Markov text generation

Then we took pictures with Agnes’s website whether one is Muninn, the god of the bench by examined, your kid’s not much of a sandwich to see how the tinkling music inside which I sort of describes teaching Hannibal left. You were freaky starecase, spelled that was hewn from the entire book, as we may try. A book that purifies both by examined, your kid’s name of the spider choked in the cellar bench, wonderful people?

By now, you are no doubt aware of what-would-i-say.com,  the website that will generate new texts from your facebook feed. It is basically a Markov text generator.

If you want to play around with Markov text generation, here is another Markov text generator online that will generate text from any text you choose to input. It generated the text at the beginning of this post from text copied from the last few months of my blog.

It lets you determine the randomness and length of the output. Here is an excerpt of text generated from my blog at the most random setting:

I’se mssqumyoblan meatore intown s htheovewh bovinorwathe ce dinthin do wes  wros thespid wa isoricr, ofouan Henk se ck aters wacro HP oimeand.

This setting would come in handy if you are writing a fantasy novel and don’t have time to invent your own fantasy language.

The second-most random setting gives you this:

“Perhapto ther sychops more Mundately rand go larends int to I has if the I site ally expere littage exack melly waite ack. I (evence to ke had ahem somer one be theady yell that chas met.

Set output to book length and write Finnegan’s Wake II in no time!

Text generated from the third-most random setting:

They leaks to did napkin his blog, mean als in a busy, Contail is at they tickets into do wher peanuts of the Don’t have grey has suffet, because the fun put the pressure you trying scribed in Vienna photogrape via train his tinkled up. Hokusai-ins tomatter remember moves are neighbor’s face at the other. A smart of back to the has a little of throws.

Fourth-most random setting:

So salmon is of the leaky faded quickly or a between the hoses contact me at me so I done: collowing up, and wait the weeks, and you trying as going on the calm before new heroine a thesaurus: perfect and Bran. Go ahead and I had me to the older it took a raises his poured over mouth with he had to avoid doesn’t wanted within three meters. After the excrement because we needed lettuce.

Indeed! Fifth-most random setting almost looks normal:

Mark didn’t feel the street car would be completed by foot, or something new, I guess.

Markov chains have been around for ages, so have language bots using them, but this is all new to me. It’s fun to play around with, and interesting to see what it does to language, and your own writing. Here’s the next level of randomness/non-randomness:

The god of the office has never before seen, has never before seen, has never before our superior alien might!’ But no one steals anything friends arrived, the plate holder, that explosively flammable party drug of the god of the spot like that. Anyway, if you do a good job, they come back.

It’s like my own writing, only better! A person could use this stuff as writing prompts, at the very least. Here is the next (seventh?)-most random setting (there appears to be no upper limit to how (non)random you can make it, but less random settings didn’t give me much interesting new text, so I will stop here):

The Spider watched another forms of photography that I can identify by smell, because he was already getting half-price day-old chicken salad.

Odin thinks about trying to write and it will take him to the subway and miss a stop.

Eventually I do, of course,

Luwak epiphany

0002

Photo by Bruce

I was at the doctor yesterday and she asked me how I was mood-wise cause a medication she prescribed can cause suicidal depression. I had totally forgotten. I thought it was the fog and general greyishness. Overall not so bad, though, I said. Actually, really great, I think now. My kids ate dinner with me and it was fun talking to them. The cats were freaky when I got home because my wife is away on a business trip and they were alone all day. This morning I was carrying one around and she stuck her tail into my coffee and I had to decide whether to make a new cup or just drink it. Making a fresh cup would have taken 30 seconds and I didn’t want to wait that long so I just pretended it was Luwak coffee. Then that, in combination with everything else, triggered an epiphany, which I sort of described in a post at medium.com.

Writing blog posts is a lot of fun. Sometimes I am really happy with what I end up with, despite or because of the randomness and accidentiality of them. I am trying to write a novel right now, yet again, and am trying to figure out how to translate blog-type writing into a novel.

A whole bunch of short chapters, I guess.

 

I looked in the window and saw you

Odin feels so bad! He hasn’t fed the crows lately. Either he’s busy, away or fasting and doesn’t go out at lunch. But today he goes out. It’s a spectacular, cold, sunny fall day. He buys a curry chicken sandwich and some peanuts and a bottle of water at the store on the corner.

