text:
Nano-NaNoGenMo or #NNNGM
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak November;
And each separate bit and pixel wrought a novel on GitHub.
April may be the cruelest month, and now the month associated with poetry, but November is the month associated with novel-writing, via NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. Now, thanks to an offhand comment by Darius Kazemi and the work of Hugo van Kemenade, November is also associated with the computer-generation of novels, broadly speaking. Any computer program and its 50,000 word+ output qualifies as an entry in NaNoGenMo, National Novel Generation Month.
NaNoGenMo does have a sort of barrier to entry: People often think they have to do something elaborate, despite anyone being explicitly allowed to produce a novel consisting entirely of meows. Those new to NaNoGenMo may look up to, for instance, the amazingly talented Ross Goodwin. In his own attempt to further climate change, he decided to code up an energy-intensive GPT-2 text generator while flying on a commercial jet. You'd think that for his next trick this guy might hop in a car, take a road trip, and generate a novel using a LSTM RNN! Those who look up so such efforts — and it's hard not to, when they're conducted at 30,000 feet and also quite clever — might end up thinking that computer-generated novels must use complex code and masses of data.
And yet, there is so much that can be done with simple programs that consume very little energy and can be fully understood by their programmers and others.
Because of this, I have recently announced Nano-NaNoGenMo. On Mastodon and Twitter (using #NNNGM) I have declared that November will also be the month in which people write computer programs that are at most 256 characters, and which generate 50,000 word or more novels. These can use Project Gutenberg files, as they are named on that site, as input. Or, they can run without using any input.
I have produced three Nano-NaNoGenMo (or #NNNGM) entries for 2019. In addition to being not very taxing computationally, one of these happens to have been written on an extremely energy-efficient electric train. Here they are. I won't gloss each one, but I will provide a few comments on each, along with the full code for you to look at right in this blog post, and with links to both bash shell script files and the final output.
OB-DCK; or, THE (SELFLESS) WHALE
perl -0pe 's/.?K/**/s;s/MOBY(.)DI/OB$1D/g;s/D.r/Nick Montfort/;s/E W/E (SELFLESS) W/g;s/\b(I ?|me|my|myself|am|us|we|our|ourselves)\b//gi;s/\r\n\r\n//g;s/\r\n/ /g;s//\n\n/g;s/ +/ /g;s/("?) ([,.;:]?)/$1$2/g;s/\nEnd .//s' 2701-0.txt #NNNGM
WordPress has mangled this code despite it being in a code element; Use the following link to obtain a runnable version of it:
OB-DCK; or, THE (SELFLESS) WHALE code
OB DCK; or, THE (SELFLESS) WHALE, the novel
The program, performing a simple regular expression substitution, removes all first-person pronouns from Moby-Dick. Indeed, OB-DCK is "MOBY-DICK" with "MY" removed from MOBY and "I" from DICK. Chapter 1 begins:
Call Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in purse, and nothing particular to interest on shore, thought would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever find growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in soul; whenever find involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral meet; and especially whenever hypos get such an upper hand of , that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, account it high time to get to sea as soon as can. This is substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with .
Because Ishmael is removed as the "I" of the story, on a grammatical level there is (spoiler alert!) no human at all left at the end of book.
perl -e 'sub n{(unpack"(A4)*","backbodybookcasedoorfacefacthandheadhomelifenamepartplayroomsidetimeweekwordworkyear")[rand 21]}print"consequence\nNick Montfort\n\na beginning";for(;$i<12500;$i++){print" & so a ".n;if(rand()<.6){print n}}print".\n"' #NNNGM
consequence code
consequence, the novel
Using compounding of the sort found in my computer-generated long poem The Truelist and my "ppg 256-3," this presents a sequence of things — sometimes formed from a single very common four-letter word, sometimes from two combined — that, it is stated, somehow follow from each other:
a beginning & so a name & so a fact & so a case & so a bookdoor & so a head & so a factwork & so a sidelife & so a door & so a door & so a factback & so a backplay & so a name & so a facebook & so a lifecase & so a partpart & so a hand & so a bookname & so a face & so a homeyear & so a bookfact & so a book & so a hand & so a head & so a headhead & so a book & so a face & so a namename & so a life & so a hand & so a side & so a time & so a yearname & so a backface & so a headface & so a headweek & so a headside & so a bookface & so a bookhome & so a lifedoor & so a bookyear & so a workback & so a room & so a face & so a body & so a faceweek & so a sidecase & so a time & so a body & so a fact […]
Too Much Help at Once
python -c "help('topics')" | python -c "import sys;print('Too Much Help at Once\nNick Montfort');[i for i in sorted(''.join(sys.stdin.readlines()[3:]).split()) if print('\n'+i+'\n') or help(i)]" #NNNGM
Too Much Help at Once code
Too Much Help at Once, the novel
