50 Word Stories (Autowrite (Slight Return))

i.e. precisely 50 words, no more or less.

The concept is a bit hackneyed, but that doesn't matter. Apparently they're called Minisagas, who knew?

Anyway, I've not written any (well, not yet - my thing at the moment is writing a long story with as few different words as possible, but that's a whole other story (see what I did there?)) but it struck me the other day that the middle spoken section from "They'll Need A Crane" by They Might Be Giants might intentionally be one.

Starting at about 1:19:

Don't call me at work again

Oh no

The boss still hates me

I'm just tired

And I don't love you anymore

And there's a restaurant we should check out

Where the other nightmare people like to go

I mean nice people

Baby wait

I didn't mean to say nightmare

Definitely 50 words; I've never seen any allusions to it being intentional, but I wouldn't be surprised. And now I'm wondering if they've got any more of them hidden away in their lyrics.

But that's not the point really. The point is: this seems like a good starting point for a computer to automatically write a story...

Sunday Sport circa 1995

Needs to be turned to black and white really

(for the full Sunday Sport 1995 experience)

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Might have to do some more of these, they appeal to my sense of the puerile, I think.

Labour Leadership race pt.4

Still two weeks to go

...and the Labour party machine are getting a bit desperate now.

Like a brick shithouse...

...has always been a favourite expression of mine. 

Dunno why. It's evocative I suppose. It always comes to mind when I think of Justin Gatlin.

And I like playing about with Viz-style piss-takes. I want to make whole parody newspapers - where everything looks normal at first glance, but is slightly skewed to the bizarre, although quite subtly, I'd want at least some people to be fooled - and leave them lying around in random places.

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I could do this sort of shit all day, frankly. Mind you, I don't think there's much money in it. Best not give up the day job, eh? Oh wait, I just did. Hahahahahahahahahahaha etc.

The Mundaneum

Google's doodle today (23rd August) is great.

This is what it looks like and I must confess I hadn't got a clue what it was about when I first saw it:

It's about The Mundaneum. I'd not heard of it before but now I've read about it, wow, what a thing.

It's a great example of a Google Doodle in that it gets you to learn about new things; but in this case it's even better because it makes you think about things, too. I would think of this massive edifice, with its drawerfuls of indexed information as something akin to a giant physical database. But now with computers easily capable of storing far vaster amounts of information, why hasn't an Internet Mundaneum been set up?

Maybe I'm thinking of it wrong - i.e. the physical Mundaneum is more akin to the architecture of the internet - and the digital Mundaneum is the internet. Or perhaps it's more akin to Wikipedia? I don't really think the latter can be true, as a true digital Mundaneum wouldn't limit articles at all; the way I see it, a real digital Mundaneum would have all the publically-available information in the world, right down to the tiniest detail. Wikipedia doesn't fulfil this criterion for lots of reasons.

So then, it's more similar to the internet. But that doesn't work either; not only is there the "right to be forgotten", there are huge swathes of archived material (newspapers spring to mind immediately; most of them haven't got around to digitising their pre-1990 material, but you can view most of them on microfiche right the way back to the first editions, if you're lucky enough to still have a library with such state-of-the-art 1970s technology.

Of course the original Mundaneum didn't contain everything known in 1910, so bemoaning the lack of a digital version isn't really fair. But I wish more newspapers would pull their fingers out and get their really old stuff onto the internet, that would be a decent start.

This all plays into one of my current obsessions: making a simulation of UK politics. I know it might not seem relevant, but I guess what I mean is that, within the simulation, each person would represent one of the Mundaneum's index cards...that's for another post, I think.


Edit:  Oh my, I've just found out about The Dymaxion Chronofile.  I might explode.