[HN Gopher] All possible plots by major authors (2020)
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All possible plots by major authors (2020)
Author : ohjeez
Score : 107 points
Date : 2024-10-15 19:06 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.the-fence.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.the-fence.com)
| kreyenborgi wrote:
| All possible trees by major forests
| jkaptur wrote:
| Every New Yorker short fiction: our protagonist, a slightly
| dislikable person, suffers from a medium-high amount of ennui.
| rKarpinski wrote:
| "thomas hardy
|
| Lies, lies, misery, lies, suicide, rape, and corn prices."
|
| So true
| wwilim wrote:
| Stephen King: you'll know better than to FAFO after I tell you
| what happened in Maine a few decades ago.
| tptacek wrote:
| To do King justice you have to capture some kind of on-the-nose
| allegory (alcoholism, childhood trauma, the existential dread
| of one's musical tastes being classifiable as dad-rock, the
| Cold War), and it can't be about the corruption and decline of
| small-town New England, which is everpresent. Yog-Sothoth
| should make an appearance.
| jl6 wrote:
| Hacker News: Apple launches data center on a stick, and boy does
| Elon Musk have an opinion about that (14879 comments)
| ryandrake wrote:
| ...re-written in Rust.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| It would have better through-put if it were rewritten in
| Elixir, I would do it in Erlang but I find the syntax less
| appealing.
| jebarker wrote:
| It's OK though, since throughput considerations don't
| matter as hardware is so fast now and your boss just wants
| you to get the thing shipped
| globalise83 wrote:
| So long as it doesn't have leaky abstractions, it passes
| muster.
| fallinditch wrote:
| Albert Camus: Alone and isolated you grapple with the absurdities
| of existence. And who the f*k are you?
| HanClinto wrote:
| Michael Crichton: Humanity employs raw hubris and technological
| advancement for a close-encounter with non-humanity. Chaos
| ensues.
| HanClinto wrote:
| The above was written by hand. As an experiment, I asked Claude
| to generate a few dozen more. Most weren't great. Here are the
| highlights:
|
| Michael Crichton:
|
| You're a brilliant scientist who's just created something that
| will revolutionize the world. Congratulations! It's now trying
| to eat you.
|
| Michael Crichton:
|
| You've stumbled upon a conspiracy involving [insert scientific
| field]. Now you're being chased by [insert government agency]
| while trying to explain complex scientific concepts to the
| reader.
|
| Suzanne Collins:
|
| You must choose between two brooding love interests while
| simultaneously overthrowing a totalitarian regime. Priorities!
|
| Stephen King:
|
| Welcome to small-town Maine, where the biggest threat isn't the
| weather, it's the [insert supernatural horror]. Don't worry, a
| writer will save the day.
|
| Neil Gaiman:
|
| Mythology crashes into modern life. You're either a god who's
| fallen on hard times or a regular person about to have a very
| weird Wednesday.
|
| Margaret Atwood:
|
| Society has taken a slight turn for the worse. Women are now
| [insert dystopian scenario]. This is definitely not a
| commentary on current events.
|
| And perhaps my favorite:
|
| George Orwell:
|
| Big Brother is watching you. So is your toaster. And your pet.
| Trust no one, especially not the pigs.
|
| Out of 30 generations, there were a few more that made me
| smile, but these were the main ones I enjoyed. Something I've
| noticed with statistical content generation is that it has a
| difficult time not being too "on the nose" -- almost like next-
| token-prediction is making it want to rush and get to the
| punchline a little too quickly. It has a hard time being
| subtle, and too often it felt like it was just a glib little
| summary of a story, rather than a sardonic take-a-step-back-
| and-look-at-the-big-picture sort of approach.
|
| No major revelations, but just barely interesting enough to
| warrant commenting here. If there were a Dull Men's Club
| version of Hacker News, I would have posted this there.
