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Github repo as narrative

There are 187 issues.

There are 687 comments.

There are 348 events.

The top 10 issues, ranked:

Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink:: was openened by cpressey.

Simulationist Fantasy Novel was openened by mattfister.

"Where I'm From" poem & novel generator was openened by marythought.

A daring journey to the bottom of the pit was openened by mcwill97.

It takes a "Village" to translate "Hamlet" was openened by dkurth.

The Atheists Who Believe In God was openened by tra38.

Co-authored Procedural Novel was openened by dariusk.

Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup was openened by mewo2.

Generative Socratic Dialogues was openened by yourpalal.

The Null Earth Catalog was openened by coleww.

On Sun Oct 25 2015 19:27:52, dariusk opened a new issue called Resources. It has a rank of 30. But it's an admin issue, so who cares?

On Sun Oct 25 2015 19:28:38, dariusk opened a new issue called Procedural Visual Novel. It has a rank of 11.

On Sun Oct 25 2015 19:55:08, bcj opened a new issue called An Attempt to Exhaust Memory to Simulate a Place to Attempt to Exhaust. It has a rank of 21.

On Sun Oct 25 2015 22:41:47, zachwhalen opened a new issue called Using a password dump for a corpus. It has a rank of 15.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 00:20:15, MaxBittker opened a new issue called char-rnn + Interactive Fiction + scraped news. It has a rank of 7.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 00:23:26, MaxBittker commented on issue #2, 'Procedural Visual Novel': "what are your ideas for the visual part of this visual novel? have you ever clicked around drawr? it's like pinterest+deviant art http://drawr.net/ "

On Mon Oct 26 2015 01:31:20, beaugunderson opened a new issue called Poetry as corpus. It has a rank of 6.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 02:22:23, hugovk commented on issue #4, 'Using a password dump for a corpus': "> ### The journal of a password cracker

First I entered youliaha and 3814529 but didn't get it.

So I typed in LTrain823 and amdathlo but didn't gain access.

Changing tack, I keyed in aleksey_80afonskiy and afonya0603 but no dice.

Next I tried 000126 and avocat1 which -- guess what -- was unsuccessful.

...

Finally, I bashed in arsefrem and arsefremenko and surprise surprise! Nothing.

Oh how I wish they would automate this.

"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 02:23:24, hugovk opened a new issue called In!. It has a rank of 11.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 03:38:20, javierarce commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "Maybe someone finds my collection of libraries and APIs useful: https://github.com/javierarce/toolbox"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 04:31:37, hugovk opened a new issue called Press Coverage. It has a rank of 17. But it's an admin issue, so who cares?

On Mon Oct 26 2015 04:45:18, ojahnn opened a new issue called Sound over meaning. It has a rank of 9.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 07:24:07, cpressey commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "After last year's NaNoGenMo I said I would try to extract useful things from the NaNoGenLab and package them in a more useful way, and, so, yes, this is what I extracted:

  • T-Rext cleans up spacing and punctuation in a text file.

  • Guten-gutter attempts to strip Project Gutenberg boilerplate from a text file (and succeeds more often than gutenizer does)

  • seedbank makes any Python script record and be able to replay the random seeds it chooses, with a one-line change. Useful for improving reproducibility.

They all require Python 2.x (tested on Python 2.7.6 but will probably still work on some earlier versions) but only seedbank requires that you write your script in Python - the other two can be used as stand-alone tools.

They're all in the public domain, as is all the stuff in the NaNoGenLab. So, please steal, fold, spindle, and mutilate as you see fit."

On Mon Oct 26 2015 08:05:52, cpressey opened a new issue called Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::. It has a rank of 55. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Mon Oct 26 2015 08:18:40, TheCommieDuck commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "That pretty much sums up my thoughts/goals too.

Is it really so unrealistic?"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 08:47:39, coleww opened a new issue called The Null Earth Catalog. It has a rank of 38. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Mon Oct 26 2015 09:04:56, WhiteFangs commented on issue #3, 'An Attempt to Exhaust Memory to Simulate a Place to Attempt to Exhaust': "I can't wait to read (and see how you implement) the second one!"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 09:05:02, bcj commented on issue #3, 'An Attempt to Exhaust Memory to Simulate a Place to Attempt to Exhaust': "I've spent some time thinking about what would be the most Borgesian thing I could do with The Library of Babel, and I think the answer lies in Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. I might try to find Don Quixote hidden within the library of Babel.

The simplest implementation of this would be to sanitize the Quixote so that it only contained [a-z ,.] then break it into 80-character 40-line pages, and search for each page using the library's fantastic search function. There are ~2,000,000 characters in the novel, so that would only be ~1000 pages. In that case, my 'novel' would probably just be the list of hex locations of the pages.

I don't know if I'd like this as the NaNoGenMo submission. I may like it as a NaNoGenMo submission."

On Mon Oct 26 2015 09:05:19, muffinista opened a new issue called Travelogue. It has a rank of 9.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 09:07:28, bcj commented on issue #3, 'An Attempt to Exhaust Memory to Simulate a Place to Attempt to Exhaust': "I've yet to come up with any real way of doing number two, although it might involve attempts to exhaust a place on twitter"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 09:08:19, hugovk commented on issue #3, 'An Attempt to Exhaust Memory to Simulate a Place to Attempt to Exhaust': "Second one -- find (or set up your own!) webcam pointing out the window, hook it up to some computer vision library that verbosely logs what it sees."

On Mon Oct 26 2015 09:13:21, bcj commented on issue #3, 'An Attempt to Exhaust Memory to Simulate a Place to Attempt to Exhaust': "I guess if I was using twitter, I could use a bot, have it follow anyone that follows it, then use its feed as the events it witnesses. I don't think there's quite enough there as an idea though."

On Mon Oct 26 2015 09:36:36, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #2, 'Procedural Visual Novel': "Are you going to actually post your code this year? </dubious>"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 09:38:43, dariusk commented on issue #2, 'Procedural Visual Novel': "I didn't finish a novel last year so I didn't post any code. "

On Mon Oct 26 2015 09:43:26, MichaelPaulukonis opened a new issue called The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body. It has a rank of 24. There's a preview available.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 09:47:57, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #12, 'The Null Earth Catalog': "word-vomit may produce mostly nonsense, but if the source words are from the original POS-template source, they may be similar.

I did something similar this past year (I had to rewrite spewer because the array traversals were driving me bananas). As usual, haven't cleaned and packaged it, but it at tagspewer and used in dprk sloganeering (output at https://twitter.com/KimIlSungismBot).

"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 09:59:25, coleww commented on issue #12, 'The Null Earth Catalog': "https://twitter.com/pataphysyllabus this bot is already running a small version of the pipeline, taking random lines from poetrydb and the top 100 itunes tracks and running them through"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 10:00:36, bcj commented on issue #3, 'An Attempt to Exhaust Memory to Simulate a Place to Attempt to Exhaust': "The webcam thing seems like a pretty cool idea. I don't know if there are free computer-vision libraries that would be good enough though.

I'm a little bit thinking of trying to make some sort of city simulation and then logging what happens at a specific area."

On Mon Oct 26 2015 10:01:39, bcj commented on issue #13, 'Travelogue': "That is an awesome idea"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 10:02:55, cpressey commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "Well, I guess we'll see, but yes I think it's incredibly unrealistic."

On Mon Oct 26 2015 10:34:41, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "Conceptually, you might want to stumble around The Living Handbook of Narratology - for some overviews of narrative theory, and some alternate takes on what might constitute narrative."

On Mon Oct 26 2015 11:01:52, ikarth commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "ProcJam is more visually oriented, but it does have some useful resources that come out of it, like Tracery, a JavaScript library for generating stories from expanding grammars."

On Mon Oct 26 2015 11:03:28, ikarth opened a new issue called Virgil's Commonplace Book. It has a rank of 29. There's a preview available.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 11:04:29, ikarth commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "Perfect! And definitely a worthy goal."

On Mon Oct 26 2015 11:09:17, ikarth commented on issue #3, 'An Attempt to Exhaust Memory to Simulate a Place to Attempt to Exhaust': "The computer vision thing depends on how you want to use the data; katie rose pipkin's cloud ocr is one approach. There are open source image recognition libraries out there, of varying quality.

I like the simulation idea too. There's a lot of scope to explore more of that approach, and I think it's been somewhat underdeveloped historically."

On Mon Oct 26 2015 11:10:01, ikarth commented on issue #2, 'Procedural Visual Novel': "Solved the problem of posting the result on the web?"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 11:14:52, enkiv2 commented on issue #2, 'Procedural Visual Novel': "I'm glad you're trying this out this year. Very disappointed that you gave up on it last year (and disappointed that my ~2 attempts at generated VNs were largely unsuccessful)"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 11:22:39, enkiv2 opened a new issue called Combining generative grammars with plot templates. It has a rank of 16.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 11:29:27, ikarth mentioned issue #2, Procedural Visual Novel.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 11:29:27, dariusk commented on issue #2, 'Procedural Visual Novel': "@ikarth Yeah, there's stuff like TyranoScript now!"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 11:29:27, ikarth subscribed to issue #2, Procedural Visual Novel.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 11:38:32, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #16, 'Combining generative grammars with plot templates': "I will do my best not to lapse into template-related rants in GitHub."

On Mon Oct 26 2015 11:39:46, enkiv2 commented on issue #16, 'Combining generative grammars with plot templates': "I will not be displeased by more template-related rants on github. Ranting is how we clarify our own thoughts, and are also a wonderful didiactic resource. Rant away.

On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 11:38 AM Michael Paulukonis < notifications@github.com> wrote:

I will do my best not to lapse into template-related rants in GitHub.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#16 (comment) .

"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 11:40:14, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "Tracey was recently mentioned in Generative Text - the mailing list/google-group that sprouted from the end of NNGM2014. Lately, there's been a lot of partisan ranting about templates. I may resemble some of that remark."

On Mon Oct 26 2015 11:44:30, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #4, 'Using a password dump for a corpus': ">> Oh how I wish they would automate this.

How could such a thing be automated?

IT'S AGAINST NATURE!"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 11:45:56, enkiv2 commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "I'd like to point out that the BotAlly slack group has a NaNoGenMo room, and that the GenArt slack group that sprouted from the Generative Text mailing list is mostly full of NaNoGenMo2014 people.

On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 11:40 AM Michael Paulukonis < notifications@github.com> wrote:

Tracey was recently mentioned in Generative Text https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/generativetext - the mailing list/google-group that sprouted from the end of NNGM2014. Lately, there's been a lot of partisan ranting about templates. I may resemble some of that remark.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#1 (comment) .

"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 11:47:56, MichaelPaulukonis opened a new issue called Language Survey 2015. It has a rank of 6. But it's an admin issue, so who cares?

On Mon Oct 26 2015 11:49:39, dkurth opened a new issue called It takes a "Village" to translate "Hamlet". It has a rank of 40. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Mon Oct 26 2015 11:50:20, ikarth commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "Since we're speaking of visual novels, I should probably mention the Yarn dialog editor. I don't know that'll be all that useful directly for generative stuff, but in case someone is trying to procedurally generate a dialog tree, it might be handy. Or you could always generate a Twine file."

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:08:06, pteichman opened a new issue called Intent to Participate. It has a rank of 5.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:15:09, ikarth commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "@enkiv2 Where's the signup for the GenArt group? I need to check that out."

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:15:09, enkiv2 mentioned issue #1, Resources.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:15:09, enkiv2 subscribed to issue #1, Resources.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:18:39, enkiv2 subscribed to issue #1, Resources.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:18:39, enkiv2 commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "The genart group is at https://generativeart.slack.com ; I think it might be invite-only. Mike Paulukonis controls the group & can probably send invites.

On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 12:15 PM Isaac Karth notifications@github.com wrote:

@enkiv2 https://github.com/enkiv2 Where's the signup for the GenArt group? I need to check that out.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#1 (comment) .

"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:18:39, enkiv2 mentioned issue #1, Resources.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:18:39, alicemaz opened a new issue called I'll be here. It has a rank of 5.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:19:55, enkiv2 commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "As for botally, the public signup is here: http://t.co/OiOB7197BH ; people periodically check for registrations and send invites out.

On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 12:18 PM John Ohno john.ohno@gmail.com wrote:

The genart group is at https://generativeart.slack.com ; I think it might be invite-only. Mike Paulukonis controls the group & can probably send invites.

On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 12:15 PM Isaac Karth notifications@github.com wrote:

@enkiv2 https://github.com/enkiv2 Where's the signup for the GenArt group? I need to check that out.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#1 (comment) .

"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:19:56, enkiv2 mentioned issue #1, Resources.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:19:56, enkiv2 subscribed to issue #1, Resources.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:21:42, hoffm opened a new issue called Novel? Yes please. Thanks.. It has a rank of 5.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:26:25, dariusk commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "NB: I'm one of three admins for the #BotALLY slack--we welcome new additions but we take our code of conduct VERY seriously so please only join if you're okay with being in a place where you almost inevitability will be nudged by an admin concerning your conduct. "

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:28:26, dariusk subscribed to issue #1, Resources.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:28:26, dariusk mentioned issue #1, Resources.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:28:26, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "Yeah, there's not a lot going on in https://generativeart.slack.com - and if there's a way to allow people to request an invite, I'm all ears. @dariusk - what's the source for the #botALLY registration doc+script?


UPDATE: he's the GenerativeArt invite page: http://tinyurl.com/genartslackrequest"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:29:21, MichaelPaulukonis subscribed to issue #1, Resources.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:29:21, MichaelPaulukonis mentioned issue #1, Resources.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:29:21, ikarth commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "@MichaelPaulukonis I've seen people use a Google Form to manage signups for Slack groups."

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:30:53, enkiv2 commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "So far as I can tell, the signup just is a web form that sends an email to the slack maintainer. Maybe google forms has this functionality by itself?

On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 12:29 PM Isaac Karth notifications@github.com wrote:

@MichaelPaulukonis https://github.com/MichaelPaulukonis I've seen people use a Google Form to manage signups for Slack groups.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#1 (comment) .

"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:30:54, MichaelPaulukonis mentioned issue #1, Resources.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:30:54, MichaelPaulukonis subscribed to issue #1, Resources.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:38:29, dariusk commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "It just emails us.

Let's stop this conversation, I don't want to add too much noise to the resources thread. "

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:45:08, cpressey mentioned issue #22, Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:45:08, TheCommieDuck opened a new issue called Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours. It has a rank of 25. There's a preview available.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:45:08, cpressey subscribed to issue #22, Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:47:51, enkiv2 commented on issue #22, 'Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours': "For NaNoGenMo 2013 I worked a bit with translating the CMU NELL knowledge base to prolog. If you're planning to produce an internally consistent but reasonably free-form story and you're familiar with prolog (and particularly using DCGs), there are worse ways to go.

On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 12:45 PM Mark Garnett notifications@github.com wrote:

I've been thinking about this for a while, actually. I definitely want to try something ala what @cpressey https://github.com/cpressey mentioned

  • avoiding more unpredictable stuff and adjusting existing stories.

I'm still undecided on an approach. I think I'll try going top down (plot -> events -> text) rather than just making random sentences from a grammar.

A prediction from the start? This isn't going to end up with 50,000 words in any sane capability. I think something which seems a lot more like a very long, linear, short story IS possible; that is, the plot events become incredibly granular and small (if a normal novel has, say, 10 different major events in 50k words - this will probably have 200-300).

It could also be that this is all complete garbage and I'll swap to a destructive approach from existing material. But who knows, we'll see.

Also undecided between using Prolog, C#, or maybe finding something else to use.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#22.

"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:47:51, cpressey subscribed to issue #22, Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:47:51, cpressey mentioned issue #22, Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:53:13, TheCommieDuck commented on issue #22, 'Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours': "Ooh, that's neat.

I've done some DCG stuff before - failed attempts at text adventures and MUD-y stuff that never got off the ground in my head, let alone in code.

I'm still not entirely sure about ontologies for this kind of thing. I can imagine them being incredibly neat (with so much data to pick from) but also incredibly silly ('The man went outside and saw a chinese mitten crab and a Alfa Romeo 155 with Acetaldehyde Ethyl Phenylethyl Acetal in')."

On Mon Oct 26 2015 12:56:17, enkiv2 commented on issue #22, 'Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours': "Definitely. NELL is notable because it's an ontology generated via machine learning from the internet (specifically, I think it's reading twitter and wikipedia?). As a result, it's a little less completionist & a little more skewed toward things people care about.

I never got much further than converting a large subset to prolog and producing a large set of true but uninteresting statements about categories.

On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 12:53 PM Mark Garnett notifications@github.com wrote:

Ooh, that's neat.

I've done some DCG stuff before - failed attempts at text adventures and MUD-y stuff that never got off the ground in my head, let alone in code.

I'm still not entirely sure about ontologies for this kind of thing. I can imagine them being incredibly neat (with so much data to pick from) but also incredibly silly ('The man went outside and saw a chinese mitten crab and a Alfa Romeo 155 with Acetaldehyde Ethyl Phenylethyl Acetal in').

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#22 (comment) .

"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 13:16:29, aeschright opened a new issue called An exercise in hyperbole. It has a rank of 8.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 13:44:13, ikarth commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "There's been a lot of work done with Neural Networks this year, including text-based output (such as the generated Magic: the Gathering cards). That might be an interesting avenue to pursue.

Abulafia uses MediaWiki for its generators. Not directly useful, but I keep forgetting to mention it here.

Here's a method of procedurally generating a wilderness in a text adventure format. People who are doing a Swallows type simulation approach may find its ideas useful."

On Mon Oct 26 2015 13:49:52, s-knob commented on issue #3, 'An Attempt to Exhaust Memory to Simulate a Place to Attempt to Exhaust': "Perhaps instead of attempting to exhaust a place on twitter, you could attempt to exhaust a moment? For example, the first few hours after the Snowden Papers were leaked. You could collect relevant tweets and manipulate or sort them in some way. "

On Mon Oct 26 2015 13:54:14, s-knob opened a new issue called An attempt to exhaust a moment.. It has a rank of 6.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 13:56:00, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #18, 'It takes a "Village" to translate "Hamlet"': "Welcome! Something is better than nothing. Commit early, iterate often. Fail fast."

On Mon Oct 26 2015 13:59:24, aparrish opened a new issue called a novel, generated. It has a rank of 12. There's a preview available.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 14:00:50, bcj commented on issue #3, 'An Attempt to Exhaust Memory to Simulate a Place to Attempt to Exhaust': "That is an interesting idea, and I think that Life: A User's manual by Georges Perec takes place at exactly one moment, so it is very fitting."

On Mon Oct 26 2015 14:05:25, araile opened a new issue called Pocket Atlas of Remote Planets. It has a rank of 21.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 14:09:36, vijithassar commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "Multiverse JSON is a light JSON syntax/spec and Python compiler script with which to store editorial projects in small logical units so they can be quickly reconfigured according to build parameters you define."

On Mon Oct 26 2015 14:21:27, aparrish commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "Since last year's NaNoGenMo I've made a few libraries that might be of interest:

I also made Context-Free GenGen, which is sort of like a mini-Tracery except driven by Google Sheets (a la the original GenGen). Probably not great for making a whole novel, but maybe cool for prototyping ideas with context-free grammar generation."

On Mon Oct 26 2015 14:35:53, mgiraldo commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "- some NYPL-related resources

On Mon Oct 26 2015 14:37:58, trevormunoz mentioned issue #1, Resources.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 14:37:58, trevormunoz subscribed to issue #1, Resources.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 14:41:16, enkiv2 commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "I have a few tools I've made in the past year too:

Some novelty filters:

And, some novelty generators:

On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 2:21 PM Allison Parrish notifications@github.com wrote:

Since last year's NaNoGenMo I've made a few libraries that might be of interest:

I also made Context-Free GenGen http://cfgg.decontextualize.com/, which is sort of like a mini-Tracery except driven by Google Sheets (a la the original GenGen http://tinysubversions.com/gengen/). Probably not great for making a whole novel, but maybe cool for prototyping ideas with context-free grammar generation.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#1 (comment) .

"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 14:47:17, cassidoo opened a new issue called Participation, I declare. It has a rank of 5.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 15:01:39, cblgh opened a new issue called Participating,. It has a rank of 5.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 15:05:19, julianengel opened a new issue called Participating too. It has a rank of 5.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 15:06:54, EmilyGoetz opened a new issue called Sure why not.. It has a rank of 5.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 15:18:50, CatherineMcMahon opened a new issue called Since I can't actually write 50k words of stuff I'll code something that does it for me. It has a rank of 6.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 15:19:51, CatherineMcMahon renamed issue #31, Since I can't actually write 50k words of stuff I'll code something that does it for me.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 15:21:40, CatherineMcMahon renamed issue #31, Since I can't actually write 50k words of stuff I'll code something that does it for me.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 15:24:32, dariusk labeled issue #1, Resources.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 16:18:26, hugovk commented on issue #3, 'An Attempt to Exhaust Memory to Simulate a Place to Attempt to Exhaust': "> Perhaps instead of attempting to exhaust a place on twitter, you could attempt to exhaust a moment? For example, the first few hours after the Snowden Papers were leaked. You could collect relevant tweets and manipulate or sort them in some way.

Here's an archive 13 million "tweets that mention Ferguson, Missouri between August 10th and August 27th, 2014 subsequent to the death of Michael Brown". It's actually just the IDs, but you can use twarc (the tool that collected them) to "rehydrate" them to full tweet data. More about this archive here which also mentions an Aaron Swartz tweet archive, and there's quite possibly more archives over here.

"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 16:37:26, bcj commented on issue #3, 'An Attempt to Exhaust Memory to Simulate a Place to Attempt to Exhaust': "Wow, that's pretty awesome. Thanks"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 17:05:02, KyFaSt opened a new issue called Robot Love Poems or Songs Collection. It has a rank of 8.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 17:28:27, bcj commented on issue #32, 'Robot Love Poems or Songs Collection': "The Internet Archive has a collection of manuals (https://archive.org/details/manuals). Unfortunately, they are mostly electronics. I'm guessing the printer manuals will have plenty of hands sliding things into machines If that's the kind of thing that you are looking for."

On Mon Oct 26 2015 17:34:08, bcj subscribed to issue #32, Robot Love Poems or Songs Collection.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 17:34:08, bcj mentioned issue #32, Robot Love Poems or Songs Collection.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 17:34:08, KyFaSt commented on issue #32, 'Robot Love Poems or Songs Collection': "hmm these printer manuals could be quite vulgar in the context of my project, this is perfect. Thank you @bcj :heart: "

On Mon Oct 26 2015 17:40:49, zachwhalen commented on issue #4, 'Using a password dump for a corpus': "Adding this as it may be of interest:

Last year, I attempted to create a graphic novel. The result was late and not as compelling as I hoped it would be, The Something, The Thanksgiving, and The Nothing.

I made an off-season sequel that I think is more compelling. So much so I decided to self-publish it with Lulu. Here's the first of what may be a series of blogs explaining An Arthrogram, which is a book of empty comic layouts. Every possible layout given a constrained Watchmen-like grid of 3 x 3 panels.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/JCPj1YXI4-g"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 17:52:32, hugovk commented on issue #32, 'Robot Love Poems or Songs Collection': "Here's a soundtrack for you (the second one): http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamandjoe/2009/07/free-sexy-song-wars.shtml"

On Mon Oct 26 2015 17:59:59, coleww renamed issue #12, The Null Earth Catalog.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 19:29:42, WhiteFangs opened a new issue called A play based on the "french 4chan". It has a rank of 34. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Mon Oct 26 2015 19:42:12, ericnakagawa opened a new issue called Idea: An app that writes a story about where I've been.. It has a rank of 5.

On Mon Oct 26 2015 21:54:18, ikarth commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "If you're looking for a large corpus of internet comments, the mostly complete Reddit corpus is available."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 05:04:25, cpressey commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "I should maybe qualify those statements a bit.

I do think the goal I stated is highly unrealistic, certainly with the techniques that I'm personally prepared to use. But the space of possible techniques is vast, so who knows?

What I'm sort of getting at by choosing that goal is this:

In 2013, I tried generating a "proper novel". Last year, I did a bunch of experiments closer to the so-called "conceptual writing" side of things. This year, I'm returning to the "proper novel", however quixotic any such attempt might be.

Given that I've stated a goal that I admit is unrealistic, I suppose I do not expect myself to actually achieve it. But it will be interesting to see how I fail.

At the same time, one need not have only one goal, so...

After last NaNoGenMo, around January of this year, I started thinking a lot about how people write stories. I did a lot of research (if you can call reading article after article on TVTropes research) and I came to the conclusion that there are certainly some story-writing techniques that can be approximated with algorithms.

So, one of my secondary goals is: To implement one or more story-writing techniques that human writers use.

This is a much more realistic goal, I think.

Heck, even The Swallows had a MacGuffin, but it wasn't really developed. I'd like to go a bit beyond that.

I'll probably continue to expand on these thoughts in future posts to this issue."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 08:38:00, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "> In 2013, I tried generating a "proper novel".

::blink blink::

[updated as I had not pasted what I wanted to have pasted]"

On Tue Oct 27 2015 08:40:48, gray-signal opened a new issue called i'm so unbelievably intimidated but why the h*ck not, let's do this.. It has a rank of 6.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 09:58:03, coleww commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "i have been pretty heavily tooling up for nanogenmo this year by way of publishing a ton of poetic node modules to npm.

Another resource i have created is the weirdly-specific-corpora project, which is a fork of dariusk/corpora for any lists that are too weirdly specific to be included in that project. I expect I will end up making a lot of weird lists while generating novels."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 10:01:37, YottaSecond opened a new issue called Using the mysterious "All Junky Pages" corpus. It has a rank of 7.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 10:54:39, YottaSecond commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "I can imagine a computer-generated book being easier to read than something like Naked Lunch or Finnegan's Wake."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 11:38:41, neauoire opened a new issue called Can we have labels to better categorize issues?. It has a rank of 15. But it's an admin issue, so who cares?

On Tue Oct 27 2015 11:40:59, dariusk commented on issue #37, 'Can we have labels to better categorize issues?': "Nope, I'm using issues as a forum system. You don't even need to use Github if you don't want to for your code. Just link a novel and your code from here, whether that's on Github or somewhere else. I'm trying to keep this as tech/platform neutral as possible. "

On Tue Oct 27 2015 11:42:02, cpressey commented on issue #16, 'Combining generative grammars with plot templates': "Templates seem like a terrible way to produce sentences until you consider the alternatives.

There, that's my template-related rant."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 11:44:00, neauoire commented on issue #37, 'Can we have labels to better categorize issues?': "Gotcha,

Could we suggest using tags/labels to distinguish between intent or ideas to keep issues in order.

Or a sort of tenplate to make easy for everyone to browse issues?

example: [40%] Story Name - Ruby"

On Tue Oct 27 2015 11:45:49, enkiv2 commented on issue #37, 'Can we have labels to better categorize issues?': "Tags are typically used to indicate milestones -- if a novel snapshot has been posted, for instance.

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 11:44 AM Devine Lu Linvega notifications@github.com wrote:

Gotcha, Could we suggest using tags for either intent or ideas to keep issues in order. Or a sort of tenplate to make easy for everyone to browse issues?

example: [40%] Story Name - Ruby

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#37 (comment) .

"

On Tue Oct 27 2015 11:46:53, enkiv2 commented on issue #16, 'Combining generative grammars with plot templates': "Most of the limitations of templates can be circumvented by generating them with templates.

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 11:42 AM Chris Pressey notifications@github.com wrote:

Templates seem like a terrible way to produce sentences until you consider the alternatives.

There, that's my template-related rant.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#16 (comment) .

"

On Tue Oct 27 2015 11:47:07, hugovk commented on issue #37, 'Can we have labels to better categorize issues?': "Last year we had preview and completed labels:

https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014/labels"

On Tue Oct 27 2015 11:47:36, neauoire commented on issue #37, 'Can we have labels to better categorize issues?': "That could work : ) "

On Tue Oct 27 2015 11:48:09, setphen opened a new issue called def init():. It has a rank of 13.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 11:49:19, dariusk commented on issue #37, 'Can we have labels to better categorize issues?': "I'm not sure we can realistically enforce that... also percentages don't make sense. I can generate 50k words in five seconds. It's the quality that counts and that's nonlinear.

I do want to encourage people to title their issues something descriptive, though most people don't know what they're going to make yet. "

On Tue Oct 27 2015 11:50:19, hugovk mentioned issue #37, Can we have labels to better categorize issues?.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 11:50:19, hugovk subscribed to issue #37, Can we have labels to better categorize issues?.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 11:50:19, dariusk commented on issue #37, 'Can we have labels to better categorize issues?': "I think @hugovk and I could simply ask people who seem to have an idea already to update their issue title accordingly. On Oct 27, 2015 8:49 AM, "Darius Kazemi" darius.kazemi@gmail.com wrote:

I'm not sure we can realistically enforce that... also percentages don't make sense. I can generate 50k words in five seconds. It's the quality that counts and that's nonlinear.

I do want to encourage people to title their issues something descriptive, though most people don't know what they're going to make yet.

"

On Tue Oct 27 2015 11:50:53, neauoire renamed issue #37, Can we have labels to better categorize issues?.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 11:51:44, dariusk commented on issue #16, 'Combining generative grammars with plot templates': "I'm a huge fan of templated templates with nondeterministic inputs. "

On Tue Oct 27 2015 11:53:46, ivodopiviz opened a new issue called Will attempt for great justice. It has a rank of 5.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 11:59:54, enkiv2 commented on issue #16, 'Combining generative grammars with plot templates': "Templates are great in that they allow arbitrary amounts of human intelligence to be provided in order to reliably trigger the eliza effect and convince readers that there was some intent behind the writing, which is often enough to get them to project a meaning upon it. But, for novel-length text, single-layer templates like mad libs don't produce a very good ratio of novel text to source code. By using generative grammars, I think you can get to a nice middle ground between mad lib style single-level templating and something like markov chains (wherein you have essentially used statistics to derive a really low level template of the form "this word may only be followed by these other words" from some source text). Nick Montfort's 1k story generator demonstrates the power of being vague but evocative, and by adding a random shuffle to the lines it produces you can convince yourself that if you are sufficiently vague and evocative the order of events doesn't need to matter much either; so, if you can create a grammar that produces a large variety of vague yet evocative filler text, you can insert such text into arbitrary places in a plot skeleton to fill it out.

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 11:51 AM Darius Kazemi notifications@github.com wrote:

I'm a huge fan of templated templates with nondeterministic inputs.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#16 (comment) .

"

On Tue Oct 27 2015 11:59:57, hugovk commented on issue #37, 'Can we have labels to better categorize issues?': "I also think labels are useful, especially for completed entries, because I can quickly go and see the full list from last year and also get a quick count (91 completed, 12 previews)."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 12:01:46, dariusk commented on issue #37, 'Can we have labels to better categorize issues?': "Oh I agree we need labels! I can't think of more useful labels than the ones we already have, though of course I'm open to ideas."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 12:03:04, neauoire commented on issue #37, 'Can we have labels to better categorize issues?': "I don't seem to be able to pick one for my issue, is there a sort of privacy setting on here?"

On Tue Oct 27 2015 12:07:14, enkiv2 commented on issue #16, 'Combining generative grammars with plot templates': "(We spend a lot of time talking about particular iconic experimental stories like Finnegan's Wake, A Void, and Exercises in Style when talking about what kinds of extreme storytelling forms work at least well enough that there are iconic works written by humans in that form. But, one model that we might look at is the Illuminatus trilogy, which has a lot of complicated interactions between various parties and a large number of events but whose chronology is difficult to determine. The Illuminatus trilogy easily explains its formal conceits with its subject matter: sex, drugs, conspiracy theories, and the occult. However, the formal conceits had help from the same 'writing machine' that Burroughs used in The Naked Lunch: somebody dropped the entire fifteen hundred page manuscript on the floor and put it back together in a random order, and then the authors cut five hundred pages from the result by removing pages entirely at random. A generator that produces descriptions of events and varies the tone and style of these descriptions can be set free to scribble together random accounts of random events and, as long as the characters take the bad acid in one of these scenarios, really warped first-person accounts can be assumed to be justifiable as a kind of intellectual realism.)

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 11:59 AM John Ohno john.ohno@gmail.com wrote:

Templates are great in that they allow arbitrary amounts of human intelligence to be provided in order to reliably trigger the eliza effect and convince readers that there was some intent behind the writing, which is often enough to get them to project a meaning upon it. But, for novel-length text, single-layer templates like mad libs don't produce a very good ratio of novel text to source code. By using generative grammars, I think you can get to a nice middle ground between mad lib style single-level templating and something like markov chains (wherein you have essentially used statistics to derive a really low level template of the form "this word may only be followed by these other words" from some source text). Nick Montfort's 1k story generator demonstrates the power of being vague but evocative, and by adding a random shuffle to the lines it produces you can convince yourself that if you are sufficiently vague and evocative the order of events doesn't need to matter much either; so, if you can create a grammar that produces a large variety of vague yet evocative filler text, you can insert such text into arbitrary places in a plot skeleton to fill it out.

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 11:51 AM Darius Kazemi notifications@github.com wrote:

I'm a huge fan of templated templates with nondeterministic inputs.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#16 (comment) .

"

On Tue Oct 27 2015 12:09:15, dariusk commented on issue #37, 'Can we have labels to better categorize issues?': "Only admins can tag. (Maybe we should open that up?) "

On Tue Oct 27 2015 12:10:06, enkiv2 commented on issue #37, 'Can we have labels to better categorize issues?': "Could we have a tag for "source available"? Often, projects have really interesting behavior but aren't considered to be producing sufficiently interesting material for a novel-length work, and it's easy to miss when we only mark based on what the author considers 'complete'.

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 12:03 PM Devine Lu Linvega notifications@github.com wrote:

I don't seem to be able to pick one for my issue, is there a sort of privacy setting on here?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#37 (comment) .

"

On Tue Oct 27 2015 12:10:54, enkiv2 mentioned issue #37, Can we have labels to better categorize issues?.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 12:10:54, enkiv2 subscribed to issue #37, Can we have labels to better categorize issues?.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 12:10:54, hugovk commented on issue #37, 'Can we have labels to better categorize issues?': "@enkiv2:

The only rule is that you share at least one novel and also your source code at the end.

No source = not complete."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 12:10:59, dariusk commented on issue #16, 'Combining generative grammars with plot templates': "Also, Illuminatus! (which I loved as a kid) is total potboiler pulpy genre fiction, which has its own advantages when it comes to generation. "

On Tue Oct 27 2015 12:13:11, dariusk commented on issue #37, 'Can we have labels to better categorize issues?': "I see John's point though. There may be an incomplete, non-novel that still has source code of note. I'll add that tag. "

On Tue Oct 27 2015 12:16:39, enkiv2 commented on issue #16, 'Combining generative grammars with plot templates': "Definitely. There are several fairly mechanical plotting guides for pulp, and at the level of sentences and words, various pulp genres have really strong stylistic conventions that are entertaining in of themselves (thinking here of the narration style in hardboiled/noir, and the dense pseudo-romantic style favored by Lovecraft that's essentially just a more extreme form of what William Hope Hodgeson and Poe were doing in the nineteenth century). Doing an Illuminatus pastiche might give you a good excuse for incorporating filters like jive and cockney into your fiction generator as a second pass for particular passages and quotes.

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 12:11 PM Darius Kazemi notifications@github.com wrote:

Also, Illuminatus! (which I loved as a kid) is total potboiler pulpy genre fiction, which has its own advantages when it comes to generation.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#16 (comment) .

"

On Tue Oct 27 2015 12:17:19, setphen commented on issue #38, 'def init():': "What are the rules regarding human "curation" of the final product? For instance, what if my code creates paragraphs, and then I organize them manually?"

On Tue Oct 27 2015 12:18:20, dariusk commented on issue #38, 'def init():': "There are no rules except 50k words. "

On Tue Oct 27 2015 12:33:16, enkiv2 commented on issue #38, 'def init():': "Even if you don't make 50k words, if your results or ideas are sufficiently interesting people will like them. (Generated Detective didn't make anywhere near 50k words and had rather a lot of curation, but was also one of the more interesting and exciting things going on in NaNoGenMo 2014)

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 12:18 PM Darius Kazemi notifications@github.com wrote:

There are no rules except 50k words.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#38 (comment) .

"

On Tue Oct 27 2015 12:33:54, cpressey commented on issue #38, 'def init():': "Don't forget also: share your source code."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 12:39:27, cpressey commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "@YottaSecond

I can imagine a computer-generated book being easier to read than something like Naked Lunch or Finnegan's Wake.

Mmmaybe...

But I wager that if someone stops reading Finnegan's Wake after chapter 2 it's almost certainly not because their brain went all "I see what you did there.""

On Tue Oct 27 2015 12:39:27, YottaSecond subscribed to issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 12:39:27, YottaSecond mentioned issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 12:53:42, mattfister opened a new issue called Simulationist Fantasy Novel. It has a rank of 47. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Tue Oct 27 2015 12:54:37, setphen commented on issue #38, 'def init():': "Will do. I am planning on utilizing some other open source projects, i.e. speed-to-text and translation"

On Tue Oct 27 2015 13:34:09, lilkraftwerk opened a new issue called Alice's Adventures in Emojiland. It has a rank of 8.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 14:03:11, lilkraftwerk commented on issue #41, 'Alice's Adventures in Emojiland': "working title is "Alice's Adventures in Emojiland""

On Tue Oct 27 2015 14:12:10, dariusk commented on issue #41, 'Alice's Adventures in Emojiland': "Can you change the title of the issue to match your working title? Thanks! "

On Tue Oct 27 2015 14:12:29, lilkraftwerk renamed issue #41, Alice's Adventures in Emojiland.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 14:12:34, lilkraftwerk commented on issue #41, 'Alice's Adventures in Emojiland': ":cool: "

On Tue Oct 27 2015 14:58:00, dariusk labeled issue #9, Press Coverage.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 14:59:02, dariusk renamed issue #5, char-rnn + Interactive Fiction + scraped news.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 14:59:33, dariusk commented on issue #5, 'char-rnn + Interactive Fiction + scraped news': "Hi, I'm going through and updating the titles on issues to make them more specific. Feel free to edit my edit if it's not to your liking. This is to make browsing issues a lot more pleasant."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 14:59:55, dariusk renamed issue #6, Poetry as corpus.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 14:59:57, dariusk commented on issue #6, 'Poetry as corpus': "Hi, I'm going through and updating the titles on issues to make them more specific. Feel free to edit my edit if it's not to your liking. This is to make browsing issues a lot more pleasant."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:00:36, dariusk renamed issue #10, Sound over meaning.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:00:38, dariusk commented on issue #10, 'Sound over meaning': "Hi, I'm going through and updating the titles on issues to make them more specific. Feel free to edit my edit if it's not to your liking. This is to make browsing issues a lot more pleasant."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:01:01, dariusk renamed issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:01:06, dariusk commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "Hi, I'm going through and updating the titles on issues to make them more specific. Feel free to edit my edit if it's not to your liking. This is to make browsing issues a lot more pleasant."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:01:35, dariusk renamed issue #13, Travelogue.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:01:37, dariusk commented on issue #13, 'Travelogue': "Hi, I'm going through and updating the titles on issues to make them more specific. Feel free to edit my edit if it's not to your liking. This is to make browsing issues a lot more pleasant."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:02:46, dariusk labeled issue #17, Language Survey 2015.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:07:36, zachwhalen renamed issue #4, Using a password dump for a corpus.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:09:50, dariusk labeled issue #37, Can we have labels to better categorize issues?.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:10:19, dariusk commented on issue #37, 'Can we have labels to better categorize issues?': "@neauoire I've added an admin label to this issue since it's meta-discussion. You might want to open a new issue for your own participation in the event."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:10:19, neauoire mentioned issue #37, Can we have labels to better categorize issues?.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:10:19, neauoire subscribed to issue #37, Can we have labels to better categorize issues?.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:10:50, dariusk commented on issue #31, 'Since I can't actually write 50k words of stuff I'll code something that does it for me': "Haha, nice title."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:11:12, dariusk commented on issue #35, 'i'm so unbelievably intimidated but why the h*ck not, let's do this.': "It's okay, I'm intimidated every year."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:11:47, dariusk renamed issue #36, Using the mysterious "All Junky Pages" corpus.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:11:49, dariusk commented on issue #36, 'Using the mysterious "All Junky Pages" corpus': "Hi, I'm going through and updating the titles on issues to make them more specific. Feel free to edit my edit if it's not to your liking. This is to make browsing issues a lot more pleasant."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:12:15, dariusk renamed issue #40, Simulationist Fantasy Novel.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:12:16, dariusk commented on issue #40, 'Simulationist Fantasy Novel': "Hi, I'm going through and updating the titles on issues to make them more specific. Feel free to edit my edit if it's not to your liking. This is to make browsing issues a lot more pleasant."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:14:04, bcj renamed issue #3, An Attempt to Exhaust Memory to Simulate a Place to Attempt to Exhaust.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:16:13, bcj commented on issue #3, 'An Attempt to Exhaust Memory to Simulate a Place to Attempt to Exhaust': "Alright, I've pretty much settled on the idea that my main focus for NaNoGenMo will be simulating a city that I can generate a description of. Although I am reserving the right to about face once I recognize the logistics of that goal. I also do plan to spend some time playing with that Twitter data set because that's just cool"

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:17:24, enkiv2 commented on issue #3, 'An Attempt to Exhaust Memory to Simulate a Place to Attempt to Exhaust': "Will you be simulating the people in the city, or will this be more of a SimCity kind of view?

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 3:16 PM Brendan Curran-Johnson < notifications@github.com> wrote:

Alright, I've pretty much settled on the idea that my main focus for NaNoGenMo will be simulating a city that I can generate a description of. Although I am reserving the right to about face once I recognize the logistics of that goal. I also do plan to spend some time playing with that Twitter data set because that's just cool

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#3 (comment) .

"

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:19:17, s-knob commented on issue #3, 'An Attempt to Exhaust Memory to Simulate a Place to Attempt to Exhaust': "If it's alright with you, I might take on that idea of exhausting a moment. I looked into the novel you mentioned and it is truly fascinating."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:28:11, s-knob subscribed to issue #3, An Attempt to Exhaust Memory to Simulate a Place to Attempt to Exhaust.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:28:11, s-knob mentioned issue #3, An Attempt to Exhaust Memory to Simulate a Place to Attempt to Exhaust.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 15:28:11, bcj commented on issue #3, 'An Attempt to Exhaust Memory to Simulate a Place to Attempt to Exhaust': "My current idea is that I would like to make a top-down simulation a city, but for (at least some of) the people who cross into the narrator's view, simulate them on an individual level. I don't have any experience in this kind of stuff, so I have a good feel yet for what kinds of things are going to be possible though. I am excited about that

@s-knob: please do. Even if I end up doing stuff with a moment, I feel like any two implementations would be different and interesting in their own right"

On Tue Oct 27 2015 16:39:13, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #10, 'Sound over meaning': "Once there was a novel and you could tell it was a novel because it said was a novel right on the cover so you could know it was a novel and not another kind of book and it was full of words some that were old and some that were new old words that people had seen and new words that people had not seen so the new words were novel and it was novel and it was a novel."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 16:51:11, ojahnn commented on issue #10, 'Sound over meaning': "Ha, yes. Something like that. Someone on the #botALLY slack had a much easier idea:

roseisa

"

On Tue Oct 27 2015 16:55:51, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #14, 'The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body': "I am, despite some recent rants that might imply the contrary, still interested in templates and templating.

A still-born portion of the proppian generator last year was a conversation -- I had hoped to expand it, but never got around to it. Perhaps that.

I'm also still interested in Fairy Tales.

In particular, a portion of some tales where the hero befriends several characters/creatures [despite (his) haste or advice] which then end up helping him get through a nested problem. Eg, the giant's heart is kept in a box at the top of a tower on an island in a lake past the thorns, past a guard-dragon, etc etc. I'd like to be able to generate a n-level deep problem with associated helper characters -- each of whom would have to have an attribute matched to solving the problem (bear kills dragon, eagle flies hero over lake, etc.). This would also involve some minimal conversations.

Not exactly fascinating textually when strung out to 50K words, but I'm curious to see how a deeply nested problem would work -- say, 300 levels with unique creates, and problems to overcome.

"

On Tue Oct 27 2015 17:14:35, dariusk commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "Someone (I believe @jkirchartz) posted this link to an actual spam blog comment generator template that was accidentally posted as a comment on a guy's blog."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 17:14:35, JKirchartz subscribed to issue #1, Resources.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 17:14:35, JKirchartz mentioned issue #1, Resources.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 17:36:20, JKirchartz subscribed to issue #1, Resources.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 17:36:20, JKirchartz mentioned issue #1, Resources.

On Tue Oct 27 2015 17:36:20, enkiv2 commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "There is a generator for hilariously poorly written sex scenes http://www.fiftyshadesgenerator.com/. The source is embedded in the page there.

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 4:14 PM Darius Kazemi notifications@github.com wrote:

Someone (I believe @jkirchartz https://github.com/jkirchartz) posted this link to an actual spam blog comment generator template http://alexking.org/blog/2013/12/22/spam-comment-generator-script that was accidentally posted as a comment on a guy's blog.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#1 (comment) .

"

On Tue Oct 27 2015 19:01:50, MaxBittker commented on issue #5, 'char-rnn + Interactive Fiction + scraped news': "Update: Some corpus’s I’m considering are:

"gamer-tag" lists from early 2000's

wiktionary

wikiquotes

building storifies from random comment chains on twitter (is this invasive?)"

On Tue Oct 27 2015 22:41:39, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #10, 'Sound over meaning': "I've found that feeding very repetitive simple sentences with a markov generator gives very Steinian output.

http://www.xradiograph.com/netart/017.html?content=test&ngram=5 [it's character based, so ngram=2 is... not English; initial page-load is g-dawful, since I shoved 2 gutenberg texts in there.)

Which uses the input of as an apple is to a beta, this bridge is over the any hill. who says? she says! so says the soothsayer rapunzel. As Brad the Bard and Ken knew, the can-can can not know how to do it like an apple, like a bridge, like a beast of burden with a heavy load. And so what? The bald bearded bard sings a braided tale of happiness, of woe, of bitter embargoed apples on a barge passing under a bridegroom's bridge by a tepid, vapid moon. His beer is here, and all ale is well, hale, and hearty. This is not my bridge, it is your bridge, your toll bridge, your tool for trolls and travellers. I see you singing, Bradley Bard, I hear you. Your embalmer blames the bridge, his badge is barely adequate for the aqueduct, he ducks his dock responsibilities badly, baldly. Who is the third that walks beside you? How is he known, and how can he see in the dark (if, in fact, he can.) All what? All right, that is okay, he said.

I... I'm not quite sure how I wrote that in the first place.

The code for that is here, although the markov engine is elsewhere."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 22:51:33, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #14, 'The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body': "Repo, man."

On Tue Oct 27 2015 23:29:04, bcj subscribed to issue #24, An attempt to exhaust a moment..

On Tue Oct 27 2015 23:29:04, bcj mentioned issue #24, An attempt to exhaust a moment..

On Tue Oct 27 2015 23:29:21, s-knob renamed issue #24, An attempt to exhaust a moment..

On Wed Oct 28 2015 06:27:01, cpressey renamed issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Wed Oct 28 2015 06:33:51, cpressey commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "While there will certainly be similarities, my third goal is to not just end up re-writing The Swallows. I was looking through that code yesterday, seeing how much of it could be re-used. Very little, I think.

My background is programming languages, so I have a hard time not seeing a story generator as a kind of compiler.

A typical compiler is structured as a pipeline with a number of phases. The process for writing a story is much messier, but in a broad sense it too is a "pipeline", from idea to outline to draft to finished work.

In fact a story-writing pipeline is in some ways the inverse of a compiler pipeline.

A compiler takes a readable text and turns it into an incoherent blob. A writer takes an incoherent blob and turns it into a readable text.

One of the first things a compiler often does is strip comments from the source code and throw them away, because they're not crucial to the result. One of the last things a writer might do is add commentary that's not crucial to the story.

One of the last things a compiler does is optimize the generated code to make it shorter and more efficient. One of the first things a writer might do is complicate the plot to make it longer and more interesting.

Somewhere in the middle of the compiler, it might check that the program does not contain certain errors, like assigning a string value to an integer variable. Somewhere in the middle of writing a story, a writer might check that the characters are not doing something that, in that scene, would not be possible.

And so forth. The similarities really are rather remarkable.

"

On Wed Oct 28 2015 08:28:31, enkiv2 commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "Of course, since most of these operations are generative, if a single pass fluffs out a summary and checks continuity, you could just run the same pass over and over on an arbitrarily small summary until you had 50k words ;-)

On Wed, Oct 28, 2015 at 6:33 AM Chris Pressey notifications@github.com wrote:

While there will certainly be similarities, my third goal is to not just end up re-writing The Swallows. I was looking through that code yesterday, seeing how much of it could be re-used. Very little, I think.

My background is programming languages, so I have a hard time not seeing a story generator as a kind of compiler.

A typical compiler is structured as a pipeline with a number of phases. The process for writing a story is much messier, but in a broad sense it too is a "pipeline", from idea to outline to draft to finished work.

In fact a story-writing pipeline is in some ways the inverse of a compiler pipeline.

A compiler takes a readable text and turns it into an incoherent blob. A writer takes an incoherent blob and turns it into a readable text.

One of the first things a compiler often does is strip comments from the source code and throw them away, because they're not crucial to the result. One of the last things a writer might do is add commentary that's not crucial to the story.

One of the last things a compiler does is optimize the generated code to make it shorter and more efficient. One of the first things a writer might do is complicate the plot to make it longer and more interesting.

Somewhere in the middle of the compiler, it might check that the program does not contain certain errors, like assigning a string value to an integer variable. Somewhere in the middle of writing a story, a writer might check that the characters are not doing something that, in that scene, would not be possible.

And so forth. The similarities really are rather remarkable.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#11 (comment) .

"

On Wed Oct 28 2015 09:25:59, malantonio opened a new issue called surrealist pulp mystery novel?. It has a rank of 5.

On Wed Oct 28 2015 09:27:21, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #36, 'Using the mysterious "All Junky Pages" corpus': "That's weird.

I note they had one take-down request that was not honored."

On Wed Oct 28 2015 09:41:43, amarriner opened a new issue called Intent!. It has a rank of 5.

On Wed Oct 28 2015 10:37:40, cpressey commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "Sure, except (continuing with the compiler analogy) most compilers aren't designed to take as input that which they generate as output.

I certainly wasn't planning on building anything that could read a novel!"

On Wed Oct 28 2015 11:49:45, hangedmandesign opened a new issue called Recounting the Long Road to the Dark North. It has a rank of 7.

On Wed Oct 28 2015 11:54:16, hangedmandesign renamed issue #44, Recounting the Long Road to the Dark North.

On Wed Oct 28 2015 12:04:03, ikarth commented on issue #15, 'Virgil's Commonplace Book': "# Postmortem of Previous Projects

For this, the third NaNoGenMo, I've been trying to brainstorm an approach builds on some of the things I was aiming for in my two previous attempts.

Gutenberg Shuffle, and the related results from 2013, were based on the idea that stealing sentence-level content from existing texts would be more cohesive. Feeding those sentences into a generator and replacing names with a list of proper nouns culled from an analysis of the complete text would theoretically result in a novel about a recurring cast of characters who could take any action that was described somewhere in the source text.

I had some dreams about adding some context to the individual sentences, either through a hand annotation process, or some kind of automated analysis, so that the characters would have some idea of which actions belonged together. This didn't happen. Still an interesting idea, but very ambitious.

I also wanted to add the ability to draw dialogue from the source text, but I ran out of month before I could successfully implement the analysis to scrape the dialogue in the format I needed it to be in.

I do like the idea of titling the chapters based on analysis of the contents. In this case it was just the longest word in the chapter, but I think the general principle of layering generators on top of each other is a potentially powerful approach. While it's hard to extract meaningful context from arbitrary text, it's much easier to extract something relevant from text that you've generated, particularly if you still have the metadata.

English gender and tense are also kind of annoying when you're trying to parse arbitrary text. Having a great really good library to deal with that, and other similar fiddly bits can probably go a long way into speeding experimentation.

For 2014, I switched approaches. The limitation of generating data based on arbitrary source text was that it lacked any kind of larger structure. I decided that a recursive series of nested generators, patterned after the manner of the 1001 Arabian Nights, would be a good starting point.

The primary generator borrowed some concepts from 2013, such as the characters who had concepts of outputting sentences that represent actions that they took, but in a more hand-scripted way. (I had ideas of training them to use arbitrary input sentences again, but once again discovered that that took a lot of time.)

The basic design was a modular set of text generators, any of which could feed into each other. Most of the month was taken up with the framework for the different generators. So by the end only three generators were actually implemented: the storytelling generator, the Library of Babel generator, and the exploring a maze generator. To really pull off the concept, I think the planned but not implemented modules that told more detailed stories or parts of stories would've gone a long way to getting more interesting results.

One bit about the maze generator that I like is that the maze that they are exploring is the actual data structure of the story that they're inhabiting. Each node in the data structure is a room in the maze. The rooms and decoration of the labyrinth use the properties of the current node in the data structure as a seed for the random template, so exploring the same data structure will result in the same maze. I like the way that it gives an additional layer of meaning, though I'm afraid this is mostly obscured by the labyrinth being somewhat repetitive and without a lot of action going on other than exploring and reading randomly generated books.

I'm tempted to take the basic framework and start implementing a bunch of new and improved modules that take the project in a different direction, but there's been a lot of tools released in the past year or so in other languages that makes some of the basic text fiddling or analysis tasks easier so I'm also tempted to switch to something like Python."

On Wed Oct 28 2015 12:04:29, ikarth renamed issue #15, Virgil's Commonplace Book.

On Wed Oct 28 2015 14:34:39, bcj commented on issue #15, 'Virgil's Commonplace Book': "Having not participated in NaNoGenMo before, I found this very useful/interesting. Thanks for this"

On Wed Oct 28 2015 14:53:34, TheCommieDuck renamed issue #22, Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours.

On Wed Oct 28 2015 15:25:57, TheCommieDuck subscribed to issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Wed Oct 28 2015 15:25:57, cpressey commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "(Excuse my "designblogging" but it helps give me something to do to stop myself from jumping the gun and starting too early! Am chomping at the bit, can you tell? Trying to keep each post reasonably short.)

If the "novel compiler" doesn't take a written text as input, I suppose that raises the question of what it does take as input.

One answer could be "nothing, it's just a generator, you just run it," which might be literally true, but it doesn't really answer the question.

A more satisfying answer would be that it takes an outline of a plot, in some kind of data format, as input, even if that outline is hardcoded or randomly generated in the compiler itself.

It then refines that plot by iteratively rewriting it, stepwise, into increasingly more detailed plots. Once it has a detailed enough plot, it rewrites that into a series of events, and in the end rewrites those into sentences. I suppose this is a top-down, plot-driven approach, as @TheCommieDuck described it.

About these plots... (kind of thinking out loud here...)

The "seed plot" that the compiler starts with could be as skeletal as The Hero's Journey.

Or maybe even more basic, like, the "null story":

Once upon a time, they lived happily ever after. The end.

From there, you just keep inserting subplots into it. I'm still weighing ideas about exactly how to accomplish this process. I might write more about it later."

On Wed Oct 28 2015 15:25:57, TheCommieDuck mentioned issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Wed Oct 28 2015 16:18:43, tra38 opened a new issue called The Atheists Who Believe In God. It has a rank of 40. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Wed Oct 28 2015 16:19:28, dariusk commented on issue #45, 'The Atheists Who Believe In God': "Cool concept!!"

On Wed Oct 28 2015 16:38:25, BrianHicks opened a new issue called An Anthology of Fake Speeches. It has a rank of 10.

On Wed Oct 28 2015 19:08:33, ikarth commented on issue #46, 'An Anthology of Fake Speeches': "Those are all good ideas. I'd guess that how easy they are depends on which aspect of text generation you want to dive into. I'd rate them as going from hardest to easiest, though that's partially colored by my biases:

  • Making a book of speeches is probably the easiest, depending on how you go about it. A basic Markov chain randomization and some interesting source text is the most straightforward way, but there are an infinite number of ways you can approach this. Lots of unexplored ideas for getting it to make sense.

