technical difficulties	screens full of soft grey static; "Dave, can you fix the static?"	visual noise (R1-6), hiss (JO-A)
Phone-in	the desk phone rings and a garbled caller asks e.g. "Why do you puke so much?" or "What do the worms in your brain tell you?" (shown in the ticker). Then the line goes quiet for up to 9 s: whatever Leno says on his own is quoted as his answer (nothing drives his voice). Silence gets crickets and the caller hangs up	ring and voice (JO); laughs/applause or silence
Monologue	a mic tap-tap, a spotlight, and his voice through a PA microphone (band-limited, a presence boost, gain into a soft clipper so loud syllables peak, a slapback; about 3 dB above his dry voice). Three "jokes": he has the floor for up to 8 s each, and nothing makes him talk. A recorded snare roll builds while he talks; when he stops, a recorded rimshot (a cymbal crash on the last) and the audience's verdict, picked at random: laughs, applause, a standing ovation (with roses), boos, boos and a few tomatoes or pipes, or a tomato, pipe or mixed storm (the harmful ones only where their switches allow; the last joke leans toward an ovation). Silence gets crickets, sometimes boos. Half the time the PA squeals with feedback as it comes on, and loud stretches can make it squeal again (recorded feedback)	spotlight (R1-6), drum roll, rimshots, feedback (JO), reward or punishment from the crowd
Guest: The Jonkler	a purple-suited, green-haired, chalk-white clown with a red painted grin strolls on, points a toy revolver at Leno and pulls the trigger three times: each time a "BANG!" flag pops out on a stick. Nothing is fired, yet Leno is thrown across the stage, twice as hard each shot (the whole body gets the same kick, so the ragdoll flies in one piece; landing from it isn't an injury). The Jonkler cackles after each one, bows and strolls off	the BANG (JO), a sudden shape (LC4), a huge shove (touch), crowd gasps and laughs
Guest: Kybo Rin	a Kylo Ren-style figure (black robe, belt, cape, the hood down) with a Commodore PET for a head (red screen, keyboard and cassette deck) storms on, ignites a crossguard lightsaber and rampages about the stage for as long as his rant (kylorant.mp3, 83 s) plays: a lurching walk, often toward Leno, both arms flailing, the saber going overhead, chopping at the floor and sweeping across. The blade is ray cast against the physics world every frame: the floor and the set throw sparks and play saber smacks and clashes, swings whoosh, the hum rises with the blade's speed, and if the blade catches Leno he is sent flying (a real injury risk: harmful). The screens play "Death Star Plans" (m8aYL2l5quU, silent, so the music carries on). Then the saber goes off and he stalks away	the rant and the saber (JO), a big dark shape coming at him (LC4), the strike (touch, punishment), crowd gasps
Guest: a goose	"Our next guest… a goose!" The goose waddles on in a follow spot, honks and poops	honks (JO), a spotlit mover (LC4, R1-6), droppings to eat
500 years young	"I'm 500 years young, folks": a stagehand carries out a birthday cake with candles, the crowd sings Happy Birthday, balloons and confetti. The cake is food he goes for even when not hungry	the song and applause (JO), sugar taste, reward
Do The Leno	the screens play the Super Mario Bros. Super Show's "Do the Mario!" (65uNCLBTje0) with its sound, from the start, under the dance party lights with a spotlight on Leno; the segment lasts as long as the video (45 s). The viewer's music ducks while it plays. Over a green screen the viewer has chosen, the screens stay green and the dance party's beat plays instead	the song (JO, with tab capture the picture too), coloured beams and the spotlight (R1-6), cheers and applause
Spin the Wheel of Leno	a prize wheel on the screens spins (at most ~1 turn a second, soft colours) and lands on a prize: a sugar shower, roses, an ovation, confetti, a goose, a mushroom, nothing, or (only when tomato storms are on) tomatoes	moving picture (R1-6), clicks (JO), then the prize
Lullaby	the studio lights fade down to about half, a music-box lullaby (Brahms) plays, the music ducks and the audience hushes; sleep pressure builds fast and he nods off (a soft "aww"); nothing that happens wakes him until the lights fade back up	dim light (R1-6), soft music (JO), sleep
Space scabies telethon	telethon card with a donation counter ("three out of four Martians have the same problem")	itching: bursts on the mechanosensory and antennal JO neurons (→ grooming)
Grey Leno dance party	disco lights and strobe, a synthesised beat; "my body is moving on its own": fictive left/right turning drives on the beat	beat (JO), strobe (R1-6), DNa01/02 fictive drives
Vote Leno	campaign card, confetti and balloon drop, "LE-NO!" chant; "Folks, I can do a backflip": the backflip happens only if the giant fibre fires within 9 s, otherwise no backflip and boos	confetti landing on him (JO + touch, like dust → grooming); cheers or boos (dopamine)
The rotten éclair	a stagehand brings an éclair. It's sweet (sugar neurons) and bitter (bitter neurons). Eating it gives him food poisoning for about a minute ("it's the rotten éclair again"): bouts of drive to the pharyngeal motor neurons, which the model's own retch/vomit readout turns into retching, and while it lasts every retch brings something up. The bouts come less often and less hard as it wears off, then his stomach settles	taste, then punishment dopamine, then retching drive
Sign-off	"…drive your car home safe, I'm gonna get my UFO": a flying saucer comes down, its tractor beam lifts Leno a few metres (in Peaceful Mode only a little), then it flies off	UFO hum (JO), beam light (R1-6), looming saucer (LC4)

