The Pilgramage

[kleer001]

I have a more, what I consider, painterly method in mind. Lots of layers, lots of curation. What I want most is to have the results readable, if not compelling. Humor is also very important. I want a sense of progression and narrative thread. I've made procedural/mechanical books before and they've always seemed odd and not very fun for other, more pedestrian, readers.

Here and here and here you'll find my purchasable poetry books (some have a few pages for preview to get the taste of them)

Instead of a smoothie style text where any one part is pretty similar to any other part, I want to paint with distinct moments. I want to sculpt a journey across a fictional land with verisimilitude, with texture and feeling. Still, I want to embrace the machine part of it and will leave lots of room for buggy fun and discovery of non-intuitive forms.

Narrative will be presented in 2nd person for an extra hook of engagement.

To this end I've begin compiling lists of the essences of day to day life around the world. Also, I will be relying heavily on the amazing database over at ConceptNet.io for filling this world.

Here is a rough outline of the content of the journal entries:

List of types of entries: (Probabilities are independent and entries stack) 50-200 words each day journaled, about 600 entries total. Type (content source) Common:50-75% Personal Activity (1-5x) Fellow Activity (if present) Environment Activity (using ConceptNet) Weather + Clouds (web) Dialogue with fellow (if present) Frequent:25-50% Personal psychology/religion (list of feeling words) Fellow psychology (if present) Environment hopes/predictions (see weather) Missing relatives/home/hometown (wiki kinship/houseItems/TownParts) Rare: <25% Medical emergency (body part then conceptNet isusedfor) Quotes (TEXT FILES * 1liners.cap) Song (scout songs) Poetry (web) Holidays (holidays and observations in the united states, markovify) FoodRecipe (recipes tried and true, markovify (title & then content) ChildhoodMemory (web A New England Girlhood, search: “I was”, “I did”, “I saw”, …) InventoryProblems (web) Once: Haunting of previous versions of protagonist (at certain times) Ghost story (Spooky campfire stories) Death / Killed by travel companion (based on strand length) Travel companion gives birth / lays eggs / mating.

I audacious ambition I also want to introduce a recursive plot structure like the following:

Recursive plot structure kind like: ABCD(CD(CD)E)EF Where the parenthesis denote the story of a fellow traveler met in the previous step. And with locations like: A = ocean, B = beach, C = forest & ghost encounter, D = town & new traveler, E = desert & ghost story, F = mountain goal

Reactions? Ideas? Suggestions?

[enkiv2]

The recursive plot structure seems pretty doable (and interesting -- it should produce a sense of coherence that's rare in generated works). How are you planning to generate dialogue? (Taking stray bits of dialogue from another source often works well -- mismatching lines if you want to create an unsettling feeling)

On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 5:57 PM kleer001 notifications@github.com wrote:

I have a more, what I consider, painterly method in mind. Lots of layers, lots of curation. What I want most is to have the results readable, if not compelling. Humor is also very important. I want a sense of progression and narrative thread. I've made procedural/mechanical books before and they've always seemed odd and not very fun for other, more pedestrian, readers.

Here http://www.lulu.com/shop/clear-menser/poesy02py/paperback/product-23175973.html and here http://www.lulu.com/shop/clear-menser/poesy01py/paperback/product-23114760.html and here http://www.lulu.com/shop/clear-menser/thed-for-man/paperback/product-23200866.html you'll find my purchasable poetry books (some have a few pages for preview to get the taste of them)

Instead of a smoothie style text where any one part is pretty similar to any other part, I want to paint with distinct moments. I want to sculpt a journey across a fictional land with verisimilitude, with texture and feeling. Still, I want to embrace the machine part of it and will leave lots of room for buggy fun and discovery of non-intuitive forms.

Narrative will be presented in 2nd person for an extra hook of engagement.

To this end I've begin compiling lists of the essences of day to day life around the world. Also, I will be relying heavily on the amazing database over at ConceptNet.io for filling this world.

Here is a rough outline of the content of the journal entries:

List of types of entries: (Probabilities are independent and entries stack) 50-200 words each day journaled, about 600 entries total. Type (content source) Common:50-75% Personal Activity (1-5x) Fellow Activity (if present) Environment Activity (using ConceptNet) Weather + Clouds (web) Dialogue with fellow (if present) Frequent:25-50% Personal psychology/religion (list of feeling words) Fellow psychology (if present) Environment hopes/predictions (see weather) Missing relatives/home/hometown (wiki kinship/houseItems/TownParts) Rare: <25% Medical emergency (body part then conceptNet isusedfor) Quotes (TEXT FILES 1liners.cap) Song (scout songs) Poetry (web) Holidays (holidays and observations in the united states, markovify) FoodRecipe (recipes tried and true, markovify (title & then content) ChildhoodMemory (web A New England Girlhood, search: “I was”, “I did”, “I saw”, …) InventoryProblems (web) Once:* Haunting of previous versions of protagonist (at certain times) Ghost story (Spooky campfire stories) Death / Killed by travel companion (based on strand length) Travel companion gives birth / lays eggs / mating.

