diary of a sad robot

[d-baker]

My nanogenmo idea: the diary of a sad robot experiencing existential crisis. It will juxtapose very human prose (drawing from a secret corpus*) with very robotic code and random errors. The entire thing will be glitched and obliterated using a combination of a markov-like algorithm and substitution of words with non-ASCII characters or whitespace. (Due to some words turning into whitespace, I've decided to generate a lot more than 50000 words so that only words that are visibly words are counted; technical issues could ruin this plan though, idk.)

It'll be implemented in Python 3.

I'm reluctant to commit (emotionally) to nanogenmo this year as I have 2 very demanding uni assignments to complete and only 3 weeks to complete them in. I initially wasn't going to open an issue at all, but this morning I made significant progress on the project while lying in bed and I decided I have a good chance of finishing it. My only problem at the moment is that the script hangs when I try to generate more than a few hundred words.

* don't worry, I have the rights to the corpus

UPDATE: here is my repo

[suisea]

you said you wouldn't post an issue!!!!!!!!!!

[suisea]

ilu

[suisea]

public displays of affection on github

[d-baker]

hahahaha I changed my mind >_> cause it was coming along so well. but I'm stuck now >.<

[greg-kennedy]

I think you could provide narrative direction by making the probabilities change as the novel progresses. Early on it is coherent, towards the end it is just errors and unintelligible noise.

[d-baker]

I actually kind of did this with my first nanogenmo (I called it a "degenerative novel") and because I've already done it I'm not keen to do it again...I do like the idea of increasing the amount of code and error stuff towards the end though, I'll just need to find a way to make it sufficiently different to my approach last time. thanks for the suggestion!

[d-baker]

here are some screenshots of bits I've liked in the output so far. I'm still working on building up the corpus and figuring out which things I should keep and which things to remove because they don't fit with the style...also, I haven't got round to adding code to the corpus yet, just errors I wrote myself.

[suisea]

iluuuuuuuuuu

[d-baker]

added some random code:

[ljcooke]

So much poetry in these snippets!

[suisea]

ilu :kissing_cat: @d-baker