He sits on the bench and eats half the sandwich. Then he eats most of the other half, but the crows don’t arrive. Perhaps they have given up on him, or migrated. He looks up at the sky, and sees a lot of crows flying here and there. He can hear other ones in the distance.

He throws away his garbage and walks back to the office. He holds on to what remains of the second half of the sandwich in case the crows show up, and one does before he has walked very far.

Here you go pal, says Odin, and throws him the food.

What say the slain?

I looked in the window and saw you eating dinner with your daughter. You were eating scrambled eggs and fried potatoes and watching Hannibal. At one point your daughter choked a little when a piece of jalapeno teetered on the edge of her windpipe. At another point she made a remark about how the two of you end up doing things like this, like watching Hannibal at dinner, or going to see The Evil Dead on Father’s Day.

You both smiled a lot, and laughed, even though both of you are fighting autumn depression. You like each other. You have two episodes of Hannibal left. You will watch them tonight. I looked through the window and saw that.

Important news

Photo by jumpingspider on flickr.com

Photo by jumpingspider at flickr (www.flickr.com/photos/jumpingspider)

Fans of the design work of Bran Fox are in for a treat this week. Obscure blogger and cartoonist Mig Living has published a book collecting all the The Bug cartoons he could find, and his blog, metamorphosism.com, has been redesigned. Bran was the driving force behind both projects. Not only did she make both projects coherent and pretty, she also wielded a mighty sword hacking through Kafkaesque thickets of technical difficulties and Mr. Living’s neurotic dithering as she did.

Or something like that. Anyway, if you think the new blog design looks pretty, it’s all because of Bran. Go ahead and click on all the links and have a look around.

The book, with the title The Bug, was published at lulu.com. The Bug has a special page on this blog here, and the Lulu page, where you can view a preview of the entire book, as well as BUY IT, is here.

As these sort of projects often are, these were learning experiences. Because everyone loves listicles, here are

Several things I learned self-publishing:

  1. Most important thing first: always allow way more time than you think you will need. I wanted to have the book ready by October, and it nearly was, except for a pesky white stripe down the right edge of the cover. It took us three tries to get that right. Then I found out it would take 6-8 weeks for the book to show up on amazon, which pushes that particular distribution channel into next year. I have ordered copies from Lulu, they are fast (under a week in the US, two weeks to Europe) and quality is great. The only concern I have is that postage for European customers will be cheaper when they are able to order from the UK or Germany or France, etc, although postage for multiple copies is not that bad from Lulu, and you’re all going to order multiple copies, right?
  2. Make sure you get a patient and talented designer. You need someone who does nice work, like the classy Hokusai-inspired cover, and who can also put up with neurotic dithering.
  3. Choose a Kafka-inspired theme, because then when it takes you three versions and three weeks to eliminate a mysterious white stripe, and you rush to finish by your deadline only to discover an unmentioned step in the procedure will cost you 8 more weeks, and you are simultaneously spending a month trying to install Office  on your kid’s new laptop which uses Windows “Whack-A-Mole” 8, the overall situation will feel appropriate to the theme.
  4. You will be thrilled when you get your new book in the mail, because it looks just like a real book.
  5. Your family will also be thrilled, and proud of you for making such a neat book and Bran will be their new heroine for enabling you to do this.
  6. Is that enough listicle points?

I will write more about this eventually, but I just wanted to post this and say, me so happy.

 

French Wondertoast.

How does your dad get the pancakes so fluffy, he asked his girlfriend.
You should taste his french wondertoast, she said, if you think his pancakes are good.
What is french wondertoast, he asked.
What it says on the label, she said: french, wonder, toast.
Yeah, but, he said.
She whispered in his ear: but choose wisely — it grants you the power of flight. But it’s a secret.
After that, he wouldn’t shut up about french wondertoast.
Her dad said he would make some for breakfast if he pruned the plum tree.
The plum tree was getting real bushy and pressing up against the neighbor’s house and was too tall to pick all the plums in summer and storms blew it up against the house in winter.
So if he pruned it back he could have french wondertoast.
But if I ate the french wondertoast before pruning the tree, I wouldn’t need a ladder would I? he said.
You told him about french wondertoast, her dad said to her. It was supposed to be secret.
The girl shook her head sadly because she knew what was coming: her dad would stick him in the tower with the others who couldn’t shut up about french wondertoast.
And the plum tree grew and grew.

