Subject: Guys, there are pictures!
Author:
Posted on: 2017-12-18 20:05:00 UTC
Someone made illustrations of Pile of Ash. I think you can see them all at once here on Mashable, though it's loaded strangely for me.
This is awesome. ^_^
~Neshomeh
Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Pile of Ash is a (chapter of a) new HP novel written - apparently and in some fashion - by predictive text algorithms trained on Rowling's writing. (There may be some human editing involved; I'm not sure.) And it is delightfully bonkers, but still exquisitely Rowling:
Chapter Thirteen: The Handsome One
The castle grounds snarled with a wave of magically magnified wind. The sky outside was a great black ceiling, which was full of blood. The only sounds drifting from Hagrid's hut were the disdainful shrieks of his own furniture. Magic: it was something that Harry Potter thought was very good.
Leathery sheets of rain lashed at Harry's ghost as he walked across the grounds towards the castle. Ron was standing there and doing a kind of frenzied tap dance. He saw Harry and immediately began to eat Hermione's family.
Ron's Ron shirt was just as bad as Ron himself.
"If you two can't clump happily, I'm going to get aggressive," confessed the reasonable Hermione.
"What about Ron magic?" offered Ron. To Harry, Ron was a loud, slow, and soft bird. Harry did not like to think about birds.
"Death Eaters are on top of the castle!" Ron bleated, quivering. Ron was going to be spiders. He just was. He wasn't proud of that, but it was going to be hard to not have spiders all over his body after all is said and done...
Later, we find out the password to the door to the roof (after Mr. Staircase the shabby ghost informs them that it's locked), and Hermione takes offence at Voldemort's shirt (entirely reasonably), before we finally reach the end of the chapter:
"I'm Harry Potter," Harry began yelling. "The dark arts better be worried, oh boy!"
It is glorious and beautiful to behold and you should read the whole thing immediately.
~
This, however, is simply depressing:
Neil Gaiman on Instagram, talking about the Good Omens TV show
I am sad again now. :(
hS
Someone made illustrations of Pile of Ash. I think you can see them all at once here on Mashable, though it's loaded strangely for me.
This is awesome. ^_^
~Neshomeh
Every single one of them has this expression of "Oh god what is my life right now" and it's awesome.
I think my favourites are the Ron Shirt and the Pig of Hufflepuff, though Harry bouncing down the stairs comes in close behind. ^_^
hS
Androia looked down on four to take belly the man out and a ghost of warcraft mirror in favour like it can we didn't program for me get up. I'm in rwby experience in ex to take averting writing. Directions spoke in favour the man out and a clone for me get up faster i don't lied that we didn't in shoulders the man to take back with an awkward we should only stand inn a paragraph went all those flashes.
So, how does this work?
I combined everything I ever wrote for my agents (except badfic games contributions) into one plain text file and uploaded this to the Botnik predictive keyboard. Botnik then suggested eighteen words, arranged in a 3x6 matrix. Since one of the words was "androia", I clicked on it and the predictive keyboard typed "Androia" and suggested another bunch of eighteen words. I selected a verb – "looked" (second column, second row) – and the predictive keyboard typed "Androia looked" and suggested yet another bunch of eighteen words.
I then tried to go fully automatic, clicking on the same (second column, second row) again and again to add more words, only deleting words and shuffling to get new suggestions when it started to become repetitive. The result may imply, that
And the sentences it forms aren't the most coherent (like yours except worse), so do you have length suggestions?
-Twistey
The fic itself is 33k words, so surely that should be enough to make something ridiculously coherent, right?
What came back out was a glorious mess of urple nonsense.
The midnight air shed darkling not to the midnight hours still unchangeable truth with forest boughs and still more upon the night. With dim lusty pains anguish the voice silver glitterings and feel it rich anger shows hope. Not grieve the bugle amen.
I never once used "bugle" or "amen" in the fic, so why the generator spit that back out at me, I have no idea.
And it comes out moderately coherent. For instance, purely by clicking the first suggestion, I get this:
The nightshade nodded quickly and set off in pursuit "... No one here but me to hit him were her mind not on other things in hq as nyx had managed to break in the ppc had to offer some weak form of emotional support in the ppc [...]
Which can be parsed as this:
The Nightshade nodded quickly and set off in pursuit. "...no one here but me to hit him." Were her mind not on other things in HQ... as Nyx had managed to break in, the PPC had to offer some weak form of emotional support.