I audacious ambition I also want to introduce a recursive plot structure like the following:

Recursive plot structure kind like: ABCD(CD(CD)E)EF Where the parenthesis denote the story of a fellow traveler met in the previous step. And with locations like: A = ocean, B = beach, C = forest & ghost encounter, D = town & new traveler, E = desert & ghost story, F = mountain goal

Reactions? Ideas? Suggestions?

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[kleer001]

enkiv2,

Yea, I really really want at least a thin sense of coherence. In studying up for the NaNoGenMo I ran into this GDC talk where a game maker presented the biggest problem in procedural content as "10,000 bowl of oatmeal" and the solution as "a star field with constellations"

Thinking about it now maybe an L-system-like setup would be a good way to build the recursive elements to start with, as a sort of map, and then replace them later with bundles of text.

Very intuitive, I was just working on the dialogue problem yesterday. I think I'm going to go with English as a second language resources. There's a few good looking archives here and here that I think I'll be mining and transforming.

[kleer001]

Been chewing and digesting, came up with a realistic plan to implement when the starting gun goes off (I wanna obey the letter of doing NaNoGenMo in the literal month of November). My notes are more copious, but these following should not change as they're the backbone, digestion system, sensory organs, and locomotive limbs of my project. Def several hours if not days of work.

Actual things to code: Interface to ConceptNet.io https://github.com/commonsense/conceptnet5/wiki/API#looking-up-related-terms Interface to dariusk/corpora/data (download + json reading)
https://github.com/aparrish/pycorpora Interface to arbitrary guttenberg books (download & parse)
https://github.com/c-w/Gutenberg Proof of concept with Tracery https://pypi.org/project/tracery/ Proof of concept text summary https://github.com/miso-belica/sumy

[hendrikboom3]

Elisabeth Vonarburg used the nested-storyteller to great effect in some of her hand-written and professionally published books. It got especially tangled when some of the stories involved the narrators of others.

[LuRsT]

Wow, good luck, to me, a newbie in procedural books, sounds very ambitious, I hope you can do what you're aiming for! Also thanks for the list, of resources, there are a few things there that I didn't know

[kleer001]

Still working on it, no completed rough draft yet. Probably 60 hours spent so far? Will post code soon, but now only the roadmap. Might need to abandon the recursive structure, dunno. Roadmap (googledoc too big to copy paste)

Summary of stuff done:

GUI of travel-engine with remedial meters of Health, Vitality, Satiation, Fear, Curiosity with their relationships and states is 75% done and working. With adjunct base narrative of travel journal with injuries and day cycles, walking and, like I said, functional meters.

Project Guttenburg pile of books for searching named events. Think of a patchwork quilt kind of thing. 40 books! I think I got a little out of hand, heh.

Interface with the pycorpora project and most everything I'll need for a roughed in blackboard generation system for all the nouns (people, animals, places)

An increasingly long list of include statements, lol!

Summary of stuff yet to do:

Need to refactor persona.py so it's less a pile of 'if' statements and long list of direct variables and more a queue of actions and a dictionary. Upload to github. Interface with ConceptNet.io (?) Write chatbot searcher for guttenberg books and interface with event-engine. Write text summary part to chew up gBook entries. Recursive storytelling structure. Other little things I've forgotten.

[kleer001]

uploaded project, not yet done tho

https://github.com/kleer001/2018NaNoGenMo/tree/master

[kleer001]

With a new job to start in two days and a stress ulcer from worrying about this and a bunch of other things I'm calling it done. Not with all the bells and whistles, but decent enough and I learned quite a bit in doing it.

Final available: The Pilgrimage

[mathias]

I think this is great! The simulation-based, "write a bunch of fragments / sentences that the computer can randomly pick from" approach is a lot more work than other approaches, but it definitely pays off in the (in this case) coherent output!

[hugovk]

I like all the listings and descriptions of food, so few adventures pay attention to this most important factor :)

[danielsinderson]

This is awesome. There's actually a lot of surprisingly affecting understatement in it, and I laughed super hard at some of the supply lists. Great job!