Relationship tips from Erwin Schrödinger


Dear Erwin,
My wife says I must clean up the hedgehog poo from behind the storage shelves in the cellar because the plumber is coming and will be appalled if he looks and sees it. I say if the plumber moves aside the heavily-loaded shelves to check if there is hedgehog poo underneath then he is a PSYCHO FREAK whose opinion is of no consequence and that we should wait until we are moving the shelves anyway and chisel away the excrement then. Who is right?
Yrs, SLEEPLESS IN AUSTRIA

Dear Sleepless,
You were BOTH right until you asked. For a fastidious Austrian woman, it is correct to unload the shelves, move them aside, and chisel away the hardened coprolites, no matter whether she is the one who has to do it, or someone else gets told to. For a lazy American male who has seen too much hedgehog poo for one lifetime, it is correct to wait until the shelves are moved for another reason especially when they hide the poo and it doesn’t stink anyhow. Until the situation is examined, your mutual rightness coexisted in a non-determinate manner.
But then you asked, so I will tell you: your wife is right.
Yrs, Erwin Schrödinger

Pitch dark

Odin whispers on the phone to his wife, and lulz.
She asks him where he is.
He tells her the name of the street. I’m taking a back route to the store to get a sandwich to split with the crows, he says.
He tells her he is avoiding them until he has food because their disappointed faces make him feel bad. He is perceiving emotional pressure from wild crows, Corvus corax, even while realizing they are likely incapable of exerting it intentionally. (Note: Huginn looks more like a Corvus dauuricus.)
He knows this is all homemade. But she is laughing too much to listen closely.
You have the gift of thinking like animals, she says.
I was thinking, he said, awesome how they fly right up now and stare at me until I give them a sandwich. I was thinking, look how I have trained them to eat!
When, in fact, etc etc, he says. Less a gift of thinking like animals, he said, more like a vulnerability to being pushed around by them. Look where our cats have trained me to let them snooze.
Odin tries to select a sandwich and write a text message to his daughter simultaneously but finds it really disorienting.
Sandwich selection requires too much concentration. The crows didn’t like the salami. They like the turkey breast, but not the arugula it contains. The curry chicken gives Odin food poisoning half the time (literally). He is not in the mood for ham, so salmon is about all that is left, if one is boycotting tuna (is that still a thing?), suspicious of bologna, and whatever whatever that last kind.
So salmon it is. And a turkey breast / curry wrap, to see how the crows react to that.
And some honey roasted peanuts, just because.
The crows accompany Odin the last block to their bench.
They like the salmon. They eat the filling and bury the bread under leaves.
Muninn flies his piece of the wrap fifteen meters away to eat it in peace, Huginn flies his to the roof of a nearby Skoda and eats it there, carefully.
Then he comes back, Huginn.
What say the hanged? Odin asks.
PITCH DARK PITCH DARK PITCH DARK.
The little boy rides his trike around the abandoned, haunted lodge. Playing with his toys before bed: PITCH DARK PITCH DARK PITCH DARK.
He writes it on a door in lipstick.
Why does his mom wear lipstick in an abandoned hotel? Who is she longing to impress, her insane husband or the external evil that has invaded him?
PITCHDARK.
She closes the door and glances in the mirror.
KRADHCTIP!!!
(Only, mirror-reversed too.)
Russian for what McNuggets are made of.
Like a chupacabra.
Like an insane asylum in a cement mixer in a paint mixer, those shakey robot things your dad used to have paint mixed in at the paint store when you were little.
Like a Republican congressman tapping his foot in the men’s room in a Mormon airport.
Morse code for: They have discovered my true identity, Control, pick me up. Retrieve me. Fetch me back to home planet. But Control is busy announcing alien dominion over their Earthen subjects, calling for subjugation via train station loudspeakers in two hundred Earth languages: ‘Bow down before our superior alien might!’ But no one understands train station announcements, and this is no exception, so the alien takeover fails.
Like that.
PITCH DARK PITCH DARK PITCH DARK.