The director's random stagehand also brings the rotten éclair instead of a sugar cube one time in four (when rotten éclairs are switched on).

Brain worms (Brain settings, off by default, engineered): "The worms in my brain only eat the cells I don't need, like policies" (candidacy speech).

• Eating: worms silence about 150 neurons per second. They only take neurons that are not sensory, motor or readout neurons and have been quiet for at least 0.5 s. An eaten neuron never fires and ignores its inputs.
• Neural map: eaten cells turn dark red, and pink worms crawl to each new meal.
• Limits: they stop at 35% of the brain. Eaten cells stay eaten through a brain reset until you press "heal".

Spontaneous runaway: with adaptation off (the default pure Shiu model), the network ignites into its self-sustained ~900k spikes/s state every so often, even at idle. The runaway guard resets it after 2.5 s, shown as a commercial break during the show.

Event frequency: a slider in the Events panel (10–200%, default 50%) scales how often the random things come round: the happenings and visitors, the director's events, the goose, the audience's throws after boos, and the breaks between show segments. 100% is the original pacing, which was a lot. It is remembered with the switches.

Keeping apart: the UFO (the sign-off), the rain cloud and spider-Leno don't start while one of the others is on, or within 90 s of another one starting; one that is due waits (the sign-off holds the show until it can come).

We'll Be Right Back: now and then (about 1 in 3, at most once every 5 minutes) when something hits Leno hard enough, the picture freezes 0.35 s later. How hard a hit is, in N·s of knock: a shove or a launch counts its size (Mr. Frog's shot, the Jonkler's bigger shots, Kybo Rin's saber); a pipe or a falling camera or light, 20 or 25× its speed when it hits, a pipe to the head counting 1.3× (so a pipe to the head, most falling rig pieces); a duende's kick, 280 × how hard that one kicked (0.75–1.3); a clown's pie, 240, a pie in the face 1.3×. 300 or more can do it; tomatoes never. The frame is posterised and tinted like the meme, "We'll Be Right Back" appears in the lower right, and the Eric Andre Show sting plays (tools/audio/s14_wbrb_sfx.py: 8d0apIpKMh8 from 0:29 until it fades, 4.4 s) with the studio, the music and the screens silent. The world and the brain hold still until the sting ends. It has a switch in the Events panel and a button in Tonight's show.

Eggs and hatchlings (js/brood.js, engineered):

• Laying: each time Leno reaches a new surface (floor, a platform step, the platform top, or a landing after flight) there is a 5% chance he squats and lays a Drosophila-style egg: white, with two respiratory filaments. The chance is adjustable in Brain settings.
• Hatching: after 12–22 s the egg wobbles and hatches into a mini Leno, randomly humanoid or fly-form.
• Hatchlings: they wander in fly-like bouts near where they hatched, return toward their parent when it is far away, chirp in a sped-up Leno voice, and fly-form ones flutter. Up to 16 hatchlings; each one leaves the show after 3–5 minutes: fly-form ones take off and fly up and away, humanoid ones walk off into the nearer wing.
• Brain: hatchlings run on simple autonomous behaviour; only the host is driven by the fly brain.

