An Expanded Meditation

[emmajuettner]

A last-minute attempt to speed-run NaNoGenMo, started and finished this evening. Probably pretty self-explanatory from the output, but: in Moby Dick, Ishmael discusses at some length his definition of a whale as "a spouting fish with a horizontal tail." My generated novel consists of a list of other dubiously accurate definitions of a whale.

Some resources used:

• Project Gutenberg's online copy of Moby Dick: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm
• from @dariusk's corpora repo, the list of adjectives for describing people: https://github.com/dariusk/corpora/blob/master/data/humans/descriptions.json
• Macmillan Dictionary's many lists of words used to describe various things, e.g. https://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/thesaurus-category/american/words-used-to-describe-the-shape-of-objects
• The tracery editor at http://tracery.io/editor/

Presented with apologies to Mr. Melville.

Tracery grammar: https://github.com/emmajuettner/an-expanded-meditation/blob/main/tracery-grammar.json
Example output: https://github.com/emmajuettner/an-expanded-meditation/blob/main/output.txt

[emmajuettner]

Just realized this is technically a late entry due to timezones! 😬 In my defense, it's still November where I am 😁

[hugovk]

Good work! I checked the output and there are no repeated lines :)

The NaNoGenMo Clocks Subcommittee have convened and after much deliberation declared that, just this once, the concept of time is an arbitrary construct, and granted a completed label.

[hugovk]

Oh and the NaNoGenMo Sampler Subcommittee was feeling left out wanted to grant a preview label, so to appease:

A whale is a respected ungulate with a craggy throat.
A whale is a judgmental ungulate with a good-looking blowhole.
A whale is a wary ungulate with a flecked hump.
A whale is an eager ungulate with a fleshy eye.
A whale is an egotistical vertebrate with a regular throat.

:)