Up-Goer Five

Here's a description of my PACBook project written on the Up-Goer Five website, which only allows you to use (what it says are) the 1,000 most common words in English.

Sometimes a computer needs to put a new word into a story, like maybe the name of a group of people, or a type of thing that you have made. But when the computer does this, it needs to use the right form of the word. Also, the computer may need to change the form of some of the other words in the story to fit in with the new word. This can be a hard problem if the story is written in a different way of speaking, like they use in other lands. I have written a computer thing which knows how to put the right form of the word into a story. Also, I have told my computer how to change the form of other words in the story, if it needs to. You need to mark up the story first, and mark up all the forms of the words that the computer will put into the story. I can show you how to do this.

I'm slightly cheating, using mark up as a single lexical item.

Club Tales

Reading The Notion Club Papers 📚 on the train, which leads me to think about the club tales genre. You know, Tales from the White Hart (Clarke), Tales of the Black Widowers (Asimov), and so on... usually short stories, a bunch of blokes get together and talk, which forms a common framing device for the actual tales.

Is it always just men? Are there any examples featuring mixed groups, or all women? Is anyone writing a c21st version?

Trying to work out the rules / conventions of the genre. They're club tales; the framing characters all know each other and meet regularly. Guests are permitted. No one in the club actually tells the story, at least not uninterruptedly; it emerges through conversation. The stories may be something that (allegedly) happened to one of the characters or maybe happened to a friend of a friend. They're tall tales or mysteries or have a twist.

Nothing happens to the members of the club in the context of the framing story. They just talk. But they're strongly drawn characters.

Outside the new south entrance to Leeds station this morning.