Senses:

• Hearing: in-world sound drives the fly's auditory JO-B (low band) and JO-A (high band) neurons, with onsets adding bursts. With "pipe tab audio" (tab capture, which shows the browser's sharing bar) that includes the real waveform of the YouTube music; otherwise the page's own sounds plus a volume-based estimate of the music.
• Eyesight: a few times a second two tiny wide cameras at Leno's eyes (one per compound eye, 150° each, ~300° together) render the scene, and each eye's brightness and motion drive its 400 sampled R1-6 photoreceptors. So the brain sees everything: the stage, the crowd, whatever approaches or darkens the view. The stage-screen vision then only adds a YouTube video from tab capture, which WebGL can't see. It can be turned off in Brain settings.
• Looming: every moving thing drives the LC4 looming neurons by how fast its angular size grows, each one tracked on its own: stagehands and hecklers, the goose, Mr. Frog and his tongue, the roadster, the UFO, spider-Leno and the swatter glove, duendes, the clown car and its clowns, a falling mushroom, balloons, hatchlings, the rain cloud and every thrown or falling object.
• Contact: bumping into anything solid (stagehands, the goose, the frog, hatchlings, aliens) and falling over drive mechanosensory neurons.
• Light: the follow spot, disco strobe and tractor beam falling on Leno add drive to the R1-6 photoreceptors of both eyes, on top of what the stage screens show.
• Touch and taste: tomato hits drive bitter taste and mechanosensory neurons (a tomato that misses him lands as pulp on the floor or stage below where it burst), pipe hits drive mechanosensory neurons plus punishment dopamine, and occasional "dust" on the antennae drives JO.
• Ambience: low-rate noise on taste and touch neurons.

State of mind and body (Mind panel, js/wellbeing.js): read-outs, not drives. Every bad state has a way back, and each row says what it is:

• Condition: a one-line summary, e.g. "on his feet; bruised, damp, frightened" or "fast asleep; tired".
• State of mind:
  • Arousal (overall firing).
  • Stress: builds with threats, hits and punishment dopamine; fades when he's safe, much faster asleep, and praise (reward) calms him.
  • Fear: follows the looming detectors and startles; fades when nothing threatens him.
  • Morale: slow dopamine mood; applause, roses and food lift it.
  • Hunger (a meal fixes it), nausea (passes), homesickness (a trip home fixes it), sleepiness (sleep clears it), and dizziness (from knocks, tumbles and the glitch; wears off).
• Body:
  • Health: injuries from hits, zaps, kicks, falls and the rig; heals slowly, faster at rest, fastest asleep.
  • Energy: used by walking, flying and struggling; restored by food and rest, and fast by sleep.
  • Wetness: rain, drying off.
  • Grime: splats and slime, cleaned by grooming (and rinsed by rain).
• Brain health: load against the runaway threshold (lower asleep), recent runaway resets, and cells lost to brain worms (the heal button restores them; Peaceful Mode turns the worms off).

Learning:

• Crowd reactions: these are reinforcement. Cheers, laughs and applause stimulate PAM (reward) dopamine neurons; boos and gasps stimulate PPL1 (punishment).
• Dopamine signal: the worker measures the model's own PAM − PPL1 activity and turns it into a dopamine signal.
• Synapse changes: that signal gates plasticity on all 11,419 synapses onto the articulator motor neurons, so rewarded vocalisations become more likely.
• Action choice: the same dopamine updates the action selector's values. Bad mood makes choices more exploratory.
• Teach a word: a stagehand repeats the word and rewards matching syllables.