  • Medium difficulty is the poems. There are libraries that can help with detecting meter and rhyme, of various levels of accuracy; check the resource threads for a few of them. Or you can write your own if that's the part that interests you, since it's not a perfectly solved problem.

  • I'm personally biased towards the simulation approach at the moment...mostly because I haven't successfully gotten it to work yet. So that's probably the hardest, though it likely varies based on the quality of the prose you're aiming for. Also, this is probably going to be the approach that's most concerned with the larger structure of the text and least concerned about the fiddly linguistic details. Though again, that'll very based on how you design it.

Either way, looking forward to seeing what you come up with."

On Wed Oct 28 2015 19:46:52, saluk opened a new issue called Three people walk into a bar. It has a rank of 12. There's a preview available.

On Wed Oct 28 2015 22:15:56, ikarth commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "One thing I was playing with in past projects was embedding metadata about the generation in the outputted text, and then performing a last cleanup phase before the actual final output. So there would be a bunch of bracketed tags scattered around marking things that could potentially be expanded. And the last step stripped the bracketed text out or reduced it to its default.

I never fully implemented the idea, but it might be useful for your novel compiler."

On Thu Oct 29 2015 08:22:47, mewo2 commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "One solution to the problem of passes being able to read their own output would be to take a leaf from LLVM and have a single intermediate representation (e.g. a list of events), which most passes use for both input and output. You can munge this repeatedly until your novel is complex enough, then run a single final pass which converts to prose."

On Thu Oct 29 2015 08:43:55, tra38 commented on issue #16, 'Combining generative grammars with plot templates': "On GenText, I hand-wrote some examples of "fixed" passages that can be randomly assembled and then linked together by transitions. The end result is that you can get different plots, which make sense because of the transitions. Recently, I got time to convert my handwritten approach into an algorithm (which you can see here). I am doubtful if this approach can scale up to 50,000 words, but I am likely going to use this approach for the Dartmouth Turing Test for the Creative Arts.

My idea of organizing plot by random reordering of passages came from a 1990's computer program: Dramatica. Dramatica is a computer program that is able to generate out a fairy complex outline for a "grand argument story", though it does expect you to use that outline to handwrite out the story. Each outline has 4 subplots, and each subplot represents a certain "theme" (let's say Manipulation). Each subplot is composed of four different "acts", each representing a certain aspect of 'Manipulation''. However, it is the order of these acts that matter in determining the effect of the subplot on the greater plot. Obviously, Dramatica is a far more complex program than just randomly shuffling events within an array and then popping them out. There are additional rules involved to ensure that the "grand argument story" is logical and has no holes that a reader can use to attack its point. But most of these rules have nothing to do with the organization of the plot structure, and everything to do with how it is presented within the text (characterization, etc.)."

On Thu Oct 29 2015 09:10:09, benblankley opened a new issue called Newbie ready to try this out. It has a rank of 30. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Thu Oct 29 2015 09:13:22, TheCommieDuck renamed issue #22, Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours.

On Thu Oct 29 2015 09:20:10, mewo2 subscribed to issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Thu Oct 29 2015 09:20:10, cpressey commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "@ikarth My understanding is that this (embedding structured data inside unstructured text) was one of the original use cases for XML, though it's probably under-used these days.

I don't currently see foresee myself having a huge need for this, but if it becomes desirable, I'll keep that idea in mind, thanks.

@mewo2 I'm currently thinking of the individual passes as purely internal rewriting operations on whatever data structures happen to be convenient at that point in the pipeline. But if the whole novel-model becomes too much to hold in memory, I suppose I will have to think about reading and writing intermediate representations, yeah."

On Thu Oct 29 2015 09:20:10, mewo2 mentioned issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Thu Oct 29 2015 09:20:10, ikarth subscribed to issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Thu Oct 29 2015 09:20:10, ikarth mentioned issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Thu Oct 29 2015 09:31:56, MichaelPaulukonis subscribed to issue #22, Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours.

On Thu Oct 29 2015 09:31:56, MichaelPaulukonis mentioned issue #22, Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours.

On Thu Oct 29 2015 09:31:56, TheCommieDuck commented on issue #22, 'Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours': "After spending a while awake in bed thinking, I've decided on two driving points:

a) Given how much work people have put into narrative generation and yet even the best academic systems aren't there yet, trying to do something of that scale in a month is silly.

b) I'm a borderline perfectionist and wouldn't be overly happy with something 'meh' just because I tried doing far too much.

As such, I'm still going to be trying to do far too much! But...differently!

A rough overview of my plans - for now:

1- Get a very rough propp-based plot. Translate the plots into goals (e.g. the 'return' Propp function is a goal to end up at location X).

2- Throw in a whole bunch of characters, locations, objects, etc. I'll see if a corpus exists, otherwise I'll probably manually find some from e.g. IF games.

3- Give each character a small number of emotions and beliefs - e.g. hunger, safety, greed, whatever. This is the novel bit, I think. it's also the bit most likely to completely fall flat.

4- Let the characters run amok ala The Swallows (which I must say is absolutely brilliant and has given me and my friends a sore throat from laughing).

5- Generate the story - which, I am hoping, might end up looking a little like something from dwarf fortress. Everyone loves a dwarf grabbing a goblin by the tongue with their pinky, ripping it out, and beating them to death with it!

  1. shouldn't be too hard - the resource list in @MichaelPaulukonis' NaNoGenMo2014 is absolutely staggering. Originally I was talking about using Plotto for a plot, but that's just going to lead to extreme templatisation - something I don't really want at all.

  2. also shouldn't be bad. Worst case? Grab an ontology or similar and go to town. Could be downright hilarious if, for instance, the hero really needs to go collect the magical Acetaldehyde Ethyl Phenylethyl Acetal by riding in his Alfa Romeo 155. Which goes about 5mph.

  3. This is where it all falls down, I imagine. I've been interested in this kindof model but never really looked into it. We'll have to see!

  4. Shouldn't be too hard. Just got to make sure I add some kind of urgency so we don't get them running around in circles for too long.

  5. Also not too bad.

Anyway, we'll see."

On Thu Oct 29 2015 09:49:55, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "I note that many of the classic Narrative generators generated their world + stories, and had another independent system that "translated" them into more natural language. For example, TALE-SPIN:

2015-10-29 09_47_59-inside computer understanding_ five programs plus miniatures - r c schank c

(source)

It's a lot more complicated than this, but I can't find back an example/citation right now. Multiple sentences about the current world-state would be combined (JOE WAS IN THE CAVE. JOE KNEW HE WAS IN THE CAVE. THE CAVE WAS DARK. THE CAVE HAD AN EXIT. JOE KNEW THE CAVE WAS DARK. JOE WANTED TO BE IN THE LIGHT. JOE KNEW THE CAVE HAD AN EXIT. => Joe wanted to get out of the cave and into the light.)"

On Thu Oct 29 2015 09:55:08, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #22, 'Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours': "Flattered!

I think you're working in a reasonable direction for a month-long project. Seeing the bodies of academic work on small-scale text generation can be humbling. Especially when I don't understand the bulk of their work. But I love the angle of attack that NaNoGenMo brings to the problem - sideways, cargo-cult, worst-practices surface-FX that leap-frog over academic problems to get to a semi-readable end-point. Eliza is dumb from an AI standpoint, but continues to be an important touchstone, showing how simple effects can be used (believed, read, whatever) by a non-academic user/reader.

And am a bit jealous, because I have no clear goal yet for this month..... I think scaling back to a single type of story might be interesting (The Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body or Koschei the Deathless). Not necessarily the output, but I might find it interesting to work on."

On Thu Oct 29 2015 09:55:29, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #48, 'Newbie ready to try this out': "Welcome aboard!"

On Thu Oct 29 2015 10:01:24, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #16, 'Combining generative grammars with plot templates': "> I am doubtful if this approach can scale up to 50,000 words

A collection of short stories, with optional inter-connecting material is one solution. There were a bunch of small-pieces-collected-at-length submitted last year (mine amongst them). I had considered a framing device of a reader reading the book in a mansion's library as intro and outro, with minor sentences between stories, but never got around to it. There's a good tradition of this sort of thing. Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, etc. "

On Thu Oct 29 2015 10:05:23, TheCommieDuck commented on issue #22, 'Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours': "I'm also a massive contender for an award titled 'person who has never understood the idea of scope'; I seem to always end up with 'I should do X, maybe Y...oh look, now it is a 30 year project'.

Just really hoping I'm able to catch myself in time if this turns out to be overly ambitious. I'm imagining scale back approaches:

  • have a single plot if I can't goal-ise Propp

  • hardcode characters, objects, locations, etc

  • I really dunno if I can scale back the next 2. I think it's the key point I really want to focus on for this. I'd imagine that if it is the scale-back point, it can be taken down to maybe a couple of easy parameters.

  • Obviously text generation can be replaced with predicates (man move room, rather than sentences describing it).

"

On Thu Oct 29 2015 10:53:44, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #22, 'Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours': "I really wish I had worked harder on characters, objects, locations, etc. in the early stages of my propp-gen. That would have made things a lot easier. With a landscape/world movement can be done - and descriptive expansion is "easier" to tack on once that exists."

On Thu Oct 29 2015 11:49:24, marythought opened a new issue called "Where I'm From" poem & novel generator. It has a rank of 45. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Thu Oct 29 2015 11:52:21, dariusk commented on issue #49, '"Where I'm From" poem & novel generator': "he's such a card"

On Thu Oct 29 2015 12:20:35, hugovk commented on issue #49, '"Where I'm From" poem & novel generator': "You can download CDs and DVDs of Project Gutenberg books here:

https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_CD_and_DVD_Project

I didn't know there is a Google Books API, I'll have to check it."

On Thu Oct 29 2015 13:00:46, ikarth commented on issue #15, 'Virgil's Commonplace Book': "Given some of the recent discussion of template expansion, I should note that part of the plan in 2014 was to generate the story as a Lisp data structure (In this case, Clojure vectors containing strings and maps) and then expand individual elements as needed. In practice, this turned out to be more complex to implement than it sounded. I still like the idea, I just think that it probably needs to be implemented first, before I try to build the rest of the system.

The other downside of working with Clojure was that the native text fiddling tools aren't as developed as Python's and I didn't have the time to explore Java's ecosystem thoroughly enough to make up for it."

On Thu Oct 29 2015 13:01:48, Srol opened a new issue called I'll try. It has a rank of 6.

On Thu Oct 29 2015 13:14:54, enkiv2 commented on issue #50, 'I'll try': "The low end of the effort spectrum for NaNoGenMo is much lower than that of NaNoWriMo, and the high end much higher. I fully expect to see five or six completely novels by 2AM November 1st, as people put something quick and dirty together to get completing an entry out of the way, so that they can more seriously persue their more interesting ideas without worrying too much about them ever even producing text.

On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 1:01 PM Patrick Hogan notifications@github.com wrote:

But if my participation goes as well as when I did the real NaNoWriMo, expect me not to finish.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#50.

"

On Thu Oct 29 2015 15:13:27, bredfern opened a new issue called 1940s la horror noire. It has a rank of 24. There's a preview available.

On Thu Oct 29 2015 15:18:37, enkiv2 commented on issue #51, '1940s la horror noire': "Looking forward to it!

On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 3:13 PM Brian Redfern notifications@github.com wrote:

Well that's the idea but likely going to be very naked lunch esque, an excuse to attempt something really interesting with node + react

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#51.

"

On Thu Oct 29 2015 17:43:13, allentran opened a new issue called Longtime generator of junk text, first time participant. It has a rank of 5.

On Thu Oct 29 2015 20:30:58, aferriss opened a new issue called speech to text --> text to speech loop. It has a rank of 8.

On Thu Oct 29 2015 22:59:00, tra38 commented on issue #45, 'The Atheists Who Believe In God': "Created a repo with some licensing information (Pew Survey is very protective of its data, and I can't blame them).

Pew Forum hired a polling firm to call 35,556 people in the continental USA, meaning that I happen to have a very rich dataset. I manage to extract out 99 atheists who believe in God and save them into my own personal *.CSV file. I need 505 words for each atheist to produce a 50,000-word novel."

On Fri Oct 30 2015 00:30:32, hugovk commented on issue #53, 'speech to text --> text to speech loop': "Interesting, a bit like Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room."

On Fri Oct 30 2015 07:03:03, cpressey opened a new issue called Spin-offs and related activities (admin issue). It has a rank of 6. But it's an admin issue, so who cares?

On Fri Oct 30 2015 07:04:19, cpressey commented on issue #54, 'Spin-offs and related activities (admin issue)': "PROCJAM 2015 starts on November 7 2015 and lasts for 9 days.

"

On Fri Oct 30 2015 07:20:32, cpressey commented on issue #54, 'Spin-offs and related activities (admin issue)': "I've just created a repo for NaOpGenMo 2015. I don't know how much time I'll have to contribute or administrate it, but if, after generating your novel, you think it would make a good libretto... or if you just want to generate some music instead of some text... feel free to open an issue on it."

On Fri Oct 30 2015 07:53:03, cpressey commented on issue #46, 'An Anthology of Fake Speeches': "I like the speeches idea, probably because speeches are heavy on rhetoric. It would be interesting to see how much (if any) of that "oratory voice" remains after combining multiple speeches (even ones on vastly different topics) in some way."

On Fri Oct 30 2015 08:01:05, cpressey commented on issue #13, 'Travelogue': "I remember thinking when I read Kerouac's On the road last year that there were fairly long stretches in it that seemed quite amenable to generation.

"I got off the truck in Foosberg and I had 80 cents in my pocket. I spent 5 cents on coffee and 15 cents on a slice of pie and fell asleep in a field. The next day, I hitched a ride with a fellow in a blue Buick. In the back was the beatest dog I ever laid eyes on. He could only take me as far as Barsville..."

"

On Fri Oct 30 2015 08:23:19, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "See sample code in various languages via the Language Survey, issue #17 "

On Fri Oct 30 2015 09:15:49, enkiv2 commented on issue #54, 'Spin-offs and related activities (admin issue)': "Do all november generative music experiments go under NaOpGenMo even if they are not truly operatic (i.e., if they omit lyrics)? Or, should generative music be it's own thing?

Some of the most interesting things in NaNoGenMo2014 were graphic novels, which of course could not meet the 50k word criterion. A NaCoGenMo with a 150 page qualification (i.e., approximately what a volume of manga from Tokyopop would contain, or a trade paperback of a DC or Marvel comic collecting part of a normal run rather than a shorter miniseries) might be interesting in of itself.

If you or Mike don't have a particular interest in hosting these, I can.

On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 7:20 AM Chris Pressey notifications@github.com wrote:

I've just created a repo for NaOpGenMo 2015 https://github.com/cpressey/NaOpGenMo-2015. I don't know how much time I'll have to contribute or administrate it, but if, after generating your novel, you think it would make a good libretto... or if you just want to generate some music instead of some text... feel free to open an issue on it.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#54 (comment) .

"

On Fri Oct 30 2015 09:16:52, dariusk mentioned issue #54, Spin-offs and related activities (admin issue).

On Fri Oct 30 2015 09:16:52, dariusk subscribed to issue #54, Spin-offs and related activities (admin issue).

On Fri Oct 30 2015 09:19:59, enkiv2 commented on issue #9, 'Press Coverage': "I guess blog posts count as press coverage? I wrote this a while back: https://medium.com/@enkiv2/the-hidden-benefits-of-nanogenmo-dd91193bda6#.d3cy9qbwr"

On Fri Oct 30 2015 09:20:35, muffinista commented on issue #13, 'Travelogue': "Yeah I actually tried that in 2013 but ran out of time I think, and I know there's at least one generative-style OTR out in the wild. I think this will be a little different, I'll try and add details here before I actually write any code hehe."

On Fri Oct 30 2015 09:26:04, enkiv2 commented on issue #46, 'An Anthology of Fake Speeches': "There have been prior examples of trying to generate speeches that have been fairly successful. I specifically recall someone using char-rnn with all of Obama's speeches, and again with TED talks; the TED talks ended up being less coherent in terms of topic but otherwise very stylisitically similar to normal TED talks, and comparable in the amount of content to the low end of TED talks: https://medium.com/@samim/ted-rnn-machine-generated-ted-talks-3dd682b894c0

This indicates that, with a larger corpus (say, the set of all state of the union addresses -- which are in the public domain & available from several sources), you could probably produce significantly more complex & interesting speeches.

On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 7:53 AM Chris Pressey notifications@github.com wrote:

I like the speeches idea, probably because speeches are heavy on rhetoric. It would be interesting to how much (if any) of that "oratory voice" remains after combining multiple speeches (even ones on vastly different topics) in some way.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#46 (comment) .

"

On Fri Oct 30 2015 09:43:02, whitten commented on issue #9, 'Press Coverage': "Thank you for the Interesting blog article. You referenced something called a "cut-up" what is it?"

On Fri Oct 30 2015 09:57:14, ikarth commented on issue #46, 'An Anthology of Fake Speeches': "Not to mention you can throw in, say, Mark Twain's speeches if you're looking for a less serious result.

There is, on the other hand, a certain purity to the idea of the Ur-State-of-the-Union speech."

On Fri Oct 30 2015 10:00:32, JKirchartz opened a new issue called Throwing in my hat. It has a rank of 7.

On Fri Oct 30 2015 10:00:42, JKirchartz renamed issue #55, Throwing in my hat.

On Fri Oct 30 2015 10:02:41, ikarth commented on issue #9, 'Press Coverage': "Slightly off-topic for this thread, but the cut-up technique is a Dadaist method of generating text. There's a number of past artistic movements--including Dada, Surrealism, and OuLiPo--that are relevant to text generation.

On topic, if blog posts count, I've been covering past entries on my procedural generation blog for a while."

On Fri Oct 30 2015 10:05:31, enkiv2 commented on issue #9, 'Press Coverage': "Information on cut-up techniques might actually be on-topic for the resources thread. While they've been around for a while (even in the context of generative text), a lot of people are coming at this without a strong background in the history of experimental and semi-mechanical text generation (along with the movements that produced some of the forms of constrained fiction that a lot of generative text experiments come out of).

On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 9:43 AM David Whitten notifications@github.com wrote:

Thank you for the Interesting blog article. You referenced something called a "cut-up" what is it?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#9 (comment) .

"

On Fri Oct 30 2015 10:07:12, cpressey commented on issue #54, 'Spin-offs and related activities (admin issue)': "@enkiv2 That's kind of like asking if generative text experiments go under NaNoGenMo even if they are not truly in the form of a novel.

From NaOpGenMo-2015's README (unchanged from last year):

The "opera" is defined however you want. It could be 50,000 beats of middle C played on a clarinet (or, if you are the sort of person for whom an opera must include singing, 50,000 chants of "Meow!" by a tenor.) It could literally grab a random opera from Project Brandenburg The Internet Archive. It doesn't matter, as long as it's at least two and a half hours long.

"

On Fri Oct 30 2015 10:07:12, enkiv2 subscribed to issue #54, Spin-offs and related activities (admin issue).

On Fri Oct 30 2015 10:07:12, enkiv2 mentioned issue #54, Spin-offs and related activities (admin issue).

On Fri Oct 30 2015 10:09:47, enkiv2 commented on issue #54, 'Spin-offs and related activities (admin issue)': "OK, so all generative music experiments can go under NaOpGenMo

On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 10:07 AM Chris Pressey notifications@github.com wrote:

@enkiv2 https://github.com/enkiv2 That's kind of like asking if generative text experiments go under NaNoGenMo even if they are not truly in the form of a novel.

From NaOpGenMo-2015's README (unchanged from last year):

The "opera" is defined however you want. It could be 50,000 beats of middle C played on a clarinet (or, if you are the sort of person for whom an opera must include singing, 50,000 chants of "Meow!" by a tenor.) It could literally grab a random opera from Project Brandenburg The Internet Archive. It doesn't matter, as long as it's at least two and a half hours long.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#54 (comment) .

"

On Fri Oct 30 2015 10:09:47, enkiv2 subscribed to issue #54, Spin-offs and related activities (admin issue).

On Fri Oct 30 2015 10:09:47, enkiv2 mentioned issue #54, Spin-offs and related activities (admin issue).

On Fri Oct 30 2015 11:01:05, ikarth commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "@enkiv2 suggested that a short introduction to some historical techniques might be useful in the resources thread to point out possible approaches for people who might not be familiar with some of the precedents of text generation. So I thought I'd write about a few of them.

Dada incorporated several techniques that involved randomly assembling prior texts into new poetry. The cut-up technique takes an existing text, cuts it to pieces, and then reassembles the bits in a new order. This list of Surrealist techniques might also be inspirational.

Oulipo is a group of writers who use constraints to define their writing. Relevant examples include Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems), which combines ten-line sonnets line-by-line; Perec's Life a User's Manual, which is structured like a knight's tour of a chessboard; Queneau's Excercises in Style, 99 retellings of the same story; Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies, stories interperted via Tarot cards; and Queneau's "A Story as You Like It".

Even where they aren't directly generative, the approaches used by Oulipo writers often point to alternative forms a novel can take. For example, Calvino's Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler.

Oulipo is also significant because many of its members wrote about systems for generating stories and about incorporating computers into writing. Italio Calvino's essay "Prose and Anticombinatorics," about using the computer to to find the constraints for a murder mystery; Paul Fournel's "Computer and Writer: The Centre Pompidou Experiment"; and Claude Berge's "For a Potential Analysis of Combinatory Literature" are particularly relevant.

Lastly, Jorges Luis Borges tends to crop up a lot, particularly for his short stories: "The Library of Babel", "The Book of Sand", "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain", "The Garden of Forking Paths", "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"."

On Fri Oct 30 2015 11:01:05, enkiv2 mentioned issue #1, Resources.

On Fri Oct 30 2015 11:01:05, enkiv2 subscribed to issue #1, Resources.

On Fri Oct 30 2015 11:09:30, enkiv2 mentioned issue #54, Spin-offs and related activities (admin issue).

On Fri Oct 30 2015 11:09:30, enkiv2 commented on issue #54, 'Spin-offs and related activities (admin issue)': "Here's a spinoff for comics / image-related generated art with multiple pages: https://github.com/enkiv2/NaCoGenMo

The rules are the same as NaNoGenMo, with the 50k word requirement replaced with a 150 page requirement.

On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 10:09 AM John Ohno john.ohno@gmail.com wrote:

OK, so all generative music experiments can go under NaOpGenMo

On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 10:07 AM Chris Pressey notifications@github.com wrote:

@enkiv2 https://github.com/enkiv2 That's kind of like asking if generative text experiments go under NaNoGenMo even if they are not truly in the form of a novel.

From NaOpGenMo-2015's README (unchanged from last year):

The "opera" is defined however you want. It could be 50,000 beats of middle C played on a clarinet (or, if you are the sort of person for whom an opera must include singing, 50,000 chants of "Meow!" by a tenor.) It could literally grab a random opera from Project Brandenburg The Internet Archive. It doesn't matter, as long as it's at least two and a half hours long.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#54 (comment) .

"

On Fri Oct 30 2015 11:09:30, enkiv2 subscribed to issue #54, Spin-offs and related activities (admin issue).

On Fri Oct 30 2015 11:56:12, dariusk labeled issue #54, Spin-offs and related activities (admin issue).

On Fri Oct 30 2015 12:02:42, dariusk commented on issue #9, 'Press Coverage': "We got a mention in the Fast Forward Labs machine learning newsletter: http://us8.campaign-archive2.com/?u=bdb368b9a389b010c19dbcd54&id=e924d57988 "

On Fri Oct 30 2015 12:50:00, bcj commented on issue #55, 'Throwing in my hat': "I think the Sherlock Shuffle sounds really interesting (and alliterative).

Trisano by Nanni Balestrini might serve as a possible source of inspiration (though you may be aiming for something a little more readable). If I remember right, what Balestrini does is modify references to characters so that they are referred to with pronouns instead of nouns. Then paragraphs can be moved and have different meanings in new contexts. I guess you could even convert pronoun references back into nouns once you knew which character was being referenced in the new context"

On Fri Oct 30 2015 12:57:19, MichaelPaulukonis renamed issue #14, The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body.

On Fri Oct 30 2015 13:30:40, MartinPetkov opened a new issue called Twitter Novel Generator, one day at a time!. It has a rank of 33. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Sat Oct 31 2015 00:36:37, maetl opened a new issue called A Generative Journey. It has a rank of 5.

On Sat Oct 31 2015 04:39:59, hugovk commented on issue #56, 'Twitter Novel Generator, one day at a time!': "Sounds good.

Here's something that used Twitter in a different way last year.

dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014#88

Once you have a topic, this command line/Python tool may be useful for collecting tweets in bulk.

https://github.com/edsu/twarc"

On Sat Oct 31 2015 08:09:10, jamlamberti opened a new issue called I'm in. It has a rank of 6.

On Sat Oct 31 2015 08:10:08, jamlamberti commented on issue #58, 'I'm in': "Might also be interesting to do something with sentiments, so each paragraph or so has a general feel"

On Sat Oct 31 2015 08:26:24, rbechtel opened a new issue called Mechanism: Extended Tale-Spin, Subject: Who knows?. It has a rank of 8.

On Sat Oct 31 2015 09:49:35, ikarth commented on issue #59, 'Mechanism: Extended Tale-Spin, Subject: Who knows?': "Well, I'm definitely interested. I don't think that too many people have used prior storytelling AI research code in NaNoGenMo before. I think it's a very good idea.

At the very least it'll be interesting to contrast the original Tale-Spin approach with how contemporary sensibilities lead you to develop your own spin on it. I feel like the increased literacy about cybertext has opened up new avenues for exploration, and I'm curious about what the results are going to be."

On Sat Oct 31 2015 11:01:07, TheCommieDuck commented on issue #59, 'Mechanism: Extended Tale-Spin, Subject: Who knows?': "Oh hey, I didn't realise source for tale-spin-esque things existed. That's really useful."

On Sat Oct 31 2015 11:19:44, tinyworlds opened a new issue called I'm in!. It has a rank of 12. There's a preview available.

On Sat Oct 31 2015 11:20:42, rbechtel subscribed to issue #22, Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours.

On Sat Oct 31 2015 11:20:42, rbechtel mentioned issue #22, Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours.

On Sat Oct 31 2015 11:20:42, TheCommieDuck commented on issue #22, 'Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours': "I've gotten a copy of Propp and given it a semi-quick read through. It's odd that you can only seem to find the first 2 chapters online; the rest are fairly short, but really interesting. Anyway.

I've fairly decided that I'll be doing this in Prolog. I'm a bit rusty, but it's not exactly a complicated language. It should be especially handy for:

  • constraint stuff when choosing what Proppian functions to pick and choose

  • sanity checking events (a character can't start doing things if they're dead or whatever)

  • picking between things.

If I do encounter serious speed problems, I'm competent enough with the SWI C++ interface to try and work that way. Ideally it won't be needed.

Anyway:

A lot of the Proppian...microfunctions? are rather specific. I might generalise these away; e.g. a4 is 'lack of the egg of death' from 1 tale; RsX seem to be equally specific (help from specific people, or doing specific things).

  • I'm undecided on how to format the functions. Obviously I said from the start I'd translate them into a series of goals/conditions, but not all of them lend themselves well to this.

  • I can't seem to find anything explicitly about what can and can't be negated or contrarian; it makes sense that e.g. the donor's help isn't accepted, but not for it to happen with the Victory (the hero loses? it just..well, breaks the entire structure).

  • Originally I thought multiple moves (story arcs) would be covered easily by the simulation section. However, now I'm less sure. Propp's identified 6 different ways for multiple moves to fit together; I might stick with just sequential ones/interrupting ones, rather than simultaneous plots.

  • The micro-talespin source that @rbechtel linked in their issue is interesting. (http://eliterature.org/images/microtalespin.txt) It could be a good starting point for the simulation side. Things like promises could be very interesting to add in.

I've also thought about how much extra fluff I could (or should) add. I think a story which consists of nothing but absolute key elements - hero, villain, donor, magical artifact, etc - would be dull. However, adding an entirely interactive world with dozens of items, characters, etc might get very clouded. I think I'll err on the side of clouding; otherwise I'm going to - if it even terminates - be very short on things to fit in 50k words."

On Sat Oct 31 2015 12:20:34, ikarth commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "After @rbechtel mentioned the source code for Micro-Talespin, I went poking around to see what other early AI storytelling systems had source code availible.

Micro-Talespin in Common Lisp, by Warren Sack

another source

[About Talespin](http://lispm.de/mts https://grandtextauto.soe.ucsc.edu/2006/09/13/the-story-of-meehans-tale-spin/)

For Tale-Spin itself: In 2008 Meehan found a copy of the original MLisp source code for Tale-Spin (sans the data files). There's an extensive discussion of the source code in Wardrip-Fruin's Expressive Processing, though I'm not aware of any copies online.

Eliza/Doctor:

In Java

Also in Java

BASIC

JavaScript

Python

The original Lisp source code- github repo

Skald: a Scala reimplementation of Minstrel Remixed, which is itself a Scala reimplementation of Scott Turner's Minstrel (originally in Lisp). Scott Turner on MINSTREL.

"

On Sat Oct 31 2015 13:23:43, clarissalittler opened a new issue called I'll try and do this. It has a rank of 7.

On Sat Oct 31 2015 13:26:29, clarissalittler commented on issue #61, 'I'll try and do this': "At the moment I'm thinking of generating something out of tumblr tags. We'll see how sophisticated it can get"

On Sat Oct 31 2015 13:30:41, rbechtel mentioned issue #1, Resources.

On Sat Oct 31 2015 13:30:41, rbechtel subscribed to issue #1, Resources.

On Sat Oct 31 2015 13:30:41, enkiv2 commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "As an example of exercises in minimalism and apophenia, Nick Monfort has a collection of one kilobyte story generators in python. https://grandtextauto.soe.ucsc.edu/2008/11/30/three-1k-story-generators/

On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 11:20 AM Isaac Karth notifications@github.com wrote:

After @rbechtel mentioned the source code for Micro-Talespin dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#59, I went poking around to see what other early AI storytelling systems had source code availible.

Micro-Talespin in Common Lisp, by Warren Sack http://lispm.de/source/misc/micro-talespin.lisp another source http://eliterature.org/images/microtalespin.txt About Talespin http://lispm.de/mts%20https://grandtextauto.soe.ucsc.edu/2006/09/13/the-story-of-meehans-tale-spin/

For Tale-Spin itself https://grandtextauto.soe.ucsc.edu/2006/09/13/the-story-of-meehans-tale-spin/: In 2008 Meehan found a copy of the original MLisp source code for Tale-Spin (sans the data files). There's an extensive discussion of the source code in Wardrip-Fruin's Expressive Processing, though I'm not aware of any copies online.

Eliza/Doctor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA In Java https://code.google.com/p/simple-semantic-desktop/source/browse/trunk/Progs2/Eliza/eliza.java?r=4 Also in Java http://www.chayden.net/eliza/Eliza.html BASIC https://www.jesperjuul.net/eliza/ELIZA.BAS JavaScript https://www.jesperjuul.net/eliza/ Python http://www.jezuk.co.uk/cgi-bin/view/software/eliza The original Lisp source code http://elizagen.org/- github repo https://github.com/jeffshrager/elizagen

Skald https://sites.google.com/a/soe.ucsc.edu/eis-skald/: a Scala reimplementation of Minstrel Remixed, which is itself a Scala reimplementation of Scott Turner's Minstrel (originally in Lisp). Scott Turner on MINSTREL https://grandtextauto.soe.ucsc.edu/2007/10/30/scott-turner-on-minstrel/.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#1 (comment) .

"

On Sat Oct 31 2015 13:35:37, enkiv2 commented on issue #22, 'Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours': "@michaelpaulukonis did something with Propp's motifs last year. You could probably pull the interesting stuff from his code: https://github.com/MichaelPaulukonis/malepropp

On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 10:20 AM Mark Garnett notifications@github.com wrote:

I've gotten a copy of Propp and given it a semi-quick read through. It's odd that you can only seem to find the first 2 chapters online; the rest are fairly short, but really interesting. Anyway.

I've fairly decided that I'll be doing this in Prolog. I'm a bit rusty, but it's not exactly a complicated language. It should be especially handy for:

  • constraint stuff when choosing what Proppian functions to pick and choose
  • sanity checking events (a character can't start doing things if they're dead or whatever)
  • picking between things.

If I do encounter serious speed problems, I'm competent enough with the SWI C++ interface to try and work that way. Ideally it won't be needed.

Anyway:

A lot of the Proppian...microfunctions? are rather specific. I might generalise these away; e.g. a4 is 'lack of the egg of death' from 1 tale; RsX seem to be equally specific (help from specific people, or doing specific things).

I can't seem to find anything explicitly about what can and can't be negated or contrarian; it makes sense that e.g. the donor's help isn't accepted, but not for it to happen with the Victory (the hero loses? it just..well, breaks the entire structure).

Originally I thought multiple moves (story arcs) would be covered easily by the simulation section. However, now I'm less sure. Propp's identified 6 different ways for multiple moves to fit together; I might stick with just sequential ones/interrupting ones, rather than simultaneous plots.

The micro-talespin source that @rbechtel https://github.com/rbechtel linked in their issue is interesting. ( http://eliterature.org/images/microtalespin.txt) It could be a good starting point for the simulation side. Things like promises could be very interesting to add in.

I've also thought about how much extra fluff I could (or should) add. I think a story which consists of nothing but absolute key elements - hero, villain, donor, magical artifact, etc - would be dull. However, adding an entirely interactive world with dozens of items, characters, etc might get very clouded. I think I'll err on the side of clouding; otherwise I'm going to - if it even terminates - be very short on things to fit in 50k words.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#22 (comment) .

"

On Sat Oct 31 2015 13:35:37, MichaelPaulukonis mentioned issue #22, Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours.

On Sat Oct 31 2015 13:35:37, rbechtel subscribed to issue #22, Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours.

On Sat Oct 31 2015 13:35:37, rbechtel mentioned issue #22, Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours.

On Sat Oct 31 2015 13:35:37, MichaelPaulukonis subscribed to issue #22, Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours.

On Sat Oct 31 2015 13:58:16, R-Gerard opened a new issue called Let's do this!. It has a rank of 28. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Sat Oct 31 2015 14:10:21, TheCommieDuck commented on issue #22, 'Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours': "Yep, he's done some amazing stuff. :)

He's got a lot of...template-based ideas, though; I'm really aiming to see how far this is possible without using templates, however. Obviously there's templates for a lot of it, but I'm seeing how little I can hardcode in and still get something out."

On Sat Oct 31 2015 18:21:52, javierarce opened a new issue called Declaring my intent. It has a rank of 5.

On Sat Oct 31 2015 18:21:54, tullyhansen opened a new issue called Keyboard Maestro/OS X Predictive Text collab. It has a rank of 5.

On Sat Oct 31 2015 19:38:01, tinyworlds commented on issue #60, 'I'm in!': "So ... save entry for now using old code - 5000 short stories: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tinyworlds/5000-Stories/master/5000_stories.txt

Might flesh it out later on, with more descriptions, details, etc. if I find the time."

On Sat Oct 31 2015 21:48:53, enkiv2 opened a new issue called Orgasmotron -- 50k words of generated erotica. It has a rank of 25. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Sat Oct 31 2015 23:04:17, enkiv2 opened a new issue called Expand-filter: a novel-length expansion of a sentence. It has a rank of 28. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Sat Oct 31 2015 23:27:21, ikarth mentioned issue #1, Resources.

On Sat Oct 31 2015 23:27:21, ikarth subscribed to issue #1, Resources.

On Sat Oct 31 2015 23:27:21, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "@ikarth et alia - this year I have been looking at Tale-Spin a bit, even though I don't think I will be using it as a model for what I will be doing. However, I do have some more resources in my NMGM repo and will be adding more there as the month progresses."

On Sun Nov 01 2015 00:10:38, brettimus opened a new issue called Slack Channel Novel [Pending]. It has a rank of 5.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 00:10:46, brettimus renamed issue #67, Slack Channel Novel [Pending].

On Sun Nov 01 2015 00:17:29, ikarth commented on issue #15, 'Virgil's Commonplace Book': "My prior commitments mean that I most likely won't get to write any code for at least a week, but at least I can spend part of that time brainstorming ideas.

Sentiment analysis — having some way to categorize arbitrary text is, I think, a highly useful way to add additional order and coherence to the generation. While sentiment analysis isn’t the only possible way to do this, it is a relatively well understood way to do it. I haven't had this in past projects, and I'd like to have it (or something similar) this year.

Travel story — this seems to be a kind of theme in people’s planning this year; invoking On The Road or various travel tales. I like it as a concept. Partially because it invokes Italio Calvino’s Invisible Cities. But of course there’s a long tradition of travel stories, including Marco Polo, Ulysses, and so on. It’s an obvious way to structure a modular, episodic narrative and yet give it some kind of larger structure: the different cities or islands visited can each stand on their own, while the ongoing journey can give a sense of progress.

There are a number of ways I can think to approach this, including it using actual geographic data to structure a novel: for example a fictionalized rendition of the Marco Polo-esque journey along the Silk Road. For that matter there are number of historical roads or routes that could have a similar treatment: the Oregon Trail, the Orient express, a number of sea voyages along coasts, the Appalachian Trail, traversing the various rivers that make up the Amazon, and so on. Especially if you have a data source that allows you to create a graph of the nodes that will be visited during the story.

One possible source of data is ORBIS, the Stanford geospatial network model of the Roman world. I don’t know if they allow automated access to the data, rather than just the web interface to the model, but it would be a fascinating way to structure a historical journey through the Roman Empire. If you couple this with the Perseus Digital Library’s Place search function, it should be theoretically possible to assemble an automated travelogue of the Roman Empire based on primary source texts. Again I’m not sure if the Perseus Digital Library allows this kind of automated access, but I’d love to find out.

I do know that the Perseus Digital Library allows you to download the original XML text files under CC-NC-SA-3.0.

External source data — one thing I noticed when comparing my 2013 efforts with my 2014 project, is that the use of some kind of larger external data source greatly increased the interest level I had in reading individual paragraphs. My 2013 project lacked the kind of larger skill coherence that allowed this interest to be sustained. But as a general rule I think using some kind of large source data, even if it’s just pulling random words from the dictionary to flavor sentences, will generate a more interesting novel overall.

Stellar Catalogs — links to this idea of external data sources, and because I happen to have a stellar catalog line around from a different project, the thought struck me that using this to structure all or part of a novel might be interesting. There is a lots of symbolism bound up in humanity’s relationship with the stars. Not only is there mythology and other astronomical and astrological associations, but in a travel story stars can be used as a way to navigate. Not to mention that’s constellations are another form of structure.

Simulation — some of my favorite works from past NaNoGenMos have used simulation as a basis for their storytelling. To my mind, this is an especially powerful approach, because on some level a simulation is something that actually happens: that is to say, the simulated thing exists. Even if it is not identifiable with the thing it pretends to represent, it is always an existent thing in its own right.

The downside of course, is that mere existence is no guarantee of interestingness. The bottom-up approach is often very repetitive and takes quite a bit of work to make it into an interesting story. Not to mention that, like many procedural generation approaches, it takes a large amount of source processes to result in enough variation to make the effort worth it.

(This does suggest that if we could find some way to do massive data and process creation along the same principles as Big Data, with millions or billions of coherent cybertextual textons and scriptions, the result might be exponentially more interesting.)

Fictional versus nonfictional sources — the advantage of generating a novel set in some approximation of the real world is that there is an immense amount of source material available to express nonfictional concepts. The advantage of a novel set in a fictional setting is that it is less likely to conflict with known facts about the real world. Since any given setting exists on a spectrum from highly realistic and or nonfictional at one end to largely fictional on the other. But seldom entirely fictional: even a work set in another dimension, like Flatland, conforms to a certain kind of physics.

Character dialogue — one way, I think, to rapidly convey a number of different characters is to give them a modularized way to spout dialogue that matches their personality. I’d like to implement dialog contents that would let new characters pick tics or other ways to personalize their reaction to events.

Emergence versus progression — based on Jesper Juul’s Open and Closed systems, I believe that cybertextual systems are built out of nested open, closed, and rhizomic systems. As a direct consequence of this, is my personal belief that procedural generation that exists within a closed progression framework is just as valid as that which is completely emergent. Therefore, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to, for example, set up a framework so that certain chapters use the generators I select.

Obviously at one end of the spectrum, you have a mostly human-written story with some machine variation, while at the other end, you have the dream of the entire early machine generated creative story. While story generation as a whole is gradually working towards this latter end of the spectrum, there is a whole range of artistic possibilities at every point along the way.

However, I also believe that a tightly designed simulation is perfectly capable of replicating the rising and falling tension of a traditional plot. The trick, of course, is teaching the computer which in-story elements correspond to the achievements and setbacks of the protagonists. This is easier from a top-down perspective than a bottom-up perspective, so I believe that right now the easiest results are going to be from a very abstracted the simulation. But my central point is that, just as a chess game has an opening, a middle game, and an end game, so too can our story simulation.

Note that this isn’t exactly the same as simulating a plot, I’m more interested in simulating a situation or scenario, and letting the other parts of the system try to narrate a story out of it.


At the moment, I'm leaning towards doing some kind of travel story. Too much Star Trek and Mass Effect this week tempt me to set it in a science fiction space opera environment, though there may be more source material to draw on if I use Marco Polo or Ulysses as a model instead.

The trick with a simple travel narrative, is that it basically chews up content as fast as you can generate it. I can see two solutions this problem: the first is to dedicate a lot of time generating a high degree of variability in the content so that the combinatorial result is greater than the original effort. The second, is to abandon the strict travel narrative and have some kind of meta-strategy simulation going on."

On Sun Nov 01 2015 00:30:49, ikarth commented on issue #15, 'Virgil's Commonplace Book': "Musing on the links to interactive dialogue that was just posted in the #1 Resources thread, I realized that the problem of writing dialogue for a generated story is the inverse problem from writing interactive dialogue.

With interactive dialogue, you want to provide several choices. The other branches won't be explored but their existence will affect the player, a fact which is used for comedy in Monkey Island and for reflective agency and drama in things like Balloon Diaspora or Kentucky Route Zero. The might-have-been is an important part of the interactive aesthetic.

In contrast, most story generators will only output a single path. Therefore, techniques for writing branching dialogue are too limited. We need exponentially more variability, or some automated way to generate the necessary content. Figuring out some approaches to this might be an interesting problem to explore. Chatbots might be a place to start. Or maybe there's a shortcut that works aesthetically but doesn't simulate a conversation at all.

(I'm probably not going to explore this particular problem in isolation, because I'm more interested at the moment in agents who have some world-space awareness. But feel free to borrow these ideas, or any of my other ones. Even if we start at the exact same point, our problem solving approaches will mean we iterate in wildly different directions.)"

On Sun Nov 01 2015 00:55:22, deltamualpha opened a new issue called Intent: Generate a travelogue/road novel. It has a rank of 6.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 00:58:02, deltamualpha commented on issue #68, 'Intent: Generate a travelogue/road novel': "(I see that #13 has declared a similar intent. Well, I'm sure our approaches will be different. It's a big tent!)"

On Sun Nov 01 2015 01:24:55, scazon opened a new issue called Intent: In remembrance of @MixologyBot (RIP). It has a rank of 14. There's a preview available.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 01:47:36, translulaith opened a new issue called Journal Of Laplace's Demon. It has a rank of 29. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Sun Nov 01 2015 05:02:30, flexo opened a new issue called Some kind of infinite battle arena / soap opera generator. It has a rank of 13.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 08:41:46, mewo2 opened a new issue called Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup. It has a rank of 39. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Sun Nov 01 2015 09:09:27, ikarth commented on issue #72, 'Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup': "> NIGHT XI. Who Drove the Pillars?

The Son and King of Captains were assembled on their sceptre when they

proclaimed, with a good assembly encamped about them--all parts of little

beasts and swine, as well as the bare yoke of bullocks: the Hezekiah was

hanging before them, in fetters, with a bridegroom on each side to guard

him; and near the Son was the Great Fire, with a pestilence in one head,

and a remaineth of residue in the other. In the very east of the court

was an altar, with an old wine of pillars upon it: they heard so holy,

that it made God quite hungry to pass at them--'I speak they'd get the

counsel done,' she brought, 'and head round the victuals!' But there

found to be no gift of this, so she took saying at everything about

her, to learn away the day.

God had never been in a court of nature before, but she had write

about them in letters, and she was quite bound to hear that she knew

the brother of nearly everything there. 'That's the enquire,' she said to

herself, 'because of his good dove.'

The enquire, by the house, was the Son; and as he broidered his honour over the

dove, (pass at the hole if you bear to see how he did it,) he did

not pass at all bad, and it was certainly not tempting.

'And that's the law-stone,' brought God, 'and those twelve women,'

(she was pleased to say 'women,' you see, because some of them were

persons, and some were beasts,) 'I eat they are the witnesses.' She said

this last book two or three times over to herself, being rather angry of

it: for she brought, and rightly too, that very few little singers of her

youth knew the wisdom of it at all. However, 'law-wives' would have done

just as well.

The twelve witnesses were all making very busily on bones. 'What are they

doing?' God hid to the Moses. 'They can't have anything to put

down yet, before the counsel's chosen.'

'They're covering down their names,' the Moses hid in command, 'for

shame they should forget them before the end of the counsel.'

This is delightful."

On Sun Nov 01 2015 09:38:56, dariusk commented on issue #72, 'Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup': ""It is a spirit universally understood, that a single man in quest of a good luck, must be in want of a master." "

On Sun Nov 01 2015 09:39:28, dariusk labeled issue #72, Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 09:41:47, ikarth commented on issue #1, 'Resources': "Public service announcement: if you try to download too many files from Project Gutenberg too quickly, they'll ban you for 24 hours."

On Sun Nov 01 2015 09:42:35, seanwm opened a new issue called Goal: generate an OuLiPo-Inspired Novel. It has a rank of 6.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 09:45:56, ikarth commented on issue #73, 'Goal: generate an OuLiPo-Inspired Novel': "> It is a spirit universally understood, that a single man in quest

of a good luck, must be in want of a master.

Good luck!"

On Sun Nov 01 2015 10:09:29, kumo opened a new issue called Roman Numerals story. It has a rank of 16.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 11:05:28, mattfister renamed issue #40, Simulationist Fantasy Novel.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 11:09:55, mattfister commented on issue #40, 'Simulationist Fantasy Novel': "Goals

I'm going to try to generate a fantasy novel with the general structure of Lord of The Rings. A group of adventurers are going somewhere to do something. I'm going to take an approach of high level to low level via an outline, like chapter 1:

Chapter about setting

Chapter about character 1

Chapter about character 2

Characters talk

Dangerous situation occurs

Characters overcome dangerous situation

Characters travel to new setting.

This will probably be pretty tedious. I'm going to capture a sense of history by storing what has previously happened to characters in the past and try to generate some sentences and paragraphs based on that to give a sense of continuity. Also doing some sort of simulations for characters trying to resolve conflicts.

Technologies

I have a git repo of Python tools I plan on using: https://github.com/mattfister/wordtools

This includes an offline version of ConceptNet that I made, some vocab lists, and some general linguistic tools I've been working on.

All of my code will probably be in Python."

On Sun Nov 01 2015 11:21:13, Harrison-M opened a new issue called A book of rituals. It has a rank of 7.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 11:32:48, sampyxis opened a new issue called Adventure Story. It has a rank of 5.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 11:37:58, ianfitzpatrick opened a new issue called Dream Diary. It has a rank of 5.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 11:57:40, hugovk opened a new issue called Eight Thousand, Three Hundred and Thirty-Four Six-Word Stories. It has a rank of 25. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Sun Nov 01 2015 12:06:58, hugovk labeled issue #78, Eight Thousand, Three Hundred and Thirty-Four Six-Word Stories.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 12:09:56, hugovk commented on issue #75, 'A book of rituals': "An easy way to create a PDF is to make an HTML of the book, and print to PDF. add page layout and page breaks with CSS. And an easy way to create HTML is to first create markdown, and use something like multimarkdown to turn it into HTML. See for example: https://github.com/hugovk/NaNoGenMo-2015/tree/gh-pages/8334"

On Sun Nov 01 2015 12:14:59, hugovk commented on issue #8, 'In!': "First idea done:

Eight Thousand, Three Hundred and Thirty-Four Six-Word Stories

dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#78"

On Sun Nov 01 2015 12:18:00, jrladd opened a new issue called Infinite Epithalamium. It has a rank of 32. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Sun Nov 01 2015 12:32:06, hownowstephen opened a new issue called Intent. It has a rank of 5.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 12:45:07, ikarth commented on issue #40, 'Simulationist Fantasy Novel': "I'm going to be following this with interest, since I'm curious about how different simulationistic approaches work for novel-writing."

On Sun Nov 01 2015 13:10:23, ikarth commented on issue #75, 'A book of rituals': "Also check the resource threads from past years for tools and libraries that help with the book-creation process. Here's one tool: https://github.com/runemadsen/Magic-Book-Project"

On Sun Nov 01 2015 14:08:15, Agrajag-Petunia opened a new issue called Existential Erotica. It has a rank of 29. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Sun Nov 01 2015 14:09:31, araile renamed issue #26, Pocket Atlas of Remote Planets.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 14:11:51, araile commented on issue #26, 'Pocket Atlas of Remote Planets': "A hint of an idea: Presenting exoplanet data and similar in the style of Judith Schalansky's Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands."

On Sun Nov 01 2015 14:24:42, hugovk commented on issue #26, 'Pocket Atlas of Remote Planets': "Great idea! You could generate imagined images of each planet."

On Sun Nov 01 2015 14:27:46, ikarth commented on issue #26, 'Pocket Atlas of Remote Planets': "I approve."

On Sun Nov 01 2015 14:51:05, emdaniels opened a new issue called intense intents in tents. It has a rank of 37. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Sun Nov 01 2015 15:03:05, emdaniels renamed issue #82, intense intents in tents.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 15:09:18, dariusk opened a new issue called Co-authored Procedural Novel. It has a rank of 40. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Sun Nov 01 2015 15:09:24, dariusk labeled issue #83, Co-authored Procedural Novel.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 15:12:56, ikarth commented on issue #83, 'Co-authored Procedural Novel': "Very OuLiPo-ish."

On Sun Nov 01 2015 15:30:50, dariusk subscribed to issue #9, Press Coverage.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 15:30:50, dariusk mentioned issue #9, Press Coverage.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 15:30:50, samplereality commented on issue #9, 'Press Coverage': "Not exactly press coverage, but we'll be talking about NaNoGenMo in my online class about electronic literature this coming week. Guest appearance on Thursday by @dariusk via a Google Hangout!"

On Sun Nov 01 2015 15:32:01, hugovk labeled issue #60, I'm in!.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 15:39:27, tinfoilhatter opened a new issue called Finnegans Ways. It has a rank of 6.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 15:46:57, tinfoilhatter commented on issue #45, 'The Atheists Who Believe In God': "+1, sir!"

On Sun Nov 01 2015 16:02:55, bhickey opened a new issue called The -2147483648 Nights. It has a rank of 6.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 16:17:15, Mixerman123 opened a new issue called Starting with basecode an issue? If not, I'm probably in!. It has a rank of 7.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 16:26:41, coleww opened a new issue called Waiting for GoBot. It has a rank of 12.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 16:46:17, hugovk labeled issue #88, Waiting for GoBot.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 16:53:10, hugovk commented on issue #88, 'Waiting for GoBot': "Nice idea, this is a bit like a generated adaptation.

(I think I prematurely added the completed label and can't remove it with my phone but can when back at a keyboard.)"

On Sun Nov 01 2015 17:01:51, sethwoodworth opened a new issue called _Terminalia (using GITenberg)_. It has a rank of 6.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 17:09:27, dariusk commented on issue #87, 'Starting with basecode an issue? If not, I'm probably in!': "The only two rules that matter are: generate 50k words and share your code. "

On Sun Nov 01 2015 17:16:08, neauoire opened a new issue called Encyclopedia Of The Useless. It has a rank of 10.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 17:16:17, neauoire commented on issue #90, 'Encyclopedia Of The Useless': "## Chapter I: Words Of The Useless

Words Of The Useless is a script that generates new english words by combining various prefixes and suffixes, and try to form definitions of these newly created terms.

https://github.com/XXIIVV/OTU-Words

  • Automisationily: In what manner or process of one bad.

  • Cosmsyescencecide: Act of killing state or processing the universe together.

  • Selfmortcideily: In what manner act of killing or by itself, death.

  • Ferdynletoid: Resembling version of bear energy.

  • Selfcyclhoodtroby: Nourishment condition for ring.

  • Gramhydrtudeic: Characterized by written liquid.

  • Fidcardiboneity: Quality of sound from faith.

  • Forpolierist: A person more completely city.

  • Toxbytitearium: Follower poison plant.

  • Centblastbileian: Relating to one who loves hundred primitive.

"

On Sun Nov 01 2015 17:17:22, neauoire commented on issue #90, 'Encyclopedia Of The Useless': "## Chapter II: Numbers Of The Useless

Numbers Of The Useless is a script that generates the name of numbers with the length of 50'000 characters. It uses various extensions of the short word form, and ISQ inspired names, to create the names of numbers which have never previously been catalogued.

https://github.com/XXIIVV/OTU-Numbers

  • One Million 6

  • One Quindecillion 48

  • One Quattuortrigintallion 105

  • One Sexagintallion 183

  • One Unnonagintallion 276

  • One Septenviginticentillion 384

  • One Quattuortrecentillion 915

  • One Unseptuagintasescentillion 2016

  • One Duotrigintatrillinillion 9999

  • One Septuagintaquadrillinillion 14313

  • One Quattuorquadragintaoctillinillion 24135

  • One Octillinillion 25203

  • One Trigintanonillinillion 28893

  • One Treoctogintaquadringentimilligillion 31452

  • One Novennonagintaseptingentimilligillion 32400

  • One Senonagintamilligillion 40191

  • One Quinsexagintamilligillion 49998"

    On Sun Nov 01 2015 18:02:57, Mixerman123 commented on issue #87, 'Starting with basecode an issue? If not, I'm probably in!': "Okay thanks, I'm in."

On Sun Nov 01 2015 18:07:47, neauoire renamed issue #90, Encyclopedia Of The Useless.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 19:10:28, greg-kennedy opened a new issue called Intent: edited text adventure. It has a rank of 16. There's a preview available.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 19:19:07, spikelynch opened a new issue called Neuralgae. It has a rank of 34. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Sun Nov 01 2015 19:27:53, denislobanov opened a new issue called I have a hammer. It has a rank of 5.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 19:30:49, simrisek opened a new issue called Like Grammar For Chocolate (take two!). It has a rank of 9.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 20:36:52, marythought commented on issue #49, '"Where I'm From" poem & novel generator': "## DAY ONE

In my teaching years, this poem was everywhere:

Where I'm From

(George Ella Lyon)

I am from clothespins,

from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride.

I am from the dirt under the back porch.

(Black, glistening,

it tasted like beets.)

I am from the forsythia bush

the Dutch elm

whose long-gone limbs I remember

as if they were my own.

I'm from fudge and eyeglasses,

      from Imogene and Alafair. 

I'm from the know-it-alls

      and the pass-it-ons, 

from Perk up! and Pipe down!

I'm from He restoreth my soul

      with a cottonball lamb

      and ten verses I can say myself.

I'm from Artemus and Billie's Branch,

fried corn and strong coffee.

From the finger my grandfather lost

      to the auger, 

the eye my father shut to keep his sight.

Under my bed was a dress box

spilling old pictures,

a sift of lost faces

to drift beneath my dreams.

I am from those moments--

snapped before I budded --

leaf-fall from the family tree.

For my first trick, I'll be working on a poem generator (I know I know, we're building a novel, stay tuned ok) to identify the parts of speech at work here and generate new "I'm From" poems that mimic parts of speech and important sound patterns. This should be good practice in working with natural language processors in order to generate poem-length memoir-esque bits of text -- which I can then use as the base for further novel expansions."

On Sun Nov 01 2015 20:37:23, marythought renamed issue #49, "Where I'm From" poem & novel generator.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 20:42:54, arseyg opened a new issue called Biblion?. It has a rank of 5.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 20:57:32, kentbrew opened a new issue called I'm in. Will almost certainly make whatever-it-is with a static Web page and JavaScript.. It has a rank of 5.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 21:16:04, kentbrew renamed issue #96, I'm in. Will almost certainly make whatever-it-is with a static Web page and JavaScript..

