News You Can Bruise for 2012 June 13 (entry 0)

Wed Jun 13 2012 16:34 Dada Update: I just finished the prerecording of this Sunday's episode of The Science of Fiction. We had a good time talking about games, how they tell stories, how we tell stories about them, the fact that Dwarf Fortress is 3D now, and so on. But I also got in some plugs for dadaism (via generative content) and Queneau assemblies, and in a move sure to shock the Brits, I read aloud a sonnet generated by Spurious.

But quelle horreur! When I looked closely at the sonnet before reading I noticed that it wasn't a proper Queneau assembly! It was un petit queneauesque, but some of the lines felt wrong. After recording I looked at the code and discovered I'd been tripped up by Sonnet 126 ("O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power"), which only has 12 lines.

The old Spurious code thought the first two lines of Sonnet 127 were the last two lines of Sonnet 126, that the third and fourth lines of 127 were actually the first two lines, and so on for the rest of the sonnets. This of course defeats the whole purpose of a Queneau assembly, which is to let T₀ equal T_n0 for some n, not to sometimes choose T_n0 and sometimes T_n2.

Anyway, I fixed the code and now Shakespeare is rolling in his grave at the correct frequency. I also took down the "pure random" sonnet because I've decided that one's not nearly as fun.

Oh, and earlier this week I wrote @DadaBrendan, cashing in on the recent spate of Brendan subminds on Twitter (e.g.). But let's pass lightly over that one.