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| A link to "All Possible Plots II" [0] would have been better,
| because it includes everything in "All Possible Plots I"
|
| [0] https://www.the-fence.com/all-possible-plots-ii/
| HanClinto wrote:
| Depending on the referrer URL, you may or may not be hit with a
| paywall.
|
| https://archive.ph/h2y0R
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| Someone do Michael Moorcock.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| due to my being saddled with the British National debt it turns
| out that a loner of a dying race must set out on a morally
| ambiguous journey through all reality, killing everyone he
| meets except for a thinly disguised Sancho Panza - Volumes 1
| through 119.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| due to my having accidentally stolen the brown acid from Alan
| Moore, who you probably suspected I might actually be for
| some years, in Volume 120 loner from a dying race meets other
| loners from other dying races in future and merges into 1000
| limbed kaiju and is forced to eat the soul of Sancha Panza.
|
| on edit: due to having eaten the brown acid I stole I forgot
| how to spell words like eldritch and Alan and have edited one
| of them in a new edition of my previous work to undo the typo
| introduced in the acid-addled version.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| due to coming down from previous trip I realized that
| racism has infected fantasy like a virus, and the only way
| forward is poorly disguised Gormenghast pastiche.
|
| on edit: thinly veiled threat to write 500 more comments on
| this issue in the next few months.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| due to my having survived the last 3 or 5000 comments,
| this part is somewhat hazy, I would just like to say that
| China Mieville is my legacy and he thinks of me as his
| literary father, which I am in a way, although I am a
| heroic loner from a forgotten race doomed to wander
| through HN writing comments for all eternity until I can
| finally destroy the Evil God who cursed me to do so and
| cash my royalty checks.
|
| on edit: or perhaps I have cashed these royalty checks
| here, in the end times, and am having lovely sex times
| with erotically gender strange creatrixii - a word like
| any other. While the world dissolves into a tangerine ice
| cream created by the whim of the last human minds to
| develop a plot point.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| OK, but what if it turns out - in the end of all this -
| I'm actually Jesus! huh!? Pretty cool right! Those drugs
| were so freaking worth it!! Now to pay off the mortgage I
| took out to afford the drugs!
|
| on edit: I would like to detour into a very long series
| of comments in the following subtree of this site as to
| why Grant Morrison sucks and has ripped me off and is no
| good.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| But first - a series of congratulatory online interviews
| between myself and various creators who do appreciate me
| and that I, in turn, appreciate.
| I_complete_me wrote:
| I have no idea what you're doing here but I am impressed
| enough to have got to the end. (No meta here, I assure
| you.)
| egypturnash wrote:
| _clearly_ you have read a significant portion of the Saga
| of the Eternal Champion.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| >> _Dan Brown -- Award-winning author Dan Brown has written a
| complicated role for you with his expensive pen. You are a
| humanities professor at an Ivy League university, but also,
| somehow, in mortal peril. Your love interest is picturesque but
| ill-mannered and French. This is somehow worth several million
| dollars._
|
| Kafka seems low-effort though. I humbly substitute:
|
| You have inside you an extraordinary writer but are instead
| employed at the postal service, where you spend the rest of your
| days watching your first manuscript submission mistakenly
| misrouted back across your desk.
| nfw2 wrote:
| You are a humanities professor at an Ivy League university, but
| also, somehow, in mortal peril. Your love interest is
| picturesque but ill-mannered...
|
| This is also true of Indiana Jones, which everyone likes.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Indiana Jones taught at Marshall College, I hardly think that
| qualifies as Ivy League. What a disappointment to his father
| that guy was.
| w-m wrote:
| Don't make fun of renowned author Dan Brown!
|
| > Renowned author Dan Brown woke up in his luxurious four-
| poster bed in his expensive $10 million house - and immediately
| he felt angry. Most people would have thought that the 48-year-
| old man had no reason to be angry. After all, the famous writer
| had a new book coming out. But that was the problem. A new book
| meant an inevitable attack on the rich novelist by the wealthy
| wordsmith's fiercest foes. The critics.
|
| > Renowned author Dan Brown hated the critics. Ever since he
| had become one of the world's top renowned authors they had
| made fun of him. They had mocked bestselling book The Da Vinci
| Code, successful novel Digital Fortress, popular tome Deception
| Point, money-spinning volume Angels & Demons and chart-topping
| work of narrative fiction The Lost Symbol.
|
| > The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical,
| repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary
| tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed
| metaphors...
|
| https://onehundredpages.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/dont-make-f...
| switch007 wrote:
| Oh man this made me laugh out loud wheezing. Thank you!
|
| > He reached for the telephone using one of his two hands
|
| lol
| farmeroy wrote:
| I clicked on this link with one of my two index fingers and
| felt the joy of a person feeling enjoyment
| vharuck wrote:
| Terry Pratchett: A visionary on the Discworld invents something
| vaguely like a modern object or industry. That invention enslaves
| the visionary and must be stopped by a crotchety old person who
| hates change.