The brain

This is a leaky integrate-and-fire network after Shiu et al. 2024 (philshiu/Drosophila_brain_model, MIT), with the same parameters:

• v₀ = −52 mV, v_th = −45 mV
• τ_m = 20 ms, τ_syn = 5 ms
• refractory period 2.2 ms, synaptic delay 1.8 ms
• 0.275 mV per synapse
• dt = 0.1 ms

Integration is exact and lazy: a neuron is stepped only while an upper bound on its voltage peak can still reach threshold. That keeps the whole network at about real time in JavaScript. tools/reference_sim.py (brute-force NumPy) reproduces its results.

Additions (each can be toggled in Brain settings):

• Spike-frequency adaptation (off by default; turn on in Brain settings for a calmer brain): each spike raises that neuron's threshold by 1 mV, decaying with τ = 150 ms. The published model tips into self-sustained runaway activity under broad or recurrent input: Or56a, PPL1, any olfactory receptor input, and mechanosensory noise. Adaptation contains most of that while keeping the classic responses:

  Stimulus	Response with adaptation
  sugar	MN9 40–60 Hz
  LC4	giant fiber ~110 Hz
  JO	aDN1 grooming ~25 Hz

• Runaway guard: if activity stays above 150k spikes/s for 2.5 s of real time, the brain is reset. Without adaptation runaways are more frequent, so expect more of these resets. With autopilot on, this is announced as a "commercial break".

• Dopamine-gated plasticity: see "Learning" above.

Olfaction is unusable in this model: stimulating fruit-odour receptor neurons (DM1–4, VA2) on either side at any rate down to 8 Hz ignites the runaway, and turning-neuron output is then right-biased regardless of side. Food finding is therefore an engineered taxis. Taste and feeding go through the model.

Layout

Path	What
js/brain-worker.js	LIF engine, plasticity, adaptation (Web Worker)
js/main.js	wiring: scene, brain messages, UI, loop
js/body.js, js/ragdoll.js, js/vnc.js	active ragdoll (Rapier), muscle model, gait generator (docs/ragdoll.md)
js/flybody.js	Fly-Leno body: six-legged gait, wings/flight, proboscis, grooming
js/leno.js	Leno loader, lip-sync rig, kinematic fallback
js/instincts.js, js/food.js	fly instincts: feeding, taxis, saccades, bouts, dust grooming
js/behavior.js	voice (phonemes from motor neurons), retch/vomit/fart
js/audience.js, js/cultists.js, js/cultist-model.js, js/npcs.js	crowd reactions, hooded masked audience, stagehand + heckler
js/mind.js	mood + action selection
js/audio.js, js/hearing.js, js/youtube.js	sound bank + lip-sync analyser, the fly's ears, music player
js/projectiles.js, js/fx.js	tomatoes/pipes, vomit/fart/juice particles
js/stage-original.js	original procedural stage (assets/original-stage-notes.md)
js/livecam.js, js/neuromap.js	studio cameras on the screens, live neural map
data/	connectome (31 MB), neuron groups/params, soma positions (committed)
tools/build_connectome.py, tools/neuron_groups.json, tools/body_spec.json	brain data build
tools/audio/	sound-bank pipeline (Demucs, Whisper, ECAPA diarisation, AudioSet tagging, phoneme CTC)
tools/export_leno.py	Leno GLB + head GLB + MouthOpen shape key (Blender)
tools/*-preview.html, tools/audition.html	stage / ragdoll / figure previews, sound audition

Sounds

Most clips are cut from the two videos:

• Leno's phonemes, syllables, mutters and words: Leno's voice, identified by speaker clustering, from w7lBVJwHABM and ki3ssj466E0.
• Splats, gasps, laughs and applause: found in those videos by AudioSet tagging.

Leno's farts (tools/audio/s12_fart_sfx.py, sfx/fart): seven stock recordings from Freesound (CC0): 506994 by C-V, 616782 by WKG-518, 663636 by frenkfurth, 685269 by prousername, 712681 by lucidrib, 751236 by AbuOwn and 790704 by Cheeseman2354; and, rarely (1 in 20), one of two meme sound files, fartreverb.mp3 (the "fart with reverb" meme) at its own level and brainfart.mp3 turned down.

