#nanogenmo 2016

ANNALES

A NaNoGenMo chronicle of rulers and kings, by Mike Lynch, who also created A Mighty Host.

He’s written three blog posts about the details of how it works: a neural net generates the basic vocabulary for the names, which is used by a Haskell text generator that uses combinators to compose the generation, which is in turn invoked by an event generator that simulates events at the court.

The result is a nicely done generated historical record that reads about right. Mike says that he’d like to have had the chance to add more variety and details--which is par for the course in my NaNoGenMo experience. We’re gradually getting better as a group at composing readable prose with intent behind it, but there’s a lot of scaffolding to solve every year.

We’re getting closer to the point, I think, were people whose primary skill is interactive writing can participate without needing deep programming knowledge. Indeed, Tracery is close to being all the tools you need for that, though novel-length generation is not its forte. I look forward to seeing future literary efforts in NaNoGenMo---and not just because I want my next effort to have as much value in the writing as in programming. (There will, of course, always be space for more programming: that’s how we got these tools in the first place, after all.)

Mike’s reasons for using Haskell mirror my reasons for using Clojure for my first couple of NaNoGenMo novels, though the ecosystem was much less developed back then and Mike’s got some elegant-ish solutions to some of the problems I struggled with at the time.

The other interesting thing about generating a historical record is that it’s precisely the kind of thing that could be meaningfully incorporated into another generator. Any story can be used as backstory for another story, after all. Or expanded upon. And these sound like some interesting stories:

Reign of Genus Dan I. Glude Game Pola I was spellbound. Succession of Genus Dan I. Willian, an exylophonetic man, adept at the use of the resisket, was promoted after having impressed Packley.

6.GD.I In this year Visuanca, a dentric woman, mighty at the chase, was much spoken of. Genus Dan I established the Temple of Lawchus.

12.GD.I Genus Dan I married Lail with wild aumeorision.

Bull-Wattion, a man of humble birth, whose father sold waterwyrkey, was much spoken of after having bested the Pacive Potricari.

Interregnum. Genus Dan I died of solomenicisy. Now began the War of Entging, in which Bull-Wattion, Visuanca and Willian were joined.

INT.3 The forces of Visuanca and the warriors of Bull-Wattion met on the Bogs of Bamweol. Hundreds of soldiers died in harness.

Now the clay of Bull-Wattion leaves not those fields.

INT.4 Visuanca, allied with opetistic cherrious ringings, took the soldiers of Willian all unawares.

INT.5 Willian took the warriors of Visuanca all unawares. Reports of neadocyres in Umpio.

Reign of Visuanca I. The soldiers of Visuanca and the warriors of Willian met on the Meadows of Quear.

Countless men bedewed the grass.

A hungry coptet was the end of brave Willian.

Visuanca I was acclaimed princeps by triumph.

Rumours of gai psens in Passionopire.

PulpMill 2016: Pulp Fantasy Novel Generator

One of my favorite projects to follow the development of during NaNoGenMo 2016 was the fantasy novel generator made by Joel Davis. It includes covers! And maps! And party members arguing!

While the individual books aren’t super in-depth, they’re each complete little adventures, with plots, foreshadowing, and fights with dragons.

Some excerpts from The Wizards by Erin Holloway (the prequel to the Award-winning Masterpiece The Wizards and the Hidden Dragons):

Ucajy reached the anvil. The forge glowed red-hot even though it was abandoned for aeons. He set the Sword of Cunot on the shining anvil. he picked up the hammer. It was massive, but seemed to weigh no more than a mulberry. Ucajy yelled, screamed out an intense cry, venting all his frustration and hopes and fears at the world and let the hammer ring against the stone. The Sword of Cunot was unchanged. He struck again. It seemed to flex, to wobble. And finally the Sword of Cunot shattered, splitting into a uncounted pieces.

Thrashern bought a round for the sailors at the local tavern and asked about ships. A schooner named The New Freedom was sailing to Bloodgloss. The captain was a prancing sea dog named Frahms.

"Sod off," said Frahms, "The New Freedom's not for landlubbers like ya." Ucajy mused, visited a street market and ate some fried alligator. Purple clouds hung across the sky.. Then, Thrashern saw Frahms in a tavern. she bought the grumpy captain enough whiskey to change their mind, even if they had a little trouble recalling it the next day.

Ucajy and Vitis stopped in to a tavern. Warm insects spun in the air. "Hey, I just..." Ucajy trailed off. He shifted on the mire. "Are you abusing spiritual authority?" he asked.

Vitis said, "I see it as more keeping a stiff upper lip."

"You're using emotional or spiritual leverage to exercise unhealthy control over others. It's not uncommon for a Thief.", replied Ucajy.

"Is that how you see it? It's just being brave and clear in the face of adverse circumstances.", replied Vitis.

Ucajy wondered about the dusty air.

You can read the whole collection here:

Captain’s Log (NaNoGenMo 2016)

There were several entries in NaNoGenMo 2016 that were inspired by Annals of the Parrigues. This project, by Eoin Noble, is one of them.

