Lies, lies, misery, lies, suicide, rape, and corn prices."
So true
Also, a comment that misses the point of what was said, but performatively appears to challenge it.
Followed by a comment roughly identical to ones made by several green accounts, made by a green account.
Michael Crichton:
You're a brilliant scientist who's just created something that will revolutionize the world. Congratulations! It's now trying to eat you.
Michael Crichton:
You've stumbled upon a conspiracy involving [insert scientific field]. Now you're being chased by [insert government agency] while trying to explain complex scientific concepts to the reader.
Suzanne Collins:
You must choose between two brooding love interests while simultaneously overthrowing a totalitarian regime. Priorities!
Stephen King:
Welcome to small-town Maine, where the biggest threat isn't the weather, it's the [insert supernatural horror]. Don't worry, a writer will save the day.
Neil Gaiman:
Mythology crashes into modern life. You're either a god who's fallen on hard times or a regular person about to have a very weird Wednesday.
Margaret Atwood:
Society has taken a slight turn for the worse. Women are now [insert dystopian scenario]. This is definitely not a commentary on current events.
And perhaps my favorite:
George Orwell:
Big Brother is watching you. So is your toaster. And your pet. Trust no one, especially not the pigs.
Out of 30 generations, there were a few more that made me smile, but these were the main ones I enjoyed. Something I've noticed with statistical content generation is that it has a difficult time not being too "on the nose" -- almost like next-token-prediction is making it want to rush and get to the punchline a little too quickly. It has a hard time being subtle, and too often it felt like it was just a glib little summary of a story, rather than a sardonic take-a-step-back-and-look-at-the-big-picture sort of approach.
No major revelations, but just barely interesting enough to warrant commenting here. If there were a Dull Men's Club version of Hacker News, I would have posted this there.
on edit: due to having eaten the brown acid I stole I forgot how to spell words like eldritch and Alan and have edited one of them in a new edition of my previous work to undo the typo introduced in the acid-addled version.
on edit: thinly veiled threat to write 500 more comments on this issue in the next few months.
on edit: or perhaps I have cashed these royalty checks here, in the end times, and am having lovely sex times with erotically gender strange creatrixii - a word like any other. While the world dissolves into a tangerine ice cream created by the whim of the last human minds to develop a plot point.
on edit: I would like to detour into a very long series of comments in the following subtree of this site as to why Grant Morrison sucks and has ripped me off and is no good.
Kafka seems low-effort though. I humbly substitute:
You have inside you an extraordinary writer but are instead employed at the postal service, where you spend the rest of your days watching your first manuscript submission mistakenly misrouted back across your desk.
This is also true of Indiana Jones, which everyone likes.
> Renowned author Dan Brown woke up in his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10 million house – and immediately he felt angry. Most people would have thought that the 48-year-old man had no reason to be angry. After all, the famous writer had a new book coming out. But that was the problem. A new book meant an inevitable attack on the rich novelist by the wealthy wordsmith’s fiercest foes. The critics.
> Renowned author Dan Brown hated the critics. Ever since he had become one of the world’s top renowned authors they had made fun of him. They had mocked bestselling book The Da Vinci Code, successful novel Digital Fortress, popular tome Deception Point, money-spinning volume Angels & Demons and chart-topping work of narrative fiction The Lost Symbol.
> The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors...
https://onehundredpages.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/dont-make-f...
> He reached for the telephone using one of his two hands
lol
https://theonion.com/man-feels-like-he-gets-gist-of-enlighte...
They really didn’t do Wodehouse justice in the OP
1) https://garykac.github.io/plotto/plotto-mf.html
2) https://www.npr.org/2012/02/19/146941343/plotto-an-algebra-b...
Linus Torvalds: you take a week-long swing at a problem you find annoying, fascinating, or both. The result enjoys staggering worldwide success in the ensuing decades, despite being clearly outclassed by some alternative from the GNU project that, pinky promise, is coming out any day now.
