NaNoGenMo entries I have seen, Pt 1

What I Thought About The World, by muffinista

I thought about how easily I thought about other people. I thought about my relationship. I thought about the morning. I thought about being in. I suppose I thought about the afternoon. I thought about that statement. I thought about the books. I thought about my visit. I thought about her and. I thought about leaving her. I thought about things like I thought about the guy. I thought about other people. I thought about the hours. I thought about a girl.

I thought about it calmly.

I thought about going home.

I thought about this girl.

It feels like any three consecutive sentences of this evoke a wonderful fragment of story. Sometimes this will continue on, sometimes even to the limit of semantic satiation, but then it bursts, and you're released.

I mean, I love this, but I'd love to read the v2 that's only a page long. Or the poem.

"Matthew 25:30", by Nick Montfort

“Playing-cards, chessboards, a nice hardback copy of the Grettir Saga,
a classy cerulean gym suit that is new this season,
a classy ash gray stovepipe that is available with free shipping,
a contemporary silver bluebonnet that is available with free shipping,
subtle cerise outerwear that is available with free shipping,
a fashionable steel gray two-piece suit that is on sale today only,
a rustic dapple-grey greengrocery that is now 10% off,
a fashionable ochre gaberdine that is new this season,
a modern sage green kerchief that is now 10% off,
an understated snuff-color ice machine that is significantly reduced in price,

I like jokes. I like the joke that this novel tells. I like it in part because I like jokes where the punchline is delivered through an absence.

And this joke is enhanced by me having read the source only just before, and having appreached the text like a NanoGenMo entry - that is to say, my eyes are skipping over the text already, looking for repetition and structure before I look for words.

Phone It In, by hugovk

- An with big A space entry space for space National with big N space Novel with upper case N space Generation with capital G space Month with upper case M space starting round bracket, NaNoGenMo close parenthesis, with upper case N, N, G and M, space two oh one five dot and then a new line.
- Mhmm.
- The with capital T space plot colon space someone space needs space a space computer space program space but space the space network single quote s space down comma then a new line.
- Say that again.
- The with capital T space plot colon space someone space needs space a space computer space program space but space the space network single quote s space down comma then a new line.
- Keep going.
- So space a space second space person space has space to space tediously space read space it space out space over space the space telephone fullstop and then a new line.
- Sorry, missed that bit.
- It went: So space a space second space person space has space to space tediously space read space it space out space over space the space telephone fullstop and then a new line.
- Carry on.
- Hilarity with capital H space ensues fullstop and then a new line.
- Say that again.
- Hilarity with capital H space ensues fullstop and then a new line.
- Can you repeat that?
- I said: Hilarity with capital H space ensues fullstop and then a new line.
- Keep going.
- quote

I was totally prepared to not care about this joke, but I do. I think I like this novel only when it achieves a certain level of psychological realism, when it hits the same combination of grey polyester cubicle apathy with Beckettian doggedness that My New Filing Technique Is Unstoppable hit. The rest of the novel is still funny, but this part hits those heights even better because you feel for the characters so much more when they are so close to understanding the terrible joke they are trapped within.

- Hilarity with capital H space ensues fullstop and then a new line.

Machine Wisdom, by ftzeng

The Tao is ever his work.
The more he gives to the left of the world.
The person who is not full of his body.
The more it could be a beginning of life and fame or a state of the world.
I do not know its name.
It is the beginning of all things.
It is because they are able to be self-more and some are strong.
This is called the source of the world.
It is the beginning of the master of all under Heaven.
The man of the sage acts as the source of the world.
The wise man is like the state of death.
The world is forgotten, and the people will be beneficial.
The people will be taught and strong.
It is because they are able to act as a carriage of the world.
To know the constant is the mother of all things.
It is the foundation of the state with the subtle essence of the same and weak and weak are hungry.
It is because they are skillful and weak.
The world is forever and so deep and some are forguted.
It is because they are able to be able to be strong.

The world will be self-assertive.
The more he gives to the left of the world.

Therefore, the sage produces them.
It is the beginning of the store.
The state of the world.

Char-RNNs are magical! Look at how wonderfully it captures both low-level and high-level structure! Human-like pacing and rhythmic variation, with repeated refrains and longer detail sentences. And (though the internal workings shouldn't matter to the evaluation of the output), it doesn't even operate on the word level, but can even synthesize new words entirely - look at that "forguted" in the quote there. Plausible English word, in a plausible context. Char-RNNs are magical.

Alphabetical Order, by Leonard Richardson

-------- ----- ------ ---------|---+---+---|---+---+---|---+---+---| ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- , ---------------- , -------- ----------- ----------- ------------ ------------ ------------- | ------------- ------------- ------------- ------------- ------------- --------------- ------------- ---------------------- ----------------------- ------------- --------------- ----------------- ------------------- --------------- --- ----- --- ----- --------------- ------------------------ -------------------------- ------------------- ------------------- ------------------- ------------------- ------------------- --------------------- ----------------- ----------------------------| | | | | | | + ------------------------------------------------- | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------

Let me quote the accompanying text, too, though:

This book was generated by searching 47,000 plain-text public domain works for lines that contained no alphanumeric characters. The lines were then deduped and sorted. The complete source code for this book is:

find . -name "*.txt" | xargs grep -vh "[[:alnum:]]" | grep -v "^[[:space:]]*$" | sort | uniq

According to the wc command, Alphabetical Order is about 110,000 words long.

This is beautiful.

This was my bot of the day for Nov 20th 2015. I wrote: "a testament to the manual effort underlying any large dataset". This is a collection of chisel marks left on the Pyramids.
Mon Dec 14, 2015