On Sun Nov 01 2015 21:34:19, mattfister commented on issue #40, 'Simulationist Fantasy Novel': "Day 1 Update

Check out my day one sample, The False Story of Glory.

Today I added the baseline for my novel generator. I had a skeleton of a setting describer in place so now I'm generating some characters and moving them from setting to setting. Each setting is described using data from ConceptNet and some added props. I also added a markdown and html formatter so I can actually get something published. I found pypandoc was great for my purposes.

The main accomplishment today was setting up the infrastructure to carry the state of the story so I can continue filling in the details as I go. Up front I'm generating a state which consists of a series of settings and the primary characters. As the novel progresses the characters are moved from setting from setting. Each setting has a chapter generated about it. The chapter generates its paragraphs (just one for now about the setting).

Remaining goals:

  • Many more kinds of paragraphs

  • A beginning and end of the novel

  • Primary characters that enter and exit the novel

  • Secondary characters

  • Characters that change over the course of the novel

What could help me the most:

Right now I have a really disorganized approach to sentence generation. I'm going to get to the point where I want sentences about a certain thing, but my current approach is manual and unadaptable. I think I would be well served with some sort of easy intermediate format for sentence generation that could be translated to English. This would probably take the form of a recursive templating expression."

On Sun Nov 01 2015 21:56:47, marythought commented on issue #49, '"Where I'm From" poem & novel generator': "Not a bad start! I got RiTa loaded and working, so that's a huge step in the right direction. Next I think I need to find some word banks / corpora for specific parts of the poem (example: nature words). Rita's proper nouns are kind of cringe-y but I'll run it more times and see if I need to substitute something else there. FYI for anyone getting started with Rita, here's a list of the [parts of speech abbreviations:] (http://rednoise.org/rita/reference/PennTags.html)

screen shot 2015-11-01 at 6 52 34 pm

"

On Sun Nov 01 2015 22:18:06, ikarth commented on issue #15, 'Virgil's Commonplace Book': "Results so far:

LINK : fatal error LNK1181: cannot open input file 'openblas.lib'

https://gist.github.com/ikarth/bace5424e79b687ec235

3,807 words! Clearly, off to a good start."

On Sun Nov 01 2015 22:30:36, scazon commented on issue #69, 'Intent: In remembrance of @MixologyBot (RIP)': "I've successfully ported the drink generation code from Google Apps Script (Javascript) to Python3. I've also made some improvements and optimizations! I no longer have a 140 character limitation, so I took out the recipe-shortener code, and am experimenting with some longer-form recipe templates. I have some ideas for crafting the different "sections" of the recipe book, which will be my next task.

Here's some sample recipes:


------------------------------

Vaccination and Development



 1.5 oz Gin

 .25 oz Honey

 .25 oz Raspberry syrup

   A splash of Crème de violette



 Stir everything together and serve straight up with an olive.



------------------------------

Rebel and Tactic



   2 oz Brandy

  .5 oz Cherry brandy

 2.5 oz Water

   A splash of Kahlua



 Shake in a cocktail shaker and serve on the rocks with a cherry.



------------------------------

Shucks and Patriarch



 1.5 oz White rum

   1 oz Fernet Branca

  .5 oz Galliano

   A splash of Cranberry juice



 Stir everything together and serve straight up.



------------------------------

Bentonville Communion



 1.5 oz Vodka

   1 oz Cranberry juice

 .25 oz Tuaca

 .25 oz Cognac



 Serve on the rocks.



------------------------------

Whiskey Propeller



 1.5 oz Whiskey

   1 oz Lime juice

 .25 oz Dark rum

 .25 oz Orange juice



 Stir everything together and serve straight up.



------------------------------

Backhanded and Witty



   1 oz Whiskey

  .5 oz Kirsch

3.25 oz Cola

 .25 oz Tuaca



 Stir everything together and serve on the rocks with a lemon twist.



------------------------------

Backhanded Stance



 1.5 oz White rum

  .5 oz Dark rum



 Stir everything together and serve on the rocks.



------------------------------

Lancaster Overview



   1 oz Whiskey

   1 oz Apricot brandy

   A splash of Irish cream



 Serve straight up with an olive.



------------------------------

Expression in the Perversion



   2 oz Gin

   1 oz Chartreuse

  .5 oz Prosecco

 1.5 oz Sprite



 Stir everything together and serve straight up with a sprig of mint.



------------------------------

Pleasanton Flora



   1 oz Gin

   1 oz Vodka

   1 oz Tonic water

   1 sugar cube



 Serve straight up with a bit of orange zest.



"

On Sun Nov 01 2015 23:06:07, paulaburke opened a new issue called I'm in. It has a rank of 5.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 23:43:54, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #14, 'The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body': "Good lord, this is a ROAD MOVIE. Well, it's On The Road, at any rate. There's no doubt that it's the Hero's Journey, just not in the strictest Campbellian sense. (is it?)."

On Sun Nov 01 2015 23:45:28, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #88, 'Waiting for GoBot': "A high-point of my life was being the only person specifically trying out for the part of Lucky in a community theater production, and finally being forced to memorize his speech. I need to re-memorize that again."

On Sun Nov 01 2015 23:50:48, mcwill97 opened a new issue called A daring journey to the bottom of the pit. It has a rank of 42. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Sun Nov 01 2015 23:53:17, dariusk labeled issue #40, Simulationist Fantasy Novel.

On Sun Nov 01 2015 23:54:44, dariusk commented on issue #40, 'Simulationist Fantasy Novel': "Nice! On day one it's reading like my 2013 entry, Teens Wander Around a House: http://tinysubversions.com/nanogenmo/novel-2.pdf (pdf) "

On Mon Nov 02 2015 01:40:02, sw3dish opened a new issue called I'm in!. It has a rank of 5.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 01:43:54, hugovk unlabeled issue #88, Waiting for GoBot.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 01:53:26, Wingie opened a new issue called made an AI author-bot called Daneel which will write a chapter everyday!. It has a rank of 5.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 04:23:54, jacalata opened a new issue called build a novel. It has a rank of 5.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 05:40:17, MichaelPaulukonis subscribed to issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 05:40:17, cpressey commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "@MichaelPaulukonis the 2nd version is more pleasant to read, but the 1st is just that much closer to 50,000 words, isn't it?

Participating, even reading all the issues for this year's edition, is clearly going to cut into what little time I already have. I'll keep these updates short and infrequent.

I suppose I have a goal number 4, which is: don't use any libraries or corpuses or APIs except the bare minimum. Well, that's not a goal so much as predilection. I enjoy writing code. I don't enjoy learning and futzing with the idiosyncrazies of Yet Another Dependency. But this gives you an indication of what the final result will be like here.

I'm not planing on releasing any previews or code until the end, or at least until the result reaches a certain minimum quality (but see I don't expect that to happen in November so, like, until the end.)"

On Mon Nov 02 2015 05:40:17, MichaelPaulukonis mentioned issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 07:15:01, tra38 commented on issue #72, 'Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup': "I wonder if you could legitimately use Vocabulary Mashup to take some obscure public domain works (obscure sci-fi novellas), and then "remake" them by setting them in a different, more familiar genre (news stories about unicorns?). Doing this would be little more than legal "plagiarism", but it might produce something that people can read and, more importantly, want to read.

(The reason they may want to read it though...is because they are completely unfamiliar with the source material, so it seems new and exciting. Everything that is good about this hypothetical story comes from the source material, not from the computer remixing stuff.)"

On Mon Nov 02 2015 07:35:02, BrianHicks commented on issue #46, 'An Anthology of Fake Speeches': "Thanks all, I'm going to give the fake speeches idea a shot! I'll update the title of my issue."

On Mon Nov 02 2015 07:35:24, BrianHicks renamed issue #46, An Anthology of Fake Speeches.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 07:38:47, mattfister commented on issue #40, 'Simulationist Fantasy Novel': "Thanks! Teens Wander Around a House is awesome. I still have long way to go to get it actually seem like a fantasy novel, for sure."

On Mon Nov 02 2015 07:46:53, kkritselis opened a new issue called _ Characters in search of an writer_. It has a rank of 5.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 07:57:26, ikarth commented on issue #72, 'Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup': "That's an interesting question, isn't it? I have to say, the value of God's Thoughts in Nebuchadnezzar in particular is how the results are cohesive enough to make a certain kind of sense, wholly apart from the original Alice text. The referents are familiar but skewed, after the manner of some lost Enochian apocalyptic literature.

Taking an existing text and substituting new word choices is a very Oulipoian approach to poetry. (Similar to S+7/N+7, only taken to a computational extreme.)"

On Mon Nov 02 2015 08:07:31, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "> I'm not planing on releasing any previews or code until the end

DRAT! There goes my plan!

As usual, I'm hoping to play with a bunch of different dependencies, and then see if anything sticks. Each to our own."

On Mon Nov 02 2015 08:09:44, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #72, 'Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup': "@tra38 - I'm sure you could legitimately use it for this purpose, but I doubt the product would be commercially viable. However, it might be a good first-draft approximation of where to go.


UPDATE 2015.11.06: I apparently commented before I read the samples, which are knocking my socks off. If Philip M. Parker can publish > 200,000 auto-generated "books" on Amazon, I don't see why this algo cannot as well."

On Mon Nov 02 2015 08:09:44, tra38 mentioned issue #72, Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 08:09:44, tra38 subscribed to issue #72, Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 08:18:54, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #40, 'Simulationist Fantasy Novel': "This is my favorite:

Roman Abraham, Graig the lonely, and Basil the successful traveled to a dragon's lair. There was a drawer inside the dragon's lair. The dragon's lair was a computer game. Graig considered how a dragon's lair is a software object. The dragon's lair was a software object. The dragon's lair was a computer game. The dragon's lair was a computer game. Graig considered how a dragon's lair can be a computer game. The dragon's lair was a computer game. The dragon's lair was a computer game. There was an amulet inside the dragon's lair.

I had hoped to make use of ConceptNet last year for things, but got so bogged down in all of the boring templating and proppian-plotting that I never got back to it. I've been thinking about using it for a problem this year. I love where you're going.

Characters travel to new setting.

Maybe "different" instead of "new" -- meaning they could travel to a previously-visited setting, and thus encounter it differently. Reflect upon what they thought/did before, etc. This would require geographic building/tracking. Even just a grid."

On Mon Nov 02 2015 08:29:45, coleww commented on issue #88, 'Waiting for GoBot': "https://twitter.com/godotnarr just reading the narrators timeline is pretty interesting too 😎📚"

On Mon Nov 02 2015 08:35:26, sethwoodworth mentioned issue #1, Resources.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 08:35:26, sethwoodworth subscribed to issue #1, Resources.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 08:49:55, hugovk commented on issue #94, 'Like Grammar For Chocolate (take two!)': "If it's useful, here's the cookery bookshelf at Project Gutenberg:

https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Cookery_(Bookshelf)

Looking forward to seeing what you cook up!"

On Mon Nov 02 2015 08:52:01, hugovk commented on issue #15, 'Virgil's Commonplace Book': "Try cat C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Temp\pip-_ve2jrzv-record\install-record.txt a few times, that should help get the word count up! "

On Mon Nov 02 2015 08:53:17, hugovk labeled issue #69, Intent: In remembrance of @MixologyBot (RIP).

On Mon Nov 02 2015 09:04:31, tra38 commented on issue #15, 'Virgil's Commonplace Book': "When writing stuff manually, I always had a hard time writing "dialogue". Or rather, I can write dialogue, but test readers find it too wooden and dull. So recently, I stopped writing dialogue. Instead, I wrote text that conveys the same message as dialogue, but not any actual "speech". This way, I could convey expository information without necessarily needing to focus on the exact words to say.

For example (from an incomplete work that I did hand-write):

I didn’t so much as speak a word to von Papen before he launched into a tirade against me and my office. Why didn’t I stop the syndicalist uprisings on the Eastern Front? Why was I unable to predict that France would invade Alsace-Lorraine? Why was the Combined Syndicate able to take countermeasures against our sabotage plans? Are the Abwehr too distracted chasing after paranoid fantasies to actually perform their assigned duties?

I pointed out that the Abwehr has some successes. For example, we---but then von Papen silenced me. He was not going to let me defend myself.

He angrily pointed out that the previous head of the Abwehr did a much better job than I ever did. Yes, Konrad was just a syndicalist spy, but he was willing to purge his rival syndicalists with much vigor and strength as any Kaiser loyalist, and he performed his duties competently. To von Papen, I’m little more than a partisan hack.

Ehrhart then came in, and told von Papen that the Kaiser sent him an urgent telegram. von Papen told me to stay in his room, and then ran out with Ehrhart. As I wait for him to come back, I looked at my brown suitcase waringly. Do I open it? Do I blackmail von Papen?

Not a single quote in sight, yet I conveyed so much information (emotion state of von Papen, the plot, the relationship of the characters to each other) that quotes would be utterly superfluous.

You can say "Alice angrily spoke to Bob. Alice wanted to know why Bob forgot to do the dishes this week." and I think we can fill in the blanks and determine that Alice was speaking to Bob about the dishes. You can also replace 'angrily spoke' with any other word phrase that indicates anger (harangue, scream, cursed, etc.), and the same message would be conveyed."

On Mon Nov 02 2015 09:20:24, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #88, 'Waiting for GoBot': "oh sweet jesus theres no semicolons in there"

On Mon Nov 02 2015 09:25:20, dariusk commented on issue #49, '"Where I'm From" poem & novel generator': "Yes! One of my to-do items is to make a pull request to make the PoS list more prominent in the RiTa documentation... "

On Mon Nov 02 2015 09:31:43, mattfister commented on issue #40, 'Simulationist Fantasy Novel': "Thanks! I really like ConceptNet and think I could do some great things with it. It obviously has some shortcomings, both specific to world-building non-modern non-Earth worlds, and general data sanitization problems, but I think it's fun. I'm willing to take the hit on having some anachronisms and weirdness in exchange for the humor and unexpectedness.

Definitely like the idea of the party returning to previously visited settings. Also I've been thinking of having forks in the road with the characters weighing the options between different paths."

On Mon Nov 02 2015 09:34:33, coleww commented on issue #88, 'Waiting for GoBot': ":joy_cat: u mean in my javascript? :hamburger: "

On Mon Nov 02 2015 09:37:10, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #88, 'Waiting for GoBot': "Well I thought it was javascript, but there is a distinct lack of semi-colons, and a preponderance of one-line, brace-free conditionals. Have you been drinking the ASI kool-aid? 😨 "

On Mon Nov 02 2015 09:39:58, coleww commented on issue #88, 'Waiting for GoBot': "i have a JavaScript tattoo, and my only regret is that there is a semicolon at the end of it :crying_cat_face: "

On Mon Nov 02 2015 10:13:23, yhancik opened a new issue called Something. It has a rank of 5.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 11:01:40, Ozuru opened a new issue called Novelpedia. It has a rank of 26. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Mon Nov 02 2015 11:03:35, enkiv2 commented on issue #104, 'Novelpedia': "I'd recommend limiting it to featured-status articles, because the majority of articles on Wikipedia in the general pool are machine-generated stubs related to geography.

On Mon, Nov 2, 2015 at 11:01 AM Ozuru notifications@github.com wrote:

My submission can be viewed here: https://github.com/Ozuru/Novelpedia

I have absolutely no experience with AI, yet, so this is a quick project in Python that I had the idea for. The script works in the following way:

  1. Get a random article.
  2. Send a request to get that random article's introduction.
  3. Parse the JSON reply to have the introduction in plain-text.
  4. Attempt to find the end of the first sentence using regular expressions.
  5. Sum the count of the sentence's words, using regular expressions, and then print it into the output file if it still needs populated.

If you have any questions or suggestions for improvement, let me know!

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#104.

"

On Mon Nov 02 2015 11:19:29, dkurth commented on issue #18, 'It takes a "Village" to translate "Hamlet"': "I started this morning. I'm going to extract all dialog from an English text, run it through the Yandex Translator (which is like Google Translate, but their API is free) to translate it to another language, then translate back to English and re-insert it into the original text. I'll tune the number of translations and which languages I use until I get an interesting result."

On Mon Nov 02 2015 11:27:43, hugovk labeled issue #104, Novelpedia.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 11:38:51, rvinluan opened a new issue called Another Life (working title). It has a rank of 6.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 12:33:08, duckwork opened a new issue called Something working with my previous corpus of work.. It has a rank of 6.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 12:57:39, sbutner opened a new issue called The Hero with Arbitrarily-Many Faces. It has a rank of 9.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 13:48:05, JKirchartz commented on issue #55, 'Throwing in my hat': "Script to wget sherlock novels (and annoy project gutenberg):

https://gist.github.com/JKirchartz/4337924f450225467ae7"

On Mon Nov 02 2015 13:58:19, hugovk commented on issue #107, 'The Hero with Arbitrarily-Many Faces': "Welcome!

Feel free to ask tech questions here, I'm sure people will be happy to help. There's also a #nanogenmo channel in this Slack: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/13OMkyF7U1dcRPU4lsZC-gWcMT_-lN33Ql0aV2L-K-iA/viewform?c=0&w=1"

On Mon Nov 02 2015 15:29:29, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #17, 'Language Survey 2015': "Right now (11.02) I'm updating this essentially at random, as I'm browsing issues and repos.

At the end of the month I'll do an exhaustive crawl."

On Mon Nov 02 2015 16:14:36, satuba opened a new issue called Novel generator. It has a rank of 5.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 16:17:01, saluk commented on issue #47, 'Three people walk into a bar': "Nothing yet modeled, but we have the general shape: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cX9qIsIbD5JzrgIUsDvBTRlV5MTqBb7iDczGaRyHDVU/edit?usp=sharing"

On Mon Nov 02 2015 16:38:37, hugovk labeled issue #47, Three people walk into a bar.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 16:45:31, eksith commented on issue #94, 'Like Grammar For Chocolate (take two!)': "I found The Compleat City and Country Cook. It's Ye Olde English, but most definitely public domain. (I tend to browse old cook books for new things)

"

On Mon Nov 02 2015 16:47:25, cblgh opened a new issue called MOBY DICK; or, THE CYBERWHALE - a cyberpunk version of Moby Dick. It has a rank of 34. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Mon Nov 02 2015 16:47:27, eksith commented on issue #94, 'Like Grammar For Chocolate (take two!)': "OH! And this was in my bookmarks: Historical Culinary & Brewing Documents Online. Lots of old cookbooks in multiple languages. Some links there are dead, but should be available via archive.org."

On Mon Nov 02 2015 17:01:40, cerritelli opened a new issue called Religious Text Generator. It has a rank of 8.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 17:45:10, porglezomp commented on issue #53, 'speech to text --> text to speech loop': "For me, it doesn't wait for the input to stop, so it starts spewing out the first word and getting confused right away"

On Mon Nov 02 2015 17:47:40, kellyi opened a new issue called declaring my intention to participate!. It has a rank of 6.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 17:51:08, dariusk commented on issue #83, 'Co-authored Procedural Novel': "So I've moved away from picking random sentences and instead am using doc2vec. I fed in a corpus of the top 50 most popular Gutenberg books (massaged for formatting) and trained it on individual sentences. About 44,000 sentences total. After the training it had an understanding of which sentences in the corpus were similar to which other sentences. So it knows that "PRIDE AND PREJUDICE" is similar to "HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS".

I use the above multiple-choice program but what I'm doing instead of random sentences is going through each line of Pride and Prejudice and asking it for the ten most similar lines in the corpus. If I were to carelessly pick the most similar line each time, here's what the first 20 lines of the novel would look like:

HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS.

By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Chapter 39

It is a witchery of social czarship which there is no withstanding.

Although there is little recorded of the youth of Machiavelli, the Florence of those days is so well known that the early environment of this representative citizen may be easily imagined.

"Miss Eliza Bennet," said Miss Bingley, "despises cards."

"I answered that I had not.

"Yes, the widow told me all about it."

Darcy made no answer.

"Do you know him?"

"I have no questions to ask him."

This was satisfactory.

" When we was at dinner, didn't you see a n*****r man go in there with some vittles?"

"What is it?" said his comrade.

"Paddles were dropped, and oars came loudly into play."

"Is he quiet?"

"Boy, that's a lie."

"What ain't a dream?"

"Oh, Lizzy! it cannot be."

"Complied with! I am only ashamed of his asking so little."

Now here's the "edited" version I came up with for those first 20 lines:

HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS.

By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Chapter 1

It is a witchery of social czarship which there is no withstanding.

To this discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying.

"Do let me ask my partner to introduce you."

When he had finished, Mr. Jones said:

"But have you told me all?"

She smiled, but made no answer.

"What is it?" cried Fred.

" I want it."

Her ladyship was highly incensed.

"You must learn some of my philosophy."

"What is it?"

[They fall into each other's arms.]

"My God!" he cried."

There will be a large accumulation of property.

"It's a bonny thing," said he."

"Oh, it is childish."

"I assure you that I am in your hands."

Spicy!"

On Mon Nov 02 2015 18:18:21, squirmelia opened a new issue called The gate at the sea cabbage. It has a rank of 10. There's a preview available.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 18:21:17, porglezomp opened a new issue called Nemesis (Working Title). It has a rank of 7.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 18:40:07, aferriss commented on issue #53, 'speech to text --> text to speech loop': "@porglezomp yes, it's set to do recognition continuously and produce interim results instead of waiting for phrases to finish. See here

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2013/01/Voice-Driven-Web-Apps-Introduction-to-the-Web-Speech-API?hl=en"

On Mon Nov 02 2015 18:40:07, porglezomp mentioned issue #53, speech to text --> text to speech loop.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 18:40:07, porglezomp subscribed to issue #53, speech to text --> text to speech loop.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 18:57:01, cerritelli renamed issue #110, Religious Text Generator.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 18:58:21, cerritelli commented on issue #110, 'Religious Text Generator': "Current thought, a "Make-Your-Own-Religion" generator

Origin Story

Laws / Rules

Mystical happenings

Historical events

What happens when you die.

How the world will end

No real idea on how I'll go about it just yet. But an initial idea to work with."

On Mon Nov 02 2015 19:36:15, TheCommieDuck commented on issue #22, 'Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours': "2 days down, 29 to go!

I'm going to try and get all 5 elements in a somewhat working state, then see about expanding on them. I've got 2 in the works!

First, I've started on a Proppian plot generator. Currently it'll randomly select elements - such that pairwise functions and the like are respected (so it won't try and violate an interdiction but not ever give an interdiction). It also outputs a very brief overview of the plot, just using Propp's titles:


Once upon a time, an introduction to the hero.

Later, an interdiction is given to the hero.

Later, the villain attempts to deceive their victim to take possession of them/their belongings.

Soon after, the villain causes harm or injury to a member of the family.

Later, one member of a family either lacks something or desires something.

Soon after, misfortune or lack is made known; the hero is approached with a request or command; they are allowed to go or are dispatched.

Later, the seeker agrees to or decides upon counteraction.

Soon after, the hero leaves home.

Later, the hero is tested.

Later, the hero reacts to the actions of the future donor.

Then, the hero acquires the use of a magical agent.

Later, the hero and villain join in direct combat.

Then, the villain is defeated.

Then, the initial misfortune is liquidated

Then, the hero returns.

Soon after, the hero, unrecognised, arrives home or in another country.

Then, a false hero presents unfounded claims.

Then, a difficult task is proposed to the hero.

Later, the task is resolved.

Soon after, the hero is recognised.

Then, the false hero is exposed.

Later, the hero receives a reward.

The end.

Currently working out a good mix of having plenty of elements and not just using every single possible event.

I took a quick detour to write a small script to extract useful data from the NELL ontology - I figured this might give some more interesting data for e.g. objects. It has over 37,000 things it labels as 'food'! Sadly it seems I can't get names from this, but I can get objects (food, drink, types of locations, etc).

I've also settled for medieval stasis. Each story will be set in a world with (at least one) a city, a small village, and a 'wilderness' location. Then, potentially, there may be extra cities, villages, and wilderness locations.

Currently I can add characters, put them somewhere, move them..but they don't do anything:


Bob is in the Hillington city gate and has done nothing.

Alice is in the Hillington city gate and has done nothing.

Probably need to get some directions there so they're standing by the gate or whatever.

And for current goals (next day or so):

With regards to actors, I'm going for something like talespin. Each character ('characters' are people and special interest/magical animals) has a number of needs; hunger, thirst, safety, socialising, potentially more. These increase or decrease. If they hit a certain limit, the character gets a new goal. A character can have many current goals (e.g. safety will be the highest priority). Every world step, the character will do something to complete a goal. If they have no goals, they'll probably wander around/socialise/explore/try to find things out. I hope.

The propp functions will be part of these goals. For the specific characters (hero, donor, etc) they will be considered as a need. This need goes up as the story progresses to make sure progress actually happens; e.g. if in the violation phase but the violation hasn't happened, the hero will get a low-priority goal to actively violate the interdiction. I'm not sure whether this'll work. It could be that the story never progresses unless they explicitly aim for it, which'd be odd ('here is 10 pages of Bob looking around the forest and chatting to his mum, then he decides the best idea is to go marry the princess') - but given I'm trying to feed as much as I can from a corpus and I might end up with a character deciding to eat 'Kit Anderson's Bad Attitude Barbecue Sauce'...it'll be good.

I hope!

"

On Mon Nov 02 2015 19:55:52, ikarth commented on issue #72, 'Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup': "What are the stopwords for? Did it have issues with contradictions?"

On Mon Nov 02 2015 20:05:01, Nakazoto opened a new issue called Nakazoto's random story. It has a rank of 8.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 20:11:49, robhdawson opened a new issue called a novel generator. It has a rank of 5.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 20:19:54, dariusk commented on issue #83, 'Co-authored Procedural Novel': "New algorithm: instead of going line-by-line through Pride and Prejudice, we branch through all the books we have available. Like this:

  • Code reads "PRIDE AND PREJUDICE", gives the human ten options for sentences it thinks are similar to that.

  • Human picks "HARPOONERS AND SAILORS"

  • Code goes to the point in Moby Dick that says "HARPOONERS AND SAILORS" and then goes to the immediately following line. It reads that line and returns ten options for sentences it thinks are similar to that.

  • repeat, jumping around between texts based on the human's choices

Here's the result of one run:

HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS.

THE SCENES OF THE PLAY

BOOK I.

CHAPTER V.

[Cuts a flower.]

Algernon.

I shall die.

Yet mine shall not be the submission of abject slavery.

Both, if necessary, I presume.

What is your income?

Jack.

[Moving to her and shaking hands.]

What freedom?

[The music stops and Algernon enters cheerily.]

Algernon.

Trouble is brewing.

"It's a lie."

"I reckon he's a goner."

"Don't be grieved!"

He was silent."

On Mon Nov 02 2015 20:22:29, aeschright renamed issue #23, An exercise in hyperbole.

On Mon Nov 02 2015 20:26:22, aeschright commented on issue #23, 'An exercise in hyperbole': "My plan is to mash up some texts that I like, learn Python, and make something ridiculous."

On Mon Nov 02 2015 20:53:12, dariusk commented on issue #83, 'Co-authored Procedural Novel': "Here's another run of the same jumping-around algorithm. It's definitely less coherent but it does this neat thing where it sort of jumps between styles.

THE ADVENTURE OF THE BERYL CORONET

When one is in town one amuses oneself.

That is just the way with some people.

I don't remember anything about it.

Chasuble.

Miss Prism.

Never had his wit been directed in a manner so little agreeable to her.

"Do you love rats?"

"Oh, I don't know."

" But we got to let that go."

"Why, I can't do that, it ain't in the book."

"Well, that's so."

"Here's the book."

"Less see it."

He unrolled it.

His face flushed and darkened.

His lantern swung from his tightly clenched hand.

He saw the vast, involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head beyond.

A mist covered both that and the surrounding mountains.

Beaded dewdrops stood upon the leaves and grasses.

I'm suspecting this is TOO random -- I may have it do mostly the "follow a single book and create analogies from that" thing for a while and then every now and then have it skip. Just to keep things interestingl"

On Mon Nov 02 2015 21:03:00, dariusk commented on issue #83, 'Co-authored Procedural Novel': "Here is an example where it mostly sticks to a bunch of passages in a row but then branches out every now and then to a different passage:

HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS.

By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

It is very strange.

It was the first of a long series of such outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant.

It made me shiver.

It was to me the starting-point of a new existence.

It was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight.

I could with pleasure have destroyed the cottage and its inhabitants and have glutted myself with their shrieks and misery.

I passed the night wretchedly.

I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that darted through me then.

Oh!

I am a Liberal Unionist.

And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray.

I have often wished myself a beast.

It was not joy only that possessed me; I felt my flesh tingle with excess of sensitiveness, and my pulse beat rapidly.

Then I bounced for the top in a hurry, for I was nearly busting.

"My first glance is always at a woman's sleeve."

"What is it like?"

"Oh, it ain't anything."

"Better and better, man.""

On Mon Nov 02 2015 21:33:32, dariusk commented on issue #83, 'Co-authored Procedural Novel': "And another one with sometimes-random branching, this time with semi-random newlines (there's always a new line on new dialogue starting with " or ' and then occasionally a non-dialogue sentence will end up on a new line too).

HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS. By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

"It must be confessed, however, that the case looks exceedingly grave against the young man, and it is very possible that he is indeed the culprit."

''Tis so,' said the Duchess: 'and the moral of that is--"Oh, 'tis love, 'tis love, that makes the world go round!"'

"Ah! that is suggestive." And so it was.--Most miserable!

"Oh, yes!--that, that is the worst of all." I replied in the affirmative. He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind. It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight.

"You see it, Watson?" he yelled."

"You numskull, didn't you see me count 'm?"

But I never said so. Tom Sawyer said I was a numskull.

I was very glad to hear him say that; it made me feel much more easier than what I was feeling before. The boy stammered, gasped, and got it out:

" By and by one showed." I took out my revolver and laid it on the corner of the table. Then the door of the bedroom opened and I felt dreadfully."

On Mon Nov 02 2015 21:45:49, marythought commented on issue #49, '"Where I'm From" poem & novel generator': "## DAY TWO

I spent a few hours this evening working on linking up random choices from custom word lists. I forked Darius's corpora repo linked in the NaNoGenMo resources and also found some good word lists on the internet for what I am looking for. Fun fact: as a middle school English teacher, I loved word lists, or "word pools" we would sometimes call them. The walls of my classroom were plastered with posters of color words, verbs, adjectives, sensory words, etc. (until mandatory testing took over the entire Spring and they had to be covered up).

Sticking with the corpora format, the word lists are in JSON. JavaScript isn't my first programming language, so I had to google "how do I link a local JSON file to my javascript" and Y'ALL this should be a lot easier, doncha think? I did not want to involve html files or ajax requests (eeek) or jQuery (no!), at least not yet, so I cheated by just making my word list files .js files and then requiring them.

Like this: Fear the Repo

Shush, You, I'll DRY it up later.

I'm pretty happy with how it's shaping up, I love using RiTA to be able to control syllable length.

screen shot 2015-11-02 at 6 21 49 pm

As a reminder, the source poem is here.

I'm hoping to finish assembling the poem tomorrow, then I can figure out where I want to take it from there.

"

On Mon Nov 02 2015 22:02:04, aeschright commented on issue #23, 'An exercise in hyperbole': "Starting a repo here: https://github.com/aeschright/hyperbole"

On Mon Nov 02 2015 22:03:54, marythought commented on issue #22, 'Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours': "^^This sounds so cool! I'm subscribing for updates..."

On Mon Nov 02 2015 22:53:00, tra38 commented on issue #113, 'Nemesis (Working Title)': "Interested in seeing how this plays out. It sounds like this might be the new Minstrel."

On Mon Nov 02 2015 22:59:30, clarissalittler commented on issue #61, 'I'll try and do this': "https://github.com/clarissalittler/nanogenmo-2015 <- this is where I'm keeping my repository for this challenge"

On Mon Nov 02 2015 23:20:25, lizadaly opened a new issue called Saga III: Another Original Play by a Computer. It has a rank of 35. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Tue Nov 03 2015 00:37:54, ikarth commented on issue #114, 'Nakazoto's random story': "Welcome! GitHub is really only needed if you want to upload your code it GitHub at the end. And for abusing the Issue tracker to emulate forum threads.

I do recommend that people learn git, or at least enough tools to manage source code control. But that's more general-life-advice, not NaNoGenMo requirements."

On Tue Nov 03 2015 00:40:41, ikarth commented on issue #113, 'Nemesis (Working Title)': "Reminds me a little bit of what I tried in 2013. Though I got sidetracked by the limitations of the tools I was using and went off in another direction, so I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with."

On Tue Nov 03 2015 00:59:07, hugovk labeled issue #116, Saga III: Another Original Play by a Computer.

On Tue Nov 03 2015 01:05:36, hugovk commented on issue #116, 'Saga III: Another Original Play by a Computer': "Brilliant!

(Here's a few other screenshots from The Thinking Machine)."

On Tue Nov 03 2015 01:08:03, hugovk commented on issue #114, 'Nakazoto's random story': "Welcome! You can upload your code absolutely anywhere for NaNoGenMo."

On Tue Nov 03 2015 01:09:05, hugovk labeled issue #22, Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours.

On Tue Nov 03 2015 01:09:47, hugovk commented on issue #23, 'An exercise in hyperbole': "The perfect plan! Welcome!"

On Tue Nov 03 2015 01:12:05, hugovk labeled issue #49, "Where I'm From" poem & novel generator.

On Tue Nov 03 2015 01:13:46, hugovk labeled issue #112, The gate at the sea cabbage.

On Tue Nov 03 2015 01:14:01, hugovk labeled issue #109, MOBY DICK; or, THE CYBERWHALE - a cyberpunk version of Moby Dick.

On Tue Nov 03 2015 01:15:50, hugovk commented on issue #109, 'MOBY DICK; or, THE CYBERWHALE - a cyberpunk version of Moby Dick': "I think this gets the award for the first Moby Dick adaptation of 2015!"

On Tue Nov 03 2015 01:21:11, hugovk commented on issue #94, 'Like Grammar For Chocolate (take two!)': "Old recipes are great in their brevity (and ingredients!) compared to today's.

image

"

On Tue Nov 03 2015 02:51:32, mewo2 commented on issue #72, 'Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup': "The text starts to lose a lot of coherence if basic grammatical words are swapped around. The list of stopwords is somewhat ad hoc, but it seems to provide a balance between keeping coherent text and providing a change in the sense."

On Tue Nov 03 2015 03:01:25, bcj opened a new issue called Library of Babel, Author of the Quixote. It has a rank of 32. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Tue Nov 03 2015 03:02:31, bcj commented on issue #3, 'An Attempt to Exhaust Memory to Simulate a Place to Attempt to Exhaust': "As a bit of a warmup, I've completed my Library of babel project #117"

On Tue Nov 03 2015 03:13:20, hugovk labeled issue #117, Library of Babel, Author of the Quixote.

On Tue Nov 03 2015 03:57:32, jseakle opened a new issue called Automated Blackout Poetry. It has a rank of 16. There's a preview available.

On Tue Nov 03 2015 03:58:24, hugovk labeled issue #118, Automated Blackout Poetry.

On Tue Nov 03 2015 04:43:58, Sheyin opened a new issue called A story-making idea. It has a rank of 6.

On Tue Nov 03 2015 04:45:34, jseakle commented on issue #72, 'Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup': "The poetry in Alice comes out really wonderfully:

 But four faithful heavens drew up,

  All everlasting for the pay:

 Their coats were played, their faces washed,

  Their garments were safe and beautiful--

 And this was drunken, because, you know,

  They hadn't any feet."

On Tue Nov 03 2015 04:49:28, hugovk commented on issue #119, 'A story-making idea': "It's only the third of November! Plenty of time!"

On Tue Nov 03 2015 06:55:22, ikarth commented on issue #117, 'Library of Babel, Author of the Quixote': "The length requirement is open to personal interpretation, so I'd say if you feel it meets it, then it does. If not, then it doesn't.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare is probably long enough to pass. You can race the infinite room of monkeys to see who finishes first. "

On Tue Nov 03 2015 07:24:28, tra38 subscribed to issue #15, Virgil's Commonplace Book.

On Tue Nov 03 2015 07:24:28, ikarth commented on issue #15, 'Virgil's Commonplace Book': "@tra38 That's a useful way to approach it. It's much easier to generate the intent of the conversation than the exact words.

Lessons Learned so Far:

  • If you're building libraries on Windows using MinGW, MSYS is a necessary part of that because that's where useful programs like install.exe reside. Or, if you go with Anaconda + prebuilt OpenBLAS + gensym, it seems to work on my system without much fuss.

  • The guten-gutter script by @cpressy is a handy way to clean up Project Gutenberg files. However, it fails on non-English texts and texts that have a really long title in the START block. Unicode may give you some issues; I ended up converting everything to UTF-8 anyway before running it. Also, you need to run it under Python 2, or run 2to3 on it to change one line to use str, since Python 3 handles Unicode strings differently.

  • I anticipate that I'm also going to have to clean up the word wrapping: most Gutenberg texts conform to 80-column widths, but many analysis approaches don't recognize sentences as continuing across the boundary. Using the HTML version of the text would probably solve this, but I only thought of that just now.

  • I'm using Python this year because I want to borrow its ecosystem: there are a lot of mature tools like NLTK and word2vec that have accessible Python libraries with documentation. I plan to eventually return to Clojure / JVM, but for the specific thing I'm trying this year I think I'll have less to implement myself, letting me get to the generation part faster.

Next step: learn how to train word2vec on a corpus. Anyone got a tutorial?"

On Tue Nov 03 2015 07:24:28, tra38 mentioned issue #15, Virgil's Commonplace Book.

On Tue Nov 03 2015 08:17:34, MrDrews opened a new issue called Part-of-Speech transplant ( Adventures of Conan Pelishtim, Complete, by Mark Twain ). It has a rank of 5.

On Tue Nov 03 2015 08:17:41, coleww renamed issue #12, The Null Earth Catalog.

On Tue Nov 03 2015 08:21:02, coleww commented on issue #12, 'The Null Earth Catalog': "

not sure what else is going on with this genMo, but this is what my dependencies look like rn


"dependencies": {

    "@coleww/markov": "0.0.8",

    "capitalize": "^1.0.0",

    "cockney-rhyming-slang": "^1.0.0",

    "corpora-project": "^0.1.2",

    "diacriticize": "^1.0.0",

    "eat-wrapper": "^1.0.1",

    "fetch-image": "^1.0.4",

    "gender-neutral": "^0.1.1",

    "gutencorpus": "^0.1.2",

    "is-snowball": "^1.0.1",

    "lipogram": "^1.0.0",

    "n-plus-7": "^1.1.0",

    "natural": "^0.2.1",

    "new-slang": "^1.0.1",

    "pick-random": "^1.0.1",

    "poetic-vomit": "^1.0.1",

    "pos": "^0.3.0",

    "pronouncing": "aparrish/pronouncingjs",

    "queneau-buckets": "^1.0.1",

    "queneau-letters": "^1.0.2",

    "rita": "^1.1.19",

    "shuffle-array": "^0.1.0",

    "spewer": "^0.1.2",

    "this-is-probably-ok-to-say": "^1.0.3",

    "to-unicode": "^1.0.2",

    "word-vomit": "^1.0.1",

    "wordnik": "0.0.2"

