Aleatory II: Text
So I’ve been working lately. As in actual teaching work, work that people pay me for. While it’s nice to have money and things to do, this means that I’ve been letting some of the “work” I was doing earlier, like editing videos, cleaning my apartment, and blogging, slide a bit. (Ok, really I was never cleaning my apartment, but we can pretend, right?)
Even YouTube. I used to spend all my time on the Tube, ostensibly to connect with people and be creative, but really to avoid all the other things I ought to have been doing. Even that’s fallen off now, and I haven’t posted a new video in over a week.
I don’t know where that train of thought was going, except perhaps that I haven’t updated this here ode to myself in several days and am not feeling particularly inspired by my day-to-day life at the moment, so it’s time to pull an idea out of the vault.
I’m going to go through my old blog posts—all 3.5 years of them—and pull up every post made on the 8th of some month. (I hope it’ll still be the 8th when I post this.) I’ll pick one sentence from each entry and make a mash-up post right here in this very space. Daring, eh?
But wait, there’s more. I’ve been wondering how to translate the idea of randomness from my aleatory video into a blog post, and I think this is as good a time as any to try it out. Along with my “intelligently-designed” mash-up, I’ll make two others out of randomly selected sentences from the same entries.
If you’re in the mood, see if you can figure out which of the posts below is the one I created “purposefully.” A correct guess earns you an imaginary cookie, by which I mean I will bake you a cookie and eat it in your honor. Imaginary for you, delicious for me. A good plan, yes? I’ve ordered the paragraphs below randomly as well, so don’t bother trying to “get inside my head” and guess where I’ve hidden the real one.
#A#
who was this guy? But I can talk about things besides myself too…really, I swear. By the by, I just retyped this entire entry from memory after xanga ate the first one, so…appreciate it. Tournament! Tonight when I got there I really hadn’t eaten lunch or dinner, so I took a break to snack on some of the food I’d just bought (mmm, delicious embezzlement). Why would you give all that up?! You speak eloquently and have seemingly read every book ever published. Anyway, you’ve probably heard by now about the Genesis crash. It is the end of the week, after all, and we all know by now what that does to Natalie’s schedule. Now, if there were only some way to apply this magical ’studying’ thing to school… I’m a huge fan of logic puzzles, so I forwent dinner to solve this one. Severe thunderstorms, hail, and 70 mph wind gusts expected. Martyrdom is fun and easy. Creepy. Clearly I would make an excellent senator. D’oh.
#B#
won’t that duct tape smart when they rip it off? Haha, so maybe nobody cares about that…but what am I doing wrong? And what if someone put a big magnet next to your eye? Woohoo! I spent a good 5 or 6 hours doing math and eating bagels, and it was GLORIOUS. An excellent choice for masochists. Heh heh heh. Anyway, you’ve probably heard by now about the Genesis crash. This one’s awful, and it’s only going to get worse. I could win an irrational fretting contest with one hand tied behind my back. Undaunted, I grabbed a stack of index cards and two colored markers, cleared a space on the floor, and had the thing solved within five minutes. Rock. As a physics major in a history class, I feel I have something to prove. It’s not something I get to experience often. Clearly I would make an excellent senator. And life should totally revolve around instant gratification, right?
#C#
and the board? LOTR? Drew Carey, tonight at the Muddhole. Wish us luck! What threat to the Bush administration are you? When I was in ninth grade, we were assigned a biography project on an author of our choice. What people love: You can answer almost any question people ask, and have thus been nicknamed Jeeves. It’s the first time anybody’s brought space-things back to Earth since the last Apollo mission in 1972. It is the end of the week, after all, and we all know by now what that does to Natalie’s schedule. I’m going to bed now. I’m a huge fan of logic puzzles, so I forwent dinner to solve this one. We thought we’d have a picnic outside, but after a week of gorgeous spring weather, we’re under a tornado watch. My enthusiasm will wear off, I’m sure, as the semester wears me down, but hopefully I can hold out for longer than I’ve done before. It’s not something I get to experience often. (I’ll be stopping by later to pick up my country club membership, fine cigars, and loose women, thanksmuch.) Oh wait.
Okay, wow. That was an assload of work, and for what? Goodness only knows, but now I can (1) go to bed and (2) cross this idea off my list of “things to blog.” If you want to look these posts up for yourselves, here’s a list of the months in which I posted something on the 8th. I’m not going to bother linking them—the archives are in the sidebar. Apparently April 8th is a never-fail blogging-day for me. Who knew?
2003: April
2004: February, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November
2005: April, May, September, November
2006: February, April
Feel free to leave your guesses in the comments. Reading the three paragraphs, I think it’s fairly obvious which one was intelligently designed, relatively incoherent though it is, but that may be because I can see the twisted, made-up logic behind it. I’m interested to see what y’all come up with—will it be obvious to you, too, or will your human brains conjure up order from randomness and be led astray?
Tags: blogging, math & puzzles