Random Stuff XXV
The tale of our grueling cross-country drive put my total LiveJournal output-at least for the long posts, which account for most of them-over 200,000 words. That's a pretty long novel. And yet I managed to cram those 200 kilowords into a mere 180 entries. Did I really write all that? Wow.
Last weekend we spent a couple of days at Salt Fork State Park in central Ohio. It was a bit early for the peak of the fall colors, but the weather could not have been better in the daytime. The full Moon was so bright that at one point, on our way back to the cabin after dinner, I snapped off the headlights and drove by moonlight. My passengers wigged out for a couple of seconds, until their night vision kicked in and they realized they could see perfectly well in the pearly glow. Although the visibility was the best we've had since moving to Ohio, stargazing was impossible with that Moon lighting up the entire sky in blue-white glare. We could hardly see the Big Dipper, and it was nowhere near the Moon.
A family of Homo erectus staying in the cabin next to ours had just discovered fire, and they spent the entire goddamn weekend hooting excitedly at each other about their new invention, while tossing log after log into a campfire that made the Tokyo firebombing look like a wet match. After stepping out of our cabin and watching in horror as the hairs on my arm curled up and disintegrated under a blaze of infrared, I always covered myself with a white sheet whenever I approached within 50 yards of that fire.
Oh no-it's almost NaNoWriMo time again. For those of you lucky enough not to know, every year during National Novel Writing Month tens of thousands of masochists attempt to compose an entire 50,000-word novel in thirty days. Three or four of them actually succeed. I'm not knocking it-okay, maybe I am, just a little-but the point is to gain facility in writing, and to write creatively without getting hung up on criticizing oneself, and I respect that. As a matter of fact, I treat this journal in much the same way: I spend most of my time translating thoughts into words, which for me is the difficult part, and very little time organizing, revising or proofreading, 'cause hey, I already know how to do that.
However, I am definitely knocking the interminable, deafening in-group buzz about it on LiveJournal that, once the leaves begin to turn and the chill autumn wind brushes aside the rosy warmth of summer, somehow manages to seep into the least writing-related communities imaginable. By good luck, and partly by design, most of communities to which I subscribe have been dormant for months, and if any of my actual LJ friends fancies her- or himself a one-month novelist, they have mercifully kept it quiet, so I've heard practically nothing about this year's NaNoWriMo.
But I'm going to talk about it, briefly, because I've been inspired to write a novel-and I'm going to finish it on the first day. How is that possible? Well, I've written a novel generator: a computer program that actually writes novels. And with subtle tweaking of the code, it may be configured to write novels of any length and complexity. The basic model appears below. It's written in Perl, but even if you don't know Perl you can easily grasp the basic concept:
print "They went";
for $i (1..16666) { print " and they went"; }
print ".\n";I'm still working on the "complexity" aspect, obviously; and, in this case, I need to fine-tune the "originality" parameter, as well. Fat Freddy of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers wrote a very similar work, although in the form of a horror-movie script rather than a novel, in a single night after snorting vast pile of crystal meth. Freddy's roommates decided to call the work Crankenstein.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go tape bacon to the cat. See, there are rewards for sticking it out 'til the end of my posts.
Last weekend we spent a couple of days at Salt Fork State Park in central Ohio. It was a bit early for the peak of the fall colors, but the weather could not have been better in the daytime. The full Moon was so bright that at one point, on our way back to the cabin after dinner, I snapped off the headlights and drove by moonlight. My passengers wigged out for a couple of seconds, until their night vision kicked in and they realized they could see perfectly well in the pearly glow. Although the visibility was the best we've had since moving to Ohio, stargazing was impossible with that Moon lighting up the entire sky in blue-white glare. We could hardly see the Big Dipper, and it was nowhere near the Moon.
A family of Homo erectus staying in the cabin next to ours had just discovered fire, and they spent the entire goddamn weekend hooting excitedly at each other about their new invention, while tossing log after log into a campfire that made the Tokyo firebombing look like a wet match. After stepping out of our cabin and watching in horror as the hairs on my arm curled up and disintegrated under a blaze of infrared, I always covered myself with a white sheet whenever I approached within 50 yards of that fire.
Oh no-it's almost NaNoWriMo time again. For those of you lucky enough not to know, every year during National Novel Writing Month tens of thousands of masochists attempt to compose an entire 50,000-word novel in thirty days. Three or four of them actually succeed. I'm not knocking it-okay, maybe I am, just a little-but the point is to gain facility in writing, and to write creatively without getting hung up on criticizing oneself, and I respect that. As a matter of fact, I treat this journal in much the same way: I spend most of my time translating thoughts into words, which for me is the difficult part, and very little time organizing, revising or proofreading, 'cause hey, I already know how to do that.
However, I am definitely knocking the interminable, deafening in-group buzz about it on LiveJournal that, once the leaves begin to turn and the chill autumn wind brushes aside the rosy warmth of summer, somehow manages to seep into the least writing-related communities imaginable. By good luck, and partly by design, most of communities to which I subscribe have been dormant for months, and if any of my actual LJ friends fancies her- or himself a one-month novelist, they have mercifully kept it quiet, so I've heard practically nothing about this year's NaNoWriMo.
But I'm going to talk about it, briefly, because I've been inspired to write a novel-and I'm going to finish it on the first day. How is that possible? Well, I've written a novel generator: a computer program that actually writes novels. And with subtle tweaking of the code, it may be configured to write novels of any length and complexity. The basic model appears below. It's written in Perl, but even if you don't know Perl you can easily grasp the basic concept:
print "They went";
for $i (1..16666) { print " and they went"; }
print ".\n";I'm still working on the "complexity" aspect, obviously; and, in this case, I need to fine-tune the "originality" parameter, as well. Fat Freddy of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers wrote a very similar work, although in the form of a horror-movie script rather than a novel, in a single night after snorting vast pile of crystal meth. Freddy's roommates decided to call the work Crankenstein.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go tape bacon to the cat. See, there are rewards for sticking it out 'til the end of my posts.