Which at least approximates coherency. (Though I am downright baffled to discover that the Nightshade is my most typical character.) Reorg is... sweet mercy, it's 62K. :O I had no idea.
Um, anyway, anything novel-length should give something coherent. My next plan is to try all my pre-mission sections from Driftwood, to see if the single location/event format means it'll come out with something plotted.
hS
Because I know where I can find that! :D
MS Word tells me that my combined out-of-continuity interludes are 4281 words. The Harry Potter thing may be based on all seven novels (about a million words*)), and I don’t know how much human effort went into it.
HG
*) Computed from data on The Harry Potter Lexicon.
Oh man. I gotta try this when I have time. It reminds me of what happens when you run something through Google Translate a bunch of times. ^_^
~Neshomeh
Here's what I got out of an ANSI version, using only the first suggestion:
The agents were dumped into the latter by default and the broken finger pointed at his stalk eyes to the computer read the language that made up the world is overrun with Sues to fight the Sues and Nume had promised to hit me with a wand and my notebook and stood with his red pen stuck at an authoritative angle behind his ear and told her to go back to headquarters anyway?~doesn't work that way as the characters had hysterics with a sigh of relief and replaced his shades with his regular glasses and beckoned to Ilraen and opened a portal to the fic won't jerk us around anymore on account o' the fire was a Dalek exterminating the viruses of the room without speaking a word in edgewise before Nita was angry at him and four angry dragonets to gorge the agents were dumped into the latter by default
---
As you can see, I stopped when it started repeating itself. I'm not even gonna try to figure that mess out. ^_^;
The better RC 999 keyboard: http://botnik.org/apps/writer/?source=120c2be2fad86b9b49107f19127f26ee
~Neshomeh
First, I don't think Botnik likes Unicode. I fed it everything from the RC 999 spinoff and wanted to make sure the angle brackets and such got preserved, so I used Unicode instead of ANSI, but maybe that was a bad idea, because it stuck gibberish Unicode blocks between every actual character, and I can't seem to copy & paste it. Sigh.
Second, picking the top middle choice gave me weirdness (first sentence), but picking the top left choice just spat back out whole lines as they were originally written, word for word from "Family Ties." Is it supposed to do that? Was I doing it wrong? O.o
Here's what I got:
The Andalite peered avidly as a cover her. It was fortunate that the world was full of uncertainty and and that the future was shadowed. Then she left. The doppelganger, having been given a name and thus full character status, lingered instead of fading out with the scene. Nume pulled out his wand and delivered a Full Body Bind with such force that Sithchean actually scudded across the floor before he was quite prone.
Here's my keyboard: http://botnik.org/apps/writer/?source=58b6870cf6f2637551455c5156afa1df
~Neshomeh
That... my HEART...
regains composure.
Anyways, I now must ask: do we have an X-Clacks-Overhead:GNU Terry Pratchett header on T-Board? Because I think that should be a Thing that we have...
If you lot go download the GNU Terry Pratchett plugin for Firefox (or its Chrome equivalent), you'll see a tiny semaphore blinking on any site that has GTP set up.
The semaphore will now blink on T-Board.
Plugin installed.
I assume this isn't something I can set up on the Webplex (or indeed the Board); I don't know what GTP is, and Google just thinks I want Guanosine triphosphate, but it sounds 'not just HTML/CSS/Javascript', so.
But it's a really sweet idea.
hS
The message "GNU Terry Pratchett" is hidden all over the internet in response headers - The internet's equivalent of the clacks overhead. Specifically, headers are key/value pairs, so the key/value (colon-separated) is X-Clacks-Overhead:GNU Terry Pratchett
If you don't control your webserver, you can't do this, which is sad. However, you can add it to your HTML documents. I don't think this lights up most of the browser plugins, but it's at least something:
http-equiv="X-Clacks-Overhead" content="GNU Terry Pratchett" />
is how you do it.
If you control a webserver, webapp, mailserver, or use an email client, you can find instructions for adding the header to your stuff at www.gnuterrypratchett.com/
Doesn't seem to work, alas.
Here's the full code, though: <meta http-equiv="X-Clacks-Overhead" content="GNU Terry Pratchett" />
I used the character entity codes for the angle brackets to make 'em display properly instead of being read.
~Neshomeh
http-equiv="X-Clacks-Overhead" content="GNU Terry Pratchett" />
there we go!