| w-m wrote:
| Or mix together your own plot, by combining any of the tropes in
| the "Periodic Table of Storytelling":
| https://jamesharris.design/periodic/
| ChocMontePy wrote:
| I need an "Every possible comment by Hacker News users"
| thechao wrote:
| Having just found out about topic X, and thought about it for
| 30 seconds, I have strong advice for the world's expert about
| an edge case they forgot for solutions to topic X.
| sseagull wrote:
| Man Feels Like He Gets Gist Of Enlightenment After First Few
| Minutes Of Hearing Zen Monk Talk
|
| https://theonion.com/man-feels-like-he-gets-gist-of-
| enlighte...
| duneisagoodbook wrote:
| I didn't read the article, but--
| gherkinnn wrote:
| http://n-gate.com/hackernews/
| nojs wrote:
| I am very disappointed this stopped
| wanderer2323 wrote:
| Wodehouse: Titanic forces beyond your control such as scheming
| aunts, accidental engagements, and inability to express your
| feelings threaten to irrevocably ruin your life forever. It'll
| take a Machiavellian mastermind and a series of unlikely
| coincidences to extricate you from this predicament but you'll
| have to pay a price.
|
| They really didn't do Wodehouse justice in the OP
| asimovfan wrote:
| how could they.. its impossible
| dmd wrote:
| See also, PLOTTO, all possible plots by ALL authors:
|
| 1) https://garykac.github.io/plotto/plotto-mf.html
|
| 2) https://www.npr.org/2012/02/19/146941343/plotto-an-
| algebra-b...
| riwsky wrote:
| #All possible codebases by major programmers
|
| Linus Torvalds: you take a week-long swing at a problem you find
| annoying, fascinating, or both. The result enjoys staggering
| worldwide success in the ensuing decades, despite being clearly
| outclassed by some alternative from the GNU project that, pinky
| promise, is coming out any day now.
|
| Grace Hopper: BEGIN a framework that powers critical government
| functions, AND has secretly saved America from mass destruction
| time and again, only to be dunked on by Reddit for trivial
| matters of syntax END.
|
| John Carmack: Doom, but better-looking.
|
| Brendan Eich: you take a week-long swing at a problem your
| employer finds commercially compelling. The result enjoys
| staggering worldwide success in the ensuing decades, despite
| being clearly outclassed by the prior art it was supposed to
| build on.
| mp05 wrote:
| > Brendan Eich: you take a week-long swing at a problem your
| employer finds commercially compelling. The result enjoys
| staggering worldwide success in the ensuing decades, despite
| being clearly outclassed by the prior art it was supposed to
| build on.
|
| Pretty brilliant, right? Right?
| riwsky wrote:
| Please forgive my JavaScript joke: it's really just a poorly-
| written series of callbacks.
| grotorea wrote:
| I would like to quote the creator of Dogecoin:
|
| > In reply to that, Mr Markus was asked whether he had
| considered energy usage when creating the cryptocurrency.
|
| > "i made doge in like 2 hours i didn't consider anything,"
| he wrote.
| ashton314 wrote:
| Fabrice Bellard: A problem with several competing solutions
| catches your fancy. Within a week you have a gleaming, state-
| of-the-art solution that is flexible, reliable, and extensible
| --all written in pure, efficient C. Everyone begins to build on
| your work.
|
| Donald Knuth: While writing your magnum opus, a minor
| irritation arises. You invent a new subfield of computing and
| spend two years developing a highly idiosyncratic language and
| tool system.\footnote{And several new typefaces!} Your
| irritation dissipates and you go back to work with your
| writing. Generations of academics curse your creation but have
| nothing better to work with. They wonder if they can get
| Fabrice Bellard to take a crack at it...
| jfvinueza wrote:
| Funny, thanks. This is another very fun one in the same spirit:
|
| https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/what-your-favorite-sad-d...
| russellbeattie wrote:
| What does it say about me that I've only actually read 14 of the
| 56 authors in the second list [1] _as an adult_ (i.e. by choice)?
| I know _of_ quite a few, but haven 't read most of them.
|
| Here's my list (++ indicates more than 1):
| Fitzgerald Hemingway ++ Shakespeare ++ Christie
| ++ Brown ++ Dickens McCarthy ++ Wodehouse
| ++ Steinbeck ++ Stoppard Kafka Conan
| Doyle ++ Seuss (of course) ++ Lee
|
| A missing classic author is Robert Louis Stevenson - all his
| books are amazing, even 150 year later.
|
| If you've read more than one Dickens novel, you have my deepest
| respect.