It tells the tale of a succession of captains sailing their ships from the ports used by the East India Company. The stories end badly, but they are stories, log entries of the happenings on the voyages: ships fought, bad and good winds, running low on rum...

https://github.com/eoinnoble/captains-log

A Primer in Gont Poetics

You might remember Martin O'Leary from The Deserts of the West. This year’s NaNoGenMo project takes things in a different direction: alien poetry.

I find the inspiration for it especially interesting:

The idea was to generate an exegesis of alien poetry, inspired by the messages we send as attempts to communicate with alien life. I was struck by the gap which separates the scientific parts of these messages (basic mathematics and fundamental physics) with the cultural parts (the Voyager Golden Record begins with a recording of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2).

When we learn a human language, we start from very human concepts ("how are you?", "I have three brothers and one dog"). In contrast, communicating with aliens may mean building everything up from the hyperfine transition lines of a hydrogen atom. This means a very different experience of culture. Is it even possible to communicate across such a gap?

Of course, by alien here, I really mean computer. Modern machine learning techniques for language tasks are the equivalent of the old trope of aliens learning to speak English by watching old TV broadcasts. Can they really understand us that way? Or is the cultural gap too vast?

I’ve talked before about using algorithms as plots: Hannah and The Twelve-Disk Tower of Hanoi and The Seeker are a couple of the examples I’ve brought up. But, as A Primer in Gont Poetics makes clear, there’s also value in using the machine processes as conceptual inspiration.

https://github.com/mewo2/gontpoetics

A Book of Explanations (NaNoGenMo 2016)

NaNoGenMo 2016 has concluded, and there are dozens and dozens of new computer-generated novels to share with you.

Thanks to Ranjit “Moonmilk” Bhatnagar, we finally have an explanation for that question that’s been troubling you.

You can an explanation of how he did it on the project’s git repository, but the thing I really like here is how often the metre of the phrases meshes with the accidentally perfect answer. It works as a poem. The staccato rhythm of repeating “why...because...” is modulated by the rhyming.

Being sourced off of Twitter, some of the questions-and-answers are about as non-worksafe as you might expect, and the answers veer from the profound to the disturbed...

The Days Left Forebodings and Water 

NaNoGenMo 2016 still has a couple of days left to run, but there are already quite a few finished novels. Like this example of blackout poetry from Liza Daly.

“The Days Left Forebodings and Water” is based on a redaction of Mary Wollstonecraft, via Liza Daly’s Blackout tool.

While there have been blackout NaNoGenMo entires before, “The Days Left Forebodings and Water” has a very high level of artistry: it works on the image of the text, identifies words that match the parts of speech that fit the sentence pattern that it is looking for, and scribbles dynamically and aesthetically to cover the rest of the page.

The result combines the virtue of Oulipoian procedures that bring out the underlying meaning of a text by performing a process on it with the similar effect of blackout poetry. The machine understands the function of the words, but relies on the original text for their meaning, bringing out poetry that was there all along but no human could have seen.

In addition to being an arresting work in its own right, this generated novel reminds us that sometimes we can create new things by taking things away, rather than constructing them. Elision is a powerful tool, and sometimes what isn’t there can be more powerful than what is.

NaNoGenMo 2016

National Novel Generation Month 2016 officially starts today. 

I’ve talked about NaNoGenMo a lot before, but I think an introduction is in order for people who are new to it or who want to learn more about it. 

So what is it? NaNoGenMo is a way for people to get together and make a thing that generates a novel, using NaNoWriMo’s definition of a novel: 50,000 words.

The way it’s organized is a bit unusual: it uses GitHub, a site for sharing open source projects, as a forum. Specifically, all of the threads are in the Issues section. There’s quite a few threads started for this year already, as people announce projects.

Each year, there’s a Resources thread with links to things that may be useful. Previous years have included links to all kinds of useful tools; if you’re at all interested in text generation they’re worth reading.

People have made all kinds of novels as part of NaNoGenMo:

A Voynich-manuscript inspired mysterious codex

Mary Sue Fanfic

Alice in Wonderland meets Moby Dick

Dreams

Stories About Passive-Aggressive Roommates

Artificial Intelligences learning about the world

A mystery/thriller text-adventure simulator

Graphic novels

Generated clickbait articles about NaNoGenMo

Fantasy Map Generator Travelogues

The Annals of the Parrigues

50,000 meows

People have used all kinds of tools to make novel generators. While Python is popular, due to the natural language libraries available, people have used tools ranging from the very complicated to the very friendly: Tracery is a very accessible way to get started with text generation, while at the other end people have build complicated neural-networks. 

While most of the novels have been in English, there have also been works in Armenian, French, Spanish, Finnish, and a procedurally-generated language.

I’ve participated every year; last year’s project was Virgil’s Commonplace Book. I wrote about it’s development on the project thread.

I look forward to seeing what everyone creates this year!