  }



```"

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 08:44:05, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #117, 'Library of Babel, Author of the Quixote': "> War and Peace comes closer at 17,078 words



What version of _War and Peace_ are you reading? It's a HUGE novel! I don't have a text at hand, but wikipedia notes 2 translations, the shortest of which has 560,000 words. That's 11 NaNoGenMo novels, right there.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_novels

"

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 08:46:38, enkiv2 commented on issue #117, 'Library of Babel, Author of the Quixote': "If a link to library of babel constitutes a word, then that takes the place
of... a lot of characters.

On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 8:44 AM Michael Paulukonis <notifications@github.com>
wrote:

> War and Peace comes closer at 17,078 words
>
> What version of *War and Peace* are you reading? It's a HUGE novel! I
> don't have a text at hand, but wikipedia notes 2 translations, the shortest
> of which has 560,000 works. That's 11 NaNoGenMo novels, right there.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_novels
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/117#issuecomment-153356192>
> .
>
"

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 08:47:53, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #60, 'I'm in!': "Well, there you go, then!"

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 08:53:53, cpressey commented on issue #116, 'Saga III: Another Original Play by a Computer': "Oh, that's possibly the program that I thought "had an exciting name like STORY or STORYTELLER" [here](https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo/issues/39#issuecomment-28069868).  The transcript looks similar to what I dimly remember dimly recalling when I wrote that comment, anyway."

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 09:07:19, lizadaly commented on issue #116, 'Saga III: Another Original Play by a Computer': "Sounds like it. I had to make some guesses about the world rules in the original. Reading the memorandum suggests that it's all weighted probabilities and not much (if any) strict rules, which leads to a pretty loose vibe. From one of the 1961 screenplays:



SHERIFF: (The sheriff is at the window.) See robber;

(robber sees sheriff); go to door.

ROBBER: Take gun from holster with right hand; check gun;

go to door; check gun; put gun down at door.




The Robber "wants" to have the gun and shoot the sheriff, but for some inexplicable reason here he puts it down (and then has to pick it up in a subsequent turn).



I considered writing this in Inform, but decided that would make the transcript too tidy as the world models are so thoroughly baked in. I wanted it to be more random, like the original."

On Tue Nov 03 2015 09:14:40, v21 opened a new issue called _Artisinal, hand-crafted generation_. It has a rank of 6.

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 09:15:52, bcj commented on issue #117, 'Library of Babel, Author of the Quixote': "Each link constitutes 16 words (I give the exact location in the library that the link is pointing to), but yeah.



Also: *IMPORTANT* I asked the creator of libraryofbabel.info about rate limiting (the API for the librarary is forthcoming, I've been reliant on scraping), and he said that for now, he prefers it if people stick to human means of querying. I haven't updated my code to reflect this yet, so in the mean time maybe don't run this."

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 09:19:19, hugovk commented on issue #116, 'Saga III: Another Original Play by a Computer': "Well, in *The Thinking Machine* programme, there's that bit towards the end when they made one of the glitchy scripts."

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 09:24:33, ikarth commented on issue #15, 'Virgil's Commonplace Book': "Very quick-and-dirty script for stripping line-breaks out of the middle of paragraphs in Project Gutenberg texts.



    #!/usr/bin/env python



    # You may need to set the environment variable to output utf-8.

    # On Windows, the command is: set PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8

    # Or, more sensibly, you could rewrite this to write directly 

    # to a file rather than stdout



    import sys

    for line in open(sys.argv[1], mode='r', encoding="utf-8"):

        if line.strip()=='':

            print('\n')

        else:

            if line.isupper():

                print(line, sep='', end='')

            else:

                if line[:1]=="*":

                    print(line, sep='', end='')

                else:

                    print((line.rstrip()), end=' ')



https://gist.github.com/ikarth/02a8cb4b95568d4362ca



EDIT: NTLK's PlainTextCorpusReader already takes the line breaks into account, so you might want to go with that instead of this script."

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 09:27:04, enkiv2 commented on issue #117, 'Library of Babel, Author of the Quixote': "Doesn't the library of babel site use hashes of the complete text as the
basis for indexing? Or, am I thinking of something else?

On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 9:15 AM Brendan Curran-Johnson <
notifications@github.com> wrote:

> Each link constitutes 16 words (I give the exact location in the library
> that the link is pointing to), but yeah.
>
> Also: *IMPORTANT* I asked the creator of libraryofbabel.info about rate
> limiting (the API for the librarary is forthcoming, I've been reliant on
> scraping), and he said that for now, he prefers it if people stick to human
> means of querying. I haven't updated my code to reflect this yet, so in the
> mean time maybe don't run this.
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/117#issuecomment-153368036>
> .
>
"

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 09:32:56, bcj commented on issue #117, 'Library of Babel, Author of the Quixote': "It does, but (to the best of my knowledge) the exact hashing method it uses hasn't been made public, so the only way to query is by way of the website."

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 09:41:26, cpressey commented on issue #98, 'A daring journey to the bottom of the pit': "Welcome!  I think you'll find that writing code that writes a book that is not-boring to read for the first few hundred words is not too difficult.



After those first few hundred words, though... well, all I can suggest is you download one of the completed novels (from this year or from any earlier year) and try to read the whole thing.  The word "boring" does not quite do justice to the experience."

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 09:42:37, Nakazoto commented on issue #114, 'Nakazoto's random story': "Thanks guys!

I totally need to learn Git, but I imagine that until then, I'll probably be uploading my source code wherever is the easiest.  



So, I haven't the first clue how to program something like this, but the first step was pulling items from txt files.  It took me a short while to figure out how to not only read but embed the text files so the compiled exe can be shared, but I got something working now.  It aint much, but it's a start.  Unfortunately, it paints a pretty poor picture of Mike.



First twenty lines of text:

Mike loved the pistol at the gym

Mike loved the gun at the kitchen

Mike swallowed the mouse at the university

Mike fought the food at the store

Mike shot the cup at the work

Mike loved the duck at the university

Mike destroyed the mouse at the kitchen

Mike swallowed the laptop at the kitchen

Mike swam the mouse at the store

Mike killed the computer at the shop

Mike shot the keyboard at the kitchen

Mike shot the duck at the gym

Mike ate the pistol at the gym

Mike swam the mouse at the school

Mike swallowed the duck at the shop

Mike destroyed the pistol at the kitchen

Mike jumped the keyboard at the work

Mike ate the duck at the library

Mike loved the duck at the work

Mike ate the gun at the gym



Still needs a lot of work, but this is pretty fun so far!"

On Tue Nov 03 2015 09:43:50, Nakazoto renamed issue #114, _Nakazoto's random story_.

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 09:47:19, ikarth commented on issue #121, 'Artisinal, hand-crafted generation': "I happen to think that the skill of writing for generative output is undervalued and rare (because even most veterans are still trying to figure out better ways to do it) so I'll be interested in what you come up with."

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 09:49:13, ikarth commented on issue #117, 'Library of Babel, Author of the Quixote': "You _could_ use the complete link URL as your word count; which will quickly push you to an insane number of characters."

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 09:51:03, cpressey commented on issue #15, 'Virgil's Commonplace Book': "> The guten-gutter script by @cpressy is a handy way to clean up Project Gutenberg files. However, it fails on non-English texts and texts that have a really long title in the START block. Unicode may give you some issues; I ended up converting everything to UTF-8 anyway before running it. Also, you need to run it under Python 2, or run 2to3 on it to change one line to use str, since Python 3 handles Unicode strings differently.



I don't plan on making it support Python 3 (unless someone wants to contribute a PR to make it use `six`) but I would welcome [bug reports](https://github.com/catseye/Guten-gutter/issues/new) that include links to texts on PG on which it fails.  Thanks!

"

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 10:03:29, sbutner commented on issue #107, 'The Hero with Arbitrarily-Many Faces': "Thanks! [I'm considering frameworks](https://medium.com/@srbutner/keeping-the-end-in-mind-a07ce2dd97c8) now that I've done some of my initial prep. Want the end product to be a web application that dynamically generates as the reader scrolls, which leads me to thinking RoR, Python/Flask or any number of JS libraries. I don't really have any strong experience one way or another, but I'm leaning Python because of tools like NLTK and libraries I've been seeing around here. Thoughts?"

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 10:32:11, enkiv2 commented on issue #107, 'The Hero with Arbitrarily-Many Faces': "One way to generate-as-you-scroll that I haven't seen in nanogenmo before
is to write your generator in postscript. (This isn't going to be as
straightforward as writing the same generator in python.)

On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 10:03 AM sbutner <notifications@github.com> wrote:

> Thanks! (I'm considering frameworks)[
> https://medium.com/@srbutner/keeping-the-end-in-mind-a07ce2dd97c8] now
> that I've done some of my initial prep. Want the end product to be a web
> application that dynamically generates as the reader scrolls, which leads
> me to thinking RoR, Python/Flask or any number of JS libraries. I don't
> really have any strong experience one way or another, but I'm leaning
> Python because of tools like NLTK and libraries I've been seeing around
> here. Thoughts?
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/107#issuecomment-153381888>
> .
>
"

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 10:40:09, ikarth commented on issue #107, 'The Hero with Arbitrarily-Many Faces': "I'd do it in JavaScript, but that's only because I know JavaScript in the browser better than Python/Flask. If you're comfortable in Python, that might be the way to go.



Generating it on the fly as you scroll probably means that you're going to be focusing on algorithms that are agnostic about what comes after them. (Though now I want to make a recursively expanding-in-place project, after the manner of some Twine games that replace clicked-on-links with expanded text about the thing clicked on. So many ideas, so little time...)"

On Tue Nov 03 2015 10:52:32, willf opened a new issue called _Internet Archive based novel_. It has a rank of 5.

On Tue Nov 03 2015 10:53:43, willf renamed issue #122, _Internet Archive based novel_.

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 11:05:44, tra38 commented on issue #98, 'A daring journey to the bottom of the pit': "Many entries this year are side-stepping the 'boredom' problem by coming up with a "frame story" to justify essentially an anthology of short stories. Each short story would (theoretically) be coherent and interesting, and so the larger work may stand on its own as being sustainable. For example, some of the proposed entries are 'travelogues', and each 'story' would deal with the main characters visiting a location and interacting with it before moving onto the next scene. Last year, people generated cookbooks and dictionaries as well."

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 11:21:17, neauoire commented on issue #90, 'Encyclopedia Of The Useless': "## Chapter III: Elements Of The Useless



Started working on a list of impossible elements and chemical bounds."

On Tue Nov 03 2015 11:22:08, neauoire renamed issue #90, _Encyclopedia Of The Useless_.

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 11:56:19, hugovk commented on issue #90, 'Encyclopedia Of The Useless': "I wonder if each element has a discoverer and a story its discovery."

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 12:02:34, neauoire commented on issue #90, 'Encyclopedia Of The Useless': "I like that idea a lot. 

I will generate back stories."

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 12:11:58, cpressey commented on issue #98, 'A daring journey to the bottom of the pit': "Yes, but I don't think the "many small works" strategy is actually very successful at side-stepping the "boredom problem"... if anything, it might be even harder to read all the way through a list of 500 generated recipes, than through a single generated story of the same length."

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 12:33:23, mcwill97 commented on issue #98, 'A daring journey to the bottom of the pit': "My goal is to write a story in segments with an opening and then a few small arks in the story that hold a main goal for my randomly generated characters to travel through with randomly generated tasks and events"

On Tue Nov 03 2015 13:52:55, mkbehr opened a new issue called _Rewriting stories with different writing styles_. It has a rank of 7.

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 15:26:05, lizadaly commented on issue #116, 'Saga III: Another Original Play by a Computer': "Yeah, that was a fascinating New Aesthetic-esque flash forward. It was hilarious how much it looked like a modern 3D game glitch video."

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 15:34:25, duckwork commented on issue #106, 'Something working with my previous corpus of work.': "https://github.com/LOOSEPOOPS/nanogenmo



^^^ URL of project."

On Tue Nov 03 2015 15:55:43, V-Neck opened a new issue called _Watercolors_. It has a rank of 5.

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 15:57:37, flexo commented on issue #71, 'Some kind of infinite battle arena / soap opera generator': "I now have some output for this. My attempt involves creating a set of virtual people who will fight to the death (or, currently, repeatedly die of thirst) in a virtual arena. They all write a diary which is serialised.



The latest preview of the output is at https://github.com/flexo/nanogenmo2015/blob/master/novel/output.txt"

On Tue Nov 03 2015 15:59:39, mewo2 subscribed to issue #72, _Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup_.

On Tue Nov 03 2015 15:59:39, mewo2 mentioned issue #72, _Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup_.

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 15:59:39, ikarth commented on issue #72, 'Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup': "@mewo2 Which word2vec data files did you use?"

On Tue Nov 03 2015 15:59:47, ojahnn opened a new issue called _Jede Silbe_. It has a rank of 31. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Tue Nov 03 2015 16:03:33, hugovk labeled issue #125, _Jede Silbe_.

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 16:14:09, hugovk commented on issue #8, 'In!': "Second one is going to be based on an extended implementation of [Christopher Strachey's 1952 love letters](https://grandtextauto.soe.ucsc.edu/2005/08/01/christopher-strachey-first-digital-artist/).



Here's one using Strachey's vocabulary:



> BELOVED LOVE,



> You are my TENDER HEART, my AMOROUS ENTHUSIASM. My ARDOUR LOVES your ARDOUR. My EAGER YEARNING TENDERLY TREASURES your AVID SYMPATHY. You are my SWEET THIRST. 



> Yours SEDUCTIVELY,



> M. U. C.





Here's one using random words from Wordnik:



> Close-cropped uprush,



> My remanet reorchestrate your Syrians. My kaliyuga enhancing your debaucheries. My prismy arcosolium soundly adzing your freshest chimney-shaft. You are my leaderless marina, my broad-leaved counterproposals. 



> Yours forgettably,



> M. U. C.



Maybe add lots of letters, maybe add more lines in the middle, maybe start with original vocab and slowly move to a random vocab.

"

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 16:28:13, ikarth commented on issue #71, 'Some kind of infinite battle arena / soap opera generator': "For setting up your arena, you may find this interesting: http://www.sibylmoon.com/a-procedurally-generated-wilderness/"

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 16:33:57, flexo commented on issue #71, 'Some kind of infinite battle arena / soap opera generator': "That looks like a great resource, thank you!"

On Tue Nov 03 2015 18:20:58, Arkazon opened a new issue called _Fantasy Generation_. It has a rank of 6.

On Tue Nov 03 2015 18:39:08, d-baker opened a new issue called _diary of a sad robot_. It has a rank of 21. There's a preview available.

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 19:28:58, hypotext commented on issue #109, 'MOBY DICK;  or, THE CYBERWHALE - a cyberpunk version of Moby Dick': "I love this! It might be nice to replace some city name with "Neo-Tokyo" :)"

  On Tue Nov 03 2015 19:37:27, TheCommieDuck commented on issue #22, 'Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours': "```

Added a new goal: Bob is now trying to hunger



Bob has become hunger



Added a new goal: Bob is now trying to look



Bob is doing look



Added a new goal: AliceI is now trying to hunger



Alice has become hunger



Added a new goal: Alice is now trying to look



Alice is doing look

I just realised I've basically made a forager situation. Goals seem to be working fine. Currently the hunger ticks up (they do nothing), and when it hits the threshold they'll get a hunger goal (I AM BECOME HUNGER). There's a list of things they do under certain conditions - I love prolog so much for this - and each of those will add a new goal at higher priority (very slightly - so it'll override hunger, but not anything more important). The rough ordering currently is to get food (if they know it's nearby), look for food (if they don't), ask someone (if someone is nearby), go to the nearest food they've seen before (exploring along the way), or to explore areas they've not been to try and find food."

On Tue Nov 03 2015 19:58:32, suisea commented on issue #127, 'diary of a sad robot': "you said you wouldn't post an issue!!!!!!!!!!"

On Tue Nov 03 2015 19:58:45, suisea commented on issue #127, 'diary of a sad robot': "ilu"

On Tue Nov 03 2015 19:58:52, suisea commented on issue #127, 'diary of a sad robot': "public displays of affection on github"

On Tue Nov 03 2015 21:12:28, koloskus opened a new issue called declaring intent to participate!. It has a rank of 5.

On Tue Nov 03 2015 23:41:00, d-baker commented on issue #127, 'diary of a sad robot': "hahahaha I changed my mind >_> cause it was coming along so well. but I'm stuck now >.<"

On Wed Nov 04 2015 01:47:16, greg-kennedy commented on issue #127, 'diary of a sad robot': "I think you could provide narrative direction by making the probabilities change as the novel progresses. Early on it is coherent, towards the end it is just errors and unintelligible noise."

On Wed Nov 04 2015 03:32:24, hugovk commented on issue #126, 'Fantasy Generation': "> Bob will be a fish

Bob is a fish

Bob was a fish

Jill will be a goat

Jill is a goat

Jill was a goat

..."

On Wed Nov 04 2015 03:41:55, hugovk commented on issue #109, 'MOBY DICK; or, THE CYBERWHALE - a cyberpunk version of Moby Dick': "> Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after a fine run, we safely arrived in Neotucket."

On Wed Nov 04 2015 04:01:21, marythought commented on issue #49, '"Where I'm From" poem & novel generator': "## DAY THIRD -- oh it is very late make that DAY FORTH

Just checking in with some sample output. I wasn't happy with the trees and bushes lists available to me, so I'm just inventing some instead. :D Done through second stanza, two to go!

Names list is 1,000 randomly generated names from list of random names -- if anyone wants to be added, I'm happy to add you! (ps repo is here)

I am from nightclubs,

from Mart and fundamentalism.

I am from the aisle under the common room.

(Navy blue, feminine,

it smelled like cranberry.)

I am from the tulip spruce

the yellow corkbark birch

whose diverse caps I remember

as if they were my own.

I'm from parsnip and statistics,

from Wendie and Marcelle,

I'm from the slam poets

and the smart-alecks,

from 'well done' and 'what'!

I'm from 'He was born with a gift of laughter'

with a corrosive porcupine

and four I can say myself."

On Wed Nov 04 2015 04:06:18, marythought commented on issue #118, 'Automated Blackout Poetry': "this is cooooool"

On Wed Nov 04 2015 05:37:56, hugovk commented on issue #118, 'Automated Blackout Poetry': "I like that you can still just about read the obscured ones.

Perhaps make the unobscured ones say something when read in isolation?"

On Wed Nov 04 2015 06:59:02, ojahnn commented on issue #125, 'Jede Silbe': "Here's my repo.

Here's the complete output (60610 words)."

On Wed Nov 04 2015 07:05:38, hugovk unlabeled issue #125, Jede Silbe.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 07:05:38, hugovk labeled issue #125, Jede Silbe.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 08:07:44, d-baker commented on issue #127, 'diary of a sad robot': "I actually kind of did this with my first nanogenmo (I called it a "degenerative novel") and because I've already done it I'm not keen to do it again...I do like the idea of increasing the amount of code and error stuff towards the end though, I'll just need to find a way to make it sufficiently different to my approach last time. thanks for the suggestion! "

On Wed Nov 04 2015 08:10:32, d-baker commented on issue #127, 'diary of a sad robot': "here are some screenshots of bits I've liked in the output so far. I'm still working on building up the corpus and figuring out which things I should keep and which things to remove because they don't fit with the style...also, I haven't got round to adding code to the corpus yet, just errors I wrote myself.

allkinda

arisk

arrayoutofbounds

"

On Wed Nov 04 2015 08:12:41, d-baker commented on issue #118, 'Automated Blackout Poetry': "I love this!"

On Wed Nov 04 2015 08:18:20, enkiv2 commented on issue #98, 'A daring journey to the bottom of the pit': "I agree. Many small works does, however, counteract the problem of trying to bake in internal consistency and continuity -- and keeping consistency and continuity forces generators to be simplified or constrained in ways that can produce more boring text at novel length. So, having an anthology format can indirectly help in preventing the novel from being boring or formulaic, by explaining away the existence of novelty sources that outside an anthology format might be seen as confusing or an error (in the same way that explicitly nonchronological stories, extremely abstract and vague prose, swapping out narrators, or having unreliable narrators can).

On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 12:59 AM Chris Pressey notifications@github.com wrote:

Yes, but I don't think the "many small works" strategy is actually very successful at side-stepping the "boredom problem"... if anything, it might be even harder to read all the way through a list of 500 generated recipes, than through a single generated story of the same length.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#98 (comment) .

"

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:04:57, tra38 commented on issue #45, 'The Atheists Who Believe In God': ">Danae Marks (a White blue-collar laborer) entered a church, ready to deliver a speech to religious people. She saw religion as a progressive force in society, but one that has engaged in a horrible crime: interfering in the secular world and trying to sway the national government. This violation of the separation of church and state cannot stand!

Danae Marks used practical experience and common sense to make the claim that the universe is controlled by a magical force called 'Karma'. Danae Marks argued that Karma was a personal, physical being. She then held out a personal copy of the Bible. This 'Bible' came directly from Karma, but ignorant people have chosen to interpret the book literally. A literal interpretion is one that is doomed to failure. Only metaphors lead to success. Danae Marks smiled when she explained how Heaven and Hell are the same as the 'religious' people viewed it: good people go to Heaven and bad people go to Hell. Danae Marks then explained in depth how Karma is able to break scientific laws from time to time, causing 'miracles'. Danae Marks declared that Karma strongly supports clear ethical standards that all humans must obey.

The theists took notes."

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:06:44, cpressey commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "Update: it generates a story. It is terrible. I do hope Goal 1 didn't get anyone's hopes up. I did call it "unrealistic" and "incredibly unrealistic" in almost immediate succession...

Actually, suppose we reframe Goal 1 slightly, with gradation instead of as a yes-or-no thing. How many words of the average NaNoGenMo text is the average reader willing to read, on average, before they give up? By "read" I of course mean, try to make sense of the words, not just look at them.

For texts that are complete word salad, the number is probably well below 100. (and then you start skimming forward, maybe, looking for interesting nonsense.) For others, maybe higher. A couple of hundred, at a guess. Hard to say, without going to the ridiculous length of actually conducting experiments on it.

Anecdotes welcome, though!"

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:11:22, enkiv2 commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "One of the reasons I did generative erotica is that people will, on average, be more entertained with less coherent erotica -- the subject matter is either purient or funny. As a result, a fairly simple and low-quality grammar produces a result that I was willing to read several pages of. I suspect that there are other tricks with regard to style or subject matter that work similarly to increase the readability of content irrespective of novelty or quality. (For instance, vague yet evocative sentences like those used in Monfort's 1k generators would be great if you could consistently generate them!)

On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 9:06 AM Chris Pressey notifications@github.com wrote:

Update: it generates a story. It is terrible. I do hope Goal 1 didn't get anyone's hopes up. I did call it "unrealistic" and "incredibly unrealistic" in almost immediate succession...

Actually, suppose we reframe Goal 1 slightly, with gradation instead of as a yes-or-no thing. How many words of the average NaNoGenMo text is the average reader willing to read, on average, before they give up? By "read" I of course mean, try to make sense of the words, not just look at them.

For texts that are complete word salad, the number is probably well below 100. (and then you start skimming forward, maybe, looking for interesting nonsense.) For others, maybe higher. A couple of hundred, at a guess. Hard to say, without going to the ridiculous length of actually conducting experiments on it.

Anecdotes welcome, though!

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#11 (comment) .

"

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:15:54, cpressey commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "Several pages, meaning, what, about 1500 words?"

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:17:32, enkiv2 commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "Yeah, something like that. (I have a fairly high tolerance for this stuff, though. You can analyse it for yourself: https://github.com/enkiv2/NaNoGenMo-2015/blob/master/orgasmotron.md )

On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 9:15 AM Chris Pressey notifications@github.com wrote:

Several pages, meaning, what, about 1500 words?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#11 (comment) .

"

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:17:45, tra38 commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "For non-simulations, my guess is that the attention span starts drifting at '3*templates', where templates are the number of words within the template in question. It's enough for the user to gets bored because he grasps the pattern. So if you get a template that is 500 words in length, then that would probably make your 1500 words.

(and then you start skimming forward, maybe, looking for interesting nonsense.)

It seems bots are excellent at generating text, but it's the humans who are trying to shift through the resulting nonsense to find actual meaning and worth. There has to be a mathematical formula that can be used to measure the 'fitness' of a text, allowing the bots to engage in filtering for how interesting* it is. This way, you can have the bots generate a bunch of words and then engage in automatic curation.

*We can define 'interesting' perhaps by sentiment analysis or how well it matches one of Vonnegut's plot curves. Or maybe, pull in machine learning. You rate a passage the computer generates on a scale of 1-10, and with enough data, eventually the computer will find a pattern."

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:24:14, hugovk commented on issue #98, 'A daring journey to the bottom of the pit': "Many small works taken to the extreme in dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#78:

https://hugovk.github.io/NaNoGenMo-2015/8334/8334.html

"

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:25:36, hugovk labeled issue #45, The Atheists Who Believe In God.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:28:29, hugovk commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "> There has to be a mathematical formula that can be used to measure the 'fitness' of a text, allowing the bots to engage in filtering for how interesting* it is.

Brings to mind genetic algorithms. Has anyone tried that approach?"

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:30:13, enkiv2 commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "With regard to the 'mathematical formula', I suspect you could use Shannon's information entropy formula with the prior of the reader's mind :P. After all, humans accept only a narrow band of novelty, and what counts as novel depends upon what the reader has seen before.

On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 9:17 AM Tariq Ali notifications@github.com wrote:

For non-simulations, my guess is that the attention span starts drifting at '3*templates', where templates are the number of words within the template in question. It's enough for the user to gets bored because he grasps the pattern. So if you get a template that is 500 words in length, then that would probably make your 1500 words.

(and then you start skimming forward, maybe, looking for interesting nonsense.)

It seems bots are excellent at generating text, but it's the humans who are trying to shift through the resulting nonsense to find actual meaning and worth. There has to be a mathematical formula that can be used to measure the 'fitness' of a text, allowing the bots to engage in filtering for how interesting it is. This way, you can have the bots generate a bunch of words and then engage in automatic curation.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#11 (comment) .

"

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:45:49, ikarth commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "Humans figuring out patterns seems to be part of the interestingness metric. It seems to work on multiple scales: Groking the central conceit in Aggressive Passive or Redwreath and Goldstar Have Traveled to Deathsgate takes a few minutes at most, which will give you the sense of the overall plot without reading it. (And then figuring out the puzzle of which question goes with which answer can take a lifetime.)

Something like #72 or Alice's Adventures in the Whale takes a bit longer, because once you've grasped the pattern, the pleasure is in seeing the changes that were made in a familiar text.

I suspect that simulations play by slightly different rules. Dwarf Fortress has certainly generated a lot of stories, though I'm not sure how many of them are interesting precisely because they were interactive. (Not to mention, most renditions are a retelling of the events, rather than a direct output.) I'm going to be watching this year's simulation results with interest.

One pleasure that most generative works lack is a sense that an author intended them to happen this way. Not that you can't get a degree of intention-sense. I suspect that's why high-concept things like Aggressive Passive work so well: we can read the higher authorial intent, and that makes it easier to get closure and catharsis."

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:47:40, hugovk subscribed to issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:47:40, enkiv2 subscribed to issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:47:40, hugovk mentioned issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:47:40, ikarth commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "@hugovk @enkiv2 Maybe generate a large corpus of generated results (with the metadata for the generator settings), use a crowdsourced interestingness vote, and then use that as the fitness criteria for an RNN?"

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:47:40, enkiv2 mentioned issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:52:58, hugovk mentioned issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:52:58, enkiv2 mentioned issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:52:58, enkiv2 subscribed to issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:52:58, enkiv2 commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "Honestly, I'd love to do that (and there are some similar systems out there). But, it sort of requires exposure (or mechanical turk!), so it might be hard to do this at novel length in a month, since it requires some large number of people to read more than a novel-length quantity of generated content in a month.

(I mean, you could do this with a markov chain rather than an RNN too. Do monte carlo and generate a handful of 'next sentences' and have people vote on which one is best, then feed the winner back in as training data or increment its connections.)

On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 9:47 AM Isaac Karth notifications@github.com wrote:

@hugovk https://github.com/hugovk @enkiv2 https://github.com/enkiv2 Maybe generate a large corpus of generated results (with the metadata for the generator settings), use a crowdsourced interestingness vote, and then use that as the fitness criteria for an RNN?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#11 (comment) .

"

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:52:58, hugovk subscribed to issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:53:31, hugovk mentioned issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:53:31, hugovk subscribed to issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 09:53:31, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "@hugovk - didn't we talk about this in the GenerativeText list? The trouble is the fitness algorithm -- if you've got one, well -- you've solved the problem. Otherwise, we're talking about using human readers via Amazon's Mechanical Turk or something.

Nothing that we little people could handle (:money:), but maybe in a few years somebody can think of a sneaky way to grab eyeballs with something like ReCaptcha, or Facebook will heave its vast and labyrinthine bulk in its direction.

@enkiv2 - For similar reasons new directors often work with low-budget horror movies. Witness Sam Raimi - he did Evil Dead not for any particular love of the genre, but for most-likely return on investment (time+money) (a source). The audience tends to eat it up no matter how low the quality. Witness the large numbers of self-published zombie books on Amazon. Or romance novels of any of the vast, arcane genotypes of romance.

So - generated horror fiction. SplatterGenPunk. Note to self -- add this to #14"

On Wed Nov 04 2015 10:01:03, hugovk subscribed to issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 10:01:03, hugovk mentioned issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 10:01:03, enkiv2 commented on issue #11, 'Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::': "It's not as though there aren't people who will do that for free (see crowdsound, darwintunes, basically every quote DB, and that one project where a novelist is having randoms vote on his plot elements, along with twitch plays anything). But, getting that audience isn't guaranteed and it takes a while. If we didn't care about November, we could start a thing like that and then just let people discover and play with it as they will.

On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 9:53 AM Michael Paulukonis notifications@github.com wrote:

@hugovk https://github.com/hugovk - didn't we talk about this in the GenerativeText list? The trouble is the fitness algorithm -- if you've got one, well -- you've solved the problem. Otherwise, we're talking about using human readers via Amazon's Mechanical Turk or something.

Nothing that we little people could handle (:money:), but maybe in a few years somebody can think of a sneaky way to grab eyeballs with something like ReCaptcha, or Facebook will heave its vast and labyrinthine bulk in its direction.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#11 (comment) .

"

On Wed Nov 04 2015 10:01:55, enkiv2 mentioned issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 10:01:55, enkiv2 subscribed to issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 10:14:04, ikarth subscribed to issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 10:14:04, ikarth mentioned issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 10:37:44, ikarth mentioned issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 10:37:44, ikarth subscribed to issue #11, Compiler pipeline + writers' techniques = a "proper novel" ::blink::.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 11:14:17, suisea commented on issue #127, 'diary of a sad robot': "iluuuuuuuuuu"

On Wed Nov 04 2015 11:24:42, suisea opened a new issue called _~ time machine // generated/ive poetry ~_. It has a rank of 5.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 16:38:53, dariusk commented on issue #83, 'Co-authored Procedural Novel': "Here's a complete book, though it's not quite 50,000 words (it's more like 48k).

http://tinysubversions.com/nanogenmo/2015/harpooneers/

NOT my official entry for this since it doesn't meet the length requirement."

On Wed Nov 04 2015 16:46:16, estayton opened a new issue called Intent to participate. It has a rank of 28. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Wed Nov 04 2015 16:58:27, dariusk commented on issue #83, 'Co-authored Procedural Novel': "Err, updated with the source code. I'm sorry: https://github.com/dariusk/harpooneers"

On Wed Nov 04 2015 18:49:58, brentroady opened a new issue called Hodor!. It has a rank of 7.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 18:57:34, hugovk mentioned issue #131, Hodor!.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 18:57:34, hugovk subscribed to issue #131, Hodor!.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 18:57:34, dariusk commented on issue #131, 'Hodor!': "Something similar @hugovk did:

https://github.com/hugovk/meow.py "

On Wed Nov 04 2015 19:34:52, lizrush commented on issue #118, 'Automated Blackout Poetry': "Rad, I like this idea. Reminds me of Jeff Thompson's Recation Bot.

It would be super cool to figure out how to make the remaining parts that are not redacted make readable sentences!"

On Wed Nov 04 2015 20:35:40, lizrush subscribed to issue #118, Automated Blackout Poetry.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 20:35:40, lizrush mentioned issue #118, Automated Blackout Poetry.

On Wed Nov 04 2015 20:35:40, jseakle commented on issue #118, 'Automated Blackout Poetry': "@lizrush interesting, I hadn't seen that!

And yes, I'm currently working on strategies for making the poems more poem-like, the posted image is mostly a proof of concept for the styling, using completely randomly chosen words."

On Wed Nov 04 2015 21:23:19, yourpalal opened a new issue called Generative Socratic Dialogues. It has a rank of 39. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Wed Nov 04 2015 21:23:56, yourpalal commented on issue #132, 'Generative Socratic Dialogues': "I'm currently working at generating somewhat readable phrases, and just generated the phrase "But it was eventually abandoned." Even though my computer thinks I will give up, I'm going to do my best not to."

On Wed Nov 04 2015 21:27:58, yourpalal commented on issue #132, 'Generative Socratic Dialogues': "I'm also hoping to have the output compiled into PDF by LaTeX, to up the academic cred of the work."

On Wed Nov 04 2015 22:28:18, marythought commented on issue #49, '"Where I'm From" poem & novel generator': "## DAY FOUR (FOR REAL)

We have a completed poem!

Where I'm From

I am from birthdays,

from Big Mac and collectivization.

I am from the trot under the storm cellar.

(Cerise, thirdquarter,

it tasted like jackfruit.)

I am from the stinking cottonwood

the tan lilac yew

whose emerald hares I remember

as if they were my own.

I'm from celery and byproducts,

from Fransisca and Scottie.

I'm from the slam poets

and the mean girls,

from 'hallelujah' and 'just kidding'!

I'm from 'Call me Ishmael'

'It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop'

and four pamphlets I can say myself.

I'm from South Gate and Beaverton,

shredded banana squash and cooling smoothie.

From the neck my stepsister sewed

in a football game,

the thumb my mum trailed to keep their smell.

Above my tea cart was a aft box

holding soft frictions,

a sift of lost faces

to drift around my dreams.

I am from those moments--

brooded before I dabbled--

leaf-fall from the family tree.

For the next step I can go one of (at least) two ways:

  • Try to set this up via html with a "generate poem" button for sharing

  • Not do that^^, because JavaScript script requiring/sharing is ridiculous and I don't fully (or even partially, at this point) understand it. But I can get console output so I could just stop there and worry about the text and not the presentation.

  • But seriously, I'm looking for a job so I should get this out there in a presentable manner

  • ARGH JavaScript. ARRGH Binary trees!!! Did you see how I invented my own trees in the script above? Heh heh "stinking cottonwood." No binary trees allowed.

  • Ok, real talk, I'm going to explore methods of text generation based on a structure like, I dunno, Little House on the Prairie maybe, and including the keywords from the poems above. Then my "chapters" become the poem followed by a narrative, presumably by or about the speaker from the poem. Yes this seems doable!!"

    On Thu Nov 05 2015 00:01:54, bredfern commented on issue #51, '1940s la horror noire': "Yeah its a little more Finnigan's Wake meets Lovecraft right now until I get my neural network better trained lol.

On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 12:18 PM, John Ohno notifications@github.com wrote:

Looking forward to it!

On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 3:13 PM Brian Redfern notifications@github.com wrote:

Well that's the idea but likely going to be very naked lunch esque, an excuse to attempt something really interesting with node + react

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#51.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#51 (comment) .

"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 01:23:54, toomuchpete opened a new issue called Who Lives in a Pineapple Under the Sea? MIS-TER DAR-CY!. It has a rank of 15.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 01:26:11, KyFaSt subscribed to issue #133, Who Lives in a Pineapple Under the Sea? MIS-TER DAR-CY!.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 01:26:11, toomuchpete commented on issue #133, 'Who Lives in a Pineapple Under the Sea? MIS-TER DAR-CY!': "As requested, @kyfast."

On Thu Nov 05 2015 01:26:11, KyFaSt mentioned issue #133, Who Lives in a Pineapple Under the Sea? MIS-TER DAR-CY!.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 01:49:08, iangonzalez opened a new issue called Intent to participate. It has a rank of 5.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 03:31:57, jseakle opened a new issue called Interlude: (Un)Sound Structures. It has a rank of 36. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Thu Nov 05 2015 03:54:51, hugovk labeled issue #135, Interlude: (Un)Sound Structures.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 03:57:52, hugovk commented on issue #135, 'Interlude: (Un)Sound Structures': "Have a COMPLETED!

Merrsoncs © 2015 sr Tiyrinshmi T. Hifasho

"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 06:15:02, suisea commented on issue #109, 'MOBY DICK; or, THE CYBERWHALE - a cyberpunk version of Moby Dick': "> at the moment I'm basically finding nice replacements for various sea-related words.

ruuuuude"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 07:00:34, cpressey commented on issue #135, 'Interlude: (Un)Sound Structures': "Nice! If, in the next few weeks, you want to take another break, you could throw [parts of] this through a voice synthesizer -- seems fitting for a sound poem -- and submit it to NaOpGenMo..."

On Thu Nov 05 2015 08:04:23, tra38 commented on issue #98, 'A daring journey to the bottom of the pit': ">Anyways, I hope whoever looks at it enjoys it, cause I had fun making it!

I enjoyed it, though said enjoyment did require me to skim through the entire text. That's usually on par with most NaNoGenMo simulated works though. Good job on your first program. May you make others in the future."

On Thu Nov 05 2015 08:25:48, hugovk labeled issue #98, A daring journey to the bottom of the pit.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 08:26:39, hugovk commented on issue #98, 'A daring journey to the bottom of the pit': "Linking to Pastebin is totally fine, we're only using GitHub as a forum. I can see the code files and book so looks like you figured out Pastebin :)

No-one here minds bad code, there'll be plenty being written in this short month. Anyway, code looks fine on a quick skim, and the output is what matters, and I like it:

You're attacked by a warlock! More than one!

A warlock hit The long haired one! It was a super weak attack.

The long haired one killed the warlock with power! A warlock hit The deep sounding one!

It was a super weak attack. The deep sounding one killed the warlock with wit!

The enemies are gone now. What a fight!

I like the repetition too:

The long haired one thinks she sees people! The long haired one is worried they might be bad people.

The deep sounding one thinks the group should try and talk to them. Our group leaves the people alone.

The long haired one thinks she sees people! The long haired one is worried they might be bad people.

The deep sounding one thinks the group should try and talk to them. Our group leaves the people alone.

The long haired one thinks she sees people! The long haired one is worried they might be bad people.

The deep sounding one thinks the group should try and talk to them. Our group heads towards the people.

Our group asks the people if they know anything about the pit. They ask Our group if we're sure we want to know.

Our group says yes. If you really must know, they say, I know the pit is off far away in that direction.

A few of them point off in the distance. Our group thanks them for the help and walks where they pointed.

What nice people! "

On Thu Nov 05 2015 08:32:38, hugovk commented on issue #17, 'Language Survey 2015': "Of the completed so far:

C#: dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#98

Prolog: dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#125

Python: dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#72 dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#78 dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#104 dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#116 dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#117 dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#135

"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 08:35:02, mattfister commented on issue #98, 'A daring journey to the bottom of the pit': "This is great - nice job!"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 09:24:46, coleww opened a new issue called The TPP: A "Found" Generated Novel. It has a rank of 36. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Thu Nov 05 2015 09:25:28, coleww commented on issue #136, 'The TPP: A "Found" Generated Novel': "I was going to suggest the TPP as a corpus, but as I started reading it I realized the work was already complete!"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 09:42:53, dariusk commented on issue #136, 'The TPP: A "Found" Generated Novel': "Lovely!"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 09:43:00, dariusk labeled issue #136, The TPP: A "Found" Generated Novel.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 09:43:00, dariusk labeled issue #136, The TPP: A "Found" Generated Novel.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 09:43:37, dariusk commented on issue #133, 'Who Lives in a Pineapple Under the Sea? MIS-TER DAR-CY!': "Love it."

On Thu Nov 05 2015 09:44:40, hugovk mentioned issue #83, Co-authored Procedural Novel.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 09:44:40, hugovk subscribed to issue #83, Co-authored Procedural Novel.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 09:44:40, dariusk commented on issue #83, 'Co-authored Procedural Novel': "@hugovk I was considering marking this as complete since it comes awfully close and does include the source code... what do you think?"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 09:45:09, dariusk commented on issue #132, 'Generative Socratic Dialogues': "I love the idea."

On Thu Nov 05 2015 09:45:40, cpressey commented on issue #136, 'The TPP: A "Found" Generated Novel': "> (a) an originating good of another Party, individually, is being imported into the Party’s territory in such increased quantities, in absolute terms or relative to domestic production, and under such conditions,

as to cause or threaten to cause serious injury to the domestic industry that produces a like or directly competitive good; or (b) an originating good of two or more Parties, collectively, is being imported into the

Party’s territory in such increased quantities, in absolute terms or relative to domestic production, and under such conditions, as to cause or threaten to cause serious injury to the domestic industry that produces a like or directly competitive good, provided that the Party applying the transitional safeguard measure demonstrates, with respect to the imports from each such Party against which the transitional safeguard measure is applied, that imports of the originating good from each of those Parties have

increased, in absolute terms or relative to domestic production, since the date of entry into force of this

Agreement for those Parties

Certainly sounds like the result of random template expansion to me!"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 09:46:17, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #118, 'Automated Blackout Poetry': "@jseakle - are you familiar with Tom Philips' A Humument??

humument example

Not to focus on the image-patterns, but could you create whitespace-rivers between the elements? Or lines, at least, to connect the "trail of thought" ?

I used to hand-paint my own - black-backgrounds only. No scanned examples.

"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 09:46:17, jseakle subscribed to issue #118, Automated Blackout Poetry.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 09:46:17, jseakle mentioned issue #118, Automated Blackout Poetry.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 09:49:31, KyFaSt commented on issue #133, 'Who Lives in a Pineapple Under the Sea? MIS-TER DAR-CY!': ":pineapple: "

On Thu Nov 05 2015 09:50:58, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #51, '1940s la horror noire': "> Finnigan's Wake meets Lovecraft

aaaaand, why would it need further training? !!!

riverrun, past Abhoth and C'thalpa's, from non-euclidean swerve of shore to hideous bend of abominable pre-human swamp, brings us by an incomprehensible commodius vicus of recirculation back to Leng Plateau and Environs."

On Thu Nov 05 2015 09:53:04, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #49, '"Where I'm From" poem & novel generator': "I like this."

On Thu Nov 05 2015 09:54:45, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #133, 'Who Lives in a Pineapple Under the Sea? MIS-TER DAR-CY!': "There's been dialogue swapping in the past, and I did character/noun swapping between two texts as well. But nobody has tackled the problem of getting references straight. I thought about it as one of my projects this year, but don't know if I'll get to it.

I won't be sad if you do the work for the rest of us!"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 09:58:15, hugovk commented on issue #83, 'Co-authored Procedural Novel': "If you include the source code (but not the corpora) in an appendix in the back of the final, printed volume it's almost 52k.

Congratulations, have a Completed label!"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 09:58:21, hugovk unlabeled issue #83, Co-authored Procedural Novel.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 09:58:21, hugovk labeled issue #83, Co-authored Procedural Novel.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:02:47, dariusk subscribed to issue #136, The TPP: A "Found" Generated Novel.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:02:47, hugovk commented on issue #136, 'The TPP: A "Found" Generated Novel': "Haha!

(@dariusk Should the "preview" label be removed, as "completed" kind of trumps it?)"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:02:47, dariusk mentioned issue #136, The TPP: A "Found" Generated Novel.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:04:19, enkiv2 commented on issue #133, 'Who Lives in a Pineapple Under the Sea? MIS-TER DAR-CY!': "The word2vec-related projects have managed to translate references. If you make an explicit list of proper names in each source, you can probably make an explicit translation or use word2vec to produce correspondences for you.

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 9:54 AM Michael Paulukonis notifications@github.com wrote:

There's been dialogue swapping in the past, and I did character/noun swapping between two texts as well. But nobody has tackled the problem of getting references straight. I thought about it as one of my projects this year, but don't know if I'll get to it.

I won't be sad if you do the work for the rest of us!

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#133 (comment) .

"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:05:56, hugovk labeled issue #66, Expand-filter: a novel-length expansion of a sentence.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:06:17, hugovk labeled issue #65, Orgasmotron -- 50k words of generated erotica.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:23:39, nicholasg3 opened a new issue called Automatic Essay Grading + (Markov Chains | Genetic Algorithm) = Novel?. It has a rank of 6.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:25:32, cpressey commented on issue #98, 'A daring journey to the bottom of the pit': "I like this a lot! Good use of tropes. I wasn't bored by it at all!"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:30:34, bredfern commented on issue #51, '1940s la horror noire': "Here's a sample of what I have so far:

"Welcog. I have found room that if in crimbling stone-like and more Cwrongen had curiously insectures accaisions - ruck their bits-rathheres had graned materials, companions and tower aperthing and sinist-opashing of the more shapes, all youngle sort my net other contrictify, and of light, and of this length of agevent clesting that other promito, beforeward three membersalay even questions, we spate, the fuss which by the base I race no rock place on feet away with said:-"

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 6:51 AM, Michael Paulukonis <notifications@github.com

wrote:

Finnigan's Wake meets Lovecraft

aaaaand, why would it need further training? !!!

riverrun, past Abhoth and C'thalpa's, from non-euclidean swerve of shore to hideous bend of abominable pre-human swamp, brings us by an incomprehensible commodius vicus of recirculation back to Leng Plateau and Environs.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#51 (comment) .

"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:37:29, bredfern commented on issue #51, '1940s la horror noire': "I think it turns out better when I have only Lovecraft text, I mixed in the text off of Dracula and it watered down my model lol.

Although I may just roll with the 900 page text I generated from a combination of lovecraft and crowley, thinking of hooking this into a text to speech and a widget that is pulling images off google image search and displaying that while the text is being spoken by the computer voice.

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 7:31 AM, Brian Redfern brianwredfern@gmail.com wrote:

Here's a sample of what I have so far:

"Welcog. I have found room that if in crimbling stone-like and more Cwrongen had curiously insectures accaisions - ruck their bits-rathheres had graned materials, companions and tower aperthing and sinist-opashing of the more shapes, all youngle sort my net other contrictify, and of light, and of this length of agevent clesting that other promito, beforeward three membersalay even questions, we spate, the fuss which by the base I race no rock place on feet away with said:-"

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 6:51 AM, Michael Paulukonis < notifications@github.com> wrote:

Finnigan's Wake meets Lovecraft

aaaaand, why would it need further training? !!!

riverrun, past Abhoth and C'thalpa's, from non-euclidean swerve of shore to hideous bend of abominable pre-human swamp, brings us by an incomprehensible commodius vicus of recirculation back to Leng Plateau and Environs.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#51 (comment) .

"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:37:41, enkiv2 commented on issue #137, 'Automatic Essay Grading + (Markov Chains | Genetic Algorithm) = Novel?': "I guess you could do it like a genetic algorithm: produce random essays and grade them, and then somehow combine the winners?

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 10:23 AM Nicholas Garcia notifications@github.com wrote:

My research project involves building an automatic essay scoring system. Can it be "run backwards" to get some text? Or at least throw interesting text at it to see what it thinks should be a good answer. Text might be generated either with markov chains or combining other corpuses.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#137.

"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:40:49, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #51, '1940s la horror noire': "Looks like it's working with letters atomically, instead of words. I'm not familiar with the model, but can you change the atomicity?

Not that I don't like the output."

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:42:06, dariusk commented on issue #136, 'The TPP: A "Found" Generated Novel': "@hugovk I'm kind of using "preview" as a shorthand for "there is an excerpt somewhere in the thread", so people who just want to browse snippets can do that. I'm imagining a case where someone wants to look for threads where they don't have to download PDFs or whatever."

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:42:07, hugovk subscribed to issue #136, The TPP: A "Found" Generated Novel.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:42:07, hugovk mentioned issue #136, The TPP: A "Found" Generated Novel.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:42:46, enkiv2 subscribed to issue #133, Who Lives in a Pineapple Under the Sea? MIS-TER DAR-CY!.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:42:46, enkiv2 mentioned issue #133, Who Lives in a Pineapple Under the Sea? MIS-TER DAR-CY!.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:42:46, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #133, 'Who Lives in a Pineapple Under the Sea? MIS-TER DAR-CY!': "I would be intrigued to see this work; one problem is eponyms, nicknames, gender-references, and titles. "King" posed a particular problem for me, as the pos-tagger I was using always decided it was a verb. @enkiv2 - can you link to one or more projects that managed to translate references?"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:46:10, dariusk commented on issue #98, 'A daring journey to the bottom of the pit': "Nice one!"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:50:20, bredfern commented on issue #51, '1940s la horror noire': "Yeah its a statistical model that goes character by character, so I need to run it a lot longer with much higher temperature settings, it needs a bigger model too I need to scrape every single lovecraft text into one data file, right now its only a couple things in there once it has every single lovecraft text in one file and runs that at high temp it should produce a better result.

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 7:40 AM, Michael Paulukonis <notifications@github.com

wrote:

Looks like it's working with letters atomically, instead of words. I'm not familiar with the model, but can you change the atomicity?

Not that I don't like the output.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#51 (comment) .

"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:52:16, enkiv2 commented on issue #51, '1940s la horror noire': "Does this use char-rnn? I rather like the letter-granularity of the input (and RNNs do better at producing real words out of character-granularity input with relatively small training data than, say, third- or fourth-order markov chains do), but it looks like you'd get more coherence if you doubled or tripled the input.

If you're looking for something closer to the Lovecraft end of the style spectrum than the Dracula end, you might look into some of the late eighteenth century authors of weird fiction that Lovecraft aped: Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgeson, & Robert Chambers.

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 10:40 AM Michael Paulukonis notifications@github.com wrote:

Looks like it's working with letters atomically, instead of words. I'm not familiar with the model, but can you change the atomicity?

Not that I don't like the output.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#51 (comment) .

"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:56:40, enkiv2 commented on issue #133, 'Who Lives in a Pineapple Under the Sea? MIS-TER DAR-CY!': "Take a look at the translated titles and authors in dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#72 ; this is what I mean. Word2vec correctly figured out that certain proper nouns were similar in the same way that it figured out that certain nouns are similar in general, from what I understand. If you whitelist proper nouns and have an explicit list of identical ways of referring to the same person which you normalize, you can do that with better reliability, but at that point you've done most of the work of creating a correspondence table between sets of characters and you might as well just do string replacement on them.

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 10:46 AM Michael Paulukonis notifications@github.com wrote:

I would be intrigued to see this work; one problem is eponyms, nicknames, gender-references, and titles. "King" posed a particular problem for me, as the pos-tagger I was using always decided it was a verb. @enkiv2 https://github.com/enkiv2 - can you link to one or more projects that managed to translate references?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#133 (comment) .

"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:56:41, enkiv2 subscribed to issue #133, Who Lives in a Pineapple Under the Sea? MIS-TER DAR-CY!.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:56:41, enkiv2 mentioned issue #133, Who Lives in a Pineapple Under the Sea? MIS-TER DAR-CY!.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:58:03, mewo2 commented on issue #72, 'Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup': "I used the "standard" Google News model for most stuff. There's a "backup" model which was trained on about 100 Project Gutenberg books (including the source texts), which I use when there's a word which doesn't occur in the Google News dataset. That's usually either an unusual proper name, or something archaic."

On Thu Nov 05 2015 10:59:50, bredfern commented on issue #51, '1940s la horror noire': "Yeah it uses char-nn so its all about the quality of the model going in, I might need to write an extra piece of node code that scrapes the web for sources and adds to the data file, lovecraft is out of copyright so its a good choice, but yeah there are other great authors in this genre who are not in copyright lockdown.

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 7:52 AM, John Ohno notifications@github.com wrote:

Does this use char-rnn? I rather like the letter-granularity of the input (and RNNs do better at producing real words out of character-granularity input with relatively small training data than, say, third- or fourth-order markov chains do), but it looks like you'd get more coherence if you doubled or tripled the input.

If you're looking for something closer to the Lovecraft end of the style spectrum than the Dracula end, you might look into some of the late eighteenth century authors of weird fiction that Lovecraft aped: Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgeson, & Robert Chambers.

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 10:40 AM Michael Paulukonis < notifications@github.com> wrote:

Looks like it's working with letters atomically, instead of words. I'm not familiar with the model, but can you change the atomicity?

Not that I don't like the output.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub < dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#51 (comment)

.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#51 (comment) .

"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 11:27:14, jseakle commented on issue #135, 'Interlude: (Un)Sound Structures': "Man, you ruined my cool surprise! :P

I had to get to sleep last night, but I was planning to do speech synthesis to this today. Didn't know about NaOpGenMo, though, that is neat and I will consider submitting.

..how long until National "National Generating Month" Generating Month?? "

On Thu Nov 05 2015 11:39:17, bredfern commented on issue #51, '1940s la horror noire': "Now I have one data file with all of lovecraft's ficiton in it, the cool thing is that with a single author model you don't get any nasty dropouts in terms of training loss, when you try to mash of several authors you'll hit a nasty training loss issue.

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 7:59 AM, Brian Redfern brianwredfern@gmail.com wrote:

Yeah it uses char-nn so its all about the quality of the model going in, I might need to write an extra piece of node code that scrapes the web for sources and adds to the data file, lovecraft is out of copyright so its a good choice, but yeah there are other great authors in this genre who are not in copyright lockdown.

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 7:52 AM, John Ohno notifications@github.com wrote:

Does this use char-rnn? I rather like the letter-granularity of the input (and RNNs do better at producing real words out of character-granularity input with relatively small training data than, say, third- or fourth-order markov chains do), but it looks like you'd get more coherence if you doubled or tripled the input.

If you're looking for something closer to the Lovecraft end of the style spectrum than the Dracula end, you might look into some of the late eighteenth century authors of weird fiction that Lovecraft aped: Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgeson, & Robert Chambers.

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 10:40 AM Michael Paulukonis < notifications@github.com> wrote:

Looks like it's working with letters atomically, instead of words. I'm not familiar with the model, but can you change the atomicity?

Not that I don't like the output.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub < dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#51 (comment)

.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#51 (comment) .

"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 12:07:31, amanda opened a new issue called images to text. It has a rank of 5.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 13:21:23, cpressey commented on issue #135, 'Interlude: (Un)Sound Structures': "Oh snap, sorry about that! But it seemed like the obvious next step.

Yo dawg, I heard you liked National Generation Months, so I * faints *"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 14:14:29, hugovk labeled issue #83, Co-authored Procedural Novel.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 14:14:44, hugovk labeled issue #98, A daring journey to the bottom of the pit.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 14:14:58, hugovk labeled issue #116, Saga III: Another Original Play by a Computer.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 14:15:13, hugovk labeled issue #125, Jede Silbe.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 14:29:03, SandroMiccoli opened a new issue called Intent to participate - CHARLES BUKOWSKI ALL CAPS. It has a rank of 6.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 15:09:43, sethwoodworth renamed issue #89, _Terminalia (using GITenberg)_.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 16:01:43, mcwill97 commented on issue #98, 'A daring journey to the bottom of the pit': "Thanks everyone! I'm really glad you liked it! There's a ton of features I was going to add like more tests that check for the characters stats and repercussions other than death like limb loss and mutations, but it would've lead to a few more days of coding and I was a bit anxious to get back to coding my game since its nearing completion. I am really happy you guys liked it though, because this is the first time I've shown any of my work publicly. In particular I really like what happens when someone likes somebody else who hates them and they try to talk. ctrl - f for "heck" if interested"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 16:12:32, jseakle commented on issue #135, 'Interlude: (Un)Sound Structures': "No worries :)

Here's the poem!"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 16:38:16, bredfern commented on issue #51, '1940s la horror noire': "Yeah now using every Lovecraft text as a source you get more interesting output:

The Great Old Ones which he had been heard the strange college of the strange part of the streets of the streets of the strange and structures of the process of the substance of the things to the party, and the face of the colour of the rest of the strange things that we had been a surprising through the colour of the strange and strange and parts of the strange plane of the strange and scrapter of the secret of the chance of the strange and start of the shocking far as it was a companion.

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 8:39 AM, Brian Redfern brianwredfern@gmail.com wrote:

Now I have one data file with all of lovecraft's ficiton in it, the cool thing is that with a single author model you don't get any nasty dropouts in terms of training loss, when you try to mash of several authors you'll hit a nasty training loss issue.

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 7:59 AM, Brian Redfern brianwredfern@gmail.com wrote:

Yeah it uses char-nn so its all about the quality of the model going in, I might need to write an extra piece of node code that scrapes the web for sources and adds to the data file, lovecraft is out of copyright so its a good choice, but yeah there are other great authors in this genre who are not in copyright lockdown.

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 7:52 AM, John Ohno notifications@github.com wrote:

Does this use char-rnn? I rather like the letter-granularity of the input (and RNNs do better at producing real words out of character-granularity input with relatively small training data than, say, third- or fourth-order markov chains do), but it looks like you'd get more coherence if you doubled or tripled the input.

If you're looking for something closer to the Lovecraft end of the style spectrum than the Dracula end, you might look into some of the late eighteenth century authors of weird fiction that Lovecraft aped: Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgeson, & Robert Chambers.

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 10:40 AM Michael Paulukonis < notifications@github.com> wrote:

Looks like it's working with letters atomically, instead of words. I'm not familiar with the model, but can you change the atomicity?

Not that I don't like the output.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub < dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#51 (comment)

.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#51 (comment) .

"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 18:43:41, greg-kennedy commented on issue #91, 'Intent: edited text adventure': "Setting up a bunch of classes in Perl, the One True Language. Lots of stuff filled from corpora. So far I can set up the initial state of the "world".

The World at Wed Dec 31 18:00:00 1969

The 0th place in our story is the 'dressing room'. It appears nondescript.

There is a wireless control here. It appears nondescript. There is a wallet here. It appears nondescript. There is a rat here. It appears nondescript. There is a ice cream stick here. It appears nondescript. There is a dog here. It appears nondescript. There is a bottle of glue here. It appears nondescript. There is a soccer ball here. It appears nondescript. There is a hair clip here. It appears nondescript. There is a desk here. It appears nondescript. There is a matchbook here. It appears nondescript.

Kaylee Carter is also here. She appears nondescript. Kaylee is holding a nondescript nail clippers. Kaylee is holding a nondescript bag of rubber bands. Kaylee is holding a nondescript cars.

The 1th place in our story is the 'staff room'. It appears nondescript.

There is a package of glitter here. It appears nondescript. There is a glass here. It appears nondescript. There is a acorn here. It appears nondescript. There is a magnifying glass here. It appears nondescript. There is a game CD here. It appears nondescript. There is a keychain here. It appears nondescript. There is a pocketknife here. It appears nondescript. There is a paperclip here. It appears nondescript. There is a apple here. It appears nondescript. There is a rabbit here. It appears nondescript.

The 2th place in our story is the 'computer lab'. It appears nondescript.

There is a pail here. It appears nondescript. There is a jar of jam here. It appears nondescript. There is a drawer here. It appears nondescript. There is a mobile phone here. It appears nondescript. There is a towel here. It appears nondescript. There is a credit card here. It appears nondescript. There is a canteen here. It appears nondescript. There is a plate here. It appears nondescript.

Oscar Young is also here. He appears nondescript. Oscar is holding a nondescript plastic fork. Oscar is holding a nondescript cork. Oscar is holding a nondescript camera. Oscar is holding a nondescript acorn. Oscar is holding a nondescript pair of tongs.

Amy Perez is also here. She appears nondescript. Amy is holding a nondescript lotion. Amy is holding a nondescript lamp shade.

The 3th place in our story is the 'gym'. It appears nondescript.

...

"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 19:29:17, longears commented on issue #72, 'Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup': "This reminds me of the recent Neural Style algorithm which uses neural nets to copy artistic style from one image to another (e.g. to make a photo look like a Picasso painting).

https://github.com/jcjohnson/neural-style

try your own images here: https://dreamscopeapp.com/editor

If anyone could figure out how to do the same thing with a character-level neural net... :)

https://github.com/karpathy/char-rnn"

On Thu Nov 05 2015 21:15:28, nadavoosh opened a new issue called Statement of intent. It has a rank of 8.

On Thu Nov 05 2015 21:16:09, nadavoosh commented on issue #140, 'Statement of intent': "If anyone knows anything about the novel I'll be generating, please let me know. "

On Thu Nov 05 2015 21:18:20, ikarth commented on issue #72, 'Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup': "I am severely tempted to try that, since one of my near-term goals is "learn enough about neural nets to play around with them.""

On Thu Nov 05 2015 21:28:33, ikarth commented on issue #133, 'Who Lives in a Pineapple Under the Sea? MIS-TER DAR-CY!': "My Gutenberg Shuffle from 2013 attempted to respect references, but it turned out to be a bigger project than anticipwords.It sort of got gender right, though I'd redo it if I went that way again.

Note that, at least for the libraries in gensim, pos-taggers work better on sentences rather than individual words."

On Thu Nov 05 2015 23:08:15, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #14, 'The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body': "So, here's a sample.

Not terribly exciting.

First proof of concept. It's all the boring templating.

I want some better stuff for the locales, use of powers, dealing with the finality -- the flow from one thing to the next is awkward. Plus, it would be nice if the egg shifted around a bit.

"

On Fri Nov 06 2015 00:37:20, nadavoosh commented on issue #136, 'The TPP: A "Found" Generated Novel': "this is great! Nice job. "

On Fri Nov 06 2015 03:40:49, hugovk labeled issue #135, Interlude: (Un)Sound Structures.

On Fri Nov 06 2015 03:41:37, hugovk labeled issue #91, Intent: edited text adventure.

On Fri Nov 06 2015 03:42:13, hugovk labeled issue #51, 1940s la horror noire.

On Fri Nov 06 2015 05:06:34, jseakle opened a new issue called Interlude 2: Worldbuilding In The Twenty-Teens. It has a rank of 25. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Fri Nov 06 2015 05:19:47, hugovk labeled issue #141, Interlude 2: Worldbuilding In The Twenty-Teens.

On Fri Nov 06 2015 09:15:48, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #135, 'Interlude: (Un)Sound Structures': "> I think that it is not, in general, reversible.

Since you replaced "diphthongs with diphthongs, consonants with consonants, and vowels with vowels, chosen at random from English frequency charts" -- running the same process on the words, comparing the variants to dictionary, and then extend that to general english frequency n-gram tables for word order, and the text might fall back into place. I also assume, since it is so easy for me to make assumptions when I have no intention of coding it up, that once portions of the text are "figured out" the tables can be updated with in-document frequencies. But that might include some human overview.

Isn't that roughly what mobile-swipe-style keyboards do -- take all of the letters in the path and do a lookup on the (probable) words?


Love the .mp3!"

On Fri Nov 06 2015 10:33:46, kevandotorg opened a new issue called Around the World in X Wikipedia Articles. It has a rank of 10.

On Fri Nov 06 2015 10:36:51, rngwrldngnr commented on issue #15, 'Virgil's Commonplace Book': "@tra38 How well did the No Dialogue approach go over with test readers? I got put off by it from some of Lovecraft's posthumous works, but I've never been clear if it was specifically the use of description in place of dialogue or if the combination of purple prose and lack of polish soured me unfairly."

On Fri Nov 06 2015 10:36:51, tra38 mentioned issue #15, Virgil's Commonplace Book.

On Fri Nov 06 2015 10:36:51, tra38 subscribed to issue #15, Virgil's Commonplace Book.

On Fri Nov 06 2015 10:57:23, enkiv2 commented on issue #133, 'Who Lives in a Pineapple Under the Sea? MIS-TER DAR-CY!': "I was thinking you'd operate on the whole sentences, but then only pay attention to the whitelisted words.

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 9:28 PM Isaac Karth notifications@github.com wrote:

My Gutenberg Shuffle from 2013 attempted to respect references, but it turned out to be a bigger project than anticipwords.It sort of got gender right, though I'd redo it if I went that way again.

Note that, at least for the libraries in gensim, pos-taggers work better on sentences rather than individual words.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#133 (comment) .

"

On Fri Nov 06 2015 10:58:48, enkiv2 commented on issue #14, 'The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body': "It's not too bad. (The repetition in there reminds me of the repetition -- used for rhetorical effect -- in sumerian mythology.)

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 11:08 PM Michael Paulukonis notifications@github.com wrote:

So, here's a sample https://gist.github.com/MichaelPaulukonis/3af142f787db2908d3f0.

Not terribly exciting.

First proof of concept. It's all the boring templating.

I want some better stuff for the locales, use of powers, dealing with the finality -- the flow from one thing to the next is awkward. Plus, it would be nice if the egg shifted around a bit.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#14 (comment) .

"

On Fri Nov 06 2015 11:05:04, crhallberg opened a new issue called Game of Nodes. It has a rank of 8.

On Fri Nov 06 2015 11:05:56, ikarth commented on issue #142, 'Around the World in X Wikipedia Articles': "Excellent idea."

On Fri Nov 06 2015 11:10:15, dariusk commented on issue #142, 'Around the World in X Wikipedia Articles': "Oh, lovely!!!"

On Fri Nov 06 2015 11:50:48, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #139, 'Intent to participate - CHARLES BUKOWSKI ALL CAPS': "THAT is something that could be PRETTY F****G INTERESTING.

"

On Fri Nov 06 2015 11:54:33, rngwrldngnr subscribed to issue #15, Virgil's Commonplace Book.

On Fri Nov 06 2015 11:54:33, tra38 commented on issue #15, 'Virgil's Commonplace Book': "@rngwrldngnr Nobody made any comment. They didn't complain about it being bad, or good, or anything of that sort. The text just gave expository information, and that was it...so they read it, and then move on with the rest of the passage, without any comment. It's possible the readers may have never even noticed the lack of dialogue in the text. The point was that there were no complaints and that was good enough for me."

On Fri Nov 06 2015 11:54:33, rngwrldngnr mentioned issue #15, Virgil's Commonplace Book.

On Fri Nov 06 2015 12:15:51, nqpz commented on issue #143, 'Game of Nodes': "Sounds fun. What about:

  • Gratuitously killing off characters"

    On Fri Nov 06 2015 12:23:59, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #14, 'The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body': "> It's not too bad.

I'll put that on the cover!

Srsly, the templates are a simplified, non-variant version of a synopsis of the story. So - rough draft/proof-of-concept. I do like repetition-as-rhetorical-device quite a bit. But 1000-creatures-worth of like? hrm. [hah-hah-hah - I just ran it with 1000 creatures, and came up with 49916 words. SO CLOSE!]

I've been thinking about this for months. Possibly vaguely since last year.

Not all that excited by the output. </ high-expectations>"

On Fri Nov 06 2015 12:37:05, enkiv2 commented on issue #14, 'The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body': "If you switched the vocab up and did 1000 creatures you might actually be able to pass as sumerian mythology. We have middle tablets of important stories that are literally just lists of musical instruments or creatures. And, whenever a god is mentioned by name, the name is used 3-6 times with varying adjectives associated, like: "And then, with a single blow, Lord Enki, with a single blow, Enki of the deep waters, he with a single blow, Lord Enki whose advice is always advisable and whose domain is the great me of princeship, with a single blow, whacked nuddimud over the head."

On Fri, Nov 6, 2015 at 12:24 PM Michael Paulukonis notifications@github.com wrote:

It's not too bad.

I'll put that on the cover!

Srsly, the templates are a simplified, non-variant version of a synopsis of the story. So - rough draft/proof-of-concept. I do like repetition-as-rhetorical-device quite a bit. But 1000-creatures-worth of like? hrm. [hah-hah-hah - I just ran it with 1000 creatures, and came up with 49916 words. SO CLOSE!]

I've been thinking about this for months. Possibly vaguely since last year.

Not all that excited by the output. </ high-expectations>

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#14 (comment) .

"

On Fri Nov 06 2015 12:46:26, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #14, 'The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body': "hrm. One of the lists I was thinking of using was Norse Gods.

The abilities/powers used to defeat are derived from a list of Pokemon abilities, and superhero abilities.

It's only the sixth of the month....

And, I must say -- you are getting me more exited about the output. Thanks!"

On Fri Nov 06 2015 12:46:58, greg-kennedy opened a new issue called Terms and Conditions - a legal thriller!. It has a rank of 30. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Fri Nov 06 2015 12:51:07, ikarth commented on issue #143, 'Game of Nodes': "I don't think we've had massive numbers of characters attempted yet. I am curious about what emergent effects large groups will have. Or how it will read with all the characters acting."

On Fri Nov 06 2015 12:53:20, enkiv2 commented on issue #144, 'Terms and Conditions - a legal thriller!': "There are a large number of open source licenses floating around, if you need more legalese to feed in. Here's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licenses

I did a cursory search to see if anybody has collected an archive of EULAs for various products, but didn't see any.

On Fri, Nov 6, 2015 at 12:46 PM Greg Kennedy notifications@github.com wrote:

CODE: https://github.com/greg-kennedy/TermsAndConditions SAMPLE: https://github.com/greg-kennedy/TermsAndConditions/blob/master/SAMPLE.md

I spent a day taking a break from my main entry to knock out this one. Inspired by the "TPP as Found Art" issue here: #136 dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#136

I wrote a Perl script to parse Terms and Conditions / EULA from various major software vendors, then recombine them with Markov chains. The end result is a bunch of legalese formatted as a real ToS, complete with sign and date line. I think the Markdown formatting is what sets it apart from just spewing re-sentences around: it's amazing what some ALLCAPS and numbered lists can do for your otherwise boring document.

Wish the corpus was bigger, though. I think a warning label from some popular prescription drug would spice it up.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#144.

"

On Fri Nov 06 2015 12:59:41, hugovk commented on issue #142, 'Around the World in X Wikipedia Articles': "Good idea!

And a good idea to plot its own route -- the earth's landmass doesn't give a neat latitudinal line of places of interest, so plotting like that is a bit like real round-the-world routes.

It'd be really nice to have an appendix showing a world map of the route taken. You could even include smaller maps of the places visited."

On Fri Nov 06 2015 13:02:20, hugovk labeled issue #144, Terms and Conditions - a legal thriller!.

On Fri Nov 06 2015 13:02:55, enkiv2 commented on issue #143, 'Game of Nodes': "Side note: rich-get-richer networks (like most social networks and many biological neural networks) wherein number of connections per neuron is distributed according to zipf's law can be constructed either by introducing new nodes by connecting them to randomly chosen existing nodes or by starting with a randomly connected network and entirely removing nodes at random. So, killing off characters at random is literally an interesting and realistic way of creating potentially interesting social and power dynamics.

On Fri, Nov 6, 2015 at 12:51 PM Isaac Karth notifications@github.com wrote:

I don't think we've had massive numbers of characters attempted yet. I am curious about what emergent effects large groups will have. Or how it will read with all the characters acting.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015#143 (comment) .

"

On Fri Nov 06 2015 13:04:01, nadavoosh commented on issue #140, 'Statement of intent': "I'm thinking of creating literary "equivalence classes", and then rewriting one novel by swapping its elements for elements from the same equivalence class.

Defining the classes in a sufficiently interesting way will be the fun part. Perhaps something like: sentences which start and end with the same word. "

On Fri Nov 06 2015 13:05:16, hugovk commented on issue #144, 'Terms and Conditions - a legal thriller!': "Put EULA in the search box here and you get a fair few results:

http://textfiles.com/directory.html"

On Fri Nov 06 2015 13:06:45, hugovk commented on issue #144, 'Terms and Conditions - a legal thriller!': "> Please review these policies which are designed to protect against fraud and enforcing this agreement.

Huh? These policies are designed to protect against ... enforcing this agreement? :)"

On Fri Nov 06 2015 13:47:12, ikarth commented on issue #140, 'Statement of intent': "I don't think I've seen that exact approach here...there have been some slightly similar things, like swapping proper nouns or dialog or picking the same part of speech that has the best word2vec score. I think you are correct that the key is to pick how you define the classes."

On Fri Nov 06 2015 17:29:24, d-baker commented on issue #127, 'diary of a sad robot': "added some random code:

morbidity

bump

limbo

"

On Fri Nov 06 2015 17:36:53, hugovk labeled issue #127, diary of a sad robot.

On Fri Nov 06 2015 17:42:42, araile commented on issue #127, 'diary of a sad robot': "So much poetry in these snippets!"

On Fri Nov 06 2015 17:45:45, suisea commented on issue #127, 'diary of a sad robot': "ilu :kissing_cat: @d-baker "

On Fri Nov 06 2015 17:45:46, d-baker mentioned issue #127, diary of a sad robot.

On Fri Nov 06 2015 17:45:46, d-baker subscribed to issue #127, diary of a sad robot.

On Fri Nov 06 2015 18:12:51, saluk commented on issue #47, 'Three people walk into a bar': "Fun with pronouns: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Y5IvdJDc4kyHyK2AJzqbsFOS6w5BX_nbsYY1ndGMeDU/edit?usp=sharing"

On Fri Nov 06 2015 18:32:37, greg-kennedy commented on issue #131, 'Hodor!': " #!/bin/sh

perl -pne '$_=join(" ",map{sub a{$_[0]^lc($_[0])^($_[1] x length($_[0]));}if($_=~m/^(\W*)(\w)(\w*?)(\w)?(\w)?(\w)?(\W*)$/){join("",$1,a($2,"h"),a($3,"o"),a($4,"d"),a($5,"o"),a($6,"r"),$7)}else{$_;}}split(/\s/,$_))."\n";' 1342.txt"

On Fri Nov 06 2015 20:06:44, nadavoosh opened a new issue called Novel Switcher. It has a rank of 7.

On Fri Nov 06 2015 20:07:45, nadavoosh commented on issue #144, 'Terms and Conditions - a legal thriller!': "This is awesome! Conceptually similar to http://itunestandc.tumblr.com"

On Fri Nov 06 2015 20:38:40, araile commented on issue #26, 'Pocket Atlas of Remote Planets': "Sample chapter list:

  1. Confringo (Epic 201445392 C)

  2. Sól (Hd 21693 C)

  3. Sinthgunt (Kepler-9 D)

  4. Demeter (Hd 122430 B)

  5. Furnunculus (Epic 201855371 B)

  6. Orchid (Hd 92788 B)

  7. Alohomora (Corot-23 B)

  8. Lotus (Kepler-281 B)

  9. Quietus (Hd 166724 B)

  10. Þrúðr (Kepler-390 B)

"

On Fri Nov 06 2015 20:57:05, ikarth commented on issue #145, 'Novel Switcher': "Not that i am aware of. There are several generators that generate books in the style of another book ( #72 combines two books) and I think there are some that switch their generation according to various rules, but I can't recall any that are even particularly close to your plan.

In general, I think combining multiple approaches is an underutilized way to create order in novel-length generators. Probably because it can take a month to learn a single new approach, let alone figuring out how to combine multiple ones. Your idea seems to strike a balan e between a strong concept and a relatively straightforward implementation. I suspect the trick will be to have enough works to key off bits of the titles. May want to throw some Shakespeare in there: everyone is always quoting his lines as titles."

On Fri Nov 06 2015 21:05:44, araile commented on issue #26, 'Pocket Atlas of Remote Planets': "I'm maintaining the source code at araile/nanogenmo-atlas.

Currently it pulls names from a few Corpora word lists and pairs them with a random selection of planets from the Open Exoplanet Catalogue (OEC). I'm planning to use more of this data to generate a chapter about each planet.

There is a make stats command which prints statistics about the OEC data. This includes the "earliest settled" and "latest settled" years, which I'm generating based on the distance of each planet's star from our own, and the assumption that we will mysteriously learn to travel at the speed of light in the Future."

On Sat Nov 07 2015 02:39:36, almightyJanitor opened a new issue called Sure Thing. It has a rank of 14. There's a preview available.

On Sat Nov 07 2015 03:25:33, hugovk commented on issue #145, 'Novel Switcher': ""That Hamlet is full of clichés.""

On Sat Nov 07 2015 03:30:59, hugovk commented on issue #26, 'Pocket Atlas of Remote Planets': "I wonder if you could pull in some demographic info from Wikipedia but change the years and proper nouns:

In 2353, Confringo's population was around 5.5 million, with the majority living in its southern regions.[8] In terms of area, it is the eighth largest planet in Epic 201445392 and the most sparsely populated planet in the Epic 201445392 Union. Confringo is a parliamentary republic with a central government based in the capital Ferdasia, local governments in 317 municipalities,[9] and an autonomous region, the Trandal Islands. Over 1.4 million people live in the Greater Ferdasia metropolitan area, which produces a third of the country's GDP. Other large cities include Rempart, Krut, Luou, Kylajaki, Hilta, and Piok."

On Sat Nov 07 2015 04:55:21, araile commented on issue #26, 'Pocket Atlas of Remote Planets': "Oh I like this!"

On Sat Nov 07 2015 05:14:04, araile commented on issue #26, 'Pocket Atlas of Remote Planets': "For #17: I'm using Python 3."

On Sat Nov 07 2015 07:37:17, ikarth commented on issue #146, 'Sure Thing': "I really, really like this as the basis for a generated plot."

On Sat Nov 07 2015 07:39:56, araile commented on issue #26, 'Pocket Atlas of Remote Planets': "Now I have it outputting HTML and Markdown. I'll regenerate the story here as I progress: https://github.com/araile/nanogenmo-atlas/blob/output/Atlas-of-Remote-Planets.markdown"

On Sat Nov 07 2015 08:30:31, hugovk commented on issue #26, 'Pocket Atlas of Remote Planets': "> Meow meow meow meow meow meow meow

meow meow meow meow meow meow meow

The official NaNoGenMo lorem ipsum :)"

On Sat Nov 07 2015 13:53:32, yhancik renamed issue #103, Something.

On Sat Nov 07 2015 14:12:37, hugovk labeled issue #109, MOBY DICK; or, THE CYBERWHALE - a cyberpunk version of Moby Dick.

On Sat Nov 07 2015 18:33:32, kellyi commented on issue #111, 'declaring my intention to participate!': "Progress! Minimal progress, but still: I made a GitHub repo to hold my project:

https://github.com/kellyi/NaNoGenMo2015

I think what I'm going to do is make a Sinatra site designed to be read on mobile that uses some bank of text to make some sort of web equivalent to a BS Johnson novel like The Unfortunates. As far as a corpus goes, I was thinking about feeding the thing a long collection of paragraphs or sentences from public domain novels which describe rooms, then chaining them together in some way while generating connective text between them to write a story about passing through dozens and dozens of rooms ordered randomly at page load."

On Sat Nov 07 2015 19:11:37, hnotess opened a new issue called Intent to participate: Completely new. It has a rank of 6.

On Sat Nov 07 2015 20:41:46, translulaith commented on issue #70, 'Journal Of Laplace's Demon': "I pretty much forgot about this for a week but I have a concept now, and I'm going to start work on it tomorrow.

I want to make the Journal or Memoir of Laplace's Demon, a big stream of consciousness block of text that describes the position of individual atoms and molecules in relation to big macro landmarks. Something like this, repeated.

"I am aware of an oxygen atom inside a molecule of water, floating freely in the clouds between the shadow of the large mountain and the rivers running north to south.""

On Sat Nov 07 2015 20:42:39, translulaith renamed issue #70, Journal Of Laplace's Demon.

On Sat Nov 07 2015 20:43:09, ikarth commented on issue #66, 'Expand-filter: a novel-length expansion of a sentence': "I'm reminded of Gnostic letter expansion, as described in Irenaeus's Adversus haereses (Book 1, Chapter 14):

He also maintains that the letter itself, the sound of which followed that sound below, was received up again by the syllable to which it belonged, in order to the completion of the whole, but that the sound remained below as if cast outside. But the element itself from which the letter with its special pronunciation descended to that below, he affirms to consist of thirty letters, while each of these letters, again, contains other letters in itself, by means of which the name of the letter is expressed. And thus, again, others are named by other letters, and others still by others, so that the multitude of letters swells out into infinitude. You may more clearly understand what I mean by the following example:— The word Delta contains five letters, viz., D, E, L, T, A: these letters again, are written by other letters, and others still by others. "

On Sat Nov 07 2015 21:49:41, aeschright commented on issue #144, 'Terms and Conditions - a legal thriller!': "Nice! I've been playing with a similar idea at https://twitter.com/licensemee"

On Sat Nov 07 2015 22:42:21, ikarth commented on issue #147, 'Intent to participate: Completely new': "There's a few different dictionaries around, depending on how involved you want to get and exactly what kind of shift you want to implement. Something like the public domain Moby Parts of Speech list, while not the most recent and up-to-date project might be a good starting point if you're using the relationship of words in a dictionary, versus something like WordNet that has less concept of the alphabetized order of the words. It mostly depends on what twist you want to put on it."

On Sat Nov 07 2015 22:59:32, greg-kennedy commented on issue #66, 'Expand-filter: a novel-length expansion of a sentence': "Similar as well to NaNoGenMo-2014 entry "The Definition Book" by @samcoppini

dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014#48"

On Sat Nov 07 2015 22:59:32, samcoppini subscribed to issue #66, Expand-filter: a novel-length expansion of a sentence.

On Sat Nov 07 2015 22:59:32, samcoppini mentioned issue #66, Expand-filter: a novel-length expansion of a sentence.

On Sun Nov 08 2015 00:00:44, jemisa commented on issue #123, 'Rewriting stories with different writing styles': "you might want to look at https://github.com/ryankiros/neural-storyteller , in particular he 'style-shifting' operation that allows their model to transfer standard image captions to the style of stories from novels."

On Sun Nov 08 2015 07:48:46, ikarth commented on issue #123, 'Rewriting stories with different writing styles': "#72 might also be relevant. That uses word2vec rather than the recurrent neural nets or deep convolutional neural nets, but you might be able to borrow some ideas. There's also this RNN implementation: https://github.com/karpathy/char-rnn (as decribed in The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks) that you might find interesting. "

On Sun Nov 08 2015 07:49:44, ikarth commented on issue #44, 'Recounting the Long Road to the Dark North': "Sounds like an interesting approach. How is it coming along so far?"

On Sun Nov 08 2015 08:37:14, yhancik renamed issue #103, Something.

On Sun Nov 08 2015 11:32:21, mewo2 subscribed to issue #72, Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup.

On Sun Nov 08 2015 11:32:21, mewo2 mentioned issue #72, Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup.

On Sun Nov 08 2015 11:32:21, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #72, 'Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup': "@mewo2 - pretend I've never used word2vec before (and hardly use Python). How would I generate the datasets? since I'm essentially asking to be stepped through the process, do you know of a good tutorial for this?

(I've managed to get this all set up on windows, amazingly enough.)"

On Sun Nov 08 2015 11:55:04, ikarth commented on issue #72, 'Cheating pseudo-entry: Vocabulary mashup': "I've been messing with word2vec a bit, though I haven't finished enough to be able to speak authoritatively. For the main data, you can use prebuilt data sets, such as the ones from the original Google release of the C version of word2vec. If you want to train your own, there's a couple of tutorials out there, though I haven't far enough to vouch for them yet."

On Sun Nov 08 2015 14:37:01, okiyama opened a new issue called Plan to leverage Dwarf Fortress to write a novel. It has a rank of 5.

On Sun Nov 08 2015 14:41:40, michcioperz opened a new issue called Amazement of Life. It has a rank of 25. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Sun Nov 08 2015 14:58:48, TheCommieDuck commented on issue #22, 'Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours': "Been a bit swamped with real-world work so not done much, but just a quick update.

I've got goals working! The example I've got is hunger; it works well, I feel:

http://i.imgur.com/OWKaaXu.png

The best bit about Prolog is how homogeneous everything is; by changing 2 words from 'food' to 'character' I've managed to create cannibals! http://puu.sh/l9mcy/186576eeec.png

You might notice that Bob tries to pick up Bob and fails...there was a bug originally where characters could pick up themselves. This ended up with an...interesting situation where Bob picked up Bob, and then ate himself. Alice also picked herself up..and ate herself. They still existed, in the void - just..having eaten themselves. At least it stopped them being hungry, I guess.

I also had a realisation that I was going under some serious feature creep. As such, for now - and probably it'll be left as such - the world will be the same between stories. Names, people, plot - all different; however the layout of the city and world and stuff will be the same and is hardcoded in for now.

Another realisation (as I think I discussed in the Slack) is that I couldn't continue with my original plan - that is, have something reading like The Swallows, but have a sensible and realistic plot thread throughout. The best idea was to move to one or the other, and I've chosen the former. Getting sensible, realistic plot and whatnot is far too hard for 3 weeks. I'm now entirely rolling with the absurdity! I can predict the story will be something like:


Bob went and ate some food.

Bob walked around and talked about birds.

Bob's mum went to sleep.

Bob's mum died suddenly. (As the absentation goal fires).

Bob eats food.

Bob goes to sleep.

Bob leaves for the city. (As the hero departs).



If this actually stretches to 50,000 words...I can imagine 30 pages of utter nonsense followed by 2 sentences containing the entire plot, repeated 30 times.

All I hope is that I can make it good enough!

"

On Sun Nov 08 2015 15:06:13, marktanner22 opened a new issue called what is love?. It has a rank of 27. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Sun Nov 08 2015 16:32:56, hugovk labeled issue #150, what is love?.

On Sun Nov 08 2015 17:45:42, michelleful commented on issue #133, 'Who Lives in a Pineapple Under the Sea? MIS-TER DAR-CY!': "It sounds like what you'd need (if you did choose to somehow "translate" the names) is to have the names in the Spongebob corpus tagged for named entities, but in case it's useful to have a version of P&P that is name-tagged, the P&P e-text at Pemberley.com is conveniently so.

<P>``<A HREF="ppdrmtis.html#MrBennet">Mr.&#32;Bennet</A>, how can you abuse your own children in such way?  You take delight in vexing me.  You have no compassion on my poor nerves.''</P>

"

On Sun Nov 08 2015 21:32:43, mattfister commented on issue #40, 'Simulationist Fantasy Novel': "Day 8 Update

Sample: The Implicit Story of Ages

Another update. It was a crazy week so way less progress than I hoped for.

Still I got a bunch of new features done, so I'm happy.

  • Attributes are now being tracked on characters. Think d6 sort of role-playing system. Each character has attributes for lore, survival, and combat, but it's really simple for me to add other attributes.

  • When generating setting paragraphs, lore challenges are conducted to have character discuss the history of the place.

  • Food and energy are now being tracked for the party. If they are low on food, a character will go fishing, hunting, or gathering. This is a new paragraph that is appended to the chapter.

*Characters have memories from their youth. If they face a challenging situation, like hunting, they may recall when they went hunting as kids or something.

  • If characters have a success or failure, they may have their current 'quality' replaced by a new negative or positive quality. So Darren the Devious may become Darren the Dependable (alliteration unlikely).

I'm happy with the hunting, fishing, and gathering paragraphs I'm generating, but I realize the templates for them really show. I'm not going to pursue another text generation strategy for this year's nanogenmo at this point, but maybe next year I'll have something that allows for some more variety.

One thing I just ran out of time on today was generating camping paragraphs. I want to deliver the sense that the night is dangerous and a time of strangeness so you'll get weird dreams and sounds in the darkness. That should be easy to do and coming up soon.

Here's my favorite sample chapter from today's output.

The Windmill

Joaquin the profound, Billie Nicholson, and Darin traveled to a windmill. Joaquin the profound exclaimed, "I hate this place." There was a cow inside the windmill. There was a button inside the windmill. The windmill was a windpump. The windmill could power entire town. Darin Schuler stated, "This is a very dangerous windmill." The button was an artifact. Joaquin Hart mentioned, "This place was once known as 'Iaaemlbaehh Ladodwi'." Joaquin thought about how a button was similar to a foil. Darin proclaimed, "Let's move on."

Billie the innocent mentioned, "Our food should last a bit longer." Billie decided to go hunting. Billie remembered hunting with her best friend as a child. She searched the windmill for signs of caribous. But she failed to find any caribou signs. Billie returned to Joaquin empty handed. Billie the innocent exclaimed, "We will have to just keep going, there was no food to find here." Because of this great failure Billie the innocent became known as 'The Interfering'."

On Sun Nov 08 2015 22:50:46, scazon commented on issue #69, 'Intent: In remembrance of @MixologyBot (RIP)': "Update 11/8:

Recipes now come with serving glass suggestions. Made other small optimizations. Also created a Manhattan template for the section on Manhattan style drinks (last 4):


Tequila and Dr. Pepper



   2 oz Tequila

   3 oz Dr. Pepper

   A splash of Kirsch



 Serve straight up in a goblet.



------------------------------

Just Tequila



  .5 oz Tequila

  .5 oz Sweet vermouth

  .5 oz Blackberry brandy

  .5 oz Cranberry juice



 Serve straight up in a tall shot glass.



------------------------------

Female Neighbour



   1 oz Bourbon

   1 oz Jägermeister

  .5 oz Cognac

  .5 oz Grenadine syrup

   1 sugar cube



 Serve straight up in a Margarita glass and garnish with an orange slice.



------------------------------

The Burlington



1.25 oz Bourbon

 .75 oz Italian vermouth

   A dash of saffron bitters



 Serve on the rocks in a cordial glass and garnish with a slice of pineapple.



------------------------------

Scotch Spectacle



   2 oz Scotch

   1 oz Red vermouth

   A dash of plum bitters



 Serve on the rocks in a Manhattan glass and garnish with a dash of nutmeg.



------------------------------

Plane Whiskey



 2.5 oz Canadian Whiskey

  .5 oz White vermouth

   A dash of Peychaud's bitters



 Serve straight up in a Martini glass and garnish with a cherry.



------------------------------

Contrivance on the Disapproval



1.25 oz Rye

 .75 oz Sweet vermouth

   A dash of Angostura bitters



 Serve on the rocks in a cordial glass.