The videos contain no clean booing, cheering or vomiting. The tagger's "retch" hits turned out to be burps and are kept as sfx/burp. So those categories come from short YouTube sound-effect uploads:

• Boos: u0D718AmYTs, hJlxgWYqvR0, Dk3OZ4a9m6o.
• Cheers: barWV7RWkq0, Vw9MCNbFggI, JhE6hEgTth0.
• Vomiting: UnDhyWnHPD0, RgJ8wfuDfo4.
• Gagging: pf93OHsjkQM, A3wzIw1tWkw, jqHViajqnwc.
• Pipe clang: f8mL0_4GeV0.
• Goose honks: zcDiAD8RGq8, J0WO22NhTK8, A8nqfY3rUKw.

Stock sounds for the monologue (tools/audio/s10_stock_sfx.py), from freely licensed recordings:

• Rimshots: "Ba dum tss [Joke Rimshot]" (Unmixed, Blue Ridge, Boutique SP12, Modern Club) by FREE_SOUND_ENTERTAINMENT on Freesound, CC BY 3.0: 561869, 561862, 561959, 561969.
• Drum rolls: Drum Roll Intro by Iwan Sounds and DIY (Wikimedia Commons, CC0), and Drum Roll - Concert Band by the United States Air Force Band (public domain).
• Mic feedback: Microphone feedback dry by celesti-whispers and Short microphone feedback by Breviceps (Freesound, CC0).

Kybo Rin (tools/audio/s13_kybo_sfx.py, files used as they are in sfx/kylo/): his rant kylorant.mp3, voiced by Vinny, from The Grey Leno Show (kept out of the preload as music.kylorant), and Star Wars lightsaber sounds (SABER/: ignition, hum, swings, smacks, clashes, sparks, power-off), © Lucasfilm.

Leno's body hitting the floor and the set (tools/audio/s11_body_sfx.py): Half-Life 2's sound/physics/body impacts (body_medium_impact_soft*, body_medium_impact_hard*, body_medium_break*), © Valve, in sfx/bodysoft, sfx/bodyhard and sfx/bodybreak. The ragdoll plays one when a heavy part of him (pelvis, chest, head, thighs, arms) suddenly loses speed; Fly-Leno when he lands from a knock. They play at their stock volume: soft thuds for small knocks, hard hits for bigger ones, and sometimes a crunch for the biggest.

The sound bank is published with the site (the source downloads under assets/_src/ stay local).

Deploying (GitHub Pages)

The site is published straight from the main branch root at https://flyleno.viosarcade.xyz/ (a custom subdomain of viosarcade.xyz: CNAME file in the repo, DNS CNAME flyleno → agitationskeleton.github.io, DNS-only, HTTPS enforced; the page also upgrades http to https itself). There is no build step; .nojekyll makes Pages serve every file as-is. Everything it loads is in the repo: the procedural stage, Leno's model, the sound bank and the connectome data (data/, ~32 MB, decompressed in the browser). YouTube embeds and tab capture both work there, since the site is served over HTTPS from a named origin.

Only the optional Nightmare Puppeteer game stage (?stage=game) and its backdrops are not in the repo.

Credits

Grey Leno model: ported by huckleberrypie: Grey Leno for Dead as Disco on Nexus Mods. The original character and model are by Vinesauce. Credit is also shown in the page footer and the About dialog.

Asset licensing

Asset	Owner / terms	In git?
Original TUURD-style stage, robed audience figures	written for this project (procedural geometry/textures; Droid Sans font, Apache-2.0)	yes
Game stage / backdrops (?stage=game)	Nightmare Puppeteer, © its developer	no
Grey Leno model	port by huckleberrypie (Nexus Mods: huckpie): Grey Leno for Dead as Disco; original character/model by Vinesauce. Used in accordance with the mod's terms of use.	yes
Leno voice bank	cut from Vinesauce's The Grey Leno Show and Grey Leno announces his candidacy, with thanks to Vinesauce	yes
Crowd / effect sounds	cut from YouTube sound-effect uploads (sources in assets/audio/manifest.json); mini-alien clips in assets/audio/sfx/minialien/ supplied for the project	yes
Connectome + LIF model	Shiu et al. 2024 (MIT); FlyWire v783 (Dorkenwald et al. 2024, Schlegel et al. 2024)	yes
Stimulus / motor neuron IDs	erojasoficial-byte/fly-brain (MIT)	yes