|
| 1. https://www.the-fence.com/all-possible-plots-ii/
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| A friend of mine has been reading Ulysses since 2022, I've
| stopped asking him about it.
| crtified wrote:
| Humanity would be a pretty bland experience if everybody
| universally read the same toplist of influences. Some may
| aspire to study The Classics at Oxford, but to me that sounds
| like a nightmare of deprivation.
|
| Accordingly I see your balanced, partial foray into those
| classics as a positive. It shows you're an individual bespoke
| personality with broader influences. _We_ won 't know which of
| the modern works we read are future classics - that'll come in
| hundreds of years.
| motohagiography wrote:
| I miss literary fiction but with age my weakness for a point has
| become an all consuming vice.
| teraflop wrote:
| Reminds me of "Book-A-Minute"
| (http://www.rinkworks.com/bookaminute/) from yesteryear.
|
| Most of the entries are for specific books, but there are also
| some authors mentioned, e.g. "The Collected Works of Dean
| Koontz": http://www.rinkworks.com/bookaminute/b/koontz.shtml
| Vedor wrote:
| "A Scanner Darkly" entry [0] is my favorite so far. Somehow,
| it's wildly accurate.
|
| [0] - http://www.rinkworks.com/bookaminute/b/dick.scanner.shtml
| karaterobot wrote:
| Whoooa, what a blast from the past. I loved that site, but I
| bet I haven't been there in 15 years. It seems their most
| recent update was just last week.
| ashton314 wrote:
| Brandon Sanderson: scrappy protagonist discovers that they have
| magical powers, despite struggling from crushing depression
| and/or trauma. This annoying guy named Hoid smirks at everyone.
| The next weekend they accidentally trigger the end of the world,
| which they prevent in the nick of time by becoming a god.
| Lance_ET_Compte wrote:
| LOL!
| karaterobot wrote:
| They could have had an entry for McSweeney's that just said "the
| text of this article".
| nfw2 wrote:
| To summarize Dan Brown books by describing the characters
| fundamentally misunderstands them. The characters are about as
| important as the characters in a porno.
|
| The point of a Dan Brown book is to chart the stupidest possible
| path through history and pop science, and he's uniquely capable
| of this.
| farmeroy wrote:
| I want an author who's work is completely unidentifiable from one
| release to the next. Or to find a dozen authors who have
| inconceivably and independently created identical manuscripts.
| Surely if there were a library with all possible books, we would
| find one of those two things...
| dsr_ wrote:
| Not exactly, but Walter Jon Williams keeps switching genres
| successfully:
|
| - Napoleonic sea fighting
|
| - early cyberpunk (Hardwired)
|
| - middle cyberpunk around the Solar System (Voice of the
| Whirlwind)
|
| - late cyberpunk post-scarcity space opera(Aristoi)
|
| - transhuman space opera (Implied Spaces)
|
| - New Mexican police procedural / thriller (Days of Atonement)
|
| - near future thrillers (This Is Not A Game and sequelae)
|
| - fantasy of city infrastructure (Metropolitan and City on
| Fire)
|
| - comedy of manners (the Drake Maijstral trilogy)
|
| - Fall of the Space Roman Empire (Dread Empire's Fall series)
|
| - Medieval fantasy (Quillifer and sequelae)
|
| and a Giant Disaster novel, a Zelaznyesque SF mystery, and a
| Star Wars work-for-hire.
|
| There's enough there for five separate authors to make marks on
| the field.
| npilk wrote:
| Sounds like you'd be interested in the short stories of Jorge
| Luis Borges - your comment brings Pierre Menard to mind.
| netcoyote wrote:
| William Gibson: You are an adequate but drug-addled hacker,
| navigating dangerous, high-tech worlds where blurred realities,
| conspiracies, and corporate power struggles force you to uncover
| hidden truths, survive against powerful forces, and ultimately
| question the nature of identity, technology, and control.
|
| Neal Stephenson: You are a small cog in a historical epic leading
| to a far-flung speculative future, where you grapple with the
| complexities of technology, cryptography, and philosophy, as well
| as incidentally discovering the best way to eat Captain Crunch
| cereal.
| tzs wrote:
| Jack Woodford, a decent pulp writer in the first half of the 20th
| century who also wrote several books on writing and on how the
| publishing industry works, including "Trial and Error" in 1933
| which Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury both cited as a major
| influence in getting their writing careers started, had a nice
| description of how to plot:
|
| > Boy meets girl; girl gets boy into pickle; boy gets pickle into
| girl
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(page generated 2024-10-15 23:00 UTC)