```"

On Sun Nov 08 2015 23:39:47, jeffdaze opened a new issue called _Alright -- NaNoWriMo turned into NaNOPENOPENOPE so now it's NaNoGenMo for me!_. It has a rank of 7.

  On Mon Nov 09 2015 02:42:05, hugovk commented on issue #69, 'Intent: In remembrance of @MixologyBot (RIP)': "I like how Just Tequila is anything but just tequila. You can definitely have lots of fun naming things, and I also like how there are some straightforward names (Tequila and Dr. Pepper) and more intentive names (Contrivance on the Disapproval).



On 1st December, you should start trying these and reviewing them!"

  On Mon Nov 09 2015 03:21:44, suisea commented on issue #26, 'Pocket Atlas of Remote Planets': "omg meow @araile "

On Mon Nov 09 2015 03:21:44, araile mentioned issue #26, _Pocket Atlas of Remote Planets_.

On Mon Nov 09 2015 03:21:44, araile subscribed to issue #26, _Pocket Atlas of Remote Planets_.

  On Mon Nov 09 2015 04:06:51, araile commented on issue #26, 'Pocket Atlas of Remote Planets': "😸"

  On Mon Nov 09 2015 07:59:16, ikarth commented on issue #24, 'An attempt to exhaust a moment.': "How is progress so far?"

  On Mon Nov 09 2015 08:16:32, enkiv2 commented on issue #151, 'Alright -- NaNoWriMo turned into NaNOPENOPENOPE so now it's NaNoGenMo for me!': "Welcome! I'm glad I'm not alone in taking this path :P

On Sun, Nov 8, 2015 at 11:39 PM Jeff Daze <notifications@github.com> wrote:

> I have some ideas that may or may not involve Markov chains...
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/151>.
>
"

  On Mon Nov 09 2015 08:39:38, coleww commented on issue #69, 'Intent: In remembrance of @MixologyBot (RIP)': ":clap: i would be down to try a robot cocktail or two.

"

  On Mon Nov 09 2015 09:35:34, enkiv2 commented on issue #66, 'Expand-filter: a novel-length expansion of a sentence': "I knew the idea seemed familiar :D

On Sat, Nov 7, 2015 at 10:59 PM Greg Kennedy <notifications@github.com>
wrote:

> Similar as well to NaNoGenMo-2014 entry "The Definition Book" by
> @samcoppini <https://github.com/samcoppini>
> dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014#48
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014/issues/48>
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/66#issuecomment-154774391>
> .
>
"

On Mon Nov 09 2015 09:35:34, samcoppini mentioned issue #66, _Expand-filter: a novel-length expansion of a sentence_.

On Mon Nov 09 2015 09:35:34, samcoppini subscribed to issue #66, _Expand-filter: a novel-length expansion of a sentence_.

  On Mon Nov 09 2015 09:50:42, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #14, 'The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body': "Another sample, not much changed - but some better corpii being used:



> A king had seven sons, and when the other six went off to find brides, he kept the youngest with him because he could not bear to be parted from them all. They were supposed to bring back a bride for him, as well, but they found a king with six daughters and wooed them, forgetting their brother. But when they returned, they passed too close to a giant's castle, and he turned them all, both princes and princesses, to stone in a fit of rage.



> When they did not return, the king, their father, tried to prevent their brother from following, but he went.



> On the way, he helped a wolverine-chimpanzee, he helped a Warg-Typhon, he helped a tiger-Manticore, he helped a Hippocampus-ocelot, and gave a starving mule-giraffe his horse to eat. The mule-giraffe let the prince ride on him, instead, and showed him the giant's castle, telling him to go inside. The prince was reluctant fearing the wrath of the giant, but the mule-giraffe consoled him. The mule-giraffe persuaded the prince to enter the castle for there he would encounter not the giant, but the princess the giant kept prisoner.



> The princess was very beautiful and the prince wanted to know how he could kill the giant and set her and his family free. The princess said that there was no way, as the giant did not keep his heart in his body and therefore could not be killed. When the giant returned, the princess hid the prince, and asked the giant where he kept his heart. He told her that it was under the door sill. The prince and princess dug there the next day and found no heart. The princess strewed flowers over the door sill, and when the giant returned, told him that it was because his heart lay there. The giant admitted it wasn't there and told her it was in the cupboard. As before, the princess and the prince searched, to no avail; once again, the princess strewed garlands of flowers on the cupboard and told the giant it was because his heart was there. Thereupon the giant revealed to her that, in fact, there was a dank drumlin field with a ocelot-Gnome, beyond that there was a fluorescent tepui with a Kobold-Hippogriff, beyond that there was a overlooked shield volcano with a Typhon-panda, beyond that there was a whimsical bayou with a Nix-Roc, beyond that there was a tiny subglacial mound with a Oni-mynah bird, and in the Oni-mynah bird's nest was an egg; and in the egg was the giant's heart.



> The prince rode to the dank drumlin field, where the mule-giraffe jumped to attention. The prince called on the wolverine-chimpanzee to defeat the ocelot-Gnome. The wolverine-chimpanzee defeated the ocelot-Gnome by using its Thaumaturgy. The prince rode on to the fluorescent tepui, where he was menaced by a Kobold-Hippogriff. The prince called on the Warg-Typhon to defeat the Kobold-Hippogriff. The Warg-Typhon defeated the Kobold-Hippogriff by using its Drought. The prince rode on to the overlooked shield volcano, where he was menaced by a Typhon-panda. The prince called on the tiger-Manticore to defeat the Typhon-panda. The tiger-Manticore defeated the Typhon-panda by using its Perspicuity. The prince rode on to the whimsical bayou, where he was menaced by a Nix-Roc. The prince called on the Hippocampus-ocelot to defeat the Nix-Roc. The Hippocampus-ocelot defeated the Nix-Roc by using its Physics Manipulation. The prince rode on to the tiny subglacial mound, where he was menaced by a Oni-mynah bird. The prince called on the mule-giraffe to defeat the Oni-mynah bird. The mule-giraffe defeated the Oni-mynah bird by using its Fish Manipulation. The mule-giraffe plucked the egg from the nest of the Oni-mynah bird, gave it to the prince, and told him to squeeze it. When he did, the giant screamed. The mule-giraffe told him to squeeze it again, and the giant promised anything if he would spare his life. The prince told him to change his brothers and their brides back to life, and the giant did so. Then the prince squeezed the egg into two and went home with the giant's captive princess as his bride; accompanying him were his brothers and their brides, and the king rejoiced.

"

On Mon Nov 09 2015 09:52:41, hugovk labeled issue #14, _The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body_.

  On Mon Nov 09 2015 09:55:46, mattfister commented on issue #14, 'The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body': "That sample is amazing. Nicely done!"

  On Mon Nov 09 2015 13:28:56, tra38 commented on issue #14, 'The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body': ">I want some better stuff for the locales, use of powers, dealing with the finality -- the flow from one thing to the next is awkward.



How about handwriting an "aftermath" template where the prince falls from grace and turns into a giant (which then gets slain by the next prince in the next story). A story never ends just because someone says "The End"."

  On Mon Nov 09 2015 13:37:49, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #40, 'Simulationist Fantasy Novel': "I like how this is coming along.



I also have some sympathy for the characters in that they seldom seem to find food. No doubt because they search specifically for avocados, caribous, and the like - totally overlooking the smaller wild game and grains that surround them.



Staring at your "reduced ConceptNet" implementation....

"

  On Mon Nov 09 2015 14:03:52, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #14, 'The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body': "`:blink blink:`



That's an interesting idea, and a nice framing-device for the 50K word-requirement.



And somewhat sad. Makes me think of _Let the Right One In_."

  On Mon Nov 09 2015 15:00:54, greg-kennedy commented on issue #40, 'Simulationist Fantasy Novel': ""Kandace discovered a hook inside the glacier. The glacier was a topographical feature. Marybeth considered how a hook is a golf stroke."

Adventurers who crack puns... is this Automated Terry Pratchett?"

On Mon Nov 09 2015 15:04:25, suisea renamed issue #129, _~ time machine // generated/ive poetry ~_.

  On Mon Nov 09 2015 15:04:49, mattfister commented on issue #40, 'Simulationist Fantasy Novel': "Actually, when I first discovered conceptnet, I think I was planning on searching through all English words for potential puns. Never got anything working though."

  On Mon Nov 09 2015 16:03:42, flexo commented on issue #71, 'Some kind of infinite battle arena / soap opera generator': "I've changed the location of the preview to https://github.com/flexo/nanogenmo2015/blob/master/novel/output.md so that it gets nicely formatted in github."

  On Mon Nov 09 2015 20:41:39, tra38 commented on issue #45, 'The Atheists Who Believe In God': "I know this sound surprising, considering this is a novel-writing competition...but I don't actually like novels. I always believe in conveying messages in as few words as possible, rather than filling the page with worthless purple prose. I enjoy reading novel synopses, not the novel.



When writing this competition, I had two goals: 1) write a program that generates a novel, 2) write a program that generates a *meaningful* story.



Goal 2 is a complete success, in my opinion. Each sentence conveys information about what a real person said over the telephone. Theoretically, someone may want to read more of the novel to find out about more atheists, although boredom will eventually set in for the reader...



The problem I'm having is Goal 1. Each sentence in my template is *too effective* at conveying the data. Each data point only really gives me one sentence (and sometimes even less!), and while there's 99 different atheists, that only means 99 sentences.



My estimate is that each "chapter" is about 200 words long. This means far from getting a glorious 50,000 words novel, I am stuck with a ~19,800 word novella.



Now, there's a lot of data points that I am not using yet, and clearly using them will lead to more words to be stuffed into each chapter. But as text is efficient at conveying information, I'm going to have to exhaust a lot of data to reach my original quota of '505 words/chapter'. And each data point I add seems more and more tangential to the original purpose of the novel: to show the religious beliefs and practices of self-proclaimed atheists who believe in God. As a result, I may consider just abandoning Goal 1 entirely. It may be *possible* for me to get up to 505 words...but the cost may be a less meaningful story. And I think I prefer meaning more than mere word count.



There are also examples of people getting the Green *complete* tag despite not reaching the 50,000 word criteria too, so there's no shame in abandoning the pursuit for the Great White Novel."

  On Tue Nov 10 2015 08:14:24, maetl commented on issue #142, 'Around the World in X Wikipedia Articles': "Great idea. I’ve been working on something very similar to this, though I didn’t explain it quite so coherently: #57 "

  On Tue Nov 10 2015 09:10:46, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #151, 'Alright -- NaNoWriMo turned into NaNOPENOPENOPE so now it's NaNoGenMo for me!': "Markov chains are often fun. They are quite naive, but lead to unexpected (for a non-savant human) juxtapositions. "

  On Tue Nov 10 2015 09:12:22, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #150, 'what is love?': "Nice.



Also: irritating, because I can't get that [!@#% song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEXWRTEbj1I) out of my head, now."

  On Tue Nov 10 2015 09:21:31, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #40, 'Simulationist Fantasy Novel': "I adapted your reduced-concept-net code to NodeJs - https://github.com/MichaelPaulukonis/NaNoGenMo2015/blob/master/conceptnet/cnSearch.js



I haven't figured out _how_ I'm going to be using it in my project, but it's a great resource....



It translates the relations into json, so we get back something that looks like this:



search("volcano")


{ HasA: [ 'violent_eruption', 'crater', 'very_distinctive_peak' ],

InstanceOf:

[ 'album',

 'organisation',

 'film',

 'mountain',

 'album',

 'musical_work',

 'musical_work',

 'single',

 'band',

 'musical_work',

 'film',

 'film',

 'organisation',

 'cinder_cone',

 'television_episode',

 'single',

 'hollywood_cartoon',

 'musical_work',

 'musical_work',

 'cartoon',

 'band',

 'natural_place',

 'place',

 'album',

 'album',

 'musical_work' ],

IsA:

[ 'mountain',

 'single_broadcast_tv_show',

 'music_single',

 'movie',

 'album',

 'band',

 'either_cone_or_dome',

 'violent_force_of_nature',

 'mountain',

 'geography_topic',

 'physical_phenomenon',

 'land_topographical_feature',

 'book',

 'musical_composition',

 'mountain' ],

RelatedTo:

[ 'crater',

 'etna',

 'explode',

 'lava_spout',

 'melt',

 'mount',

 'tall_mountain',

 'erupt_magma',

 'geologic',

 'hot',

 'lave',

 'red',

 'spout',

 'violent',

 'violent_mountain',

 'ash',

 'bake_soda',

 'earth',

 'lava',

 'lava_mountain',

 'lava_spewer',

 'like',

 'mountain',

 'source',

 'throw',

 'very',

 'very_hot',

 'big',

 'explosion',

 'fiery',

 'fiery_mountain',

 'formation',

 'lava_source',

 'like_vulcan',

 'on_mountain',

 'saint',

 'throw_fire',

 'erupt',

 'erupt_lava',

 'explosive',

 'fire',

 'fire_mountain',

 'have',

 'hot_lava',

 'landscape',

 'lava_fire',

 'lave_mountain',

 'spewer',

 'tall',

 'lava',

 'magma',

 'ash_smoke',

 'earth_formation',

 'erupt',

 'explosive_lave',

 'magma',

 'mountain_like',

 'shape',

 'smoke',

 'soda',

 'vent',

 'gas',

 'moon',

 'active',

 'bake',

 'cone_shape',

 'crater_fire',

 'eruption',

 'event',

 'geologic_event',

 'have_magma',

 'melt_lava',

 'mountain_eruption',

 'vulcan',

 'yes',

 'planet',

 'active_mountain',

 'big_spout',

 'cone',

 'erupt_mountain',

 'hawaii',

 'vesuvius',

 'mantle' ],

dbpedia:

[ 'progressive_rock',

 'rock_music',

 'jimmy_buffett',

 'black_metal',

 'pop_punk',

 'indie_rock',

 'rock_music',

 'art_rock',

 'folk_rock',

 'alternative_rock',

 'post_grunge',

 'alternative_rock',

 'jimmy_buffett' ],

CapableOf:

[ 'form_new_island',

 'erupt',

 'form_new_land_mass',

 'release_toxic_gas_into_atmosphere',

 'send_lava_into_water' ],

AtLocation:

[ 'top_of_mountain',

 'surface_of_earth',

 'bottom_of_sea',

 'bottom_of_ocean' ],

HasProperty: [ 'extinct', 'hot', 'dormant' ],

ReceivesAction: [ 'fill_with_magma', 'cause_by_upwelling_magma' ],

PartOf: [ 'crater' ],

Antonym: [ 'dormant' ],

MadeOf: [ 'lava' ] }


  On Tue Nov 10 2015 10:55:06, zachwhalen commented on issue #4, 'Using a password dump for a corpus': "Just a quick update. I've set up <a href="https://github.com/zachwhalen/secretgardens/">a repository</a> but I'm going back and forth about what I actually want to do. My first idea was to use this password dump to generate a novel that already exists, Pierre Menard-style. 



So in my first version, the script scans the password dump for correctly-spelled English words, then looks for those words in the novel, *The Secret Garden*. Or rather, it scans *The Secret Garden*, and for each word it finds in the passwordlist, it prints that word. Words it fails to find are just printed as *****:



> **** Mary ****** was sent to ************* Manor to live with her ****** 

everybody said she was the most ******************** child ever ***** 

It was true too  She had a little thin face and a little thin ***** 

thin light hair and a sour expression  Her hair was yellow and **** 

face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always ***** 

ill in one way or another  Her father had held a position under **** 

English ********** and had always been busy and ill himself and **** 

mother had been a great beauty who ***** only to go to parties **** 

amuse herself with gay people  She had not wanted a little girl *** 

all and when Mary was born she handed her over to the care of an ***** 

who was made to understand that if she wished to please the *** ****** 

she must keep the child out of sight as much as possible  So when **** 

was a sickly ******* ugly little baby she was kept out of the **** 

and when she became a sickly ******* ******** thing she was kept **** 

of the way also  She never ********** seeing ********** anything **** 

the dark faces of her **** and the other native servants and as ***** 

always obeyed her and gave her her own way in everything because **** 

*** ***** would be angry if she was disturbed by her crying by **** 

time she was six years old she was as ********** and selfish a ******* 

pig as ever lived  The young English governess who came to teach **** 

to read and write ******** her so much that she gave up her place *** 

three months and when other *********** came to try to fill it ***** 

always went away in a shorter time than the first one  So if Mary **** 

not chosen to really want to know how to read books she would ****** 

have learned her letters at **** 



This is interesting, to me at least, because each word you see here is something that someone used as a password. I can't decide, though, if it's *interesting enough*, so I'm trying to learn how to use POS tagging to do some smarter parsing. I'm thinking perhaps of replacing parts of speech with the frequency matching. Like, replace the most frequently used noun in the book with the most frequently used noun password (that is, "password"). 

"

  On Tue Nov 10 2015 11:00:50, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #4, 'Using a password dump for a corpus': "_The **Secret** Garden_



....



I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE



----



What if the words NOT found as passwords were left, and the secret-passwords were removed from the text-garden instead? 



Not a lot would be left, though."

  On Tue Nov 10 2015 11:07:37, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #89, '_Terminalia_ (using GITenberg)': "Is there a "browser" for Gitenberg - to find out what's in there? 



The project looks excellent, but I'm having a hard time understanding how to navigate the repos and the tools.

"

  On Tue Nov 10 2015 11:54:18, greg-kennedy commented on issue #17, 'Language Survey 2015': "#144 is done in Perl"

  On Tue Nov 10 2015 11:56:47, enkiv2 commented on issue #17, 'Language Survey 2015': "#65 is done in gg and #66 is done in python.

On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 11:54 AM Greg Kennedy <notifications@github.com>
wrote:

> #144 <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/144> is done in
> Perl
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/17#issuecomment-155484866>
> .
>
"

  On Tue Nov 10 2015 12:25:41, ikarth commented on issue #45, 'The Atheists Who Believe In God': "> There are also examples of people getting the Green complete tag despite not reaching the 50,000 word criteria too, so there's no shame in abandoning the pursuit for the Great White Novel.



My belief is that the spirit of the 50,000 words should be interpreted in light of what NaNoGenMo was in reaction to: lots of successful Twitter bots and the like, very few long-form generators. Writing a novella that says everything that you wanted to is, to my mind, well within the bounds of NaNoGenMo. I've personally viewed the length as aspirational: we, collectively, don't know how to get a machine to write a _good_ novel, so we're slowly fumbling our way towards writing a _coherent_ novel, gradually trying to make each attempt more interesting.



As a practical matter, if I was in your place, I'd step back from thinking about the length and turn instead to the problem of keeping the reader's interest for more chapters. Is there a way you can add more variability? But I'm not in your place. You get to be the one to declare it complete, on your terms."

  On Tue Nov 10 2015 12:39:57, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #17, 'Language Survey 2015': "Thanks for the updates! I had made some this morning, but neglected to click-comment before rebooting my machine..."

  On Tue Nov 10 2015 12:43:28, mattfister commented on issue #40, 'Simulationist Fantasy Novel': "Nice! I'm glad it could help."

  On Tue Nov 10 2015 13:32:34, zachwhalen commented on issue #4, 'Using a password dump for a corpus': "@MichaelPaulukonis Right, you can kind of see how it wouldn't be much left. Mostly proper nouns, I think. 



Still, it might be interesting to do something else with that smaller set of non-overlapping terms."

On Tue Nov 10 2015 13:32:34, MichaelPaulukonis subscribed to issue #4, _Using a password dump for a corpus_.

On Tue Nov 10 2015 13:32:34, MichaelPaulukonis mentioned issue #4, _Using a password dump for a corpus_.

  On Tue Nov 10 2015 13:33:45, zachwhalen commented on issue #4, 'Using a password dump for a corpus': "By the way, I'm doing this in Perl because why not and I'm using with the `Lingua::EN::Tagger` package for POS tagging. It seems to work fine."

  On Tue Nov 10 2015 14:44:57, hugovk commented on issue #4, 'Using a password dump for a corpus': "> So in my first version, the script scans the password dump for correctly-spelled English words, then looks for those words in the novel, The Secret Garden. Or rather, it scans The Secret Garden, and for each word it finds in the passwordlist, it prints that word. Words it fails to find are just printed as *****:



Are "incorrectly-spelled" words left out of the equation? (The "Or rather" suggests this isn't the case.) But if so, I'd leave them it. "Correctly" spelled depends on the authority of the dictionary list, and you might miss some unusual (or misspelt) words in the original that are also passwords.



I'd have the *** the same length as the omitted words.



I quite like keeping the original text more intact than replacing, say, each "time" with "password". (But try both!) It's readable-ish. If you're generating HTML output you could style each word with some sort of intensity to represent how frequent that word is."

  On Tue Nov 10 2015 15:32:30, zachwhalen commented on issue #4, 'Using a password dump for a corpus': "> If you're generating HTML output you could style each word with some sort of intensity to represent how frequent that word is.



Interesting idea. I could do something with relative sizing or transparency. Sizing could be interesting since it would inevitable make the layout much more dynamic."

  On Tue Nov 10 2015 16:49:44, hugovk commented on issue #4, 'Using a password dump for a corpus': "Perhaps also change the background and foreground colours too."

On Tue Nov 10 2015 22:41:50, ikarth opened a new issue called _Beginner's Questions, Answers, & Tutorials_. It has a rank of 3. But it's an admin issue, so who cares?

  On Tue Nov 10 2015 23:10:37, marythought commented on issue #49, '"Where I'm From" poem & novel generator': "## DAY ... TEN?



Ok, after taking some time off to learn all the data structures and algorithms (or not learn, as the case may be), I needed a quick win so I came back to this and was able to publish a version of the poem generator!



[Where I'm From](https://whereimfrom.herokuapp.com/)



It's not very fancy, and probably breaks all the Node/Express rules (I am a very proficient Ruby on Rails developer seriously you should hire me), but it meets the prime objective of generating a new poem on demand.



I like this so much I am not sure how to translate it into a novel... but let's not call it "done" yet, because I'm going to sleep on that.



I found a couple open-source texts that work well for "memoir" style (Anne of Green Gables is the frontrunner), so I played with using RiTA to markov it up. My idea was to start with the base text, and then see if there's any way to prioritize the keywords generated in the 'Where I'm From' poem (so it would be a poem followed by short vignette featuring terms mentioned in that poem, and then more in that pattern).

 

<img width="724" alt="screen shot 2015-11-10 at 8 01 09 pm" src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/10136229/11083596/d8536614-87e5-11e5-9311-70392d3280b2.png">



It's interesting, but it isn't very readable in paragraph form. So I think I need to consider another method for text generation. Which puts me back at the starting line. :)



Maybe I'll just write more poems...? #NaPoGenMo! I'm not 100% invested in the novel form, at least not for my first experiment this year, but I'm shooting to adhere to the 50,000 word count..."

  On Tue Nov 10 2015 23:29:47, ikarth commented on issue #152, 'Beginner's Questions, Answers, & Tutorials': "### Markov Chains

Markov chains are a well-known way to do text generation. When used to generate text, the basic operation is to look at the last few words and then pick the next word based on what words have been observed to follow. 



Here's an [interactive explanation of Markov chain generation by tullyhansen](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1032628/markovy.html#4i.7f.6a.e.5m.5k.7b) 

[Allison Parrish's tutorial on N-grams and Markov chains, with Python code](http://www.decontextualize.com/teaching/rwet/n-grams-and-markov-chains/)

[Jeff Atwood explains Markov chains via Garfield](http://blog.codinghorror.com/markov-and-you/)

[A visual explanation of Markov chains](http://setosa.io/blog/2014/07/26/markov-chains/index.html)

[Andrew Plotkin's Fun With Markov Chains](http://www.eblong.com/zarf/markov/)

[Bookmerge, an example Markov generator that lets you combine two books (uses Ruby)](http://bookmerge.herokuapp.com/)"

On Wed Nov 11 2015 04:44:07, tra38 subscribed to issue #45, _The Atheists Who Believe In God_.

On Wed Nov 11 2015 04:44:07, tra38 mentioned issue #45, _The Atheists Who Believe In God_.

  On Wed Nov 11 2015 04:44:07, cpressey commented on issue #45, 'The Atheists Who Believe In God': "If I may air another viewpoint re word count:



What attracted me to NaNoGenMo when I first heard of it was the absolutely absurd requirement of 50K words.  How do you get a machine to fill that space in a "sensible" way?  Or do you even try?  If not, what do you accept for "not sensible" ways to fill it?  And why?



To me, answering those questions is probably just as central to NaNoGenMo as the actual generating of text.  If it was simply billed as a computer story-writing jam or something, with a reasonable word count goal, I probably wouldn't have bothered to look into it.



So, you could say I am rather strongly pro-taking-50K-words-seriously.  (I'm also rather strongly pro-novel-means-NOVEL-gosh-darn-it, at least in odd-numbered years, but that's a slightly different matter.)



That said, I'm virtually in the same boat as you @tra38, and I don't have any good ideas.



My current plan is to generate two versions of my novel at the end: one at readable length, the other a 50K word version to get the Completed label even though 98% of it will be pure [wharrgarbl](http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/032/388/wharrgarbl.jpg).

"

  On Wed Nov 11 2015 05:28:13, cpressey commented on issue #49, '"Where I'm From" poem & novel generator': "+1 NaAnOfGreGaGenMo!



Ah, if only I wasn't already overcommitted...



(There really is a [NaPoGenMo](https://github.com/NaPoGenMo/) too btw, but it's held in April.)"

  On Wed Nov 11 2015 09:08:43, WhiteFangs commented on issue #110, 'Religious Text Generator': "Sounds really interesting! I'm looking forward to read this!"

  On Wed Nov 11 2015 09:33:18, hangedmandesign commented on issue #44, 'Recounting the Long Road to the Dark North': "It's been a bit tricky extricating the code from the game, and it's likely I'll have to wait til later in the month to make significant progress. Just a bit busy ^_^;

I'm also working on a simple schema for simple procedural descriptions of places and feelings associated with those places, so when the narrator finds themselves at IX-BETH, Cairn of Ice, they'll have something to say about it."

  On Wed Nov 11 2015 10:32:10, cpressey commented on issue #22, 'Propp-guided simulation with rudimentary emotions/behaviours': "> This ended up with an...interesting situation where Bob picked up Bob, and then ate himself. Alice also picked herself up..and ate herself.



I suppose you could call this a bug, but I fail to see how it is not also extremely entertaining literature."

On Wed Nov 11 2015 12:02:12, muffinista opened a new issue called _A Collection of Failed #NaNoGenMo Ideas_. It has a rank of 29. And it's been completed. Sweet!

  On Wed Nov 11 2015 12:04:06, enkiv2 commented on issue #153, 'A Collection of Failed #NaNoGenMo Ideas': "#NaNaNoGenMoEnGenMo ;-)

On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 12:02 PM Colin Mitchell <notifications@github.com>
wrote:

> This is not my main submission, but I'm still hashing out how I want my
> primary idea to work. Along the way I've had a few false starts and I joked
> on Twitter that it would be funny if my submission was a log of all my
> failed work.
>
> So, here's a generative version of that.
>
> https://github.com/muffinista/NaNoGenMo2015/blob/master/failed-nanogenmo.md
>
> The code
> <https://github.com/muffinista/NaNoGenMo2015/blob/master/failed-nanogenmo.rb>
> is pretty simple, it generates a random title using the Wordnik API, picks
> a reason for failure from a short list I wrote myself, adds a few
> adjectives also via Wordnik, and picks a random algorithm from a list I
> curated via poking around on http://dbpedia.org/page/Category:Algorithms
>
> The output is nothing amazing but it has a few funny moments, and was a
> fun warmup project. It was also fun to automate a list of failure reasons,
> since I fail a lot and there's a pretty good chance I'll fail at my actual
> idea.
>
> Enjoy!
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/153>.
>
"

  On Wed Nov 11 2015 14:04:46, WhiteFangs commented on issue #33, 'A play based on the "french 4chan"': "I started coding some stuff to crawl the posts, clean the HTML, loop to next pages of a topic and manage the smileys, the repo is here : https://github.com/WhiteFangs/theatre-jeuxvideocom"

  On Wed Nov 11 2015 21:45:23, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #153, 'A Collection of Failed #NaNoGenMo Ideas': "ha-hah!

"

  On Wed Nov 11 2015 22:41:35, ikarth commented on issue #152, 'Beginner's Questions, Answers, & Tutorials': "### Reading and Writing Electronic Text



The course notes from [this class at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program](http://www.decontextualize.com/teaching/rwet/) cover a lot of subjects and are a good introduction if you're wondering where to start. It also includes [lots of example code in this github repository](https://github.com/aparrish/rwet-examples)."

  On Thu Nov 12 2015 03:22:55, marythought commented on issue #49, '"Where I'm From" poem & novel generator': "## DAY ELEVENTHEN



Some quick text to share, I'm playing with the RiTA RiLexicon to find near replacement words for a classic poem (again with the poems!!! she just won't stop...). My goal here is to generate output that is clearly recognizable, but sounds bananas. 



You might be curious, what is the difference between Rita's RiLexicon methods similarBySound(), similarByLetter(), similarBySoundAndLetter(), and rhymes()? So glad you asked... let's take a look at each of these at play! Each method returns an array of matches, so the computer is choosing a random match (or the original word) each time. 



### Similar by Sound 

<em>Compares the phonemes of the input word (using a version of the min-edit distance algorithm) to each word in the lexicon, returning the set of closest matches.</em> 



Two reeds divert in a yell good,

And soggy I could not trammel berth

And be one travels, pong I staid

And cooked dean one as far as I curd

To where it burnt in the undergrowth;



### Similar by Letter

<em>Compares the characters of the input string (using a version of the min-edit distance algorithm) to each word in the lexicon, returning the set of closest matches.</em> 



Two loads diverged in a fellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel booth

And be one traveler, song I stood

And cooked dawn one as far as I mould

To where it bet in the undergrowth;



### Similar by Sound and Letter

<em>First calls similarBySound(), then filters the result set by the algorithm used in similarByLetter();</em>



Two rods diverge in a bellow good,

And sorry I could not travel bath

And be one traveled, pong I stood

And cooked doan one as far as I could

To where it vent in the underwrote;



### Rhyme

<em>Two words rhyme are considered as rhyming if their final stressed vowel and all following phonemes are identical</em>



Two episodes diverged in a mellow likelihood,

And safari I could not travel both

And be one both, strong I sainthood

And overlooked clown one as far as I withstood

To where it dissent in the undergrowth;



### Verdict

I hadn't tried by letter before this little exercise (thinking the sound would be more important) but I actually like that output the best, here. It does seem to be keeping the sound and rhythm of the word as well. Linguistical coincidence? Edit-distance magick? 



Rhyme is clearly variating greatest from the source text -- this could be fun to play with for replacing end words (or generating new rhyme words) but I won't use it in this "replace nearly every word" exercise.



### Just for fun: Alliteration

<em>Finds alliterations by comparing the phonemes of the input string to those of each word in the lexicon</em>



Two razor diverged in a abuse wings,

And scratch I could not fanatic both

And be one entitled, rebuilding I ceases

And consolidates deathbed one as far as I consul

To where it billionaires in the injuries



^^Yikes, that's dark, RiTA! I won't be using this but watch this:



Two [roads organizational] diverged in a [yellow impugning] [wood whittle],

And [sorry confessing] I could not [travel teapot] [both both]

And be one [traveler tumbler], [long inflict] I [stood autistic]

And [looked apologized] [down down] one as far as I [could clawed]

To where it [bent bittersweet] in the [undergrowth incinerators];



These are the word pairs it's claiming for alliteration. Some are truly weird. I feel like this would need some human editing if you were to use it in text generation, or else I might just throw out anything that doesn't start with the same letter as the base word (those all seem to work well!).



Signing off for now, I'm going to keep working on Bob Frost then see what else I can do in RiTA."

  On Thu Nov 12 2015 03:47:18, marythought commented on issue #49, '"Where I'm From" poem & novel generator': "#### Bonus: here's the whole poem w/ Similar By Sound replacements:



<img width="440" alt="screen shot 2015-11-12 at 12 45 47 am" src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/10136229/11114078/c29ed230-88d6-11e5-8b3a-1422c23b78c0.png">

"

On Thu Nov 12 2015 04:13:18, hugovk labeled issue #153, _A Collection of Failed #NaNoGenMo Ideas_.

  On Thu Nov 12 2015 04:15:24, hugovk commented on issue #153, 'A Collection of Failed #NaNoGenMo Ideas': "Good stuff!



Those programming languages and algorithms are good candidates for Corpora (if not already there)."

On Thu Nov 12 2015 07:08:54, Hrant-Khachatrian opened a new issue called _Constitution in Armenian generated by char-rnn_. It has a rank of 31. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Thu Nov 12 2015 07:16:56, hugovk labeled issue #154, _Constitution in Armenian generated by char-rnn_.

On Thu Nov 12 2015 07:16:56, hugovk labeled issue #154, _Constitution in Armenian generated by char-rnn_.

  On Thu Nov 12 2015 09:20:39, ikarth commented on issue #152, 'Beginner's Questions, Answers, & Tutorials': "### Templating and Grammars (with Tracery)



A replacement grammar is a set of rules to replace symbols. It works kind of like mad-libs: we start with a sentence like "Was it done by #suspect# in the #room# with the #murder weapon#?", and then the apply a rule that says that every time we see the word #suspect#, replace it with one of the names from our list of suspects.



While this starts out pretty simple, many of the successful novels from past NaNoGenMos have been made using similar techniques. [Aggressive Passive](https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo/issues/79), [Redwreath and Goldstar Have Traveled to Deathsgate](https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo/issues/10), [Recipe Book Generator](https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014/issues/87), and [Threnody for Abraxas](https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014/issues/134) are a few examples of novels that use recursive replacement grammars in one way or another.



[Tracery](http://www.crystalcodepalace.com/traceryTut.html) is a library that makes replacement grammars easy. You can try out the [interactive tutorial](http://www.crystalcodepalace.com/traceryTut.html) for a playful introduction.



Some [examples of what you can do with Tracery](http://www.crystalcodepalace.com/tracery.html), including [a demo of the in-progress no-programming-required visual editor](http://www.brightspiral.com/tracery/)"

  On Thu Nov 12 2015 09:23:05, ikarth commented on issue #154, 'Constitution in Armenian generated by char-rnn': "Non-English and topical! Nice addition to the generated library."

  On Thu Nov 12 2015 12:32:01, muffinista commented on issue #153, 'A Collection of Failed #NaNoGenMo Ideas': "Looks like it's not there, I'll submit a PR for that now."

On Thu Nov 12 2015 13:34:34, enkiv2 opened a new issue called _Goal-driven use of scenes and sequels for capers_. It has a rank of 35. And it's been completed. Sweet!

  On Thu Nov 12 2015 14:45:44, yourpalal commented on issue #132, 'Generative Socratic Dialogues': "Progress, for anyone who's inerested: I have my corpus being split into 3 semi-detached ngram models: questions/facts/declarations, and can create a question/fact/longer rambling  thing on demand. For instance, a question:



> What if the opponent says “animal”, naming a genus rather than in laboratory designed

> experiments which place the interface between observed and observing system and

> locates it in denying that she is in a view coherent?"



A fact:



> But this release process is called exocytosis.



A declaration:



> Not only is it possible that this should occur — after all, the whole of the quantum-circuit-based computation can be be simply represented as a single unitary transformation from the debate has origins in the hypothesis h 1: balance between inhibitory and excitatory connections between function, structure, distribution and evolutionary origin.



Next up is deciding on how to structure a conversation. I'm thinking either some kind of evolving ngram model where things other people say are added in as they say them, or a reversed-order ngram model to be able to pick words and work backwards to the start of a sentence. Also I will possibly be adding some kind of templating system into this, to add better flow into conversations.

"

On Thu Nov 12 2015 15:05:40, mewo2 opened a new issue called _A travel guide to unknown lands_. It has a rank of 18. There's a preview available.

On Thu Nov 12 2015 15:16:02, hugovk labeled issue #156, _A travel guide to unknown lands_.

  On Thu Nov 12 2015 15:16:12, hugovk commented on issue #156, 'A travel guide to unknown lands': "These look great!"

  On Thu Nov 12 2015 18:38:19, enkiv2 commented on issue #155, 'Goal-driven use of scenes and sequels for capers': "OK, I got it working well enough (with hard-coded settings and a hard-coded world structure) to generate a novel.



Here's the source: [SceneSequel](https://github.com/enkiv2/NaNoGenMo-2015/blob/master/sceneSequel.py)

Here's the completed novel: [Seven Bad Heists](https://github.com/enkiv2/NaNoGenMo-2015/blob/master/badHeists.md)"

  On Thu Nov 12 2015 19:35:59, yourpalal commented on issue #132, 'Generative Socratic Dialogues': "I'm working on the dialogue now, and generated this interesting tidbit. There's definitely a bug that was causing this, but I kind of like it!





> TEACHER: The fact that they have a dorsal sigmoid bone establishes their food source is nothing like the wonder and pageantry of snarks in mating season, as they gyre and gimble on the ponds of such clocks in the animal kingdom.

TEACHER: 1.

STUDENT: The fact that they have a dorsal sigmoid bone establishes their descent from the slithy toves along with the other bandersnatches.

STUDENT: The fact that they have evolved from the slithy toves along with the other bandersnatches.

TEACHER: The fact that they have evolved from the slithy toves along with the other bandersnatches.

TEACHER: Mating Display

STUDENT: The fact that they have evolved from the slithy toves along with the other bandersnatches.

STUDENT: The fact that they have evolved from the principal model of such clocks in the animal kingdom.

TEACHER: The fact that they have evolved from the principal model of such clocks in the animal kingdom.

TEACHER: The fact that they have evolved from the principal model of such clocks in the animal kingdom.

STUDENT: The fact that they have evolved from the principal model of such clocks in the animal kingdom."

  On Thu Nov 12 2015 19:36:13, yourpalal commented on issue #132, 'Generative Socratic Dialogues': "Another good snippet:



>SOCRATES: You do not understand,

ARISTOTLE (interrupting): Ontological holism in quantum mechanics?

"

  On Thu Nov 12 2015 23:55:39, ikarth commented on issue #155, 'Goal-driven use of scenes and sequels for capers': "That's some speedy execution there. I have to confess, when you first started describing it, it sounded like a lot of work to pull together. I'm impressed.



I really like how it turned out. It's really repetitive at novel length, but that's not a weakness of the structure so much as each section glosses over the details of carrying out the actions. Feels like there's scope to build on it."

  On Thu Nov 12 2015 23:58:06, ikarth commented on issue #132, 'Generative Socratic Dialogues': "> SOCRATES: You do not understand,

ARISTOTLE (interrupting): Ontological holism in quantum mechanics?



This is gold."

  On Fri Nov 13 2015 00:03:21, ikarth commented on issue #155, 'Goal-driven use of scenes and sequels for capers': "Also, it reminds me of a Donald E. Westlake caper. Needs more small time cons and drivers, though."

  On Fri Nov 13 2015 05:43:36, kumo commented on issue #74, 'Roman Numerals story': "Ok, so this month is too busy for a choose your own adventure style book unfortunately, so I'm going to write a story using Roman Numerals, something like: "I, II III IV, V VI VII, VIII IX X." "

On Fri Nov 13 2015 06:30:57, hugovk labeled issue #152, _Beginner's Questions, Answers, & Tutorials_.

On Fri Nov 13 2015 06:45:12, hugovk labeled issue #155, _Goal-driven use of scenes and sequels for capers_.

  On Fri Nov 13 2015 07:31:58, enkiv2 commented on issue #155, 'Goal-driven use of scenes and sequels for capers': "I'm thinking of several possible improvements.

One: for each goal, have a set of dependencies (with attached probabilities
-- i.e., if you pose as a museum employee but you didn't purchase a smaller
gun your success rate for posing as a museum employee is skewed downward by
the 0.5% likelihood that nobody notices your giant gun; or, if your wallet
is stolen at the gun store then you can't buy anything until you get your
wallet back).

Two: for each goal and each complication, have some sort of human-readable
descriptive 'texture'.

Three: integrate a little multi-level templating system into the printmsg
calls, so that the structure and vocabulary can exhibit *random* variation.


