How nerdy are you?This week Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, died. A whole generation of pasty dice-obsessed nerds owes him big time. Me included.
So, in his honour, how nerdy were you? Are you still sunlight-averse? What are the sad little things you do that nobody else understands?
As an example, a B3ta regular who shall remain nameless told us, "I spent an entire school summer holiday getting my BBC Model B computer to produce filthy stories from an extensive database of names, nouns, adjectives, stock phrases and deviant sexual practices. It revolutionised the porn magazine dirty letter writing industry for ever.
Revel in your own nerdiness.
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chthonic, Thu 6 Mar 2008, 10:32)
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"A B3TA regular who shall remain nameless" owns upThey say that sit an infinite number of monkeys at typewriters, and sooner or later they would come up with the Works of Shakespeare.
And thussly, I worked several months in my bedroom writing up a little number called Project Hamlet for a college computer science project. It was a pseudo-intelligent prose-writing programming - a neat little bit of coding and huge amounts of data, all nicely sorted into vowels, nouns, pronouns and adjectives. Type RUN, and it would turn out page after page of genuine-looking, if virtually plotless manuscript.
With college lecturers, parents and other hangers-on mightily impressed with my l33t skills, I took the beast home and filled it with the names of every female I knew and every filthy sexual perversion in the book, and several that the book didn't know about.
Voila! Instant lesbian porn! Writhing, naked, thrusting, squirming red-hot flanges straight from the deranged mind of a teenage virgin. This was surely the greatest invention, ever, and not incredibly sad in any way whatsoever.
Karen who worked the till at my Saturday job in a shop featured rather heavily for two very good reasons, neither of which I ever got to see first hand.
The computer churned out reams and reams of some of the most disgusting filth known to man, most of which now forms the bulk of the William J Clinton Presidential Library, the greatest collection of the pornographic arts outside the Vatican. And that, dear reader, is how the letters page in Fiesta is written. I could have made a fortune from it, but hey, it was my gift to the world.
THAT'S how nerdy I am.
Shameless plug for my campaign to build twin 300-foot floodlit statues of the Minogue sisters at Wembley Stadium: HERE
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Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Thu 6 Mar 2008, 11:23,
3 replies)
Roald Dahl wrote a short story along these lines.The Great Automatic Grammatizer, I think it was called. The story is written from the point of view of one of the few real human writers left -- all the others have been driven out of business by this machine, and the public doesn't know. Great little story.
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Bob Todd whee, Thu 6 Mar 2008, 13:52,
closed)
...Isn't there something along these lines in Italo Calvino somewhere, too? If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, IIRC
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 6 Mar 2008, 14:42,
closed)
There are machines like this described in 1984.Including ones that write trashy porn for the proles.
(, Fri 7 Mar 2008, 16:47, closed)
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