Sunday, October 5, 2008

Bitter at the root: more fun with Markov

I'm fascinated with subjecting my text to the Markov Text Synthesizer. I took the same text from yesterday and subjected it to four more runs through the engine. It still reads about the same, but the grammar becomes a mess.

I like good grammar!

I spent a good deal of time today playing with this. It produces a lot of total garbage. But, what interests me is that if there is a subtext in the text, it still comes through. It's the essence of the stream of consciousness spew, stew or whatever one wants to call it.

I don't like absurdity for the sake of it. But I want to play the game fairly and not change the grammar or eliminate words from the product. So, when the text becomes so garbled that there's nothing left but its essence, it winds up like this (and again, the only way I rearranged the text is visually, not the order or the tense):

It was all this:

Regret.
Will.

I can not let myself
lapse into bitterness.

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