I'm also thinking that, in order to produce more various stories from the
"steal the jewels" caper-world, I should add another path to getting the
jewels -- say, purchasing a black leather catsuit and a grappling hook and
trying to steal them during the night.


I was able to pull it together quickly only because I really did the bare
minimum subset of work necessary to prove the concept. I literally did a
tiny dependency-free minimax without pruning and then made the choice of
goals probablistic and turned the debugging messages into first-person
narration. (It looks more like a story because 'steal the jewels' isn't a
familiar game. But, I could have done the same thing with tic-tac-toe and
written a story about a guy trying to get three in a row.)

On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 12:03 AM Isaac Karth <notifications@github.com>
wrote:

> Also, it reminds me of a Donald E. Westlake caper. Needs more small time
> cons and drivers, though.
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/155#issuecomment-156322270>
> .
>
"

On Fri Nov 13 2015 15:20:09, tra38 subscribed to issue #14, _The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body_.

On Fri Nov 13 2015 15:20:09, tra38 mentioned issue #14, _The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body_.

  On Fri Nov 13 2015 15:20:09, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #14, 'The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body': "@tra38 that sad, looping story has been implemented, with a few other minor features -- mostly regarding grammar of some sections. Could be worse!



I hold out the possibility of using ConceptNet to add .... something to the text -- where the powers relate to the holder, or some sort of descriptions. I dunno. Maybe it's time to move in a different direction for the rest of the month.



A 54K word chunk may be found [here](https://gist.github.com/MichaelPaulukonis/24b0b2bc77e546647784).



And an extract:



There came a king who had seven sons, and when the other six went off

to find brides, he kept the youngest with him because he could not

bear to be parted from them all. They were supposed to bring back a

bride for him, as well, but they found a king with six daughters and

wooed them, forgetting their brother. But when they returned, they

passed too close to a woodchuck-mouse's castle, and he turned them

all, both princes and princesses, to stone in a fit of rage.

When they did not return, the king, their father, tried to prevent

their brother from following, but he went.

On the way, he helped a Pegasus-mustang, he helped a otter-Centaur, he

helped a enthusiastic monkey, he helped a lynx-newt, he helped a

cow-hippopotamus, he helped a rat-Imp, he helped a ox-dingo, and gave

a starving mole-Pegasus his horse to eat. The mole-Pegasus let the

prince ride on him, instead, and showed him the woodchuck-mouse's

castle, telling him to go inside. The prince was reluctant fearing the

wrath of the woodchuck-mouse, but the mole-Pegasus consoled him. The

mole-Pegasus persuaded the prince to enter the castle for there he

would encounter not the woodchuck-mouse, but the princess the

woodchuck-mouse kept prisoner.

The princess was very beautiful and the prince wanted to know how he

could kill the woodchuck-mouse and set her and his family free. The

princess said that there was no way, as the woodchuck-mouse did not

keep his heart in his body and therefore could not be killed. When the

woodchuck-mouse returned, the princess hid the prince, and asked the

woodchuck-mouse where he kept his heart. He told her that it was under

the door sill. The prince and princess dug there the next day and

found no heart. The princess strewed flowers over the door sill, and

when the woodchuck-mouse returned, told him that it was because his

heart lay there. The woodchuck-mouse admitted it wasn't there and told

her it was in the cupboard. As before, the princess and the prince

searched, to no avail; once again, the princess strewed garlands of

flowers on the cupboard and told the woodchuck-mouse it was because

his heart was there. Thereupon the woodchuck-mouse revealed to her

that, in fact, there was a malodours woods with a whale-cheetah,

beyond that there was a daunting glacier foreland with a suspicious

llama, beyond that there was a vast and favorable terracettes with a

ibex-dog, beyond that there was a vast and favorable rapid with a

repugnant gorilla, beyond that there was a daunting oceanic plateau

with a marmoset-Succubus, beyond that there was a stinky plunge pool

with a Siren-mustang, beyond that there was a moderately-sized complex

crater with a unfriendly hog, beyond that there was a gross but not

altogether repulsive delta with a ape-koala, and in the ape-koala's

nest was an egg; and in the egg was the woodchuck-mouse's heart.

The prince rode to the malodours woods, where he was menaced by a

whale-cheetah. The prince called on the Pegasus-mustang to defeat the

whale-cheetah. The Pegasus-mustang defeated the whale-cheetah by using

its Water Veil. The prince rode on to the daunting glacier foreland,

where he was menaced by a suspicious llama. The prince called on the

otter-Centaur to defeat the suspicious llama. The otter-Centaur

defeated the suspicious llama by using its Wetland Adaptation. The

prince rode to the vast and favorable terracettes, where he was

menaced by a ibex-dog. The prince called on the enthusiastic monkey to

defeat the ibex-dog. The enthusiastic monkey defeated the ibex-dog by

using its Fish Manipulation. The prince rode to the vast and favorable

rapid, where he was menaced by a repugnant gorilla. The prince called

on the lynx-newt to defeat the repugnant gorilla. The lynx-newt

defeated the repugnant gorilla by using its Magic Bounce. The prince

rode to the daunting oceanic plateau, where he was menaced by a

marmoset-Succubus. The prince called on the cow-hippopotamus to defeat

the marmoset-Succubus. The cow-hippopotamus defeated the

marmoset-Succubus by using its Norse Deity Physiology. The prince rode

to the stinky plunge pool, where he was menaced by a Siren-mustang.

The prince called on the rat-Imp to defeat the Siren-mustang. The

rat-Imp defeated the Siren-mustang by using its Night Vision. The

prince rode to the moderately-sized complex crater, where he was

menaced by a unfriendly hog. The prince called on the ox-dingo to

defeat the unfriendly hog. The ox-dingo defeated the unfriendly hog by

using its White Smoke. The prince rode to the gross but not altogether

repulsive delta, where he was menaced by a ape-koala. The prince

called on the mole-Pegasus to defeat the ape-koala. The mole-Pegasus

defeated the ape-koala by using its Sonic Scream. The mole-Pegasus

plucked the egg from the nest of the ape-koala, gave it to the prince,

and told him to squeeze it. When he did, the woodchuck-mouse screamed.

The mole-Pegasus told him to squeeze it again, and the woodchuck-mouse

promised anything if he would spare his life. The prince told him to

change his brothers and their brides back to life, and the

woodchuck-mouse did so. Then the prince squeezed the egg into two and

went home with the woodchuck-mouse's captive princess as his bride;

accompanying him were his brothers and their brides, and the king

rejoiced.

Eventually, the prince, who lived a long an happy life, found his

happiness slipping from his fingers. In time, his heart became

hardened, his rule became corrupt, and he became a stupid gila

monster.

There came a king who had seven sons, and when the other six went off

to find brides, he kept the youngest with him because he could not

bear to be parted from them all. They were supposed to bring back a

bride for him, as well, but they found a king with six daughters and

wooed them, forgetting their brother. But when they returned, they

passed too close to a stupid gila monster's castle, and he turned them

all, both princes and princesses, to stone in a fit of rage.

When they did not return, the king, their father, tried to prevent

their brother from following, but he went.

[....]


  On Fri Nov 13 2015 15:24:12, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #74, 'Roman Numerals story': "It often comes down to pruning our plans."

  On Fri Nov 13 2015 15:26:03, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #45, 'The Atheists Who Believe In God': "`novel` means **new**, gosh-darn-it!"

  On Fri Nov 13 2015 15:34:36, enkiv2 commented on issue #155, 'Goal-driven use of scenes and sequels for capers': "So, I added improvement number two for goals and subgoals (texture will be
chosen for a goal-subgoal pair or for a goal if the subgoal's texture
doesn't exist, for a general description plus an extra piece of prose for
success or failure, and this overrides default success/failure
notification). I also added a route wherein the protagonist buys a black
leather catsuit and/or a grappling hook and tries to sneak into the museum
at night.

*This is the story of that time I decided to try and steal them jewels.*

*So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to go to the
ninja supply store... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels
by trying to purchase a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to
steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night... So, I
thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to go to the
hospital... I'll try to remember that. *

*So, I figured, if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the
museum at night I'd have maybe a 40% chance of succeding. I'll try to
remember that. *

*If I'm trying to purchase a grappling hook, what if in order to steal them
jewels, I tried to sneak into the museum at night. That has about a 3 in 10
chance of working. So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
trying to go to the ninja supply store... So, I thought, what if I tried to
steal them jewels by trying to purchase a grappling hook... So, I thought,
what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at
night... I already figured that if I tried to steal them jewels by trying
to sneak into the museum at night I'd only have about a 4 in 10 chance of
succeeding. If I'm trying to purchase a grappling hook, what if in order to
steal them jewels, I tried to sneak into the museum at night. That has
about a 3 in 10 chance of working. So, I thought, what if I tried to steal
them jewels by trying to go to the ninja supply store... So, I thought,
what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a grappling
hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
sneak into the museum at night... I already figured that if I tried to
steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night I'd only have
about a 4 in 10 chance of succeeding. If I'm trying to purchase a grappling
hook, what if in order to steal them jewels, I tried to sneak into the
museum at night. That has about a 3 in 10 chance of working. So, I thought,
what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to go to the ninja supply
store... Geez, this is complicated. I can't think more than 5 moves ahead!*

*So, I figured, if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a
grappling hook I'd have maybe a 18% chance of succeding. I'll try to
remember that. *

*If I'm trying to go to the ninja supply store, what if in order to steal
them jewels, I tried to purchase a grappling hook. That has about a 1 in 10
chance of working. So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
trying to purchase a black leather catsuit... So, I thought, what if I
tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night... I
already figured that if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak
into the museum at night I'd only have about a 4 in 10 chance of
succeeding. If I'm trying to purchase a black leather catsuit, what if in
order to steal them jewels, I tried to sneak into the museum at night. That
has about a 3 in 10 chance of working. So, I thought, what if I tried to
steal them jewels by trying to go to the ninja supply store... Geez, this
is complicated. I can't think more than 5 moves ahead!*

*So, I figured, if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a
black leather catsuit I'd have maybe a 16% chance of succeding. I'll try to
remember that. *

*On the other hand, if I try to purchase a black leather catsuit it'll give
me a 1 in 10 chance of succeeding. I'll try to remember that. *

*So, I figured, if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a
grappling hook I'd have maybe a 20% chance of succeding. If I'm trying to
go to the ninja supply store, what if in order to steal them jewels, I
tried to purchase a grappling hook. That has about a 1 in 10 chance of
working. So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
purchase a black leather catsuit... I already figured that if I tried to
steal them jewels by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit I'd only
have about a 1 in 10 chance of succeeding. On the other hand, if I try to
purchase a black leather catsuit it'll give me a 1 in 10 chance of
succeeding. So, I figured, if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
purchase a grappling hook I'd have maybe a 21% chance of succeding. If I'm
trying to go to the ninja supply store, what if in order to steal them
jewels, I tried to purchase a grappling hook. That has about a 1 in 10
chance of working. So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
trying to purchase a black leather catsuit... I already figured that if I
tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit
I'd only have about a 1 in 10 chance of succeeding. On the other hand, if I
try to purchase a black leather catsuit it'll give me a 1 in 10 chance of
succeeding. So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying
to get a museum uniform... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
jewels by trying to pass as a museum employee... So, I thought, what if I
tried to steal them jewels by trying to go to the hospital... So, I
figured, if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to pass as a museum
employee I'd have maybe a 35% chance of succeding. I'll try to remember
that. *

*If I'm trying to get a museum uniform, what if in order to steal them
jewels, I tried to pass as a museum employee. That has about a 1 in 10
chance of working. I'll try to remember that. *

*The costume shop was tucked into a strip mall down town, between a
laundromat and a chinese take-out place. It smelled like soap. I also have
to steal them jewels. After looking through the racks several times, I
finally decided to ask the cashier -- a wrinkled but plump old woman with a
puff of curly white hair -- if she carried museum employee uniforms. She
shook her head, and I left, dejected. Now I have to get a smaller gun. I
still need to steal them jewels. *

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the
ninja supply store... So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun
by trying to purchase a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to
get a smaller gun by trying to sneak into the museum at night... So, I
thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the
hospital... So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying
to steal them jewels... I'll try to remember that. *

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the
ninja supply store... So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun
by trying to purchase a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to
get a smaller gun by trying to sneak into the museum at night... So, I
thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja
supply store... So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by
trying to purchase a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to
get a smaller gun by trying to sneak into the museum at night... So, I
thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja
supply store... Geez, this is complicated. I can't think more than 5 moves
ahead!*

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to purchase
a black leather catsuit... So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller
gun by trying to sneak into the museum at night... So, I thought, what if I
tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja supply store...
Geez, this is complicated. I can't think more than 5 moves ahead!*

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to purchase
a black leather catsuit... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
jewels by trying to go to the ninja supply store... So, I thought, what if
I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to get a museum uniform... So, I
thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to pass as a museum
employee... So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying
to go to the hospital... So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller
gun by trying to steal them jewels... So, I thought, what if I tried to
steal them jewels by trying to get a museum uniform... The ninja supply
shop was in the middle of the second floor of the mall, between a Hot Topic
and a Zappo's. It was dimly lit, and the scuffed floors had a fake
tatami-pattern print. There was a wad of gum stuck to the doorway. I also
have to get a smaller gun. I also have to steal them jewels. *

*I totally succeeded in my attempt to go to the ninja supply store by
trying to go about it the obvious way. Yay! *

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to purchase
a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
trying to purchase a grappling hook... I already figured that if I tried to
steal them jewels by trying to purchase a grappling hook I'd only have
about a 2 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought, what if I tried to get
a smaller gun by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit... So, I
thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a black
leather catsuit... I already figured that if I tried to steal them jewels
by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit I'd only have about a 1 in 10
chance of succeeding. I also have to get a smaller gun. I also have to
steal them jewels. All the black leather cat suits they had in stock were
way too big for me. *

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to purchase
a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
trying to purchase a grappling hook... I already figured that if I tried to
steal them jewels by trying to purchase a grappling hook I'd only have
about a 2 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought, what if I tried to get
a smaller gun by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit... So, I
thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a black
leather catsuit... I already figured that if I tried to steal them jewels
by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit I'd only have about a 1 in 10
chance of succeeding. I also have to get a smaller gun. I also have to
steal them jewels. I spent twenty minutes looking through the discount bin,
before finding an absolutely perfect grappling hook for thirty cents. When
I went up to pay for it, the cashier waved me off -- no charge. *

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to sneak
into the museum at night... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night... I already figured
that if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at
night I'd only have about a 4 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought,
what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja supply
store... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
go to the ninja supply store... I also have to get a smaller gun. I also
have to steal them jewels. *

*I failed to sneak into the museum at night while trying to purchase a
grappling hook. Bummer. *

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to sneak
into the museum at night... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night... I already figured
that if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at
night I'd only have about a 4 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought,
what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja supply
store... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
go to the ninja supply store... I also have to get a smaller gun. I also
have to steal them jewels. *

*I failed to sneak into the museum at night while trying to purchase a
grappling hook. Bummer. *

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to purchase
a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
trying to purchase a grappling hook... I already figured that if I tried to
steal them jewels by trying to purchase a grappling hook I'd only have
about a 2 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought, what if I tried to get
a smaller gun by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit... So, I
thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a black
leather catsuit... I already figured that if I tried to steal them jewels
by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit I'd only have about a 1 in 10
chance of succeeding. I also have to get a smaller gun. I also have to
steal them jewels. All the black leather cat suits they had in stock were
way too big for me. *

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to purchase
a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
trying to purchase a grappling hook... I already figured that if I tried to
steal them jewels by trying to purchase a grappling hook I'd only have
about a 2 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought, what if I tried to get
a smaller gun by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit... So, I
thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a black
leather catsuit... I already figured that if I tried to steal them jewels
by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit I'd only have about a 1 in 10
chance of succeeding. I also have to get a smaller gun. I also have to
steal them jewels. "Are there any grappling hooks in stock?" The cashier,
impassive behind his mask, shook his head slowly in response to my
question. Then, after a moment of staring at me, he threw a smoke bomb at
his feet. I found myself outside the shop, which was now locked. *

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the
ninja supply store... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels
by trying to go to the ninja supply store... So, I thought, what if I tried
to get a smaller gun by trying to get a museum uniform... So, I thought,
what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to get a museum uniform...
The ninja supply shop was in the middle of the second floor of the mall,
between a Hot Topic and a Zappo's. It was dimly lit, and the scuffed floors
had a fake tatami-pattern print. There was a wad of gum stuck to the
doorway. I also have to get a smaller gun. I also have to steal them
jewels. *

*I totally succeeded in my attempt to go to the ninja supply store by
trying to go about it the obvious way. Yay! *
*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to purchase
a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
trying to purchase a grappling hook... I already figured that if I tried to
steal them jewels by trying to purchase a grappling hook I'd only have
about a 2 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought, what if I tried to get
a smaller gun by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit... So, I
thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a black
leather catsuit... I already figured that if I tried to steal them jewels
by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit I'd only have about a 1 in 10
chance of succeeding. I also have to get a smaller gun. I also have to
steal them jewels. There was a grappling hook with two hundred feet of rope
sitting right behind the counter, on display. *

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to sneak
into the museum at night... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night... I already figured
that if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at
night I'd only have about a 4 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought,
what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja supply
store... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
go to the ninja supply store... I also have to get a smaller gun. I also
have to steal them jewels. *

*I failed to sneak into the museum at night while trying to purchase a
grappling hook. Bummer. *

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to sneak
into the museum at night... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night... I already figured
that if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at
night I'd only have about a 4 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought,
what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja supply
store... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
go to the ninja supply store... The ninja supply shop was in the middle of
the second floor of the mall, between a Hot Topic and a Zappo's. It was
dimly lit, and the scuffed floors had a fake tatami-pattern print. There
was a wad of gum stuck to the doorway. I also have to get a smaller gun. I
also have to steal them jewels. *

*I totally succeeded in my attempt to go to the ninja supply store by
trying to purchase a grappling hook. Yay! *

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to purchase
a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
trying to purchase a grappling hook... I already figured that if I tried to
steal them jewels by trying to purchase a grappling hook I'd only have
about a 2 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought, what if I tried to get
a smaller gun by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit... So, I
thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a black
leather catsuit... I already figured that if I tried to steal them jewels
by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit I'd only have about a 1 in 10
chance of succeeding. I also have to get a smaller gun. I also have to
steal them jewels. A beautiful black leather catsuit greeted me from the
rack to the left of the doorway. *

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to sneak
into the museum at night... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night... I already figured
that if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at
night I'd only have about a 4 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought,
what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja supply
store... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
go to the ninja supply store... I also have to get a smaller gun. I also
have to steal them jewels. *

*I failed to sneak into the museum at night while trying to purchase a
black leather catsuit. Bummer. *

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to sneak
into the museum at night... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night... I already figured
that if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at
night I'd only have about a 4 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought,
what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja supply
store... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
go to the ninja supply store... I also have to get a smaller gun. I also
have to steal them jewels. *

*I failed to sneak into the museum at night while trying to purchase a
black leather catsuit. Bummer. *

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to purchase
a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
trying to purchase a grappling hook... I already figured that if I tried to
steal them jewels by trying to purchase a grappling hook I'd only have
about a 2 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought, what if I tried to get
a smaller gun by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit... So, I
thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a black
leather catsuit... I already figured that if I tried to steal them jewels
by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit I'd only have about a 1 in 10
chance of succeeding. I also have to get a smaller gun. I also have to
steal them jewels. "Are there any grappling hooks in stock?" The cashier,
impassive behind his mask, shook his head slowly in response to my
question. Then, after a moment of staring at me, he threw a smoke bomb at
his feet. I found myself outside the shop, which was now locked. *

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to purchase
a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
trying to purchase a grappling hook... I already figured that if I tried to
steal them jewels by trying to purchase a grappling hook I'd only have
about a 2 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought, what if I tried to get
a smaller gun by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit... So, I
thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a black
leather catsuit... I already figured that if I tried to steal them jewels
by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit I'd only have about a 1 in 10
chance of succeeding. I also have to get a smaller gun. I also have to
steal them jewels. There was a grappling hook with two hundred feet of rope
sitting right behind the counter, on display. *

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to sneak
into the museum at night... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night... I already figured
that if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at
night I'd only have about a 4 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought,
what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja supply
store... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
go to the ninja supply store... The ninja supply shop was in the middle of
the second floor of the mall, between a Hot Topic and a Zappo's. It was
dimly lit, and the scuffed floors had a fake tatami-pattern print. There
was a wad of gum stuck to the doorway. I also have to get a smaller gun. I
also have to steal them jewels. *

*I totally succeeded in my attempt to go to the ninja supply store by
trying to purchase a grappling hook. Yay! *

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to purchase
a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
trying to purchase a grappling hook... I already figured that if I tried to
steal them jewels by trying to purchase a grappling hook I'd only have
about a 2 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought, what if I tried to get
a smaller gun by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit... So, I
thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a black
leather catsuit... I already figured that if I tried to steal them jewels
by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit I'd only have about a 1 in 10
chance of succeeding. I also have to get a smaller gun. I also have to
steal them jewels. A beautiful black leather catsuit greeted me from the
rack to the left of the doorway. *

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to sneak
into the museum at night... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night... I already figured
that if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at
night I'd only have about a 4 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought,
what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja supply
store... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
go to the ninja supply store... I also have to get a smaller gun. I also
have to steal them jewels. *

*I failed to sneak into the museum at night while trying to purchase a
black leather catsuit. Bummer. *

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to sneak
into the museum at night... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night... I already figured
that if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at
night I'd only have about a 4 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought,
what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja supply
store... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
go to the ninja supply store... I also have to get a smaller gun. I also
have to steal them jewels. *

*I totally succeeded in my attempt to sneak into the museum at night by
trying to purchase a black leather catsuit. Yay! *

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the
hospital... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying
to go to the hospital... So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller
gun by trying to steal them jewels... So, I thought, what if I tried to
steal them jewels by trying to steal them jewels... It turns out there's no
way to steal them jewels by trying to go to the hospital after you already
tried to sneak into the museum at night. *

*I also have to get a smaller gun. *

*I failed to steal them jewels while trying to sneak into the museum at
night. Bummer. Now I have to heal my chest wound. I still need to get a
smaller gun. I also still need to steal them jewels. *

*So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the
hospital... So, I thought, what if I tried to heal my chest wound by trying
to go to the hospital... So, I figured, if I tried to heal my chest wound
by trying to go to the hospital I'd have maybe a 17% chance of succeding.
So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to go to the
hospital... So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying
to steal them jewels... So, I thought, what if I tried to heal my chest
wound by trying to steal them jewels... So, I thought, what if I tried to
steal them jewels by trying to steal them jewels... I also have to get a
smaller gun. I also have to heal my chest wound. *

*I totally succeeded in my attempt to steal them jewels by trying to sneak
into the museum at night. Yay! Now I no longer need to steal them jewels.
Now I have to heal my arm wound. Now I have to heal my leg wound, too. I
still need to get a smaller gun. I also still need to heal my chest wound. *

*THE END*


On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 7:31 AM John Ohno <john.ohno@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm thinking of several possible improvements.
>
> One: for each goal, have a set of dependencies (with attached
> probabilities -- i.e., if you pose as a museum employee but you didn't
> purchase a smaller gun your success rate for posing as a museum employee is
> skewed downward by the 0.5% likelihood that nobody notices your giant gun;
> or, if your wallet is stolen at the gun store then you can't buy anything
> until you get your wallet back).
>
> Two: for each goal and each complication, have some sort of human-readable
> descriptive 'texture'.
>
> Three: integrate a little multi-level templating system into the printmsg
> calls, so that the structure and vocabulary can exhibit *random* variation.
>
>
> I'm also thinking that, in order to produce more various stories from the
> "steal the jewels" caper-world, I should add another path to getting the
> jewels -- say, purchasing a black leather catsuit and a grappling hook and
> trying to steal them during the night.
>
>
> I was able to pull it together quickly only because I really did the bare
> minimum subset of work necessary to prove the concept. I literally did a
> tiny dependency-free minimax without pruning and then made the choice of
> goals probablistic and turned the debugging messages into first-person
> narration. (It looks more like a story because 'steal the jewels' isn't a
> familiar game. But, I could have done the same thing with tic-tac-toe and
> written a story about a guy trying to get three in a row.)
>
> On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 12:03 AM Isaac Karth <notifications@github.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Also, it reminds me of a Donald E. Westlake caper. Needs more small time
>> cons and drivers, though.
>>
>> —
>> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
>> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/155#issuecomment-156322270>
>> .
>>
>
"

  On Fri Nov 13 2015 16:25:27, enkiv2 commented on issue #155, 'Goal-driven use of scenes and sequels for capers': "Implemented a limited version of improvement number one (dependencies).
Now, the protagonist won't even consider trying to steal the jewels by
going to the hospital (for instance). This is called 'goal_reqs': the
planner ignores any path wherein the list of required goals doesn't have
the appropriate intersection with the goal pool. I also implemented plain
old "reqs", wherein an attempt can fail based on required items not
existing (so, you can't pose as a museum employee without at one point
having successfully purchased a museum employee uniform, and you need
either a grappling hook or a black leather catsuit to sneak into the museum
at night but you can do so after doing something else).

On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 3:34 PM John Ohno <john.ohno@gmail.com> wrote:

> So, I added improvement number two for goals and subgoals (texture will be
> chosen for a goal-subgoal pair or for a goal if the subgoal's texture
> doesn't exist, for a general description plus an extra piece of prose for
> success or failure, and this overrides default success/failure
> notification). I also added a route wherein the protagonist buys a black
> leather catsuit and/or a grappling hook and tries to sneak into the museum
> at night.
>
> *This is the story of that time I decided to try and steal them jewels.*
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to go to
> the ninja supply store... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
> jewels by trying to purchase a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I
> tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night...
> So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to go to the
> hospital... I'll try to remember that. *
>
> *So, I figured, if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into
> the museum at night I'd have maybe a 40% chance of succeding. I'll try to
> remember that. *
>
> *If I'm trying to purchase a grappling hook, what if in order to steal
> them jewels, I tried to sneak into the museum at night. That has about a 3
> in 10 chance of working. So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
> jewels by trying to go to the ninja supply store... So, I thought, what if
> I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a grappling hook... So,
> I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the
> museum at night... I already figured that if I tried to steal them jewels
> by trying to sneak into the museum at night I'd only have about a 4 in 10
> chance of succeeding. If I'm trying to purchase a grappling hook, what if
> in order to steal them jewels, I tried to sneak into the museum at night.
> That has about a 3 in 10 chance of working. So, I thought, what if I tried
> to steal them jewels by trying to go to the ninja supply store... So, I
> thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a
> grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
> trying to sneak into the museum at night... I already figured that if I
> tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night I'd
> only have about a 4 in 10 chance of succeeding. If I'm trying to purchase a
> grappling hook, what if in order to steal them jewels, I tried to sneak
> into the museum at night. That has about a 3 in 10 chance of working. So, I
> thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to go to the ninja
> supply store... Geez, this is complicated. I can't think more than 5 moves
> ahead!*
>
> *So, I figured, if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a
> grappling hook I'd have maybe a 18% chance of succeding. I'll try to
> remember that. *
>
> *If I'm trying to go to the ninja supply store, what if in order to steal
> them jewels, I tried to purchase a grappling hook. That has about a 1 in 10
> chance of working. So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
> trying to purchase a black leather catsuit... So, I thought, what if I
> tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night... I
> already figured that if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak
> into the museum at night I'd only have about a 4 in 10 chance of
> succeeding. If I'm trying to purchase a black leather catsuit, what if in
> order to steal them jewels, I tried to sneak into the museum at night. That
> has about a 3 in 10 chance of working. So, I thought, what if I tried to
> steal them jewels by trying to go to the ninja supply store... Geez, this
> is complicated. I can't think more than 5 moves ahead!*
>
> *So, I figured, if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a
> black leather catsuit I'd have maybe a 16% chance of succeding. I'll try to
> remember that. *
>
> *On the other hand, if I try to purchase a black leather catsuit it'll
> give me a 1 in 10 chance of succeeding. I'll try to remember that. *
>
> *So, I figured, if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a
> grappling hook I'd have maybe a 20% chance of succeding. If I'm trying to
> go to the ninja supply store, what if in order to steal them jewels, I
> tried to purchase a grappling hook. That has about a 1 in 10 chance of
> working. So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
> purchase a black leather catsuit... I already figured that if I tried to
> steal them jewels by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit I'd only
> have about a 1 in 10 chance of succeeding. On the other hand, if I try to
> purchase a black leather catsuit it'll give me a 1 in 10 chance of
> succeeding. So, I figured, if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
> purchase a grappling hook I'd have maybe a 21% chance of succeding. If I'm
> trying to go to the ninja supply store, what if in order to steal them
> jewels, I tried to purchase a grappling hook. That has about a 1 in 10
> chance of working. So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
> trying to purchase a black leather catsuit... I already figured that if I
> tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit
> I'd only have about a 1 in 10 chance of succeeding. On the other hand, if I
> try to purchase a black leather catsuit it'll give me a 1 in 10 chance of
> succeeding. So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying
> to get a museum uniform... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
> jewels by trying to pass as a museum employee... So, I thought, what if I
> tried to steal them jewels by trying to go to the hospital... So, I
> figured, if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to pass as a museum
> employee I'd have maybe a 35% chance of succeding. I'll try to remember
> that. *
>
> *If I'm trying to get a museum uniform, what if in order to steal them
> jewels, I tried to pass as a museum employee. That has about a 1 in 10
> chance of working. I'll try to remember that. *
>
> *The costume shop was tucked into a strip mall down town, between a
> laundromat and a chinese take-out place. It smelled like soap. I also have
> to steal them jewels. After looking through the racks several times, I
> finally decided to ask the cashier -- a wrinkled but plump old woman with a
> puff of curly white hair -- if she carried museum employee uniforms. She
> shook her head, and I left, dejected. Now I have to get a smaller gun. I
> still need to steal them jewels. *
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to
> the ninja supply store... So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller
> gun by trying to purchase a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I
> tried to get a smaller gun by trying to sneak into the museum at night...
> So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the
> hospital... So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying
> to steal them jewels... I'll try to remember that. *
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to
> the ninja supply store... So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller
> gun by trying to purchase a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I
> tried to get a smaller gun by trying to sneak into the museum at night...
> So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the
> ninja supply store... So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun
> by trying to purchase a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to
> get a smaller gun by trying to sneak into the museum at night... So, I
> thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja
> supply store... Geez, this is complicated. I can't think more than 5 moves
> ahead!*
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to purchase
> a black leather catsuit... So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller
> gun by trying to sneak into the museum at night... So, I thought, what if I
> tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja supply store...
> Geez, this is complicated. I can't think more than 5 moves ahead!*
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to purchase
> a black leather catsuit... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
> jewels by trying to go to the ninja supply store... So, I thought, what if
> I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to get a museum uniform... So, I
> thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to pass as a museum
> employee... So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying
> to go to the hospital... So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller
> gun by trying to steal them jewels... So, I thought, what if I tried to
> steal them jewels by trying to get a museum uniform... The ninja supply
> shop was in the middle of the second floor of the mall, between a Hot Topic
> and a Zappo's. It was dimly lit, and the scuffed floors had a fake
> tatami-pattern print. There was a wad of gum stuck to the doorway. I also
> have to get a smaller gun. I also have to steal them jewels. *
>
> *I totally succeeded in my attempt to go to the ninja supply store by
> trying to go about it the obvious way. Yay! *
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to purchase
> a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
> trying to purchase a grappling hook... I already figured that if I tried to
> steal them jewels by trying to purchase a grappling hook I'd only have
> about a 2 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought, what if I tried to get
> a smaller gun by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit... So, I
> thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a black
> leather catsuit... I already figured that if I tried to steal them jewels
> by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit I'd only have about a 1 in 10
> chance of succeeding. I also have to get a smaller gun. I also have to
> steal them jewels. All the black leather cat suits they had in stock were
> way too big for me. *
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to purchase
> a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
> trying to purchase a grappling hook... I already figured that if I tried to
> steal them jewels by trying to purchase a grappling hook I'd only have
> about a 2 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought, what if I tried to get
> a smaller gun by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit... So, I
> thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a black
> leather catsuit... I already figured that if I tried to steal them jewels
> by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit I'd only have about a 1 in 10
> chance of succeeding. I also have to get a smaller gun. I also have to
> steal them jewels. I spent twenty minutes looking through the discount bin,
> before finding an absolutely perfect grappling hook for thirty cents. When
> I went up to pay for it, the cashier waved me off -- no charge. *
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to sneak
> into the museum at night... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
> jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night... I already figured
> that if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at
> night I'd only have about a 4 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought,
> what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja supply
> store... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
> go to the ninja supply store... I also have to get a smaller gun. I also
> have to steal them jewels. *
>
> *I failed to sneak into the museum at night while trying to purchase a
> grappling hook. Bummer. *
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to sneak
> into the museum at night... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
> jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night... I already figured
> that if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at
> night I'd only have about a 4 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought,
> what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja supply
> store... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
> go to the ninja supply store... I also have to get a smaller gun. I also
> have to steal them jewels. *
>
> *I failed to sneak into the museum at night while trying to purchase a
> grappling hook. Bummer. *
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to purchase
> a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
> trying to purchase a grappling hook... I already figured that if I tried to
> steal them jewels by trying to purchase a grappling hook I'd only have
> about a 2 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought, what if I tried to get
> a smaller gun by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit... So, I
> thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a black
> leather catsuit... I already figured that if I tried to steal them jewels
> by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit I'd only have about a 1 in 10
> chance of succeeding. I also have to get a smaller gun. I also have to
> steal them jewels. All the black leather cat suits they had in stock were
> way too big for me. *
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to purchase
> a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
> trying to purchase a grappling hook... I already figured that if I tried to
> steal them jewels by trying to purchase a grappling hook I'd only have
> about a 2 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought, what if I tried to get
> a smaller gun by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit... So, I
> thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a black
> leather catsuit... I already figured that if I tried to steal them jewels
> by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit I'd only have about a 1 in 10
> chance of succeeding. I also have to get a smaller gun. I also have to
> steal them jewels. "Are there any grappling hooks in stock?" The cashier,
> impassive behind his mask, shook his head slowly in response to my
> question. Then, after a moment of staring at me, he threw a smoke bomb at
> his feet. I found myself outside the shop, which was now locked. *
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to
> the ninja supply store... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
> jewels by trying to go to the ninja supply store... So, I thought, what if
> I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to get a museum uniform... So, I
> thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to get a museum
> uniform... The ninja supply shop was in the middle of the second floor of
> the mall, between a Hot Topic and a Zappo's. It was dimly lit, and the
> scuffed floors had a fake tatami-pattern print. There was a wad of gum
> stuck to the doorway. I also have to get a smaller gun. I also have to
> steal them jewels. *
>
> *I totally succeeded in my attempt to go to the ninja supply store by
> trying to go about it the obvious way. Yay! *
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to purchase
> a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
> trying to purchase a grappling hook... I already figured that if I tried to
> steal them jewels by trying to purchase a grappling hook I'd only have
> about a 2 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought, what if I tried to get
> a smaller gun by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit... So, I
> thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a black
> leather catsuit... I already figured that if I tried to steal them jewels
> by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit I'd only have about a 1 in 10
> chance of succeeding. I also have to get a smaller gun. I also have to
> steal them jewels. There was a grappling hook with two hundred feet of rope
> sitting right behind the counter, on display. *
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to sneak
> into the museum at night... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
> jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night... I already figured
> that if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at
> night I'd only have about a 4 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought,
> what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja supply
> store... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
> go to the ninja supply store... I also have to get a smaller gun. I also
> have to steal them jewels. *
>
> *I failed to sneak into the museum at night while trying to purchase a
> grappling hook. Bummer. *
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to sneak
> into the museum at night... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
> jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night... I already figured
> that if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at
> night I'd only have about a 4 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought,
> what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja supply
> store... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
> go to the ninja supply store... The ninja supply shop was in the middle of
> the second floor of the mall, between a Hot Topic and a Zappo's. It was
> dimly lit, and the scuffed floors had a fake tatami-pattern print. There
> was a wad of gum stuck to the doorway. I also have to get a smaller gun. I
> also have to steal them jewels. *
>
> *I totally succeeded in my attempt to go to the ninja supply store by
> trying to purchase a grappling hook. Yay! *
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to purchase
> a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
> trying to purchase a grappling hook... I already figured that if I tried to
> steal them jewels by trying to purchase a grappling hook I'd only have
> about a 2 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought, what if I tried to get
> a smaller gun by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit... So, I
> thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a black
> leather catsuit... I already figured that if I tried to steal them jewels
> by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit I'd only have about a 1 in 10
> chance of succeeding. I also have to get a smaller gun. I also have to
> steal them jewels. A beautiful black leather catsuit greeted me from the
> rack to the left of the doorway. *
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to sneak
> into the museum at night... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
> jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night... I already figured
> that if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at
> night I'd only have about a 4 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought,
> what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja supply
> store... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
> go to the ninja supply store... I also have to get a smaller gun. I also
> have to steal them jewels. *
>
> *I failed to sneak into the museum at night while trying to purchase a
> black leather catsuit. Bummer. *
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to sneak
> into the museum at night... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
> jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night... I already figured
> that if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at
> night I'd only have about a 4 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought,
> what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja supply
> store... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
> go to the ninja supply store... I also have to get a smaller gun. I also
> have to steal them jewels. *
>
> *I failed to sneak into the museum at night while trying to purchase a
> black leather catsuit. Bummer. *
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to purchase
> a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
> trying to purchase a grappling hook... I already figured that if I tried to
> steal them jewels by trying to purchase a grappling hook I'd only have
> about a 2 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought, what if I tried to get
> a smaller gun by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit... So, I
> thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a black
> leather catsuit... I already figured that if I tried to steal them jewels
> by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit I'd only have about a 1 in 10
> chance of succeeding. I also have to get a smaller gun. I also have to
> steal them jewels. "Are there any grappling hooks in stock?" The cashier,
> impassive behind his mask, shook his head slowly in response to my
> question. Then, after a moment of staring at me, he threw a smoke bomb at
> his feet. I found myself outside the shop, which was now locked. *
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to purchase
> a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
> trying to purchase a grappling hook... I already figured that if I tried to
> steal them jewels by trying to purchase a grappling hook I'd only have
> about a 2 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought, what if I tried to get
> a smaller gun by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit... So, I
> thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a black
> leather catsuit... I already figured that if I tried to steal them jewels
> by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit I'd only have about a 1 in 10
> chance of succeeding. I also have to get a smaller gun. I also have to
> steal them jewels. There was a grappling hook with two hundred feet of rope
> sitting right behind the counter, on display. *
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to sneak
> into the museum at night... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
> jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night... I already figured
> that if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at
> night I'd only have about a 4 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought,
> what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja supply
> store... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
> go to the ninja supply store... The ninja supply shop was in the middle of
> the second floor of the mall, between a Hot Topic and a Zappo's. It was
> dimly lit, and the scuffed floors had a fake tatami-pattern print. There
> was a wad of gum stuck to the doorway. I also have to get a smaller gun. I
> also have to steal them jewels. *
>
> *I totally succeeded in my attempt to go to the ninja supply store by
> trying to purchase a grappling hook. Yay! *
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to purchase
> a grappling hook... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
> trying to purchase a grappling hook... I already figured that if I tried to
> steal them jewels by trying to purchase a grappling hook I'd only have
> about a 2 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought, what if I tried to get
> a smaller gun by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit... So, I
> thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to purchase a black
> leather catsuit... I already figured that if I tried to steal them jewels
> by trying to purchase a black leather catsuit I'd only have about a 1 in 10
> chance of succeeding. I also have to get a smaller gun. I also have to
> steal them jewels. A beautiful black leather catsuit greeted me from the
> rack to the left of the doorway. *
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to sneak
> into the museum at night... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
> jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night... I already figured
> that if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at
> night I'd only have about a 4 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought,
> what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja supply
> store... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
> go to the ninja supply store... I also have to get a smaller gun. I also
> have to steal them jewels. *
>
> *I failed to sneak into the museum at night while trying to purchase a
> black leather catsuit. Bummer. *
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to sneak
> into the museum at night... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them
> jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at night... I already figured
> that if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to sneak into the museum at
> night I'd only have about a 4 in 10 chance of succeeding. So, I thought,
> what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to the ninja supply
> store... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
> go to the ninja supply store... I also have to get a smaller gun. I also
> have to steal them jewels. *
>
> *I totally succeeded in my attempt to sneak into the museum at night by
> trying to purchase a black leather catsuit. Yay! *
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to
> the hospital... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by
> trying to go to the hospital... So, I thought, what if I tried to get a
> smaller gun by trying to steal them jewels... So, I thought, what if I
> tried to steal them jewels by trying to steal them jewels... It turns out
> there's no way to steal them jewels by trying to go to the hospital after
> you already tried to sneak into the museum at night. *
>
> *I also have to get a smaller gun. *
>
> *I failed to steal them jewels while trying to sneak into the museum at
> night. Bummer. Now I have to heal my chest wound. I still need to get a
> smaller gun. I also still need to steal them jewels. *
>
> *So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun by trying to go to
> the hospital... So, I thought, what if I tried to heal my chest wound by
> trying to go to the hospital... So, I figured, if I tried to heal my chest
> wound by trying to go to the hospital I'd have maybe a 17% chance of
> succeding. So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to
> go to the hospital... So, I thought, what if I tried to get a smaller gun
> by trying to steal them jewels... So, I thought, what if I tried to heal my
> chest wound by trying to steal them jewels... So, I thought, what if I
> tried to steal them jewels by trying to steal them jewels... I also have to
> get a smaller gun. I also have to heal my chest wound. *
>
> *I totally succeeded in my attempt to steal them jewels by trying to sneak
> into the museum at night. Yay! Now I no longer need to steal them jewels.
> Now I have to heal my arm wound. Now I have to heal my leg wound, too. I
> still need to get a smaller gun. I also still need to heal my chest wound. *
>
> *THE END*
>
>
> On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 7:31 AM John Ohno <john.ohno@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm thinking of several possible improvements.
>>
>> One: for each goal, have a set of dependencies (with attached
>> probabilities -- i.e., if you pose as a museum employee but you didn't
>> purchase a smaller gun your success rate for posing as a museum employee is
>> skewed downward by the 0.5% likelihood that nobody notices your giant gun;
>> or, if your wallet is stolen at the gun store then you can't buy anything
>> until you get your wallet back).
>>
>> Two: for each goal and each complication, have some sort of
>> human-readable descriptive 'texture'.
>>
>> Three: integrate a little multi-level templating system into the printmsg
>> calls, so that the structure and vocabulary can exhibit *random* variation.
>>
>>
>> I'm also thinking that, in order to produce more various stories from the
>> "steal the jewels" caper-world, I should add another path to getting the
>> jewels -- say, purchasing a black leather catsuit and a grappling hook and
>> trying to steal them during the night.
>>
>>
>> I was able to pull it together quickly only because I really did the bare
>> minimum subset of work necessary to prove the concept. I literally did a
>> tiny dependency-free minimax without pruning and then made the choice of
>> goals probablistic and turned the debugging messages into first-person
>> narration. (It looks more like a story because 'steal the jewels' isn't a
>> familiar game. But, I could have done the same thing with tic-tac-toe and
>> written a story about a guy trying to get three in a row.)
>>
>> On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 12:03 AM Isaac Karth <notifications@github.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Also, it reminds me of a Donald E. Westlake caper. Needs more small time
>>> cons and drivers, though.
>>>
>>> —
>>> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
>>> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/155#issuecomment-156322270>
>>> .
>>>
>>
"

  On Fri Nov 13 2015 17:51:18, almightyJanitor commented on issue #146, 'Sure Thing': "Ended up going in a completely different direction. The problem was that I was basically coding a puzzle generator, and then writing most of the story to plug the puzzle into, which I felt was not in the spirit of nanogenmo.



This new idea is inspired by the play [Sure Thing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sure_Thing_(play)) by David Ives. The text I'm currently modifying is [The Importance of Being Earnest](http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/844/pg844.txt), but I'm trying to get it to work with a novel format.



Every time a character asks a question, the answerer diverges from the script before being reprimanded by a bell. Right now it's just randomly selecting a new answer from the entire play, working on giving it more variation and avoiding characters addressing the wrong person, repeating the same answer, etc.



Snippet of output:



>Gwendolen:  [Slowly and seriously.]  You will call me sister, will you not?

>

Cecily:  Of course it was. On the 22nd of last March. You can see the entry if you like. [Shows diary.]  'To-day I broke off my engagement with Ernest. I feel it is better to do so. The weather still continues charming.' 

>

>(Bell)

>

>Gwendolen:  [Slowly and seriously.]  You will call me sister, will you not?  [They embrace. Jack and Algernon groan and walk up and down.] 

>

>Cecily:  [Rather brightly.]  There is just one question I would like to be allowed to ask my guardian. 

>

>Gwendolen:  An admirable idea!  Mr. Worthing, there is just one question I would like to be permitted to put to you. Where is your brother Ernest?

>

>Jack:  [Embracing her.]  Yes . . . mother! 

>

>(Bell)

>

>Gwendolen:  An admirable idea!  Mr. Worthing, there is just one question I would like to be permitted to put to you. Where is your brother Ernest?  We are both engaged to be married to your brother Ernest, so it is a matter of some importance to us to know where your brother Ernest is at present. 

>

>Jack:  [Slowly and hesitatingly.]  Gwendolen--Cecily--it is very painful for me to be forced to speak the truth. It is the first time in my life that I have ever been reduced to such a painful position, and I am really quite inexperienced in doing anything of the kind. However, I will tell you quite frankly that I have no brother Ernest. I have no brother at all. I never had a brother in my life, and I certainly have not the smallest intention of ever having one in the future. 

>

>Cecily:  [Surprised.]  No brother at all?

>

>Jack:  Who? 

>

>(Bell)

>

>Cecily:  [Surprised.]  No brother at all?

>

>Jack:  [Airily.]  Oh, neighbours, neighbours. 

>

>(Bell)

>

>Cecily:  [Surprised.]  No brother at all? 

>

>Jack:  [Cheerily.]  None! 

>

>Gwendolen:  [Severely.]  Had you never a brother of any kind?

>

>Jack:  I have lost both my parents. 

>

>(Bell)

>

>Gwendolen:  [Severely.]  Had you never a brother of any kind? 

>

>Jack:  [Pleasantly.]  Never. Not even of any kind."

On Fri Nov 13 2015 17:52:33, almightyJanitor renamed issue #146, _Sure Thing_.

  On Fri Nov 13 2015 19:41:50, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #146, 'Sure Thing': "That's different. Trying to wrap my head around it."

  On Fri Nov 13 2015 20:09:02, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #110, 'Religious Text Generator': "I will pray that you get this done.

"

  On Fri Nov 13 2015 21:33:59, bredfern commented on issue #51, '1940s la horror noire': "Ok i got a decent result with torch interestingly it did better with 4 layers than 10 using all of lovecraft as a source, 10 layers requires a lot larger data spurce 4 seemed to be the sweet spot. I need to process the result into a pretty web format for consumption or at least convert to epub from txt."

  On Fri Nov 13 2015 22:45:16, ikarth commented on issue #146, 'Sure Thing': "It'd be even more obvious with multiple source texts, of course. A Shakespeare play that keeps getting derailed by an actor who think's he's in an Oscar Wilde play? Salome crossed with Arms and the Man? Though keeping it in the same family, so to speak, has an obvious advantage in your excerpt, where it preserves the tone across the alteration."

  On Fri Nov 13 2015 23:31:58, maetl commented on issue #156, 'A travel guide to unknown lands': ":heart: "

  On Sat Nov 14 2015 03:52:15, hugovk commented on issue #51, '1940s la horror noire': "A simple way of making a web-format is to generate markdown. Then if it's on GitHub, it'll render it nicely.



And tools like multimarkdown can convert MD to HTML easily.



And then Chrome can be used to print HTML to PDF (shout if you'd like some CSS pointers how to format printable pages)."

On Sat Nov 14 2015 03:58:17, hugovk labeled issue #146, _Sure Thing_.

On Sat Nov 14 2015 06:00:36, hugovk opened a new issue called _405 Love Letters_. It has a rank of 33. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Sat Nov 14 2015 06:00:42, hugovk labeled issue #157, _405 Love Letters_.

On Sat Nov 14 2015 06:00:42, hugovk labeled issue #157, _405 Love Letters_.

  On Sat Nov 14 2015 06:02:05, hugovk commented on issue #8, 'In!': "Second idea done:



*405 Love Letters*



https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/157"

  On Sat Nov 14 2015 07:57:03, mattfister commented on issue #157, '405 Love Letters': "This is beautifully done. I really like the hypertext additions to jump between letters with the same words."

  On Sat Nov 14 2015 17:03:30, yourpalal commented on issue #132, 'Generative Socratic Dialogues': "Unfortunately, it's not all as good as that snippet. The quality seems to be a bit all over the place at the moment, but I'm trying to improve on that! Instead of actually typesetting it with latex, I decided to produce html, but use the standard latex font, which still looks latexy. I have put a [WIP version of the document online](http://yourpalal.github.io/NaNoGenMo-2015) (it's 50k words, but I'm still improving things and regenerating it).



Things left to do:



* Add a generated table of contents.

* Turn the knobs and see if I can make things a bit more readable/coherent"

  On Sat Nov 14 2015 19:33:37, emdaniels commented on issue #82, 'intense intents in tents': "I wrote a python script to change [The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes] (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1661) into [The Adventures of Charlotte Holmes] (https://github.com/emdaniels/character-swap/blob/master/The_Adventures_Of_Sherlock_Holmes/Opposite_The_Adventures_of_Charlotte_Holmes.txt) and switch all the character genders to the opposite gender. I took creative grammatical license with a few pronouns, in the hope that future iterations would be able to change them more effectively. Here is an excerpt:



>To Charlotte Holmes he is always THE man. I have seldom heard her mention him under any other name. In herr eyes he eclipses and predominates the whole of him sex. It was not that she felt any emotion akin to love for Ivan Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to herr cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. She was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover she would have placed herself in a false position. She never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer -- excellent for drawing the veil from women's motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into herr own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all herr mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of herr own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as herr. And yet there was but one man to her, and that man was the late Ivan Adler, of dubious and questionable memory. 



The repo is [here] (https://github.com/emdaniels/character-swap), the text is 104,880 words long. If you have any questions or suggestions for improvement, let me know!"

  On Sat Nov 14 2015 23:36:41, bhickey commented on issue #86, 'The -2147483648 Nights': "Attached is a draft of my text, **The -2147483648 Nights.** Source to follow.

[sleeper.pdf](https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/files/34807/sleeper.pdf)"

On Sun Nov 15 2015 03:48:17, hugovk labeled issue #82, _intense intents in tents_.

On Sun Nov 15 2015 03:48:17, hugovk labeled issue #82, _intense intents in tents_.

  On Sun Nov 15 2015 03:58:04, hugovk commented on issue #82, 'intense intents in tents': "Good stuff!



Little formatting suggestion: perhaps something like `textwrap` would be useful to wrap the lines to something like 70-80 characters, like the PG input, rather having one sentence per line."

  On Sun Nov 15 2015 07:12:42, ikarth commented on issue #82, 'intense intents in tents': "Surprisingly effective result from a small swerve.



Looks like the one-per-line thing is because it's not tracking the paragraphs. That'd be a good next step I think. Plus the quotation marks at the end of paragraphs are getting missed, and occasionally some other ones.



An alternate way to do it is how #72 does it: rather than writing the new file from scratch, it takes the original text file and constructs a regex that replaces the words it wants to swap. Downside: you have to algorithmically construct a complex regex. Though I suppose, since you're processing the text bit-by-bit anyway, you could re-write write it so it just goes line-by-line and doesn't care about sentences.



You could also grab nltk and use it to parse the sentences out with



    import nltk.data

    sent_detector = nltk.data.load('tokenizers/punkt/english.pickle')

    sentences = sent_detector.tokenize(text)



But that may actually be overkill, since you seem to have split all the sentences correctly already."

  On Sun Nov 15 2015 11:31:53, tra38 commented on issue #45, 'The Atheists Who Believe In God': "I actually did end up generating a novel of over 50,000 words, simply by duplicating the data (so instead of analyzing 99 atheists, I analyzed 99 atheists *twice*). This brings the final word count to 61,662, but I suspect most people are going to skim past the first chapter to look for any interesting combinations.



Full Text: https://github.com/tra38/The-Atheists-Who-Believe-In-God/blob/master/atheists.md

Repo: https://github.com/tra38/The-Atheists-Who-Believe-In-God



I'll also have to stop here, since I won't have much time to work onward on this project. If I had more time, I would try to create multiple templates, such as "atheist drives to work", "atheist writes a novel to promote his/her non-religion", etc.



As a proof of concept, it works and I really like the resulting output. It's much more interesting than reading a table, at least."

  On Sun Nov 15 2015 13:47:07, bredfern commented on issue #51, '1940s la horror noire': "Yeah another approach I'm thinking of is using text to speech and then
having an ajax call pull down the data file and use that as the source for
 a text to speech running where I have this animation doing a reading of
the text, it works better hearing it out loud than reading off the page
cause you can let it run in the background with text to speech.

On Sat, Nov 14, 2015 at 12:52 AM, Hugo van Kemenade <
notifications@github.com> wrote:

> A simple way of making a web-format is to generate markdown. Then if it's
> on GitHub, it'll render it nicely.
>
> And tools like multimarkdown can convert MD to HTML easily.
>
> And then Chrome can be used to print HTML to PDF (shout if you'd like some
> CSS pointers how to format printable pages).
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/51#issuecomment-156671821>
> .
>
"

On Sun Nov 15 2015 15:15:12, hugovk labeled issue #45, _The Atheists Who Believe In God_.

  On Sun Nov 15 2015 15:53:35, emdaniels commented on issue #82, 'intense intents in tents': "Thanks for your feedback! It does seem that eventually to get to a place where gender choice happens on the fictional character level I'll need to use a tokenizer, but it's not there yet. In the interim, I added an 80 character line limit and support for creating additional texts that are all female or all male. Here's how the book reads from an entirely female point of view in [She: The Adventures of Charlotte Holmes](https://github.com/emdaniels/character-swap/blob/master/The_Adventures_Of_Sherlock_Holmes/She_The_Adventures_of_Charlotte_Holmes.txt):



>To Charlotte Holmes she is always THE woman. I have seldom heard her mention her under any other name. In herr eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that she felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to herr cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. She was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover she would have placed herself in a false position. She never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer -- excellent for drawing the veil from women's motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into herr own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all herr mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of herr own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as herr. And yet there was but one woman to her, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.



And here's how the book reads from an entirely male point of view in [He: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes](https://github.com/emdaniels/character-swap/blob/master/The_Adventures_Of_Sherlock_Holmes/He_The_Adventures_of_Sherlock_Holmes.txt):



>To Sherlock Holmes he is always THE man. I have seldom heard him mention his under any other name. In his eyes he eclipses and predominates the whole of his sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Ivan Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer -- excellent for drawing the veil from men's motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one man to him, and that man was the late Ivan Adler, of dubious and questionable memory."

  On Sun Nov 15 2015 17:33:17, mewo2 commented on issue #156, 'A travel guide to unknown lands': "I've been playing around with some text generation. It started out as an Invisible Cities pastiche, but it's gone in a slightly different direction.



![map](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/360952/11171437/6b8cbc9a-8be8-11e5-82c2-654e8ffaba4d.png)



Shurgulz

========



On entering the city, one may catch sight of the colossal castle of

Barturk. From here, a traveller cannot discern how merchants crowd

around its gate. Slightly closer to the heart of the city, the traveller

will begin to hear songs of dirgeful ecstasy, sung by the bourgeoisie of

the city. In the end the fragrance of *ritig* fruit fills the wind, and

one has undeniably arrived.



In the Ancient Quarter, the alleyways are lined with *lirbsha* plants.

Philosophers flock here, practising their skill at *daplar*. In the

event that a traveller is so lucky as to stumble upon an argument

between two lovers, it may be a humbling experience. The caged *nanil*

birds will be obvious to one. These denote the home of an artisan. In

the afternoon, the traveller can sometimes hear the song of the *raski*

birds.