The program looks up all the help topics provided within the (usually interactive) help system inside Python itself. Then, it asks for help on everything, in alphabetical order, producing 70k+ words of text, according the GNU utility wc. The novel that results is, of course, an appropriation of text others have written; it arranges but doesn't even transform that text. To me, however, it does have some meaning. Too Much Help at Once models one classic mistake that beginning programmers can make: Thinking that it's somehow useful to read comprehensively about programming, or about a programming language, rather than actually using that programming language and writing some programs. Here's the very beginning:
The "assert" statement
Assert statements are a convenient way to insert debugging assertions
into a program:
assert_stmt ::= "assert" expression ["," expression]
A plot
So far I have noted one other #NNNGM entry, A plot by Milton Läufer, which I am reproducing here in corrected form, according to the author's note:
perl -e 'sub n{(split/ /,"wedding murder suspicion birth hunt jealousy death party tension banishment trial verdict treason fight crush friendship trip loss")[rand 17]}print"A plot\nMilton Läufer\n\n";for(;$i<12500;$i++){print" and then a ".n}print".\n"'
Related in structure to consequence, but with words of varying length that do not compound, Läufer's novel winds through not four weddings and a funeral, but about, in expectation, 735 weddings and 735 murders in addition to 735 deaths, leaving us to ponder the meaning of "a crush" when it occurs in different contexts:
and then a wedding and then a murder and then a trip and then a hunt and then a crush and then a trip and then a death and then a murder and then a trip and then a fight and then a treason and then a fight and then a crush and then a fight and then a friendship and then a murder and then a wedding and then a friendship and then a suspicion and then a party and then a treason and then a birth and then a treason and then a tension and then a birth and then a hunt and then a friendship and then a trip and then a wedding and then a birth and then a death and then a death and then a wedding and then a treason and then a suspicion and then a birth and then a jealousy and then a trip and then a jealousy and then a party and then a tension and then a tension and then a trip and then a treason and then a crush and then a death and then a banishment […]
Share, enjoy, and please participate by adding your Nano-NaNoGenMo entries as NaNoGenMo entries (via the GitHub site) and by tooting & tweeting them!
Gomringer's Untitled Poem ["silencio"], an Unlikely Sonnet
The untitled poem by Eugen Gomringer that we can only call "silencio" is a classic, perhaps the classic, concrete poem. According to Marjorie Perloff's Unoriginal Genius, the "silencio" version of the poem dates from 1953. In my 1968 edition of The Book of Hours and Constellations I find the German manifestation of this poem (with the word "schweigen") and the English poem (with the word "silence"), on the same page at the very beginning of the book — but no "silencio." The place where I do find "silencio" is An Anthology of Concrete Poetry from 1967, edited by Emmett Williams. My copy is the re-issue by Primary Information.
Williams mentions tendencies and tries not to too strongly characterize any particular poets in the anthologies when he writes, in the introduction:
The visual element of their poetry [the concrete poets' poetry] tended to be structural, a consequence of the poem, a "picture" of the lines of force of the work itself, and not merely textural. It was poetry beyond paraphrase … the word, not words, words, words or expressionistic squiggles …
There are several essential points here about the project of concrete poetry and how it differs from, for instance, the shapes of "Easter Wings" and the other poems in George Herbert's The Altar, as well as the way Lewis Carroll presented the image of a mouse's tail in words that tell the mouse's tale in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. However brilliant these two writers were, in these cases they were using language to make pictures; the concrete poets, beginning with Gomringer, worked to create structures. Their poems are not just verse (lineated language), but made from lines of force. In many cases, as with the unnamed poem I must call "silencio," an entire concrete poem can be understood to cohere as a word.
There are other interpretations of Gomringer's poem that situate it in history, but I will give a simple one that situates it within the project of concrete poetry — followed by another that places it in a different and much longer-lived poetic tradition.
The lines of force of this poem are, most obviously, those that allow for the gap in the middle where the ground (the absence of text, the absence of "silencio") becomes figure. As ink declares silence, or, if we read the text aloud, as our voice declares silence, attentive readers can't help but notice a truer silence in the middle of the page.
At the next stage, there is silence between each "silencio," horizontally and vertically. We overlook this gap, which is seen even when text is not presented on a grid. It too will be represented if we read the poem aloud, however, between each spoken word.
We can go further, although ear and eye would not agree about the silences. There are spaces, and thus silences of a visual sort, between each of the letters in "silencio," too.