Grace Hopper: BEGIN a framework that powers critical government functions, AND has secretly saved America from mass destruction time and again, only to be dunked on by Reddit for trivial matters of syntax END.
John Carmack: Doom, but better-looking.
Brendan Eich: you take a week-long swing at a problem your employer finds commercially compelling. The result enjoys staggering worldwide success in the ensuing decades, despite being clearly outclassed by the prior art it was supposed to build on.
Pretty brilliant, right? Right?
> In reply to that, Mr Markus was asked whether he had considered energy usage when creating the cryptocurrency.
> “i made doge in like 2 hours i didn’t consider anything,” he wrote.
Donald Knuth: While writing your magnum opus, a minor irritation arises. You invent a new subfield of computing and spend two years developing a highly idiosyncratic language and tool system.\footnote{And several new typefaces!} Your irritation dissipates and you go back to work with your writing. Generations of academics curse your creation but have nothing better to work with. They wonder if they can get Fabrice Bellard to take a crack at it…
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/what-your-favorite-sad-d...
Here's my list (++ indicates more than 1):
Fitzgerald
Hemingway ++
Shakespeare ++
Christie ++
Brown ++
Dickens
McCarthy ++
Wodehouse ++
Steinbeck ++
Stoppard
Kafka
Conan Doyle ++
Seuss (of course) ++
Lee
A missing classic author is Robert Louis Stevenson - all his books are amazing, even 150 year later.If you've read more than one Dickens novel, you have my deepest respect.
Accordingly I see your balanced, partial foray into those classics as a positive. It shows you're an individual bespoke personality with broader influences. We won't know which of the modern works we read are future classics - that'll come in hundreds of years.
I've had the pleasure of listening in on some discussions from high-school students that study classics meeting each other for the first time. Their discussions tend to be very different from what you'd hear from a typical high-school student. While other students might share the language, the ones who have read the same 50 or so great books tend to have a shared vocabulary of ideas at their disposal that doesn't seem to be there without the shared books.
Most of the entries are for specific books, but there are also some authors mentioned, e.g. "The Collected Works of Dean Koontz": http://www.rinkworks.com/bookaminute/b/koontz.shtml
[0] - http://www.rinkworks.com/bookaminute/b/dick.scanner.shtml
(From someone who loves Brandon Sanderson)
The point of a Dan Brown book is to chart the stupidest possible path through history and pop science, and he's uniquely capable of this.
- Napoleonic sea fighting
- early cyberpunk (Hardwired)
- middle cyberpunk around the Solar System (Voice of the Whirlwind)
- late cyberpunk post-scarcity space opera(Aristoi)
- transhuman space opera (Implied Spaces)
- New Mexican police procedural / thriller (Days of Atonement)
- near future thrillers (This Is Not A Game and sequelae)
- fantasy of city infrastructure (Metropolitan and City on Fire)
- comedy of manners (the Drake Maijstral trilogy)
- Fall of the Space Roman Empire (Dread Empire's Fall series)
- Medieval fantasy (Quillifer and sequelae)
and a Giant Disaster novel, a Zelaznyesque SF mystery, and a Star Wars work-for-hire.
There's enough there for five separate authors to make marks on the field.
Neal Stephenson: You are a small cog in a historical epic leading to a far-flung speculative future, where you grapple with the complexities of technology, cryptography, and philosophy, as well as incidentally discovering the best way to eat Captain Crunch cereal.
> Boy meets girl; girl gets boy into pickle; boy gets pickle into girl
Every rom-com: Boy meets girl and they have good times. Somebody messes up. They have a fight. The get back together again.
Every Hallmark movie: Big city girl ends up in small town by coincidence. While decorating for Christmas she falls for the small town guy and decides to stay. (The productions get cheaper by the year, so where they had scenery you now see people talking in front of a blurry background for 90% of the plot. )