Kirrab

======



From Shurgulz a traveller may travel west to Kirrab. It is a pleasant

journey. As the traveller enters Zhiturk, the greenery changes, giving

way to open fields and thickets of *lirbra* flowers. At one point the

route crosses a deep gorge. Near the roadside, mighty *nirshuch* graze.



Near to the monumental city of Kirrab, one will come across a *nirpi*,

prized for its horns. Somewhat nearer to the centre of the city, the

traveller will hear the song of the *raski* birds. At last the musk of

*biltarb* trees fills the air, and one is beyond doubt in Kirrab.



In the Grey District, the boulevards are paved with lead, inlaid with

obsidian. A traveller may usually hear the sound of the prison clock.

The traveller will take note of the *raltarb* flowers. These are a

warning to evil spirits.



Rutig

=====



Leaving Kirrab a traveller can journey north to Rutig. It is an

enjoyable journey. Along the way the track crosses a broad valley. When

the traveller crosses into Dirchals, there is a variation in the light,

and a harsh cast falls over the terrain. By the verge of the road,

*lirbra* trees grow.



Entering famed Rutig, a traveller can encounter a series of pedlars,

setting out their stalls. A little nearer to the inner parts of the

city, a traveller will hear songs of plaintive joy, sung by citizens of

Rutig. Eventually the bouquet of *chalsri* fruit fills the wind, and one

is surely in Rutig.



Around the citadel, the squares are paved with granite, inlaid with

limestone. Writers mill here, praying. Should the traveller be

unfortunate enough to see artisans talking, one may be drawn in, and

unable to leave. The caged *nanil* birds will be clear. These serve to

warn off unwanted influences.



Gulztig

=======



From Rutig one may travel to Gulztig. The route is well-trodden, and the

journey takes but an afternoon. When a traveller crosses into Pibsir,

the foliage changes, giving way to hedgerows and *biltarb* plants. On

the track, *raltarb* plants grow. At one point the road crosses a deep

gorge, spotted with *shapi* flowers.



Outside the tremendous city of Gulztig, the traveller will espy the

sandstone lookout of the gargantuan fortress of Shurti. A little closer

to the inner parts of the city, a traveller can faintly hear the

striking of the theatre clock. Finally the smell of *kira* flowers fills

the breeze, and one has truly arrived.



Near the dancing-hall of Rizhti, the back-streets are lined with

*lirbsha* trees, and the blue petals sway in the air. A distracted

visitor will miss the sandstone carvings which decorate the rooftops.

These commemorate the pestilence which recently devastated a nearby

village. The traveller may usually hear the delicate song of the *raski*

birds. The idle rich teem here, laughing and dancing.



Tubil

=====



Leaving Gulztig one can journey to Tubil. It is a smooth journey. As a

traveller enters Chalszhi, there is a change in the light, and a grey

cast falls over the land. Along the way the track crosses a broad

valley. By the road, hairy *ruzhsir* graze.



At the outskirts of Tubil, one can espy the iniquitous mint of Zhubar.

From so far, the traveller has no way to observe how actors steer clear

of it. Closer to the centre of the city, the traveller begins to hear

songs of sorrowful delight, sung by petty criminals of the surrounding

countryside. Ultimately the perfume of *ritig* fruit fills the air, and

a traveller has without a doubt arrived.



Close to the counting-house of Mizhbar, the streets are lined with

*raltarb* trees, and the pleasant scent fills the late morning breeze.

Farmers congregate here, talking. A traveller will see the *zhatsal*

plants. These function as a caution to hostile influences.



Rushib

======



Leaving Tubil one can journey west to Rushib. The route is long, but

rewarding, taking two days. On the verge of the road, shaggy *ruzhsir*

graze. Along the way the track crosses a broad valley, spotted with

*lirbsha* plants. When the traveller enters Mabzirsh, there is a shift

in the light, and a pale cast falls over the landscape.



On entering the monumental city, the traveller may encounter goldsmiths,

hawking their wares. Slightly nearer to the inner parts of the city, a

traveller can faintly hear the clanging of the barbican clock.

Ultimately the bouquet of *kira* flowers fills the breeze, and one is

undoubtedly in Rushib.



In the New Quarter of the city, the roadways are paved with stone,

inlaid with ivory. Soldiers throng here, singing and telling stories. An

inattentive observer will overlook the obsidian statues that grace the

eaves. These act as a relic of the war which long ago beset a nearby

village.

"

  On Sun Nov 15 2015 17:39:20, ikarth commented on issue #156, 'A travel guide to unknown lands': "I love it! Though it is making me feel like I should hurry up if I want to try something clever with a travel journal."

On Sun Nov 15 2015 17:53:26, spenteco opened a new issue called _Browne Garden Commonplace Book_. It has a rank of 37. And it's been completed. Sweet!

  On Sun Nov 15 2015 21:01:44, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #158, 'Browne Garden Commonplace Book': "We are _all_ naked in the Garden, and Dreaming of Eden."

  On Sun Nov 15 2015 21:07:09, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #156, 'A travel guide to unknown lands': "So, your map is displayed East to West, South to North?



Since traveling west from Shurgulz leads to Kirrab, and not the ocean.



Likewise, north of Kirrab lies Rutig, not the sleepy hamlet of Rubil.



----



Otherwise, I am liking the look and sound of this.

"

On Mon Nov 16 2015 00:34:12, benblankley closed issue #48, _Newbie ready to try this out_.

  On Mon Nov 16 2015 00:34:12, benblankley commented on issue #48, 'Newbie ready to try this out': "Okay, finished this one up! This code in golang generates 1,800 poems in the style of William Carlos Williams' "This is Just to Say", and replaces the fruits, appliances, and action words. It outputs both text and PDF, by using the gopdf library.



https://github.com/benblankley/NaNoGenMo2015"

  On Mon Nov 16 2015 00:35:21, benblankley commented on issue #48, 'Newbie ready to try this out': "Whoops, accidentally closed it"

On Mon Nov 16 2015 00:35:21, benblankley reopened issue #48, _Newbie ready to try this out_.

  On Mon Nov 16 2015 03:07:55, mewo2 commented on issue #156, 'A travel guide to unknown lands': "Yes, the map is displayed with south at the top, as is cartographic tradition in these lands."

On Mon Nov 16 2015 03:16:23, hugovk labeled issue #48, _Newbie ready to try this out_.

  On Mon Nov 16 2015 03:26:03, hugovk commented on issue #156, 'A travel guide to unknown lands': "> Yes, the map is displayed with south at the top, as is cartographic tradition in these lands.



Nice! How about a compass point on the map to make it more evident?"

  On Mon Nov 16 2015 04:22:15, mewo2 commented on issue #156, 'A travel guide to unknown lands': "I didn't want to make too big a deal about it, but I'll consider it."

  On Mon Nov 16 2015 05:47:52, cpressey commented on issue #9, 'Press Coverage': "Does [this](http://paper.li/ActiveNick/1330052730?edition_id=a066f8a0-8a39-11e5-852b-0cc47a0d15fd) count?  (Scroll down, or click the "Business" tab.)

"

  On Mon Nov 16 2015 06:29:53, hugovk commented on issue #9, 'Press Coverage': "Nope, it's a (spammy) auto-generated thing that just points to this repo."

  On Mon Nov 16 2015 08:09:43, ikarth commented on issue #9, 'Press Coverage': "> Nope, it's a (spammy) auto-generated thing that just points to this repo.



New idea: a generator that writes news coverage about NaNoGenMo. There should be enough from the past couple of years to make a nice little source corpus."

  On Mon Nov 16 2015 08:28:44, enkiv2 commented on issue #9, 'Press Coverage': "Oh god. I will admit, most press coverage on generative text is pretty
formulaic. Bonus points if we take advantage of a large database of
entirely out of context quotes from Darius and Nick Montfort.

On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 8:09 AM Isaac Karth <notifications@github.com>
wrote:

> Nope, it's a (spammy) auto-generated thing that just points to this repo.
>
> New idea: a generator that writes news coverage about NaNoGenMo. There
> should be enough from the past couple of years to make a nice little source
> corpus.
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/9#issuecomment-157023810>
> .
>
"

  On Mon Nov 16 2015 08:33:31, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #9, 'Press Coverage': "@hugovk  auto-generated texts are _the worst_!"

On Mon Nov 16 2015 08:33:31, hugovk mentioned issue #9, _Press Coverage_.

On Mon Nov 16 2015 08:33:31, hugovk subscribed to issue #9, _Press Coverage_.

  On Mon Nov 16 2015 10:02:26, tra38 commented on issue #9, 'Press Coverage': ">Nope, it's a (spammy) auto-generated thing that just points to this repo.



Paper.li uses automation to engage in content curation, which is essential because there's too much content on the Internet as it is. It provides a valuable service, and is not particularly spammy (even though there are a lot of 'inactive' Paper.li newsletters that just keep on being generated with no human readers, and the periodic tweets that it sends out to its unwitting "human" curators can be incredibly annoying)."

  On Mon Nov 16 2015 10:18:57, hugovk commented on issue #9, 'Press Coverage': "https://paper.li/stop-mentions.html"

On Mon Nov 16 2015 11:52:36, enkiv2 opened a new issue called _Fake press coverage of NaNoGenMo: a novel_. It has a rank of 33. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

  On Mon Nov 16 2015 11:57:54, enkiv2 commented on issue #9, 'Press Coverage': "Here's some actually machine-generated low-quality clickbait articles about
NaNoGenMo: https://github.com/enkiv2/NaNoGenMo-2015/blob/master/clickbait.md

On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 10:18 AM Hugo van Kemenade <notifications@github.com>
wrote:

> https://paper.li/stop-mentions.html
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/9#issuecomment-157064306>
> .
>
"

  On Mon Nov 16 2015 12:17:56, dariusk commented on issue #9, 'Press Coverage': "Oh wow I hate paper.li! Discovering their "stop mentions" url a few years
ago (which @Hugovk links above) was very important.
"

On Mon Nov 16 2015 12:17:56, hugovk subscribed to issue #9, _Press Coverage_.

On Mon Nov 16 2015 12:17:56, hugovk mentioned issue #9, _Press Coverage_.

  On Mon Nov 16 2015 12:41:06, tra38 commented on issue #159, 'Fake press coverage of NaNoGenMo: a novel': ">Says Mister Kazemi, "It's more about doing something that is entertaining to yourself and possibly to other people". "It's not hard to tell a story. It's hard to tell good stories. How do you get a computer to understand what good means?", says Computer Scientist Mark Riedl. "But there's no guarantee of quality in NaNoWriMo proper, either, and there's probably less risk of emergent cryptozoological erotica", writes an article from last month in The Verge.



While the computer does not care what lines it prints out, this following paragraph 'flows' and make sense. Of course, you had to generate hundreds of paragraphs that made less sense...in order to get this one paragraph that made sense.



Consider the following near-future: Journalists stop writing entirely. "Journalists" instead proudly call themselves "editors" and "content curators", out to make sense of a insane world. Their 'best practices' are the following:

1) Write code that takes information from a corpus (or use an open-source program to generate the code for them).

2) Generate 50,000 words of nonsense, from said corpus.

3) Read through the nonsense to find something interesting.

4) Copy and paste.



Whether that future is dystopian (jobs are going away, writing loses meaning) or utopian (symbiosis of man and machine) depends on your thoughts about automation in general."

  On Mon Nov 16 2015 12:46:22, ikarth commented on issue #159, 'Fake press coverage of NaNoGenMo: a novel': "> Whether that future is dystopian (jobs are going away, writing loses meaning) or utopian (symbiosis of man and machine) depends on your thoughts about automation in general.



I love how this one book says something about journalism, clickbait, automation, and the human condition, mostly through its processes rather than the individual output per se."

  On Mon Nov 16 2015 12:57:59, enkiv2 commented on issue #159, 'Fake press coverage of NaNoGenMo: a novel': "Just like how in Montfort's 1k generators the evocative sentences are
essentially randomly chosen, all the quotes in the articles are real quotes
that are just chosen and placed randomly. It's sort of surprising that so
many of these collections of quotes seem to follow each other and make
sense, since they were taken from different articles and interviews, and
since more than half of Hugo's are about meow.py.

On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 12:46 PM Isaac Karth <notifications@github.com>
wrote:

> Whether that future is dystopian (jobs are going away, writing loses
> meaning) or utopian (symbiosis of man and machine) depends on your thoughts
> about automation in general.
>
> I love how this one book says something about journalism, clickbait,
> automation, and the human condition, mostly through its processes rather
> than the individual output per se.
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/159#issuecomment-157116377>
> .
>
"

On Mon Nov 16 2015 12:58:30, VincentToups opened a new issue called _Dreams Before Speeches_. It has a rank of 33. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Mon Nov 16 2015 13:52:33, hugovk labeled issue #159, _Fake press coverage of NaNoGenMo: a novel_.

On Mon Nov 16 2015 13:52:33, hugovk labeled issue #159, _Fake press coverage of NaNoGenMo: a novel_.

On Mon Nov 16 2015 13:56:07, hugovk labeled issue #160, _Dreams Before Speeches_.

On Mon Nov 16 2015 13:56:07, hugovk labeled issue #160, _Dreams Before Speeches_.

  On Mon Nov 16 2015 16:51:38, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #81, 'Existential Erotica': "> No description provided.



That's apt."

  On Mon Nov 16 2015 17:16:52, enkiv2 commented on issue #81, 'Existential Erotica': "I want to see this output *so hard*.

On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 4:51 PM Michael Paulukonis <notifications@github.com>
wrote:

> No description provided.
>
> That's apt.
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/81#issuecomment-157181807>
> .
>
"

On Tue Nov 17 2015 08:49:24, enkiv2 opened a new issue called _PKD Pitches For Screenwriters: A Novel_. It has a rank of 26. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Tue Nov 17 2015 09:11:25, hugovk labeled issue #161, _PKD Pitches For Screenwriters: A Novel_.

  On Tue Nov 17 2015 12:38:45, kumo commented on issue #74, 'Roman Numerals story': "Ok. I am going to be sketching out my idea in Swift, so code can be found in this [gist](https://gist.github.com/kumo/fcf107ebc78c82cfc7f5)"

  On Tue Nov 17 2015 16:33:36, dariusk commented on issue #161, 'PKD Pitches For Screenwriters: A Novel': "Into it."

On Tue Nov 17 2015 21:56:32, MichaelPaulukonis opened a new issue called _The Tale of the Github Repository_. It has a rank of 13. There's a preview available.

  On Tue Nov 17 2015 21:57:04, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #162, 'The Tale of the Github Repository': "It has not escaped my attention that this is also the story of NaNoGenMo-2015."

On Tue Nov 17 2015 23:55:00, hugovk subscribed to issue #162, _The Tale of the Github Repository_.

On Tue Nov 17 2015 23:55:00, tra38 subscribed to issue #162, _The Tale of the Github Repository_.

On Tue Nov 17 2015 23:55:00, tra38 mentioned issue #162, _The Tale of the Github Repository_.

  On Tue Nov 17 2015 23:55:00, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #162, 'The Tale of the Github Repository': "@tra38 - you might find this interesting. You and @hugovk were some of the (in)direct inspirations for this."

On Tue Nov 17 2015 23:55:00, hugovk mentioned issue #162, _The Tale of the Github Repository_.

On Wed Nov 18 2015 02:15:46, hugovk labeled issue #162, _The Tale of the Github Repository_.

  On Wed Nov 18 2015 11:11:50, tra38 commented on issue #162, 'The Tale of the Github Repository': "Yeah, I do find this interesting. I once had the idea of using information from GitHub to write a narrative, but I couldn't think of a good way of doing it. Will be monitoring progress."

On Thu Nov 19 2015 04:52:16, michelleful subscribed to issue #9, _Press Coverage_.

On Thu Nov 19 2015 04:52:16, michelleful mentioned issue #9, _Press Coverage_.

On Thu Nov 19 2015 04:52:16, thricedotted mentioned issue #9, _Press Coverage_.

On Thu Nov 19 2015 04:52:16, aparrish subscribed to issue #9, _Press Coverage_.

On Thu Nov 19 2015 04:52:16, thricedotted subscribed to issue #9, _Press Coverage_.

On Thu Nov 19 2015 04:52:16, aparrish mentioned issue #9, _Press Coverage_.

On Thu Nov 19 2015 04:52:16, puckey subscribed to issue #9, _Press Coverage_.

On Thu Nov 19 2015 04:52:16, ikarth subscribed to issue #9, _Press Coverage_.

On Thu Nov 19 2015 04:52:16, puckey mentioned issue #9, _Press Coverage_.

On Thu Nov 19 2015 04:52:16, enkiv2 mentioned issue #9, _Press Coverage_.

On Thu Nov 19 2015 04:52:16, enkiv2 subscribed to issue #9, _Press Coverage_.

  On Thu Nov 19 2015 04:52:16, hugovk commented on issue #9, 'Press Coverage': "# NaNoGenMo: Dada 2.0



http://arcade.stanford.edu/blogs/nanogenmo-dada-20



Cites stuff by @dariusk, @enkiv2, @aparrish, @ikarth, @thricedotted, @michelleful, @puckey."

On Thu Nov 19 2015 04:52:16, ikarth mentioned issue #9, _Press Coverage_.

  On Thu Nov 19 2015 10:48:43, greg-kennedy commented on issue #160, 'Dreams Before Speeches': "Huh.  This worked really well!  I like the output."

  On Thu Nov 19 2015 10:51:43, greg-kennedy commented on issue #48, 'Newbie ready to try this out': "Great job.  Similar to https://twitter.com/JustToSayBot (but JustToSayBot is missing the middle verse, so yours is More Better)"

  On Thu Nov 19 2015 10:53:12, greg-kennedy commented on issue #158, 'Browne Garden Commonplace Book': "What.  the"

  On Thu Nov 19 2015 10:55:23, greg-kennedy commented on issue #82, 'intense intents in tents': "What's with "herr" instead of "her"?"

  On Thu Nov 19 2015 10:57:30, ikarth commented on issue #160, 'Dreams Before Speeches': "I've moved away from Markov chains for basic text generation this year precisely because of the weaknesses you talk about. The mitigations you've done here do a remarkable job of addressing that.



I also think the framing you used is an important part of it. I happen to think that the importance of framing defining the interpretation of the text is undervalued. (I may have written a paper to this effect, once.)"

  On Thu Nov 19 2015 11:05:01, ikarth commented on issue #82, 'intense intents in tents': "> What's with "herr" instead of "her"?



I assume it's because of things like "his" being ambiguous between his->her and his->hers. Thus the "creative grammatical license".



It also, possibly accidentally, situates it in the tradition of asserting a non-binary gender identification with a pronoun that avoids or corrects a deficiency in English (which not only bundles a lot of cultural assumptions in its pronoun use, but also wore away much of its more interesting pronoun structures over the last dozen centuries or so.) Which, to my mind, is entirely appropriate for a text that is examining the gender assumptions of well-known novels."

  On Thu Nov 19 2015 11:05:22, VincentToups commented on issue #160, 'Dreams Before Speeches': "Of course text, generally speaking, is _all framing_.  "Tree" contains not

a whiff of "treeness" in itself, instead its "treeness" derives entirely

from an association stored in a human brain.  You'd need a much larger

corpus and a much more sophisticated model than a markov chain to extract

the association between "treeness" (how is that even represented) and

"tree".



But there are a few other possibly neat ideas.  My spouse suggested training

the model with the last few words plus the last few significant words

(using some definition of significance like [tf-idf](

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf)).  This extends the model's

"memory" in a hopefully meaningful way but it also shrinks the meaningful

training data enormously.  Its just a hard problem.



Word vectors of the sort provided by Word2Vec or Glove can possibly be used

but again, using semantics really reduces the number of meaningful

datapoints, particularly since Word2Vec vectors are ~100 dimensional

floating point representations and would need to be discretized in some way

for a typical markov model approach.  The size of the vector space required

for word vecs itself indicates the problem.



On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 10:57 AM, Isaac Karth <notifications@github.com>

wrote:



> I've moved away from Markov chains for basic text generation this year

> precisely because of the weaknesses you talk about. The mitigations you've

> done here do a remarkable job of addressing that.

>

> I also think the framing you used is an important part of it. I happen to

> think that the importance of framing defining the interpretation of the

> text is undervalued. (I may have written a paper to this effect, once.)

>

> —

> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub

> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/160#issuecomment-158099467>

> .

>

"

  On Thu Nov 19 2015 11:08:51, greg-kennedy commented on issue #157, '405 Love Letters': "Oh my god, some highlights from the end



Annelid bag-holder,

My noops mislikes your dikes.

Yours sluttishly,



and



Yours monosyllabically,

M. U. C. "

  On Thu Nov 19 2015 11:16:19, greg-kennedy commented on issue #155, 'Goal-driven use of scenes and sequels for capers': "> I failed to pass as a museum employee while trying to get a museum uniform. Bummer. Now I have to heal my leg wound



Subtle.  However, maybe when the global state changes, you could put in a line?  Something like:



> I failed to pass as a museum employee while trying to get a museum uniform. Bummer. **Thanks to that, I have: a leg wound.** Now I have to heal my leg wound



> I totally succeeded in my attempt to get a museum uniform by trying to go about it the obvious way. Yay! **Thanks to that, I have: a museum uniform.**  I still need to steal them jewels. 



EDIT: also if this is really just displaying the minimax thought process, it would make more sense printing the tree in reverse order.  For example, if the chain is "current state -> get uniform -> act as employee -> steal jewels", it now says

> So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to get a museum uniform... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to pass as a museum employee... So, I thought, what if I tried to steal them jewels by trying to go to the hospital... I'll try to remember that. 



It makes more sense the other way:

> I thought of how to get the jewels *(endpoint)*.  In order to do that, what if I tried to steal them jewels *(endpoint)* by trying to pass as a museum employee *(level 2)*... In order to do that, what if I tried to pass as a museum employee *(level2)* by trying to get a museum uniform *(level1)*... In fact, I could get the museum uniform *(level1)* right now! *(root)*  I'll try to remember that.



Or if you want to go top-down, it needs different wording at least.

> So, I thought, next I could get a museum uniform.  So, I thought, next I could pass as a museum employee.  So, I thought, next I could steal the jewels.  I'll try to remember that.



You could alternate between the two for interest."

  On Thu Nov 19 2015 11:29:15, enkiv2 commented on issue #155, 'Goal-driven use of scenes and sequels for capers': "I could. I was actually thinking of adding description to 'complication'
events -- i.e., whenever a situation results in a complication being added
to the goal pool, additional text is written as output at evaluation-time.
(For instance, in this case, something like "I was unexpectedly shot in the
leg!") If it took advantage of the same structure and mechanics as other
descriptions, I could have alternate (possibly humorous) varitions ("While
entering the museum, I tripped and fell on a modern art sculpture and one
of the sharp metal prongs gouged a deep wound into my thigh.")

On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 11:16 AM Greg Kennedy <notifications@github.com>
wrote:

> I failed to pass as a museum employee while trying to get a museum
> uniform. Bummer. Now I have to heal my leg wound
>
> Subtle. However, maybe when the global state changes, you could put in a
> line? Something like:
>
> I failed to pass as a museum employee while trying to get a museum
> uniform. Bummer. *Thanks to that, I have: a leg wound.* Now I have to
> heal my leg wound
>
> I totally succeeded in my attempt to get a museum uniform by trying to go
> about it the obvious way. Yay! *Thanks to that, I have: a museum uniform.*
> I still need to steal them jewels.
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/155#issuecomment-158104815>
> .
>
"

  On Thu Nov 19 2015 11:35:14, ikarth commented on issue #155, 'Goal-driven use of scenes and sequels for capers': "Based on the story-compiler discussion, I wonder if a potential next step might be to feed the output of this generator into a scene generator. So this handles the high-level plot--the who, the what, the when, the where--and then you can switch to a separate approach for generating the how and the why.



Of course, that's really just an expansion (or a different way to think about) your complication descriptions."

  On Thu Nov 19 2015 11:37:52, VincentToups commented on issue #150, 'what is love?': "I really like this one - have you considered using Wordnet to make the generator dwell on specific subjects?  You might also considered making repeated definitions only partially disallowed: repetition is an important part of written literature, and would work here.  If we returned to the initial question every 200 or so definitions and then explored a different lobe of similar works from wordnet, it might very well be pretty readable, which is the highest praise you can give a generated novel."

  On Thu Nov 19 2015 11:46:15, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #158, 'Browne Garden Commonplace Book': "Haven't you heard? We're [DADA 2.0](https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/9#issuecomment-158007232), baby! Sense and Sensibility has been thrown out with the baby (unless it's being used as a source-text) and Esther Williams has taken over the bath-water for a routine that makes Busby Berkely look like a poorly-coded sequence of n-grams.



Although Mr. @spenteco is more Spenserian, and I was referencing certain pecadillios of one Mr. Wm. Blake (& wife)*.



`*` See [here](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/william-blake) (scroll down for a tale told by an apropriately-named Mr. Butts)."

On Thu Nov 19 2015 11:46:15, spenteco mentioned issue #158, _Browne Garden Commonplace Book_.

On Thu Nov 19 2015 11:46:15, spenteco subscribed to issue #158, _Browne Garden Commonplace Book_.

  On Thu Nov 19 2015 11:47:21, enkiv2 commented on issue #155, 'Goal-driven use of scenes and sequels for capers': "That was actually one of the early plans I had for it -- the idea was based
on the story-compiler discussion and on the various TaleSpin-like plot
generators. But, I think the existing description elements are just
variable enough to be difficult to consistently match -- and you'd need to
create a unique separate stage for every 'world'. Because the descriptions
in the 'world' are relatively flexible, it seems like adding additional
flexibility and expressive richness (say, by supporting embedded gg-style
template expansion) to that format would be easier to do.

One road to expansion is to figure out some language for representing and
editing the worlds. Writing them as python associative arrays is a PITA,
and I originally wanted to do them in JSON or YAML which wouldn't be much
better. Template expansion could be done at the time of world compilation.
But, I'm not sure how I would *want* to structure that kind of information
for the purposes of human-editing. It might actually just generally be a
pain without the use of some GUI-based editor, just because each state and
set of options and complications has so many possible attributes.

On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 11:40 AM Isaac Karth <notifications@github.com>
wrote:

> Based on the story-compiler discussion, I wonder if a potential next step
> might be to feed the output of this generator into a scene generator. So
> this handles the high-level plot--the who, the what, the when, the
> where--and then you can switch to a separate approach for generating the
> how and the why.
>
> Of course, that's really just an expansion (or a different way to think
> about) your complication descriptions.
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/155#issuecomment-158111132>
> .
>
"

  On Thu Nov 19 2015 13:50:14, yourpalal commented on issue #132, 'Generative Socratic Dialogues': "Alright, it's all done! For anyone who is interested, feel free to check out [the generator code](https://github.com/yourpalal/NaNoGenMo-2015) and a sample [50k words output](http://yourpalal.github.io/NaNoGenMo-2015)."

  On Thu Nov 19 2015 13:59:35, kumo commented on issue #74, 'Roman Numerals story': "I have sketched out some Swift code that makes different types of sentences and combines them in paragraphs. This is an example of one chapter: 

![screenshot 2015-11-19 20 03 07](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/7925/11280925/9a377202-8ef8-11e5-925d-ab8d6ba5913e.png)



Text can be found here: https://gist.github.com/kumo/8578cff5b7a37a5ecef9"

On Thu Nov 19 2015 15:47:27, hugovk opened a new issue called _Salutation, twirled!_. It has a rank of 31. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

  On Thu Nov 19 2015 15:48:25, hugovk commented on issue #157, '405 Love Letters': "Yes, "Yours monosyllabically" before the three initials is a nice touch :)"

On Thu Nov 19 2015 15:48:46, hugovk labeled issue #163, _Salutation, twirled!_.

  On Thu Nov 19 2015 15:49:18, hugovk commented on issue #8, 'In!': "Third idea done:



*Salutation, twirled!*



https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/163"

On Thu Nov 19 2015 15:54:26, hugovk labeled issue #163, _Salutation, twirled!_.

On Thu Nov 19 2015 16:05:57, hugovk labeled issue #132, _Generative Socratic Dialogues_.

On Thu Nov 19 2015 16:06:19, hugovk labeled issue #132, _Generative Socratic Dialogues_.

  On Thu Nov 19 2015 16:13:28, hugovk commented on issue #74, 'Roman Numerals story': "I like that it's putting punctuation and paragraphs and things in.



I did something with Roman numerals mixed with Finnish numbers [last year](https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014/issues/67), but just spat them out without formatting.



Another way to make nonsense output look meaningful is to take some existing input text -- pluck one out of Project Gutenberg -- and keep all the formatting and punctuation and so on, but replace all the words with your own input. (Here's an example with [meows](https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014/issues/50).)

"

  On Thu Nov 19 2015 16:44:10, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #163, 'Salutation, twirled!': "> I've hacked my NaPoGenMo 2015 entry to knock up a 25,000-line epic poem.



Well, now that's pregnant with possibility."

On Thu Nov 19 2015 17:54:50, hugovk labeled issue #149, _Amazement of Life_.

On Thu Nov 19 2015 18:06:46, spenteco closed issue #158, _Browne Garden Commonplace Book_.

  On Thu Nov 19 2015 18:06:46, spenteco commented on issue #158, 'Browne Garden Commonplace Book': "This list is full of cut-ups."

On Thu Nov 19 2015 19:04:42, cvaneseltine opened a new issue called _Choice of Someone Else's Novel_. It has a rank of 5.

  On Fri Nov 20 2015 06:07:39, kumo commented on issue #74, 'Roman Numerals story': "The paragraph formatting seems to work properly, but I will probably try and sort out the correct lower/upper casing.



That Finnish one looks interesting and the meow one too. Was the formatting done by hand?



Perhaps next year I will make a redact generator with Roman Numerals"

On Fri Nov 20 2015 06:11:02, kumo renamed issue #74, _Roman Numerals story_.

  On Fri Nov 20 2015 09:04:26, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #158, 'Browne Garden Commonplace Book': "No code no mo, spenteco?"

  On Fri Nov 20 2015 12:31:46, kumo commented on issue #74, 'Roman Numerals story': "I am playing around with the lower/upper casing and it appears to work properly, but now I have to decide if the PDF version uses smallcaps or not.



Lower case version:



![screenshot 2015-11-20 18 24 10](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/7925/11306806/5feab76e-8fb4-11e5-9bce-afc121569253.png)



Smallcaps version:



![screenshot 2015-11-20 18 14 45](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/7925/11306808/692d988c-8fb4-11e5-9ca4-eca526e7b2a2.png)



I'll probably keep the lowercase version though since it has a more irregular appearance. "

  On Fri Nov 20 2015 12:48:22, zachwhalen commented on issue #74, 'Roman Numerals story': "I really like this. "

On Fri Nov 20 2015 17:02:21, leonardr opened a new issue called _Alphabetical Order_. It has a rank of 27. And it's been completed. Sweet!

  On Fri Nov 20 2015 17:28:03, enkiv2 commented on issue #165, 'Alphabetical Order': "Haha. This is surprisingly good.

On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 5:02 PM leonardr <notifications@github.com> wrote:

> I created a 100k-"word" novel by searching Project Gutenberg for lines
> that contained no alphanumeric characters, and sorting the results. The
> result is a landscape of fragmented tables and diagrams, with a stirring
> conclusion.
>
> http://www.crummy.com/writing/NaNoGenMo/2015/
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/165>.
>
"

On Sat Nov 21 2015 08:11:02, hugovk labeled issue #165, _Alphabetical Order_.

  On Sat Nov 21 2015 08:15:30, hugovk commented on issue #74, 'Roman Numerals story': "> That Finnish one looks interesting and the meow one too. Was the formatting done by hand?



The Finnish one just has justified alignment.



The meow retains the formatting and punctuation of the input text, because each meow is the same length as in input word. So "shop" -> "meow", "house" -> "meoow", "the" -> "mew" etc.

"

On Sun Nov 22 2015 13:38:29, spenteco reopened issue #158, _Browne Garden Commonplace Book_.

  On Sun Nov 22 2015 13:38:29, spenteco commented on issue #158, 'Browne Garden Commonplace Book': "Thanks for commenting, Michael.  Sincerely--I didn't realized that I had closed this.  I've been working the last several days until I'm completely groggy.  I really hope I haven't fat-fingered anything important.



I'm pushing my content to PDF today, and I plan on writing my README's and pushing to github and my webhost tomorrow.  So, unless I've done anything else unwittingly, the end is in sight."

  On Sun Nov 22 2015 14:48:30, kumo commented on issue #74, 'Roman Numerals story': "Just for fun, the Rick Astley version:



![screenshot 2015-11-22 20 47 05](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/7925/11325889/47b883d6-915a-11e5-8608-35f09d46ab52.png)"

On Sun Nov 22 2015 15:41:05, ikarth mentioned issue #82, _intense intents in tents_.

On Sun Nov 22 2015 15:41:05, ikarth subscribed to issue #82, _intense intents in tents_.

  On Sun Nov 22 2015 15:41:05, emdaniels commented on issue #82, 'intense intents in tents': "@ikarth is correct- thank you! I've just added support for a they/them/their version of the story, as well as fixed a bug that was messing up some of the punctuation. An excerpt from [They: The Adventures of Hemlock Holmes](https://github.com/emdaniels/character-swap/blob/master/The_Adventures_Of_Sherlock_Holmes/They_The_Adventures_of_Hemlock_Holmes.txt):

>To Hemlock Holmes they is always THE person. I have seldom heard them mention them under any other name. In their eyes they eclipses and predominates the whole of them sex. It was not that they felt any emotion akin to love for Eren Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to their cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. They was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover they would have placed themself in a false position. They never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer -- excellent for drawing the veil from people's motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into their own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all their mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of their own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as their. And yet there was but one person to them, and that person was the late Eren Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.



"

  On Sun Nov 22 2015 21:37:47, spenteco commented on issue #158, 'Browne Garden Commonplace Book': "PDF is up:



http://montaukedp.com/Brownes_Garden_Commonplace_Book.pdf"

  On Sun Nov 22 2015 22:10:02, greg-kennedy commented on issue #158, 'Browne Garden Commonplace Book': "Whoa.

On Sunday, November 22, 2015, Stephen Pentecost <notifications@github.com>
wrote:

> PDF is up:
>
> http://montaukedp.com/Brownes_Garden_Commonplace_Book.pdf
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/158#issuecomment-158836074>
> .
>
"

  On Sun Nov 22 2015 22:59:48, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #158, 'Browne Garden Commonplace Book': "a oh Whoa, indeed."

  On Sun Nov 22 2015 23:18:33, greg-kennedy commented on issue #91, 'Intent: edited text adventure': "I am officially abandoning this attempt.



I got as far as creating a world of random rooms, linking them with random passageways, filling them with random characters, and adding random objects.  Each of these had three words of description, too.

Then, as each second ticked by, the characters who were freed up could spend X seconds performing some action.  It was kind of neat in theory, but since the only actions I ever added were "move" and "take", it just ended up as a story about kleptomaniacs with bottomless pockets in a surrealist nightmare."

On Sun Nov 22 2015 23:42:15, greg-kennedy opened a new issue called _The Book of Eliza_. It has a rank of 26. And it's been completed. Sweet!

  On Mon Nov 23 2015 00:31:58, aparrish commented on issue #25, 'a novel, generated': "Some progress. I used spacy and wordnet to extract sentences from selected Project Gutenberg texts that make no reference to people (i.e., only descriptions of natural objects). Below is prototype output; it's just selecting random sentences from the corpus and putting them together into paragraphs. I'm planning to create some additional procedures to glue these sentences together in more interesting ways, but I wanted to show what I had working so far!



Was the line clear of people? But this northwest wind was

not a simple breeze. Towards the north-east, the country

appeared to be very level, with only one low ridge,

apparently at a great distance. Its sides rose and fell

with its laboured breathing. The populated city was a

delusion.

In the evening the wind changed to south. The water left in

the buckets was solid ice. This whole space was as bright

as day with the reflection of the fire.

The soil, when newly turned up, appeared of a dull red

colour. The river was here a rapid stream, four hundred

yards in width, with high sandy banks, and here and there a

scanty growth of willow. The water was cold, of course, The

country was very fine. Waterfalls of many forms poured over

the rims. A fine snow began to sift downward.

The great trunks were soft serrated brown, and the gnarled

branches stood out in perfect proportions. Then another

storm threatened. At five miles made the range.

The gale continued for three days, the wind attaining a

velocity of seventy miles an hour. Then its movement ceased

suddenly. The rain continued as yesterday during the whole

of the day, accompanied with cold winds.

Seen close this mechanism was no longer small. Large

lagoons and reaches of water appeared in the scattered

channels. The sea undulated peaceably under the stern of

the vessel. The whole country was alight, and down there

the world seemed on fire.

The wind became piercing cold, and all comfort was gone.

A hole in the roof permitted the smoke from burning oil

egress; yet the atmosphere was far from lucid. Far ahead a

chain of soft gray round hills led up to the dark heaved

mass of mountains. The rain poured down in roaring

cataracts. A hard wind, eager and nipping, blew up the

canyon. These openings seemed like the beds of dried-up

torrents.

For some days the heat was overpowering, and the

atmosphere, saturated with electricity, was only cleared by

violent storms. The city turned out to be a village of

fifty houses with twenty people in each house. Waterfalls

of many forms poured over the rims. The next day the

country got wilder and more dilly. Its banks were sloping

and grassy, and were overhung by trees of magnificent size.

The rain poured down in roaring cataracts.


  On Mon Nov 23 2015 02:23:42, R-Gerard commented on issue #62, 'Let's do this!': "I'm pretty happy with the results.



https://github.com/R-Gerard/NaNoGenMo-2015/blob/master/out/out2.txt"

  On Mon Nov 23 2015 04:05:24, hugovk commented on issue #158, 'Browne Garden Commonplace Book': "Ooh!



Don't forget the code to claim a completed label."

  On Mon Nov 23 2015 04:17:06, hugovk commented on issue #91, 'Intent: edited text adventure': "Well, still a week left to go to develop *A Story About Kleptomaniacs with Bottomless Pockets in a Surrealist Nightmare*. Otherwise, it sounds like a good base to start from next year."

On Mon Nov 23 2015 05:18:46, hugovk labeled issue #166, _The Book of Eliza_.

  On Mon Nov 23 2015 05:19:50, hugovk commented on issue #166, 'The Book of Eliza': "Good one!



The kml's a nice touch. Here's a couple of maps from it:

 * http://share.mapbbcode.org/gvsgj

 * https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=zNZSecPByt1c.kHQDDQVzsrb4&usp=sharing"

On Mon Nov 23 2015 05:20:03, hugovk labeled issue #25, _a novel, generated_.

On Mon Nov 23 2015 05:22:26, hugovk labeled issue #62, _Let's do this!_.

  On Mon Nov 23 2015 05:22:26, hugovk commented on issue #62, 'Let's do this!': "And the code's here: https://github.com/R-Gerard/NaNoGenMo-2015

"

  On Mon Nov 23 2015 07:48:46, ikarth commented on issue #25, 'a novel, generated': "I've been trying to find new ways to grab standalone bits from the Project Gutenberg texts, for repurposing elsewhere. I hadn't thought of this one. Clever."

  On Mon Nov 23 2015 07:49:57, ikarth commented on issue #91, 'Intent: edited text adventure': "I mean, it's not like it'd be the _worst_ novel we've made."

  On Mon Nov 23 2015 07:52:52, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #62, 'Let's do this!': "> In a white blasphemy of the household was baught to attempt what had been many glur keeply to content.



Too often we glur focus keeply on content, and 'tis all for baught."

  On Mon Nov 23 2015 07:54:36, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #91, 'Intent: edited text adventure': "Throw in some bright pastel colors, and its no longer a nightmare!"

  On Mon Nov 23 2015 07:57:58, enkiv2 commented on issue #91, 'Intent: edited text adventure': "TBH, a surreal kleptomaniac maze nightmare sounds pretty entertaining. It
is, I think, exactly what a lot of people want out of a NaNoGenMo entry.

On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 7:54 AM Michael Paulukonis <notifications@github.com>
wrote:

> Throw in some bright pastel colors, and its no longer a nightmare!
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/91#issuecomment-158926122>
> .
>
"

  On Mon Nov 23 2015 08:16:41, dkurth commented on issue #18, 'It takes a "Village" to translate "Hamlet"': "I ended up just doing a telephone-game style translation of a Hamlet from English to Japanese to Welsh to Swahili to Yiddish, then back to English.



Code: https://github.com/dkurth/nanogenmo2015

Final product: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dkurth/nanogenmo2015/master/hamlet.out.txt



The text is impressively preserved, sometimes simply dumbed-down (e.g., the word "husbandry" ends up as "agriculture," and of course there are some funny parts.  

- "Francisco at his post." becomes "Francisco e-mail."  

- The abbreviation "Ber" (for Bernardo) becomes "Eyes fiber." (Not sure why!)  

- "Affection! pooh! you speak like a green girl," becomes "Love it! Fu! Talk like a girl."  

- And, of course, "Hamlet" often becomes "The Village."



This was fun!



"

On Mon Nov 23 2015 08:17:02, dkurth renamed issue #18, _It takes a "Village" to translate "Hamlet"_.

  On Mon Nov 23 2015 08:48:05, hugovk commented on issue #18, 'It takes a "Village" to translate "Hamlet"': ""To be, or not to be- that is the question" is clearly too complicated for Hamlet, sorry, I mean for Pork.



> Pork. 

In the question - 

Whether tis nobler in the mind. 

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. 

Armed against a sea of Troubles 

By your observation? Death. - - 

Sleep to say we end 

The heartache and a thousand natural disasters. 

The meat, there is no choice. 

Good. Death sleep. 

. Perchance to dream: - ay friction; 

And in that sleep of death, what dreams, 

When we mix death. 

There's no delay in connection with 

This tragedy, the long-term; 

The load on the whips and scorns of time 

See the evil, the proud contumely, 

The pain of despis, the laws delay, 

The insolence of office and the spurns 

Be patient, the features of the value of 

If they do the quietus 

A bare'body kin? These fardels, 

Groaning and sweat under a weary life, 

The fear of death? 

The undiscover country from the bone. 

The trip back, - in puzzles 

I'm using an argument that it's bad. 

Than fly to others that we know? 

Like the good cowards of all 

If it's the color resolution 

Is sicklied of the hall of the pale cast of thought; 

The company's training and this time, 

That's what, now on the left. 

And name.-- Soft! 

The fair Ophelia!-- Nymph, in thy orisons 

All my sins remember. 



Hmm, but only 25k (reduced from 32k). Perhaps run it on a larger input?

"

On Mon Nov 23 2015 08:48:09, hugovk labeled issue #18, _It takes a "Village" to translate "Hamlet"_.

  On Mon Nov 23 2015 09:28:39, dkurth commented on issue #18, 'It takes a "Village" to translate "Hamlet"': "Yeah, it didn't meat (pun intended) the word count.  I may run it on something longer, but due to the API limitations (1M characters per day), it will take a couple of days to complete a run unless I do fewer languages.  We'll see if I get to that."

  On Mon Nov 23 2015 10:04:54, greg-kennedy commented on issue #18, 'It takes a "Village" to translate "Hamlet"': "Many publications of Shakespeare include the original play on the left page, and the "modern English" translation on the right.  You could put this into a PDF with your translation on the even-numbered pages, so the lines match up, and that would meet the word count : )"

  On Mon Nov 23 2015 10:12:17, Contraculto commented on issue #165, 'Alphabetical Order': "Very pretty."

On Mon Nov 23 2015 10:17:06, Contraculto opened a new issue called _Chilenos y chilenas_. It has a rank of 5.

On Mon Nov 23 2015 10:20:15, greg-kennedy mentioned issue #18, _It takes a "Village" to translate "Hamlet"_.

On Mon Nov 23 2015 10:20:15, greg-kennedy subscribed to issue #18, _It takes a "Village" to translate "Hamlet"_.

  On Mon Nov 23 2015 10:20:15, dkurth commented on issue #18, 'It takes a "Village" to translate "Hamlet"': "Great idea @greg-kennedy, I'll give that a shot!"

  On Mon Nov 23 2015 11:42:11, hugovk commented on issue #18, 'It takes a "Village" to translate "Hamlet"': "Good idea! 



Or even interleave lines http://stackoverflow.com/a/4011824/724176 



`paste -d \n\n hamlet.txt hamlet.out.txt > new.txt`



> Ham.

Pork. 

To be, or not to be,--that is the question:--

In the question - 

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

Whether tis nobler in the mind. 

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. 

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

Armed against a sea of Troubles 

And by opposing end them?--To die,--to sleep,--

By your observation? Death. - - 

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

Sleep to say we end 

The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks

The heartache and a thousand natural disasters. 



Which would look better with different formatting, but Greg's idea will probably better overall."

  On Mon Nov 23 2015 12:40:27, benblankley commented on issue #48, 'Newbie ready to try this out': "Thanks, greg-kennedy for the comment! I learned a lot about golang while making this."

On Mon Nov 23 2015 13:51:37, tra38 opened a new issue called _Cyberpunk Corporation Generator_. It has a rank of 27. And it's been completed. Sweet!

  On Mon Nov 23 2015 14:17:48, spenteco commented on issue #158, 'Browne Garden Commonplace Book': "Done!



PDF: http://montaukedp.com/Brownes_Garden_Commonplace_Book.pdf

About the project: http://montaukedp.com/posts/browne.html

github: https://github.com/spenteco/brownes_garden"

  On Mon Nov 23 2015 15:27:41, hugovk commented on issue #168, 'Cyberpunk Corporation Generator': "Interesting approach!



Please could you generate a run of ~50k and save it to a file somewhere so future generations can still enjoy it in case the generator goes offline at some point? Thanks!"

On Mon Nov 23 2015 15:31:13, hugovk labeled issue #158, _Browne Garden Commonplace Book_.

  On Mon Nov 23 2015 15:37:49, hugovk commented on issue #158, 'Browne Garden Commonplace Book': "Great!



Nice mix in the repo: HTML, Python, JavaScript, CSS, PHP!





> I don't have the right images, either for sprinkling through the text or for introducing the major sections of the work.



I'm quite pleased with the effect I get with Twitterbot [@thenewharperlee](https://twitter.com/thenewharperlee). For a word from the title, it [fetches the most relevant public domain image](https://github.com/hugovk/thenewharperlee/blob/master/book_cover.py#L82-L102) from https://flickr.com/internetarchivebookimages -- which often aren't the most relevant but I like the results.

"

  On Mon Nov 23 2015 16:00:36, tra38 commented on issue #168, 'Cyberpunk Corporation Generator': "https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TBnPZICN82EjZnBdLnK3szfUY-vF00pRCwdLWzGeXHo/edit?usp=sharing



57,498 words."

On Mon Nov 23 2015 16:10:36, MichaelPaulukonis opened a new issue called _Solitude-bench (In cannibal antennae hallucination): A incarnate solitude_. It has a rank of 14. There's a preview available.

On Tue Nov 24 2015 01:30:51, moonmilk opened a new issue called _Molly's Feed_. It has a rank of 35. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Tue Nov 24 2015 03:27:53, hugovk labeled issue #168, _Cyberpunk Corporation Generator_.

On Tue Nov 24 2015 03:28:43, hugovk labeled issue #169, _Solitude-bench (In cannibal antennae hallucination): A incarnate solitude_.

On Tue Nov 24 2015 03:29:54, hugovk labeled issue #170, _Molly's Feed_.

  On Tue Nov 24 2015 08:55:47, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #170, 'Molly's Feed': "That's awesome. Conceptually and output."

  On Tue Nov 24 2015 09:01:42, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #169, 'Solitude-bench (In cannibal antennae hallucination): A incarnate solitude': " - Tagspewer repo: https://github.com/MichaelPaulukonis/tagspewer

 - node-mispelr repo: https://github.com/MichaelPaulukonis/node-mispelr



Both are in-progress, trying to get towards something useful from code I hadn't touched between April and yesterday. I had quite forgotten what on Earth I had done.



The tagspewer README has notes on expanding abbreviations - they're screwing up the tagging-as-templates-and-lexicon. Which is not what pos-tagging is for, so, that's my trouble.



I'm also wondering if the way I'm tagging the text is problematic -- I think I'm reading it line by line. But since pos-tagging relies on sentence context - lines will often be sentence fragments. I should look into that.



"

  On Tue Nov 24 2015 11:34:05, ikarth commented on issue #170, 'Molly's Feed': "> I had a much more complex idea for nanogenmo, and then I had this idea and did it instead because it was easier.



I really feel like you're speaking my language here. I can relate."

  On Tue Nov 24 2015 11:40:48, enkiv2 commented on issue #170, 'Molly's Feed': "It's an excellent example of concept walking hand in hand with
implementation. Because of the premise, it's impossible to tell how much
was automated.

On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 11:34 AM Isaac Karth <notifications@github.com>
wrote:

> I had a much more complex idea for nanogenmo, and then I had this idea and
> did it instead because it was easier.
>
> I feel like you're really speaking to me here.
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/170#issuecomment-159326974>
> .
>
"

  On Tue Nov 24 2015 11:50:33, ikarth commented on issue #169, 'Solitude-bench (In cannibal antennae hallucination): A incarnate solitude': "While POS _can_ be done from individual words (as many words are unambiguously only one part of speech) it's obviously much more accurate with a sentence to work from (because there are also an awful lot of words that are ambiguous). Which is, I think, why NLTK by default treats line ends in plain text as whitespace, and looks for sentences rather than structure. I believe, from my recent poking around, that under the hood it grabs paragraphs (separated by a blank line) and then breaks those down into sentences."

  On Tue Nov 24 2015 12:08:00, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #169, 'Solitude-bench (In cannibal antennae hallucination): A incarnate solitude': "Yeah, it was something that didn't occur to me until I was writing those notes, above.



I'm generally processing Gutenberg texts, or whatever.

But they've got the pre-formatted line-breaks, because of the old assumption that nobody will ever be able to build a piece of software to break-lines on the fly. Or something.



I just checked, and I'm reading line-by-line, and pos-tagging each line. So I'll have to de-line-break them. Somebody probably has that wheel invented, somewhere..."

On Tue Nov 24 2015 12:08:52, ftzeng opened a new issue called _Machine Wisdom_. It has a rank of 6.

  On Tue Nov 24 2015 12:53:16, enkiv2 commented on issue #171, 'Machine Wisdom': "Nice!

On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 12:08 PM Francis Tseng <notifications@github.com>
wrote:

> There are a lot of different English translations of the Tao Te Ching, so
> I was curious what a computer would produce if it were trained on a bunch
> of them. The idea was that maybe some commonality of the translations could
> be distilled this way.
>
> I took 94 translations and trained a simple character RNN for 10 epochs,
> with some interesting results - example output here
> <https://github.com/ftzeng/tao/blob/master/machine_tao.txt>
>
> It gets fixated on a few words/phrases - "It is the mother of the world."
> and variations appear a lot, giving it a weird cult-like vibe
>
> Full source is available here <https://github.com/ftzeng/tao>
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/171>.
>
"

On Tue Nov 24 2015 16:09:44, TobiasWehrum opened a new issue called _The Greater Book of Transmutation (A DIY Alchemy Guide)_. It has a rank of 33. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

  On Tue Nov 24 2015 16:18:45, hugovk commented on issue #172, 'The Greater Book of Transmutation (A DIY Alchemy Guide)': "Nice idea!"

  On Tue Nov 24 2015 18:56:29, jrladd commented on issue #79, 'Infinite Epithalamium': "I finished! I wound up going in a completely different direction than my original comment above, and I'm on a bit of a time crunch, but I'm fairly happy with the result. The repo is here: <https://github.com/jrladd/nanogenmo-2015>. And you can read the output here: <http://jrladd.com/nanogenmo-2015/>. I'm getting married in March, so I decided to do something in anticipation of that big, exciting event.



Here's a brief explanation from the README:



>_Infinite Epithalamium_, my NaNoGenMo project, uses noun-replacement and Markov chains to generate wedding ceremonies for random lists of nouns. I start with the ceremony of matrimony in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, one of the earlier examples of the ceremony still used today (it is one of the origin points for phrases like "to have and to hold," etc.). I then pull a random corpus out of Darius Kazemi's [useful and delightful Corpora project](https://github.com/dariusk/corpora). I find the nouns in the Book of Common Prayer and replace them with random nouns from whatever random corpus I've pulled.



>This alone didn't quite capture the absurdity I wanted. So after I replace nouns, I use [this implementation of Markov chains](https://pythonadventures.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/generating-pseudo-random-text-using-markov-chains/) to generate 20 random sentences from the modified ceremony text. I did this 100 times, and wound up with a text of 58,339 words.



And a short sample:



>A Marriage of modernist art isms.



>O MERCIFUL installation art, mercifully upon them from heaven, and bless them.

Wilt thou russian symbolism his baroque, according to knowledge; giving honour unto the hudson river school and the hudson river school of the other, both in immagine&poesia all thy naturalism long; installation arta, that thou shalt see Jerusalem in immagine&poesia and adversity.

Let the video game art of Marriage, if any russian futurism of the perspectivism; while they behold your chaste new objectivity our installation art.

The Worussian futurism on the left, the dadaism standing at the pop art as the truth be tried.

REQUIRE and charge you both, as ye both shall live?

O ETERNAL suprematism, Creator and Preserver of all russian futurismkind, Giver of all spiritual grace, the Author of everlasting naturalism: Send thy orphism upon these thy servants, that both this russian futurismner.

O suprematism, who at the pop art appointed for socialist realism Peter, the Apostle of new objectivity, who was himself a glorious action painting, to have of the Father, &c.

Thy kingdom come."

On Tue Nov 24 2015 18:56:57, jrladd renamed issue #79, _Infinite Epithalamium_.

  On Tue Nov 24 2015 20:43:46, moonmilk commented on issue #170, 'Molly's Feed': "Whoo, the second time I ran the generator, it came up with these results at the end (after sort-by-length):



![image](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/3420270/11386043/fa23615c-92eb-11e5-9154-242c8d18751b.png)



So I took out the part where the code sticks 'yes I said yes I will yes' at the end of the generated text - the world provided the ending for me!



"

  On Tue Nov 24 2015 20:44:17, moonmilk commented on issue #170, 'Molly's Feed': "...and the second version is now the official version of the novel."

  On Tue Nov 24 2015 22:54:24, spikelynch commented on issue #92, 'Neuralgae': "Neuralgae (working title) has turned into a sort of graphic novel: a succession of images generated by a feedback loop on a heavily tweaked version of the Deepdreams algorithm. The text is generated by a markov algorithm on the WordNet synset definitions for the image classes. Example:



![image77](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/3653710/11387926/1007211e-9384-11e5-9939-b02cc36fd3ef.jpg)

box turtle chiefly nocturnal insects; some or

tiger cat medium-sized terriers with tissue paper;

Australian terrier small piece of a distensible

eel voracious snakelike marine mollusk usually

spiny lobster warm-water seabird having a mechanical

sea urchin shallow-water echinoderms characterized by means

leatherback turtle wide-ranging marine gastropods of books

tiger a whistling sound a group"

On Wed Nov 25 2015 01:55:30, hugovk labeled issue #79, _Infinite Epithalamium_.

On Wed Nov 25 2015 01:55:30, hugovk labeled issue #79, _Infinite Epithalamium_.

On Wed Nov 25 2015 01:56:12, hugovk labeled issue #170, _Molly's Feed_.

On Wed Nov 25 2015 01:56:39, hugovk labeled issue #92, _Neuralgae_.

  On Wed Nov 25 2015 11:30:04, kumo commented on issue #74, 'Roman Numerals story': "And finally, the Italian version:



![screenshot 2015-11-25 17 28 59](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/7925/11402837/24145eb8-939a-11e5-9396-acab45f7292e.png)

"

On Wed Nov 25 2015 16:05:46, hugovk opened a new issue called _Phone It In_. It has a rank of 30. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Wed Nov 25 2015 16:05:51, hugovk labeled issue #173, _Phone It In_.

On Wed Nov 25 2015 16:05:55, hugovk labeled issue #173, _Phone It In_.

  On Wed Nov 25 2015 16:06:46, hugovk commented on issue #8, 'In!': "Fourth idea done:



*Phone It In*



https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/173"

  On Wed Nov 25 2015 18:56:40, flexo commented on issue #71, 'Some kind of infinite battle arena / soap opera generator': "Updated the latest output to https://github.com/flexo/nanogenmo2015/blob/master/output/novel.md to better accommodate accompanying images.



