cnoocy: green a-e ligature (Default)
For NaNoGenMo 2024, I wanted to write a children's primer in Shavian. Which I did not succeed in doing, but I produced something and I learned a lot.

Project writeup )

Some technical details )

I would like, at some point, to produce a Shavian alphabet picture book without the length and time restrictions of NaNoGenMo, but it won't be today.
cnoocy: green a-e ligature (Default)
My NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generation Month) project for 2023 is at https://github.com/mmoskowitz/NaNoGenMo-MMXXIII , and the novel itself is at https://github.com/mmoskowitz/NaNoGenMo-MMXXIII/blob/main/novel.txt

This text is a myriad of epic nonsense.

That is to say, this is 10,006 lines of Latin dactylic hexameter, which is syntactically and metrically valid, but which makes semantic sense only accidentally. From Lȳsidamus spatham honōret holarcticus almam (May Lysidamus from near the North Pole honor his nourishing sword) to Arachnae ballia depsant, (Arachnes knead custodies) this has been composed by a program that makes use of a lexicon extracted from the Latin entries in Wiktionary, and assembles them like Mad-Libs into different sentence structures within the constraints of dactylic hexameter. There is no narrative and a very limited set of sentence structures, but it was an interesting exercise to build (and does not contain any machine learning) and I hope it is enjoyable, though I certainly wouldn’t recommend trying to read any large part of it.

More info and code at the link above!
cnoocy: green a-e ligature (Default)
On the morning of Saturday, November 27, I was thinking about NaNoGenMo. NaNoGenMo is National Novel Generation Month, which challenges participants to use technology to generate a novel (very loosely defined) of at least 50,000 words during the month of November. While doing so, I came up with an idea that I wanted to attempt.

You may notice that coming up with the idea on the 27th gave me four days to complete the task, two of them workdays. But I succeeded!

What I made, with links to pdfs along with an image )
How I made it, with GitHub links )
What I learned )
cnoocy: green a-e ligature (Default)
Every December, I participate in a fanfiction exchange called Yuletide, in which people request fanfiction for artworks and other fandoms that do not have significant amounts of fanfiction written for them.

This year, there was a request for fanfiction for the poem "The Tay Bridge Disaster" by William McGonnagal. This is one of McGonnagal's best-known poems, and he is known for being among the worst poets ever to write in English. So of course I am a fan. When all I knew was that someone had requested the poem as a fandom, I was already interested in writing something for them. But then I saw the letter, in which one of the suggestions was "Retell it in Virgilian hexameters."

Here's the thing. I had already written the first line as a Virgilian hexameter. About a year earlier, I had seen in a listing of Latin placenames for locations in Britain that the Scottish river Tay is Tavus, and had translated McGonagall's "Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!" as "Trāminis ō pulcher pons tū Tāvī radiantis!" So I had to write more. It was a moral imperative.

As it turned out, I wasn't able to get the whole poem translated by the Yuletide deadline. I did get the opening and closing stanzas, which are perhaps among the best-known parts of the poem. So I put a frame story onto it of discovering the two fragments, which gave me the chance to use some MLA citations. The selection by Colin S.K. Walker is real, and very recommended.

De Tavi Pontis Clade Carminis Fragmenta: Newly Discovered Fragments (543 words) by cnoocy
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Tay Bridge Disaster - William McGonagall
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Additional Tags: Academia, scholarship, Hexameter
Summary:

The opening and closing of Gulielmus McGonagall's De Tavi Pontis Clade, newly discovered in the original Latin.

cnoocy: green a-e ligature (Default)
The cat has had meat.
I have had a banana.
We both lick our paws.
cnoocy: green a-e ligature (Default)
 My rubber-soled boots
Make a sound like wooden clogs
On the frozen ground
cnoocy: green a-e ligature (Default)
I have had multiple people express some confusion over this "Yuletide" thing I'm doing, and while there are FAQs at the Yuletide site, they're more focused on participants. So here's a quick info dump for bystanders.

(Those who know more about Yuletide than me, please let me know if I've said something inaccurate or misleading.)
More info )

tl,dr: Yuletide is for odd fanfic; please don't talk about what people may be writing until New Year's Day.
cnoocy: green a-e ligature (Default)
Hi! This is my first Yuletide, after being inspired during Madness with Revolver last year. Thank you for writing a story for me!

specific Yuletide Writer info )
cnoocy: green a-e ligature (Default)
So, there's a podcast, Coverville, that plays cover songs. I've been listening to it for a number of years, and it's a pretty popular podcast. In a couple of weeks, they're doing a 24-hour coverthon, a half-fundraiser/half-benefit. They're offering hourly sponsorships, which give the sponsor the chance to have their business mentioned multiple times in the hour, and have a logo up on the stream.

