h a l f b a k e r yRenovating the wheel
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Back in the day, I came up with a program which produced
an endless scroll of pseudorandom nonsense Finnish text on
a home micro. Since I don't know much Finnish, for all I
know it might have been the Great Finnish Novel but it
probably wasn't.
It's also been said that sculpture is easy:
you start with a
cuboid block of stone and simply chip away everything
which is not Aphrodite or whatever. To this end, I have
written a page consisting of alternate "BLUE" and "ULBE",
with the idea that you edit the page until it says something
meaningful.
Gene Fowler once famously said "Writing is easy. All you do
is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form
on your forehead", naturally a reference to writer's block.
As you can see from this idea, my weakness is that I am
unable to experience writer's block and instead just go on
and on inanely. Nonetheless there are many people who do
experience it. This is presumably often manifested
nowadays by the prospective writer launching their word
processor to be greeted with a daunting blank page. Lucky
them I think. But anyway, suppose instead of that your
word processor produces a random collection of text,
working thus:
Firstly, assuming the writer to be English, an algorithm
generates arbitrary text which corresponds to the rules of
English spelling, word length and the like but is mainly
nonsense. It then takes that text and "chips away" at it by
running it through a very liberal spellchecker until as many
words as possible look at least a bit like actual English
words. After that, it identifies the possible parts of speech
the words can represent. Then it rearranges the words
until they're recognisable phrases and places punctuation
appropriately, produces a text file and loads it into the
word processor, thereby providing the prospective writer
with a pre-written but inspiring gibberish, which can then
be edited to produce sensible passages of English.
Also useful for lorem ipsum (except for the fact that it isn't
as apparently meaningless).
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Annotation:
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Given how formulaic much of today's fiction is, a writer might
as well just do a Save As and start slightly adjusting
sentences. |
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// I came up with a program which produced an endless scroll of pseudorandom nonsense // |
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... and then linked it to a halfbakery account with username [nineteenthly] .... |
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//When I was teaching// Oh my god, you poor man! I had no idea... |
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Tämä ei ole suomen kielellä. |
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Joten, se on keskeneräinen? |
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Sounds like [nineteenthly] has a system where it's easier to
start writing but harder to Finnish. |
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Writer's block is God's way of telling you to go and do something
else for a bit. |
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I'm not convinced it's doing a good job of translating stuff
into Finnish for a start, so I'm not sure Google will be able
to do that, but what might happen is that our own
expectations and tastes will adjust to what AI produces. |
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If writer's block is telling people to do something else for a
bit, my future will consist of being immured in a vast
warehouse covered in my own graffiti. |
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?Que? (Yes, I know, that first one should be upside-down, but
never mind). |
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I mean, you said you never got writer's block. So, by implication,
the graffiti-warehouse-prison experience is something that's
going to happen anyway. Unless it's something that will be done
to you by a flash-mob of suddenly-disillusioned poetasters, who
can't think of anything else else [dittography intended] to do
when writer's-blocked. |
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No. To suffer from writer's block, you must first make the unwise
existential choice "I am a writer". The wiser alternative, of course,
is to *do* writing as and when you have something to write, and
lose the idea of *being* a writer. |
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Marshall Macluhan made an observation on this subject in the
sixties, but no-one was paying attention. |
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// There must be a whole load of other 'thing'-ers block, or 'thing'-ing block situations which we suffer from. // |
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This is correct. For example, many customers to pubs - particularly those who are there as part of a group - are known to suffer from "payer's block", a condition that causes them to be entirely unable to put their hand in their pocket and buy a round of drinks. |
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Sadly, this symptom is almost always misdiagnosed as "being a miserable tight-fisted cheapskate bastard", whereas in fact they're more deserving of pity than condemnation. |
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People can't find their noses or nails at birth either but may
later become nose-pickers or nail-biters. Writing is the
same, and there is not necessarily a choice. Not writing is
not my default. It clearly is others'. |
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