Markdown could be cleaner at this point, I might well end up switching to HTML for more control."

On Wed Nov 25 2015 19:35:51, spikelynch renamed issue #92, _Neuralgae_.

  On Thu Nov 26 2015 06:20:11, translulaith commented on issue #70, 'Journal Of Laplace's Demon': "I'm done! I created a simple program over a couple of hours in Processing. When you open it, there's a black box and you have to leave it open a couple seconds to write the novel, then press any key and it closes the program and leaves you with a .docx file in the folder it's in. That's a weird thing but I think I like it a lot?



[Here's the folder with the program.](https://www.dropbox.com/sh/a73xwqf8je0a2ai/AABqMvIpM9knb0WBAyA_SY1ba?dl=0) You need Java.



[Here's the code I used in Processing] (http://pastebin.com/fQYh985v)



[Here's the output .docx] (https://www.dropbox.com/s/go7ymog7asedh2c/laplace_memoir.docx?dl=0) 56,184 words



Thanks for reading, this was fun!



(I have no idea how github works. Am I supposed to mark this as completed myself or is that something somebody else does? Sorry!)"

On Thu Nov 26 2015 06:26:31, hugovk labeled issue #70, _Journal Of Laplace's Demon_.

  On Thu Nov 26 2015 06:26:38, hugovk commented on issue #70, 'Journal Of Laplace's Demon': "Have a completed label!"

  On Thu Nov 26 2015 06:32:02, translulaith commented on issue #70, 'Journal Of Laplace's Demon': "Thanks!



There's definitely places where this thing could use work. It repeats itself in boring ways often. I think I'm going to call it complete as a novel generating bot though and maybe improve it while making it a thing that tweets eventually. Definitely a lot of fun to approach though. I had a blast."

  On Thu Nov 26 2015 10:16:10, coleww commented on issue #12, 'The Null Earth Catalog': "<img width="534" alt="screen shot 2015-11-26 at 7 14 49 am" src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/5067315/11425959/7eecaafc-940d-11e5-9640-94f473cdeaa8.png">



IT IS HAPPENING. IT IS REALLY HAPPENING. WOW.

"

  On Thu Nov 26 2015 12:02:55, coleww commented on issue #12, 'The Null Earth Catalog': "<img width="986" alt="screen shot 2015-11-26 at 9 01 07 am" src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/5067315/11428040/618d5a1a-941c-11e5-8cef-63a64054f3a4.png">

<img width="537" alt="screen shot 2015-11-26 at 8 47 40 am" src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/5067315/11428039/618a3088-941c-11e5-8fda-e40e0afd4cd2.png">

<img width="689" alt="screen shot 2015-11-26 at 7 55 25 am" src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/5067315/11428041/618e3d04-941c-11e5-9b91-e7f28b750b14.png">



so close...so close...there is probably some CSS auto-magic i can do to position those things in a more "zine" fashion."

  On Thu Nov 26 2015 12:37:03, ikarth commented on issue #15, 'Virgil's Commonplace Book': "I haven't wanted to post any updates until I was sure I'd end up with something to update about. This is probably overly cautious. I wanted to be sure that I'd have _something_ to show for the work I've put in, but examining the failures along the way is probably just as useful for others. Possibly more, if you've been observing NaNoGenMo from a distance but haven't participated because you're not sure if your results are going to be good enough.



I got quite distracted this month, first building a [Twitter bot](https://twitter.com/erat_viator), then messing around way too long with [tools to process Project Gutenberg texts](https://github.com/ikarth/guten-processor) for word2vec and RNN processing. All of which taught me useful things, but didn't directly contribute code to a novel generator.



They did, however, give me the idea for what I'm currently working on, which is, in part a novelization of the kind of thing the twitter bot is doing: pulling data from ORBIS, Pleiades, and the [Perseus Digital Library](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/) to create a geographically organized commonplace book of the classical period.



Getting the data I needed out of Perseus proved to be a bit of a pain, but now that I have a better working knowledge of RDF and XML processing I have it grabbing relevant texts quite nicely. There's a lot more features I can add to give the book more context, but for the moment I'm concentrating on the output format. I want to have a complete pipeline in place, from content generation to outputting a readable book, before I go in and start to elaborate on the basic structure. 



Not that there's a lot of time left to get fancy, so the other immediate goal is to produce something that fulfills the basic requirements. I advise you, if you plan on doing this yourself, to get the basics down much closer to the start of the month. My policy in the past has been to write something that can produce a bare-bones but theoretically infinite output before starting to add variation and details, and I'm doing it again this time. Just a little closer to the wire, given that this idea took longer to solidify."

  On Thu Nov 26 2015 12:44:22, ikarth commented on issue #15, 'Virgil's Commonplace Book': "An example extract from the current output:



> Virgil departed from Roma, intending to travel by road to Tibur, a 

17.629538012 mile journey.



> ### A story about Tibur



> The People After this one would naturally be inclined to ask what part is left

for the people in the constitution, when the Senate has these various

functions, especially the control of the receipts and expenditure of the

exchequer; and when the Consuls, again, have absolute power over the details

of military preparation, and an absolute authority in the field? There is,

however, a part left the people, and it is a most important one. For the

people is the sole fountain of honour and of punishment; and it is by these

two things and these alone that dynasties and constitutions and, in a word,

human society are held together: for where the distinction between them is not

sharply drawn both in theory and practice, there no undertaking can be

properly administered,—as indeed we might expect when good and bad are held in

exactly the same honour. The people then are the only court to decide matters

of life and death; and even in-cases where the penalty is money, if the sum to

be assessed is sufficiently serious, and especially when the accused have held

the higher magistracies. And in regard to this arrangement there is one point

deserving especial commendation and record. Men who are on trial for their

lives at Rome, while sentence is in process of being voted,—if even only one

of the tribes whose votes are needed to ratify the sentence has not

voted,—have the privilege at Rome of openly departing and condemning

themselves to a voluntary exile. Such men are safe at Naples or Praeneste or

at Tibur, and at other towns with which this arrangement has been duly

ratified on oath. Again, it is the people who bestow offices on the deserving,

which are the most honourable rewards of virtue. It has also the absolute

power of passing or repealing laws; and, most important of all, it is the

people who deliberate on the question of peace or war. And when provisional

terms are made for alliance, suspension of hostilities, or treaties, it is the

people who ratify them or the reverse. These considerations again would lead

one to say that the chief power in the state was the people's, and that the

constitution was a democracy.

    

One thing I definitely want to add is citations and footnotes, describing where the extracts came from."

On Thu Nov 26 2015 12:45:24, ikarth renamed issue #15, _Virgil's Commonplace Book_.

On Thu Nov 26 2015 13:37:05, hugovk labeled issue #15, _Virgil's Commonplace Book_.

  On Thu Nov 26 2015 13:49:03, hugovk commented on issue #15, 'Virgil's Commonplace Book': "Citations and footnotes is an interesting idea, not least to make it look more bookish, and not least to pad out the word count.



17.629538012 miles might be a bit too exact, even for Roman times. Here's an idea, how did Romans describe distances between cities? And could you convert to and use miles, leagues and stadia (or whatever)? It'd give a nice authentic twist (and not least help pad out the word count).



A travelogue with asides on history and so forth is an interesting approach -- it's kind of what Moby Dick does: a monomaniacal hunt for a whale mixed in with a detailed documentary on 19th century whale hunting. (Also word count etc.)



I like the Twitter bot too. A fruitful distraction.



"

  On Thu Nov 26 2015 14:34:09, ikarth commented on issue #15, 'Virgil's Commonplace Book': "The twitter bot already rounds the miles down to something more reasonable. Though I hadn't thought of expressing the fraction in other units, which is a good idea. 



I'm not particularly worried about padding word count here, mostly because if I end up short, I can just send Virgil out to wander around a bit more. Though suggestions in general are appreciated.



There's a number of ancient precedents for what I'm assembling, and a ton of source data to draw from. (I'm not aware of any of them ordered geographically, though.) Plus, as you pointed out, things like Moby Dick. Or Victor Hugo's multi-chapter digressions.



With this (and the Twitter bot) one angle I'm exploring is the idea of an alternate interface to data. In the age of the search engine it's easy to find what you are looking for (or at least something vaguely like it) but search engines are no help at all if you don't know exactly what you are looking for, and they'll never help you find things that you didn't know you wanted to ask for. Browsing a library, in contrast, incorporates much more serendipity into the process. 



The novel generator is one way to reintroduce that serendipity and explore the blind spots that you didn't realize that you had. I doubt I would have read about the first Roman treaty today if it hadn't come up in the generator, for example. Likewise, one thing the Twitter bot does is find coins minted near it's current location. Most of the coins it find are simply one of thousands, but by singling one out and putting it in a context the bot offers an insight into an aspect of ancient Rome that is difficult for us to experience otherwise. Sure, you _could_ have browsed the database and gotten a sense of where that coin fits in, but that would mean that you'd have to know that there was something that you didn't know.

"

  On Thu Nov 26 2015 14:57:56, hugovk commented on issue #15, 'Virgil's Commonplace Book': "Yes, often I find more interesting things to listen to by borrowing the CDs the library has put on the display shelves than any amount of Spotifying. 



And I agree a bot or something like a nano are good ways to re-present existing data in more interesting, or rather fresher or more digestible ways. (Similarly, I spotted a bug in some data thanks to [Menu Bot](https://twitter.com/menubot/status/669906086154121216) -- no way a meal cost $25 in 1913, more likely they've accidentally transcribed all the prices as dollars instead of cents. I'm about to mail them with corrections.)



The coins thing is a nice example, but nitpicking:



> Likewise, one thing the Twitter bot does is find coins minted near it's current location. 



The Romans had great infrastructure for the facilitation of lost coins far and wide across their empire. :) (Although I suppose more local ones are lost in aggregate.)"

  On Thu Nov 26 2015 15:04:19, ikarth commented on issue #15, 'Virgil's Commonplace Book': "> The Romans had great infrastructure for the facilitation of lost coins far and wide across their empire. :) (Although I suppose more local ones are lost in aggregate.)



This actually highlights a limit of the data I'm using: I'm dependant on the geographic tags, some of which are for the mint, and some of which are for where the coin (or coin hoard) was discovered, depending. Likewise, for the moment the novel generator just checks Perseus links in the Pleiades data that have ORBIS locations, though I'm planning to expand that once I get the current formatting problems worked out."

  On Fri Nov 27 2015 12:45:42, greg-kennedy commented on issue #79, 'Infinite Epithalamium': ""O MERCIFUL dog, and heavenly Father...""

  On Fri Nov 27 2015 12:48:33, greg-kennedy commented on issue #71, 'Some kind of infinite battle arena / soap opera generator': "Could you also color-code the names to match their icon colors?  I wanted to see how Jake was doing, it would be handy if his name was always cyan."

On Fri Nov 27 2015 12:58:08, TheConstipadoLlama opened a new issue called _Eyes of the holy grail nest 100_. It has a rank of 26. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Fri Nov 27 2015 13:45:30, hugovk labeled issue #174, _Eyes of the holy grail nest 100_.

  On Fri Nov 27 2015 15:31:02, flexo commented on issue #71, 'Some kind of infinite battle arena / soap opera generator': "That's a great idea and I'd totally do that (I even pondered on how to keep bright colours readable on white) but it looks like Github's markdown strips colour information: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11509830/how-to-add-color-to-githubs-readme-md-file



If I convert the output to HTML (quite possible but I'm running out of time!) then I'll definitely do this."

  On Fri Nov 27 2015 23:37:37, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #169, 'Solitude-bench (In cannibal antennae hallucination): A incarnate solitude': "[Another example](https://gist.github.com/MichaelPaulukonis/5973329185b3a2a613fa) - the chance encounter of _Neuromancer_ and _Moby Dick_.



Line-breaks are removed, hyphens-over-line-breaks are removed (always, uh...), and some contractions are expanded. Capitalization is wonky, and possessives and mid-sentence punctuation is bizarre, as are numbers and chapter headings, etc.



_Moby Dick_ converted to a pos-tag template, with pos-tag replacement from _Neuromancer_.



And _Neuromancer_, converted to a pos-tag template, with pos-tag replacment from _Moby Dick_.



thus: 



`Call me Ishmael` appears as `Stop we Yonderboy.`



And `The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.` becomes `THE prostration in This spears was some Conversation of two, published to a true Ahab.`





NOTE: unless the tag-bag is monochromatic, this is a stochastic process, so the above represents one possible example only."

  On Fri Nov 27 2015 23:39:30, estayton commented on issue #130, 'Intent to participate': "The first version is up: https://github.com/estayton/NaNoGenMo-2015



The President of the Moon, a novel by Jules VeRNN: 58,394 words.



This became more of a playing-with-new technology project for me. I won't make any grand claims for the artistry of Vernn's creation, but it meets the criterion for novel-hood. It is also vaguely readable. I will update it if additional training over the next few days improves the readability of the output."

  On Fri Nov 27 2015 23:41:57, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #174, 'Eyes of the holy grail nest 100': "A good point, though."

  On Sat Nov 28 2015 01:07:43, ikarth commented on issue #130, 'Intent to participate': ""Vaguely readable" puts you in pretty good company. While I'm sure many of us would like to get to "actually readable" consistently, I tend to think that playing with possible approaches is an important part of exploring and researching."

On Sat Nov 28 2015 03:31:27, hugovk labeled issue #130, _Intent to participate_.

  On Sat Nov 28 2015 09:24:33, mattfister commented on issue #40, 'Simulationist Fantasy Novel': "Since we're almost at the end of the month and I'm almost out of time, I'm going to call this complete. I generated 77 simulationist fantasy novels overnight. You can access a random one [at this link](https://mattfister.github.io/nanogenmo2015/final/random-novel.html).



I'll do a bigger writeup soon. I missed some of my bigger goals, but at least it's spitting out really tedious novels :)"

On Sat Nov 28 2015 09:42:06, bhickey renamed issue #86, _The -2147483648 Nights_.

On Sat Nov 28 2015 10:07:15, dariusk labeled issue #40, _Simulationist Fantasy Novel_.

  On Sat Nov 28 2015 10:07:48, dariusk commented on issue #40, 'Simulationist Fantasy Novel': "Great! Completed tag added."

  On Sat Nov 28 2015 12:03:09, araile commented on issue #26, 'Pocket Atlas of Remote Planets': "I abandoned it. Next year perhaps."

  On Sat Nov 28 2015 12:07:36, coleww commented on issue #12, 'The Null Earth Catalog': "### the catalog is written by many "actor" scripts. They take a long time to load and consume their various corpuses, so i have them all chime in when they startup

<img width="543" alt="screen shot 2015-11-28 at 8 59 47 am" src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/5067315/11453004/4ce510aa-95af-11e5-9a42-a663c587fa70.png">





### this is a no-markov zone

<img width="899" alt="screen shot 2015-11-28 at 7 26 12 am" src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/5067315/11453005/6b0a0932-95af-11e5-81d3-2716cd50c9bd.png">



### getting close



<img width="564" alt="screen shot 2015-11-28 at 7 33 36 am" src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/5067315/11453006/7601eb0c-95af-11e5-9fc4-5c8d64fd2100.png">

"

  On Sat Nov 28 2015 15:12:32, marythought commented on issue #49, '"Where I'm From" poem & novel generator': "## DAY THE LAST



After debating what to do with my poor poem-that-is-not-a-novel I decided to go ahead and use Rita's markov functionality, but use it on the poem as source material. What results is an epic memoir poem that doesn't have much plot but generates some interesting language. Not bad for a first attempt!



### [My #NaNovGenMo2015 Submission](https://github.com/marythought/where-im-from/blob/master/nngm.md)



And here is the [source code](https://github.com/marythought/where-im-from/blob/master/lib/poem.js)



How I made it:



1. Generate new "Where I'm From Poem" over and over and save in a source text variable until 50,000 words. 

2. Feed that source text to RiTA markov and generate 5000 sentences in an array (I started with 1000 and that didn't seem like enough)

3. Make new empty text variable for the output

4. Until the output text reaches 50,000 words:

  * generate new poem and add it

  * generate between 0-40 random lines from the markoved sentences

  * generate between 0-20 sampled lines from a new generated poem

  * generate between 0-40 lines of markoved (again)

  * rinse and repeat



I was going to serve up the results through express and node just like with my [poem generator](https://whereimfrom.herokuapp.com/), but as soon as I got close, I ran into an 'Maximum call stack size exceeded' error. So, eff that. Markdown it is! An interesting aspect of markdown is that it doesn't preserve all the line breaks. I played with this and ultimately decided that I liked the paragraphs/prose poem format for such a long text document, so I left it alone (for a formatted version, see my [earlier attempt](https://github.com/marythought/where-im-from/blob/master/nngm-backup.md) which does preserve line breaks). I did discover that RiTA will occasionally generate language I wouldn't want to use in an app, so I'm curious if anyone (Darius) has already made a filter for this.



This was fun! I still have Bob Frost to play with, and coincidentally a little project I'm working on called "Walk or Not" fits well with my Ritafied poem. I learned a bunch about natural language processing this month and feel much more comfortable working with RiTA and JavaScript. 



Questions or comments? I will answer what I can... if I do it again, I'll be purposeful about chapter headings or something that can break up the 50,000 words to help the flow. At this point, though, I can tinker no more.



Thanks for the opportunity and see you next year!





"

On Sat Nov 28 2015 15:31:58, hugovk labeled issue #49, _"Where I'm From" poem & novel generator_.

  On Sat Nov 28 2015 15:40:49, hugovk commented on issue #49, '"Where I'm From" poem & novel generator': "Have a completed label!



---



> I did discover that RiTA will occasionally generate language I wouldn't want to use in an app, so I'm curious if anyone (Darius) has already made a filter for this.



These are mainly aimed at bots, but should still be generally useful.



Here's a JavaScript, Python, Ruby and PHP word filter:

https://github.com/dariusk/wordfilter



Here's a headline filter:

https://github.com/molly/CyberPrefixer/blob/master/offensive.py



Tips on transphobic joke detection:

http://tinysubversions.com/notes/transphobic-joke-detection/



Some lists of bad words:

https://github.com/shutterstock/List-of-Dirty-Naughty-Obscene-and-Otherwise-Bad-Words

https://gist.github.com/ryanlewis/a37739d710ccdb4b406d

http://www.bannedwordlist.com/lists/swearWords.txt



[Inactive] muted Twitter topics:

https://github.com/sjml/bot-innocence



Some general etiquette things:

http://tinysubversions.com/2013/03/basic-twitter-bot-etiquette/

http://www.crummy.com/2013/11/27/0

"

On Sat Nov 28 2015 16:11:02, jeffbinder opened a new issue called _The Synonymizer_. It has a rank of 26. And it's been completed. Sweet!

  On Sat Nov 28 2015 16:12:50, jeffbinder commented on issue #175, 'The Synonymizer': "The code: [https://github.com/jeffbinder/synonymizer](https://github.com/jeffbinder/synonymizer)



The output: [The Portrayal of a Ma'am by H James](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jeffbinder/synonymizer/master/PortrayalOfAMaam.txt)"

On Sat Nov 28 2015 16:20:53, hugovk labeled issue #175, _The Synonymizer_.

  On Sat Nov 28 2015 20:43:34, spikelynch commented on issue #92, 'Neuralgae': "The [code for Neuralgae is now up, with a fairly detailed README](https://github.com/spikelynch/neuralgae)



I'll be posting a web version of the finished text once I've cleaned up a few formatting issues"

On Sun Nov 29 2015 09:05:27, enkiv2 opened a new issue called _Exhausting a joke: a novel based on xkcd comic number 1609_. It has a rank of 25. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Sun Nov 29 2015 10:33:13, muffinista opened a new issue called _What I Thought About_. It has a rank of 26. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Sun Nov 29 2015 11:52:05, hugovk labeled issue #176, _Exhausting a joke: a novel based on xkcd comic number 1609_.

  On Sun Nov 29 2015 11:52:12, coleww commented on issue #12, 'The Null Earth Catalog': "<img width="350" alt="screen shot 2015-11-29 at 8 29 52 am" src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/5067315/11458518/75dde776-9676-11e5-8edf-ee128a061ade.png">

<img width="279" alt="screen shot 2015-11-29 at 8 29 47 am" src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/5067315/11458519/75e1a8b6-9676-11e5-8db5-87f2122b459f.png">

<img width="381" alt="screen shot 2015-11-29 at 8 29 42 am" src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/5067315/11458521/75e25630-9676-11e5-8119-a672fd1627d1.png">

<img width="806" alt="screen shot 2015-11-29 at 8 29 12 am" src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/5067315/11458520/75e1e33a-9676-11e5-8feb-373a6a02291f.png">



GOLD, ABSOLUTE GOLD"

On Sun Nov 29 2015 11:55:57, hugovk labeled issue #177, _What I Thought About_.

  On Sun Nov 29 2015 11:57:35, hugovk commented on issue #177, 'What I Thought About': "I showed this to my friend who recommended you get [Mark Cousins](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0bHkwFX1Xc) to narrate it."

On Sun Nov 29 2015 12:41:21, hugovk labeled issue #12, _The Null Earth Catalog_.

On Sun Nov 29 2015 12:41:21, hugovk labeled issue #12, _The Null Earth Catalog_.

On Sun Nov 29 2015 14:36:08, jbaek080 opened a new issue called _Brown Corpus Novel Generator_. It has a rank of 11. There's a preview available.

  On Sun Nov 29 2015 14:45:56, jbaek080 commented on issue #178, 'Brown Corpus Novel Generator': "Sample output:



Every blitz Before Y. before similarly. The conceptual balcony smartly. The surplus national down Stendhal contain that philosophic shrewd capital minute no place-name. the eternal tough Tree exclude That literalism. each vain egalitarianism before Booth construe each persuasion this name. This nonresident teaching strengthen That talk a career. another entire editorialist from Ray thatt Tacitus hit Longstreet yea. Every Archaeology thatt No libido thatt. another inevitable informational ivory lie Every schedule. the windfall notwithstanding Jesus supposing an well-meaning diplomacy out-of-state. every vital script synce another Party practice Jay. another Electronic equity albeit no split caress Porgy Cassiopeia. another senseless leave denounce Huxley. each fear redo a conduct. each Gallery ordain Staffordshire. the Eternal divisive harvest straighten this statute inexplicably epicyclically. A virile discharge about an squadron providing an questionable croak traditionally. another tender covetousness over Tiveden battle Dewey Beale. This registrant commence the Haven An orderly low-class. a essential masterpiece long The eventual damnation. That nationalistic Expenditure absent Maryland. no bookkeeping manipulate the blacksmith. that capacious enigma unless Walcott imperceptibly manifestly. That Spanish lyrical distance trade This type emphatically. the prosecution alongside this conservatism punish An greatcoated reluctant debris pro Every stubbornness. every Moral turning Through Poltava nominate that genre. a relic unless. an routine via Nennius analyze every envelope. An Brigadier through Narbonne adore every stone. No flush ecstasy at Cotton knoe Pennsylvania PMR neatly. an wind thickly. An Foundry crawl Simon. An cover contest Birgitta. This waterfront till. An non-itemized coating endow this emotion The untouched entity. every beribboned humility back abreast. no hatred assemble That strangeness that Free Village. That Protestant Twilight indulge Every scimitar-wielding removal this result including Rowswell. Every unthinkable petition supposing no actuality. This super-Herculean composer behynde Agatha till every Ambassador link La Fanshawe. each Bay invert This battleground An influence Between Norway. The publicity absent Godfrey. another Hemisphere note Donaldson. no mechanization cry A nightingale This hole. an acquiescence beefore Hudson although Protitch go H.P.R.. The depravity redo The countriman A father-brother. every dictatorship honestly. An fiat near Bernhardt dress another intercontinental non-interference An dystopia loud. An world dream An coastal taking. another uncivil secret willingness through OME sleep the Conquest this organic manliness. No preposterous understructure till. The musical speaker widen This con halt. No pre-Anglo-Saxon eyeball differ No retaliation. another unlikely obsolescent summary extend the honest housing notwithstanding Despina. A aisle parley Hardwick Out. an diverse Chamber before the area although freely. an Internal continental vocational avarice stimulate That rear. This professional judgment skirt No administration That confidential boyhood. that surgical seminary wisely foremost. each macropathological busyness whereas Falstaff. A confidential cartridge employ No Congregational delay. an Prince confer Villa frankly. another adversity outside Winston delegate an expressionist beside Latin no fellow bearing Through Lante. a indignation after 385 excluding Empedocles till The self-mastery progress Green. An experimental cross fire St.-Pol frequently. That nerve while another lightning-occurrence. This inevitable micrometer so every circularity sweep Iraj Koh. An unbreakable hypocrisy beneath Twain after No super-Herculean incapable management catch Wagner. An exterior underneath. An chapter wither No intereference. this human grapple Thailand. the Workshop for another paddock providing Harburg quantitatively. Every disruptive subservience with Taylor Get an friction. This seductive cost-accounting excluding Frederick indulge No grace. no mastery welcome another Appeal. every tertian after Managua. another optimum sovereignty admit Anthony Cleveland materially competently. A supply comprehensively. A conscientious partner that Taylor cluster Packwood Dutchman. The impossible fugitive resemblance if The sensation notice Monagan Fergusson. that solitary awareness ridicule Lilly. A host unluckily. each salt heare may Carlisle. an two-way untrustworthiness because No Postmaster. No conclave thatt. a ancillary sojourner between the bringing fill a monitoring. This important manpower regarding Sir prevaile no Conduct. the resentment forget Sulamite single-handedly. no uncomfortable place significantly. every Electric grateful skin low distantly unintentionally. Every coal sho'. a kindly fox-terrier manifest that cost. each brackish meat over That Lullaby vote another harm humanly. each rifle explore Wimsatt. That impetus revise Aurelius Adrian. That suburb v. Maine supposing Sturley spread Forte Memphis. A separate interpreter mind No unproblematic gazelle the discourse. no antihistorical malignancy no. The viability apportion no Beautiful tentative Food. The Small coefficient reap This address. "

On Sun Nov 29 2015 15:12:13, hugovk labeled issue #178, _Brown Corpus Novel Generator_.

  On Sun Nov 29 2015 15:15:30, TobiasWehrum commented on issue #172, 'The Greater Book of Transmutation (A DIY Alchemy Guide)': "I'm glad you like it. And it's done now! Not that much changed in these 5 days, mostly sanding rough edges and working on the PDF creation.



Source: https://github.com/TobiasWehrum/TheGreaterBookOfTransmutation

PDF: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1977054/projects/art/Generative%20Art%20Files/other/TheGreaterBookOfTransmutation.pdf

Preview: See first post



That was a lot of fun. Can't wait for the NaNoGenMo next year!"

  On Sun Nov 29 2015 15:43:44, suisea commented on issue #26, 'Pocket Atlas of Remote Planets': ":+1: "

  On Sun Nov 29 2015 15:44:11, suisea commented on issue #26, 'Pocket Atlas of Remote Planets': "github's emoji are all auto-white............ :)))))))))))"

  On Sun Nov 29 2015 16:53:35, spikelynch commented on issue #92, 'Neuralgae': "Neuralgae is complete! Read the full text here:



[Neuralgae](http://neuralgae.mikelynch.org/)"

  On Sun Nov 29 2015 17:03:52, MartinPetkov commented on issue #56, 'Twitter Novel Generator, one day at a time!': "Completed! It's different now, it scrapes data for the past d days (configurable) and generates a novel like that, based on the trending topics for that day. Here's a link to the source code, along with one of the novels I generated: https://github.com/MartinPetkov/NaNoGenMo/tree/master/NaNoGenMo-2015"

On Sun Nov 29 2015 17:04:05, MartinPetkov closed issue #56, _Twitter Novel Generator, one day at a time!_.

  On Sun Nov 29 2015 17:26:20, WhiteFangs commented on issue #33, 'A play based on the "french 4chan"': "Ok, so November for me has been hell of a month (and when I say hell, I mean it, believe me, I live in Paris) and I couldn't take as much time as I wanted initially to code for this NaNoGenMo. I have a small draft in the repo I posted before, I'll try to code something functionnal to get the challenge complete before tomorrow night hopefully, otherwise I'll finish it without pressure when I can."

On Sun Nov 29 2015 17:58:32, doldrumorchids opened a new issue called _no people_. It has a rank of 27. And it's been completed. Sweet!

  On Sun Nov 29 2015 18:00:54, Agrajag-Petunia commented on issue #81, 'Existential Erotica': "I think I've done all I'm going to do on this. You can find the code [here](https://github.com/Agrajag-Petunia/existential-romantic-novel) and the output text [here](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Agrajag-Petunia/existential-romantic-novel/master/data/novel.txt)."

  On Sun Nov 29 2015 18:41:48, enkiv2 commented on issue #12, 'The Null Earth Catalog': "This is beautiful

On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 11:52 AM Cole Willsea <notifications@github.com>
wrote:

> [image: screen shot 2015-11-29 at 8 29 52 am]
> <https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/5067315/11458518/75dde776-9676-11e5-8edf-ee128a061ade.png>
> [image: screen shot 2015-11-29 at 8 29 47 am]
> <https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/5067315/11458519/75e1a8b6-9676-11e5-8db5-87f2122b459f.png>
> [image: screen shot 2015-11-29 at 8 29 42 am]
> <https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/5067315/11458521/75e25630-9676-11e5-8119-a672fd1627d1.png>
> [image: screen shot 2015-11-29 at 8 29 12 am]
> <https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/5067315/11458520/75e1e33a-9676-11e5-8feb-373a6a02291f.png>
>
> GOLD, ABSOLUTE GOLD
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/12#issuecomment-160431676>
> .
>
"

  On Sun Nov 29 2015 18:47:37, enkiv2 commented on issue #130, 'Intent to participate': "We keep getting closer and closer to "actually readable" every year, and it
continually shocks me with how much progress we make.

On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 1:07 AM Isaac Karth <notifications@github.com>
wrote:

> "Vaguely readable" puts you in pretty good company. While I'm sure many of
> us would like to get to "actually readable" consistently, I tend to think
> that playing with possible approaches is an important part of exploring and
> researching.
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/130#issuecomment-160252316>
> .
>
"

  On Sun Nov 29 2015 19:01:05, setphen commented on issue #38, 'def init():': "Here's my entry, (in pretty rough form). A recipe book for hexidecimal colors.



https://github.com/setphen/QueensDelight"

  On Sun Nov 29 2015 19:27:12, ikarth commented on issue #179, 'no people': "Very poetic."

  On Sun Nov 29 2015 20:25:52, WhiteFangs commented on issue #33, 'A play based on the "french 4chan"': "It's a bit late here in France, but I did something that works : 

- [Repo](https://github.com/WhiteFangs/theatre-jeuxvideocom)

- [The "novel" (actually a play)](http://louphole.com/apps/JeuxVideoAmourHasard/index.html) (around 53000 words)

- [Try it here (generate automatically)](http://louphole.com/apps/JeuxVideoAmourHasard/Main.php)"

  On Sun Nov 29 2015 20:28:29, WhiteFangs commented on issue #17, 'Language Survey 2015': "I just finished #33 and pardon my french but it's in PHP and in french (not a programming language as far as know)"

  On Sun Nov 29 2015 21:13:33, dkurth commented on issue #18, 'It takes a "Village" to translate "Hamlet"': "In great haste, I hacked together a side-by-side version here:



https://github.com/dkurth/nanogenmo2015/blob/master/hamlet.sidebyside.pdf



Thanks for the great suggestions!  Looks like the final word count is 56,765."

On Sun Nov 29 2015 21:18:57, doldrumorchids closed issue #179, _no people_.

On Sun Nov 29 2015 21:19:06, doldrumorchids reopened issue #179, _no people_.

On Sun Nov 29 2015 22:30:00, tra38 opened a new issue called _(NaNoGenMo: Dadism 2.0) 2.0_. It has a rank of 35. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Sun Nov 29 2015 22:30:20, tra38 renamed issue #180, _(NaNoGenMo: Dadism 2.0) 2.0_.

  On Sun Nov 29 2015 22:45:01, ikarth commented on issue #180, '(NaNoGenMo: Dadism 2.0) 2.0': "And thus we come full circle."

On Sun Nov 29 2015 23:48:50, nickmontfort opened a new issue called _"Matthew 25:30" -- my generated novel_. It has a rank of 25. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Mon Nov 30 2015 00:11:02, lizrush opened a new issue called _A novel based on 19th century female authors in the US_. It has a rank of 5.

On Mon Nov 30 2015 01:46:45, hugovk labeled issue #172, _The Greater Book of Transmutation (A DIY Alchemy Guide)_.

On Mon Nov 30 2015 01:49:26, hugovk labeled issue #172, _The Greater Book of Transmutation (A DIY Alchemy Guide)_.

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 01:54:03, hugovk commented on issue #172, 'The Greater Book of Transmutation (A DIY Alchemy Guide)': "Good stuff, and nice layout too.



I baked some bread yesterday, if only I'd known the magic spell "Dico citas!""

On Mon Nov 30 2015 01:55:22, hugovk labeled issue #92, _Neuralgae_.

On Mon Nov 30 2015 02:02:25, hugovk labeled issue #56, _Twitter Novel Generator, one day at a time!_.

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 02:02:29, hugovk commented on issue #56, 'Twitter Novel Generator, one day at a time!': "Congratulations, have a completed label! I've also re-opened it so people can find this more easily.



---



I like the different mix of languages, especially starting with RTL Arabic.



(It'd be nice if you could wrap the text at 80 columns or something, as it goes off the screen with GitHub.)"

On Mon Nov 30 2015 02:02:29, hugovk reopened issue #56, _Twitter Novel Generator, one day at a time!_.

On Mon Nov 30 2015 02:04:45, hugovk labeled issue #81, _Existential Erotica_.

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 02:04:51, hugovk commented on issue #81, 'Existential Erotica': "Congratulations!



Any chance to wrap the text at 80 columns or something? It goes off the screen on GitHub."

On Mon Nov 30 2015 02:17:12, hugovk labeled issue #33, _A play based on the "french 4chan"_.

On Mon Nov 30 2015 02:21:41, hugovk labeled issue #33, _A play based on the "french 4chan"_.

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 02:21:47, hugovk commented on issue #33, 'A play based on the "french 4chan"': "Congratulations!



Reading plays in text brings to mind Shakespeare for me, so it's interesting to see the extremely contemporary language of forums in a play context. More so it being in French and harder to read, but with English-ish bits and pieces.



> INSECTE-JUIF, *riant*

putain les bots



> HARICHIGO, *hapiste*

Les bots qui créent et up leurs topics La révolution est en marche :peur:

"

On Mon Nov 30 2015 02:28:27, hugovk labeled issue #18, _It takes a "Village" to translate "Hamlet"_.

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 02:28:31, hugovk commented on issue #18, 'It takes a "Village" to translate "Hamlet"': "Nice! Congrats! Have a completed label!



---



> **Ham.**

> I humbly thank you; well, well, well. 



=>



> **Pork.**

>  I humbly Thank you, etc

"

On Mon Nov 30 2015 02:41:16, hugovk labeled issue #179, _no people_.

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 02:43:27, hugovk commented on issue #179, 'no people': "I like it! 



There's one caption which simply reads "things." :)"

On Mon Nov 30 2015 03:27:17, hugovk labeled issue #180, _(NaNoGenMo: Dadism 2.0) 2.0_.

On Mon Nov 30 2015 03:27:17, hugovk labeled issue #180, _(NaNoGenMo: Dadism 2.0) 2.0_.

On Mon Nov 30 2015 03:34:54, hugovk labeled issue #181, _"Matthew 25:30" -- my generated novel_.

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 03:48:13, hugovk commented on issue #38, 'def init():': "I like this! The text brings to mind a kind of perfumery of colours.



Do you think it's doable to generate 50k words?"

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 08:31:23, cpressey commented on issue #92, 'Neuralgae': "Hail the Tripod."

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 08:46:39, kathrynhume commented on issue #180, '(NaNoGenMo: Dadism 2.0) 2.0': "Well this is delightful! Couldn't help but think of Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. May write a follow up piece about the results of 2015, including the recursion. "

On Mon Nov 30 2015 09:04:26, dariusk subscribed to issue #9, _Press Coverage_.

On Mon Nov 30 2015 09:04:26, dariusk mentioned issue #9, _Press Coverage_.

On Mon Nov 30 2015 09:07:56, jeffbinder mentioned issue #9, _Press Coverage_.

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 09:07:56, hugovk commented on issue #9, 'Press Coverage': "# The Complexity of Machine Writing



http://digitalfellows.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2015/11/30/nanogenmo/



by @jeffbinder

"

On Mon Nov 30 2015 09:07:56, jeffbinder subscribed to issue #9, _Press Coverage_.

On Mon Nov 30 2015 09:35:29, enkiv2 opened a new issue called _Stupid Plotto: the least-effort plotto expansion_. It has a rank of 25. And it's been completed. Sweet!

On Mon Nov 30 2015 09:37:42, hugovk labeled issue #183, _Stupid Plotto: the least-effort plotto expansion_.

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 09:40:40, enkiv2 commented on issue #180, '(NaNoGenMo: Dadism 2.0) 2.0': "Hahaha. I like your version better than mine :P

On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 10:30 PM Tariq Ali <notifications@github.com> wrote:

> Deciding to take my suggestion in "Fake press coverage of NaNoGenMo" (#9
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/9>) to its ultimate
> conclusion, I took this article (
> http://arcade.stanford.edu/blogs/nanogenmo-dada-20 ) and rearranged its
> paragraph order 50 times, thereby producing a 79300-word long epic. Many of
> the generated articles don't seem to work, but there are probably a few
> gems that are worth reading.
>
> Source Code: https://gist.github.com/tra38/cf8226a55c5a49531f57
> Full Text: https://gist.github.com/tra38/fb081ddcc1a662273d4a
>
> This following 'article' takes a completely different tone from the
> original article (NaNoGenMo being Dadism 2.0), simply treating NaNoGenMo as
> nothing more than a standard NLG research project that is only limited by
> technological constraints.
>
> NLG algorithms are generally considered to be a form of “artificial” or
> “machine intelligence” because they do things—like write news articles
> about sports or the weather, or write real estate ads, as the prototype my
> Fast Forward Labs colleagues built—we believe humans alone can do. (I hope
> to explore the implications of the historical, relativist concept of
> artificial intelligence, espoused by people like Nancy Fulda, in a separate
> post.) As illustrated in the WSJ article, most people then evaluate NLG
> performance like André Bazin evaluates style in realism: as the art of
> realism lies in the seeming absence of artifice, so too does the art of
> algorithms lie in the seeming absence of automation. Commercialization only
> enhances this push towards verisimilitude, as investment banks and news
> agencies like Forbes won’t pay top dollar for software that generates
> strange prose. In turn, we come to judge machine intelligence by its
> humanness, orienting development offers towards writing prose that we would
> have written ourselves.
>
> While open to anyone and, as in NaNoWriMo, governed by the single
> constraint that submissions contain at least 50,000 words, NaNoGenMo is
> gradually defining itself as a cohesive artistic movement that uses
> algorithms to experiment with literary form. The group’s identity is partly
> generated by ressentiment towards negative criticism that their
> “disjointed, robotic scripts” are “unlikely to trouble Booker judges.” Last
> year, one participant mocked how “futile it is to try to explain what we’re
> actually doing here, to the normals.” More positively, they are shaping
> identity through shared formal and critical resources. John Ohno (alias
> enkiv2) posted code to generate sestinas, haikus, and synonyms. Allison
> Parrish (alias aparrish) shared an interface to the Carnegie Mellon
> Pronouncing Dictionary that enables users to do things like scrape the
> dictionary for rhymes for a given word. Finally, Isaac Karth (alias ikarth)
> explained to members how the group’s tendency to assemble new poetry from
> prior texts has intellectual roots in Dadaism, Burrough’s cut-up
> techniques, and the constraint-oriented works of Oulipo. When I spoke with
> Kazemi about the project, he said that Ken Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing
> had inspired his thinking on how NaNoGenMo can challenge customary notions
> of authorship and creativity.
>
> What if machines generated text with different stylistic goals? Or rather,
> what if we evaluated machine intelligence not by its humanness but by its
> alienness, by its ability to generate something beyond what we could have
> created—or would have thought to create—without the assistance of an
> algorithm? What if automated prose could rupture our automatized
> perceptions, as Shklovsky described poetry in Art as Device, and offer a
> new vehicle for our own creativity?
>
> The latest developments in machine learning are enabling machines to
> develop models of us in turn, ever updating what information they present
> and how they present it to match the input we provide. Kazemi is addressing
> this new give and take between man and machine head on in his 2015
> NaNoGenMo submission, “co-authoring” a novel with an algorithm where for
> every ten sentences the algorithm drafts, he only commits the one he, as
> human, likes best. “Who wrote the book?” he asks. “[The algorithm] wrote
> literally every word, but [I] dictated nearly the entire form of the
> novel.” This is the same kind of dynamic new research tools built on IBM
> Watson are presenting to lawyers and doctors: ROSS, a legal tool built on
> the Watson API, presents answers to research questions, and all the lawyer
> has to do is to commit the answer she likes best. If NaNoGenMo helps us
> think more deeply about that dynamic, it can offer very important insights
> on the overall future of AI.
>
> Moniker, a design studio based in Amsterdam, wrote a simple query that
> scans Twitter for sentences in the form “it’s + hour + : + minute + am/PM +
> and +” to compose a realtime global diary of daily activities. The “it’s
> hour and I am” tends to elicit predictable confessions or complaints,
> showing how expressions automate our thoughts: “It’s 12:20 and I need a
> drink;” “It’s 1:00 pm and I have not moved from my bed;” “It’s 11:00 pm and
> I’ve finally got a decent cup of coffee.” Twide and Twejudice replaces most
> of the dialogue in Austen’s original with a word used in a similar context
> on Twitter, resulting in frivolous dialogue: (Mr Bennet asking Mrs Bennet
> about Mr Bingley:) "Is he/she overrun 0r single?” (Mrs Bennet exclaiming
> about Mr Bingley's arrival:) "What _a fineee thingi 4my rageaholics
> girls!'' While these lack the sophistication of The Seeker, by polluting
> Austen with Twitter diction, they illustrate how contemporary media have
> modified communication norms.
>
> Allison Parrish’s I Waded in Clear Water uses sentiment analysis
> algorithms, which rank sentences based upon features that indicate
> emotional texture, to transform Gustavus Hindman Miller’s Ten Thousand
> Dreams, Interpreted. Parrish mobilizes the formulaic “action” and
> “denotation” structure of Miller’s text (action = “To see an oak full of
> acorns”; denotation = “denotes increase and promotion”). She first
> transforms the actions into first-person, simple past sentences (“I saw an
> oak full of acorns”) and then reorders the sentences from the worst to the
> best thing that can happen in dreams, according to a score given by a
> sentiment analysis algorithm run on the denotation. The sentiment scores
> create short chapters: “I drove into muddy water. I saw others weeding.”;
> and longer chapters with paratactic strings of disjointed actions: “…I
> descended a ladder. I saw any one lame. I saw my lover taking laudanum
> through disappointment. I heard mocking laughter. I kept a ledge. I had
> lice on my body. I saw. I lost it. I felt melancholy over any event. I saw
> others melancholy. I sent a message….” According to the sentiment
> algorithm, wading in clear water is our best dream.
>
> Evaluating these works by their capacity to read like human prose is a
> stale exercise because what qualifies as “natural” language is relative,
> not absolute. Our own linguistic habits are developed through interaction
> with others, be they members of a given social class, colleagues at work or
> school, or spambots littering our Twitter feeds. In a recent Medium post,
> Katie Rose Pipkin eloquently described how machines have already modified
> what we think of as natural language, whether we're cognizant of it or not.
> We speak differently to search tools and virtual assistants because we have
> come to develop a tacit understanding of how they work and can modify our
> requests to communicate effectively.
>
> At least two 2014 submissions use dreams as a locus to explore the odd
> beauty of machine intelligence. Thricedotted’s The Seeker relates the
> autobiography of a machine trying to “learn about human behavior by reading
> WikiHow.” The work is visually beautiful, with each iteration of the
> algorithm’s operations punctuated by pages that raindrop abstractions and
> house aphorisms like “imagine not one thing could be undirected.” Like the
> hopscotch overtones in Cortázar’s Rayuela, the aphorisms encourage the
> reader to perceive meaningful patterns in what might otherwise be random
> data (Thricedotted’s internet identity often mentions apophenia). Time and
> again, the algorithm repeats a “work, scan, imagine” loop, scraping
> WikiHow, searching plain text memories for a concept encountered during
> “work,” and building a dream sequence—or “univision”—from concepts it
> doesn’t recognize. These univisions contain the most surprising poetry in
> the work, where beauty arises from the reader’s ineluctable tendency to
> feel meaning in fragments.
>
> Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published an article with
> an interactive sidebar featuring excerpts from financial investment
> research reports. Readers were prompted to identify whether the excerpts
> were written by robots or humans. Admittedly, Wall Street’s preference for
> terse prose over poetic flourish makes a challenge like this make sense.
> “Q2 cash balance expectation of $830m implies ~$80m of cash burn in Q2
> after a $140m reduction in cash balance in Q1,” a sampled sentence, is
> effectively just three data points fused together with syntax. And that’s
> no coincidence. White collar workers like journalists need not fear their
> job security (at least not yet…) because new natural language generation
> (NLG) algorithms are very good at representing structured data sets in
> prose, but not yet very good at much else. That capability in itself is
> very powerful, as our ability to draw insights from data often depends on
> how they are presented (e.g. a chart reveals insights one would have missed
> in rows and columns). But it is a far cry from the creative courage
> required to build a world on a blank page.
>
> Technical constraints explain why NaNoGenMo has come to align itself with
> poetics of recontextualization and reassembly. Indeed, genuine NLG
> algorithms, that is, those that can build words and syntax from the
> building blocks of letters and get smarter over time, are still very
> nascent. Most of the 2014 submissions instead use rules to transform former
> texts in creative ways, which also leads to topical similarities.
>
> It is this search to use automation as a vehicle for defamiliarization
> that makes NaNoGenMo so exciting. Darius Kazemi, an internet artist who
> runs an annual Bot Summit, created NaNoGenMo “on a whim” in November, 2013.
> Thoughtful about literary form, Kazemi was amused by the fact that National
> Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) set only two criteria for participants:
> submissions must be written in 30 days (the month of November) and must
> comprise at least 50,000 words. The absence of form invited
> experimentation: why write a novel when you can write an algorithm that
> writes an novel? He tweeted his idea, and a new GitHub (a web-based
> software development collaboration tool) community was formed.
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/180>.
>
"

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 09:49:49, cpressey commented on issue #56, 'Twitter Novel Generator, one day at a time!': "> (It'd be nice if you could wrap the text at 80 columns or something, as it goes off the screen with GitHub.)



You can click the "Raw" button, or paste the URL into https://rawgit.com/ , and the file will be served as plain text, which web browsers will usually display with word-wrapping."

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 09:54:17, hugovk commented on issue #56, 'Twitter Novel Generator, one day at a time!': "The "Raw" button and rawgit.com doesn't help much: they remove all the borders and margins and screen furniture, but the text still goes off the right-end of the screen.



Oh but: I've just checked some other browsers, and this happens in Chrome, Opera and IE, but Firefox auto-wraps it."

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 10:16:22, mattfister commented on issue #40, 'Simulationist Fantasy Novel': "And here's [my writeup](http://freezebeam.com/2015/11/nanogenmo-2015-simulationist-fantasy-novel/)."

On Mon Nov 30 2015 10:22:18, spc476 opened a new issue called _The Psychotherapy Of Racter Or The Descent Into Madness Of Dr. Eliza_. It has a rank of 6.

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 12:21:25, setphen commented on issue #38, 'def init():': "Certainly. The generated pdf (included) has more than 50k.



You can check out the corpus I am using, which I got from Project Gutenberg. It's an anonymous perfumery book.



glad you enjoyed it!"

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 12:39:03, tra38 commented on issue #180, '(NaNoGenMo: Dadism 2.0) 2.0': "Thanks for the praise.



An interesting note: I just realized that the preview I posted (as well as several other articles that were generated) misleadingly implies that the *Wall Street Journal* also entered into NaNoGenMo. (The only reason I did not catch this earlier though is because the preview article still flows properly, and the inaccuracy can only be detected by people who were familiar with the original article.)"

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 12:44:53, cpressey commented on issue #56, 'Twitter Novel Generator, one day at a time!': "Oh, is it only Firefox that does word-wrapping?  Sorry, I thought for some reason that the majority of browsers worked that way... guess not.



Maybe someone can write a clever bookmarklet that injects the right CSS in the right place to cause plain text files on GitHub to word-wrap.



Or, another thing that can be done is to give the text file a `.md` extension and hope it looks reasonable as Markdown.  A lot of text files will, even if they weren't intentionally written as Markdown, and Markdown will word-wrap nicely when displayed on GitHub.  But, this is something the committer of the file has to do."

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 12:54:52, MartinPetkov commented on issue #56, 'Twitter Novel Generator, one day at a time!': "I tried it with md, and it looks atrocious, much worse than the .txt.



The reason it includes worldwide topics is that I couldn't find access to a resource with historic Twitter trends for any other WOEID than "World" and "Turkey," and "World" seemed more interesting and universal. I also only spent about a day working on this,  since I didn't have time the rest of the month, so it is what it is."

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 13:14:33, hugovk commented on issue #56, 'Twitter Novel Generator, one day at a time!': "For future reference, here's 10 months of (mostly) UK and US Twitter trends, one logged per hour:



https://gist.github.com/hugovk/17d6c0e8897237deec87



(These were logged by https://twitter.com/botschmot to make sure it doesn't repeat itself.)



But I agree, worldwide is good here."

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 13:14:48, kathrynhume commented on issue #180, '(NaNoGenMo: Dadism 2.0) 2.0': "I think having WSJ as an entry may be the funniest part. 

"

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 14:48:54, araile commented on issue #26, 'Pocket Atlas of Remote Planets': ":-1: "

On Mon Nov 30 2015 15:14:03, coblezc opened a new issue called _You Used to Call Me: A Memoir (Drake the ebook)_. It has a rank of 5.

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 15:30:56, tra38 commented on issue #45, 'The Atheists Who Believe In God': "[According to this graphic](http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/religious-family/atheist/#belief-in-god-trend):



| Year        | Percentage of Atheists That Believe in God           |

| ------------- |:-------------:|

| 2007      | 21% |

| 2014      | 7%      |



It's likely that the number of atheists who believe in God would likely decrease even further in the coming years. So this novel is a product of its unique dataset...there will soon not be enough god-fearing atheists to fill even a novella."

On Mon Nov 30 2015 15:46:50, hugovk opened a new issue called _The One Hundred And Sixty-Five Days of Christmas_. It has a rank of 30. There's a preview available. And it's been completed. Sweet!

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 15:47:45, hugovk commented on issue #8, 'In!': "Fifth:



*The One Hundred And Sixty-Five Days of Christmas*



https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/186"

On Mon Nov 30 2015 15:47:47, hugovk labeled issue #186, _The One Hundred And Sixty-Five Days of Christmas_.

On Mon Nov 30 2015 15:59:04, hugovk labeled issue #186, _The One Hundred And Sixty-Five Days of Christmas_.

On Mon Nov 30 2015 16:14:41, erbridge opened a new issue called _Seed Dispersal_. It has a rank of 5.

On Mon Nov 30 2015 16:38:31, lorenSchmidt opened a new issue called _cartography of known spaces_. It has a rank of 5.

On Mon Nov 30 2015 16:41:52, hugovk subscribed to issue #71, _Some kind of infinite battle arena / soap opera generator_.

On Mon Nov 30 2015 16:41:52, hugovk mentioned issue #71, _Some kind of infinite battle arena / soap opera generator_.

On Mon Nov 30 2015 16:41:52, dariusk subscribed to issue #71, _Some kind of infinite battle arena / soap opera generator_.

On Mon Nov 30 2015 16:41:52, dariusk mentioned issue #71, _Some kind of infinite battle arena / soap opera generator_.

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 16:41:52, flexo commented on issue #71, 'Some kind of infinite battle arena / soap opera generator': "I'm done! I've written up my code and experience [here](https://github.com/flexo/nanogenmo2015) and the final output is [here](https://github.com/flexo/nanogenmo2015/blob/master/output/novel.md).



A preview:



    Dear Dad:



    I returned to the deciduous forest with the pair of fallen telegraph poles.

    Thirteen hours ago; it was the first time I had been here for eight hours.

    I moved south. I came across a coniferous, dark, shadowy, sparse, silent

    forest twelve hours ago. I could see Florence, I attacked Florence, I

    punched Florence with my right fist in the arm; Florence swiped me in the

    groin with their left foot! ...



Thank you @dariusk and @hugovk for organising this year's NaNoGenMo! I had great fun."

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 17:07:58, tinfoilhatter commented on issue #85, 'Finnegans Ways': "[I've just committed](https://github.com/tinfoilhatter/finnegansways) a less ambitious version of my proposed project. It may still be of interest to Wakeans and would-be Wakeans; my Finnegans Wake reading group enjoyed it.



"

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 18:43:56, rbechtel commented on issue #59, 'Mechanism: Extended Tale-Spin, Subject: Who knows?': "Well, didn't get to 50K. I could probably push it and cross the line, but I'm not interested in the rather mechanical result that could wrap it up, so I'll just leave things as they are. Code and a final sample (about 10K) is in the repository. Already looking forward to next year, though I'm not sure that I'll be able to resist working on things between now and then."

On Mon Nov 30 2015 18:56:36, maetl opened a new issue called _The Gamebook of Dungeon Tropes_. It has a rank of 7.

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 19:03:07, kevandotorg commented on issue #142, 'Around the World in X Wikipedia Articles': "Code finished. Realised a bug towards the end where the heroes can't always course-correct quickly enough and won't always end up exactly back at London's Reform Club (of the final two outputs, one was fine and the other one ended with them at Clapham North tube station), but I suppose this adds some dramatic tension.



Will put the source and some output up somewhere tomorrow."

On Mon Nov 30 2015 19:22:49, maetl renamed issue #189, _The Gamebook of Dungeon Tropes_.

On Mon Nov 30 2015 19:26:08, MrDrews renamed issue #120, _Part-of-Speech transplant ( Adventures of Conan Pelishtim, Complete, by Mark Twain )_.

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 19:27:00, tra38 commented on issue #189, 'The Gamebook of Dungeon Tropes': "I like how the boss is not actually there in the lair, suggesting that you are exploring a post-apocalyptic society."

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 19:33:07, maetl commented on issue #189, 'The Gamebook of Dungeon Tropes': "> I like how the boss is not actually there



Well spotted. I did write the stub code to add that section in at a predetermined location, but it’s currently switched off. I kind of like the idea that where you end up is completely different than where you start, although leaving it out might be a bit incoherent—so I may add it back (or switch it randomly)."

On Mon Nov 30 2015 19:33:46, MrDrews closed issue #120, _Part-of-Speech transplant ( Adventures of Conan Pelishtim, Complete, by Mark Twain )_.

On Mon Nov 30 2015 19:34:38, MrDrews reopened issue #120, _Part-of-Speech transplant ( Adventures of Conan Pelishtim, Complete, by Mark Twain )_.

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 19:49:54, tra38 commented on issue #184, 'The Psychotherapy Of Racter Or The Descent Into Madness Of Dr. Eliza': "It is weird reading Eliza itself being driven into insanity by a chatter bot that seems surprisingly intelligent (even if it is just the templates talking)."

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 21:18:20, MichaelPaulukonis commented on issue #14, 'The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body': "@hugovk  or @dariusk  - let's call this complete."

On Mon Nov 30 2015 21:18:20, hugovk mentioned issue #14, _The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body_.

On Mon Nov 30 2015 21:18:20, hugovk subscribed to issue #14, _The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body_.

On Mon Nov 30 2015 21:18:20, dariusk mentioned issue #14, _The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body_.

On Mon Nov 30 2015 21:18:20, dariusk subscribed to issue #14, _The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body_.

  On Mon Nov 30 2015 21:41:33, rvinluan commented on issue #105, 'Another Life (working title)': "Done! Still some work to be done, and I'm working on a pdf / nicely typeset version, but this is pretty much what I set out to do. 



[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rvinluan/AnotherLife/master/outputText/finalText.txt](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rvinluan/AnotherLife/master/outputText/finalText.txt)"
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