My crazy idea is to have one of these hours be sponsored by the letter R and the number 7, as if it were an episode of Sesame Street. We'll be essentially anonymous to the show's listeners.

It'll cost some money (the total for a sponsorship is $150), but I can put up a lot of it, and I have at least one co-conspirator.

Anyway, let me know, by comment, email, or private message, if you want to be part of this. Or if you have any questions.
cnoocy: green a-e ligature (Default)
Not reference books about zombies, reference books that are back from the dead. I now own a newly-printed copy of a type of reference book that's been out of print for more than a century.
The full story )
cnoocy: green a-e ligature (Default)
O Snow
You are so pretty
Thank you for being
Such pretty snow

Sonnet

Jun. 6th, 2008 08:14 am
cnoocy: green a-e ligature (Default)
This is the Rikchik sonnet about [livejournal.com profile] lumpybeast I mentioned recently.
Read more... )
There is another post in the Rikchik Language Institute community that deals with more of the language side of the sonnet.
cnoocy: green a-e ligature (Default)
I have mail in my mailbox with the subject line "New black Chinese radicals".

This is an entirely legitimate work e-mail that does in fact contain new black Chinese radicals.
cnoocy: green a-e ligature (Default)
In his post about the new squidpunk anthology, John Scalzi mentioned that he's written an ode in Ionic Hexameter. A few people misread that as "Ironic Hexameter", including Steven Gould, who claimed to "REALLY WANT" to read something in this meter.

Well, I couldn't leave a request like that sitting on the table,* so here goes.

I'm very good at writing sonnets, as you see,
Observing ev'ry rule of this poetic form.
My verse is always metrical, and never free;
I never violate a long-establish'd norm.
My teachers told me, "Don't attempt to make a change
In something that has lasted through the centuries."
So I've made sure my lines are full of nothing strange
That might cause puzzlement, confusion, or unease.
I rhyme the verses as Elizabethans rhyme,
Three interlocking quatrains and a final pair.
My iambs march in perfectly consistent time,
And ev'ry syllable is placed with greatest care.
The sonnet is the form at which I most excel,
And this one is the proof that I can write them well.


(Thanks to [livejournal.com profile] tahnan for proofreading.)
* Especially from a talented author whose books illustrate that the dangers of the supernatural are nothing compared to the perils of interpersonal relationships and federal agents.
cnoocy: green a-e ligature (Default)
1. Found an equation that will cause my cell phone's calculator to freeze and reboot the entire phone (Samsung Stripe, (2^1024)^1.5)
2. Taught Jeffrey Rowland the word "zarf"
cnoocy: green a-e ligature (Default)
I've been participating some in the discussions of authorial intent occasioned by J. K. Rowling's statements this weekend. In one of my comments on the subject, I came up with what I think is a useful turn of phrase that [livejournal.com profile] jadelennox told me was worth blogging:

"The creator told me it works this way" is no more a valid excuse for bad literary analysis than it is for bad science.
cnoocy: green a-e ligature (Default)
Apparently Ray Bradbury has been saying that Fahrenheit 451 is not a book about censorship, but one about television. And everyone is up in arms about it trying to prove that he once said different.

Can I just say it doesn't matter? If there was ever a clear piece of evidence that the author is not the ultimate authority on a work, it's right here. Stop paying attention to Bradbury and talk about the book. Talk about the book as an anti-censorship work. Don't rebut Bradbury in terms of his brain. It's kind of his turf, so it's not going to go well for you.

I notice that a lot of the people commenting on this are themselves authors, so maybe they have trouble letting go of their own, um, authority. If you're an author, learn to be one of many readers of the book you've written. Find and read Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's "Pharaoh's Daughter" because she's an author who gets it.
cnoocy: green a-e ligature (Default)
El gato está siempre huyendo porque todos los hombres quieren comerlo.
cnoocy: green a-e ligature (Default)
Celestial Matters by Richard Garfinkle is a very good book, with an interesting premise and an engaging plot. It is a book you should go out, buy, and read.

Unless you're me.

In which case it's the best book ever.

Most Popular Tags

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Style Credit

Page generated Jun. 6th, 2025 05:38 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios