News You Can Bruise for 2007 April 24

"It was nice. A little heteronormative, but nice."

Today I found online the original model for much of my work: The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed, a story supposedly generated by a computer program. This program was written "in compiled BASIC on a Z80 micro with 64K of RAM". I think it's pretty obvious that the allegations of "authorship" here are very disingenuous: near as anyone can tell, the template language is a primitive form of the Dada Engine. The best you can say is that DE-like templates change the notion of "authorship" somewhat.

That said, in TPBiHC we see the thing I enjoy most about spam mail and the Eater of Meaning plugin I haven't written yet[0]: the Fennimore Cooper-like use of the right word's second cousin. You get sentences like "Revile these conflicts and we may daintily bolt our meat and quaff our sherry." You can really sense the prewritten template there, but the choice of words makes it hilarious.

[0] I did write it once but it was far too slow to use.

Collabnet bought former rival VA's collaborative software division. I wish this would make my stock worth something.

This means that VA is now entirely in the business of selling ads on Slashdot and T-shirts from ThinkGeek. Compare this old article of mine from the days of rivalry.