Fascinating, isn't it, that John Cage's 4'33" was composed and presented in 1952, preceding this poem? This poem, too, seems to structurally show, through its lines of force, that silence can take center stage.
In any case, without offering more than a brief appreciation, I mean to make it clear that this is a quintessential concrete poem. One can read it out loud, but that does not provide the listener with the effect of apprehending the structure of the poem on the page. The poem is not a picture of anything. It is a structure. And it is not squiggles or simply a bunch of words, even if the single lexeme "silencio" is repeated fourteen times. It is fitting to apprehend and read the whole poem as a word, not a bunch of words.
Accepting this, I would like to offer an interpretation of this poem that may seem perverse, but which I believe shows this poem's radical versatility: It can be seen in the light of a poetic tradition that long predates concrete poetry. This poem is not only a concrete poem, but also a sonnet. Specifically, I'll argue that although the repeated word is a Spanish word, it fits into the English-language tradition of the sonnet. Because concrete poetry is a transnational phenomenon and Gomringer writes in English as well as German and Spanish, this disjunction may be less unusual that it otherwise would be.
Consider that the poem consists of fourteen occurrences of "silencio," which despite their unusual arrangement on the page can be read aloud as fourteen lines. It would be hard not to read them this way.
Because each word is the same, the poem follows the rhyme scheme of a sonnet — any rhyme scheme, including the Petrarchan or Shakespearean in English, including those typical in Spanish.
If some reader finds it impossible for the same line to be repeated fourteen times in a sonnet, I refer this reader to the 2002 "Sonnet" by Terrance Hayes, which consists of fourteen repetitions of the line "We sliced the watermelon into smiles."
But is it metrical? The word "silencio" pronounced by itself has two metrical feet ( x / | x / ) and is in perfectly regular iambic dimeter. This is also the meter of Elizabeth Bishop's last poem, "Sonnet," which begins:
Caught — the bubble
in the spirit level,
a creature divided;
and the compass needle
There's much more variation in Bishop's poem, but the metrical regularity of Gomringer's poem shouldn't preclude it from being in this particular form. While I don't have an example of a sonnet with repeated lines (like the one by Hayes) from before 1953, there are earlier sonnets in dimeter, or one, at least: a piece of light verse by Arthur Guiterman, published in The New Yorker on July 7, 1939.
Sonnets can be about anything, although the form does have a heritage. Reading the poem as a sonnet allows us to make a connection to the sonnet tradition if we wish. We can, for instance, ask whether this sonnet has anything to do with love, whether in the most traditional sense of love for a woman or, in John Donne and Herbert's senses, religious love. Could the silence of this sonnet be that of being understood, and of not needing to say anything aloud?
Seeing this Gomringer poem as a sonnet also allows us to put it into conversation with other one-word texts (those that have several tokens but repeat a single type) that can also be viewed as sonnets, because they have fourteen tokens.
The one I know of, and which fascinates me, is Dance, a typing by Christoper Knowles that I saw contextualized as visual art in his 2015 solo show at the Philadelphia ICA. The page of this work is blank except for a line at the top that repeats the word "DANCE" (in capital letters) fourteen times, with a space between each occurrence. This makes for 83 characters: 5 × 14 = 70 for the word DANCE, plus the 13 spaces that go between each pair of words. While a sheet of paper is typically thought to accommodate 80 typewritten characters across its width, Knowles found that by beginning at the extreme left edge of the page and typing to the extreme right edge, he could fit exactly 83 onto it.
The typing Dance can be read as a sonnet in hemimeter — a term used by George Starbuck for "half-feet," and associated with light verse. Where "silencio" offers a more static and contemplative structure, I can't help but imagine Knowles typing DANCE repeatedly, his hands dancing on the typewriter, as he also produced a text that is a score, instructing us to dance. Not so much a structure, it seems to me, but an exhortation and a trace of its making. And, of course, a text that can be read in the sonnet tradition, asking us to consider how dance, repeated, insistent, filling the width of the page completely, relates to love.
A Bit about Alphabit
During Synchrony 2019, on the train from New York City to Montreal, two of us (nom de nom and shifty) wrote a 64 byte Commodore 64 program which ended up in the Old School competition. (It could have also gone into the Nano competition for <=256 byte productions.) Our Alphabit edged out the one other fine entry in Old School, a Sega Genesis production by MopeDude also written on the train.
The small program we wrote is not a conventional or spectacular demo; like almost all of the work by nom de nom, it uses character graphics exclusively. But since we like sizecoding on the Commodore 64, we wanted to explain this small program byte by byte. We hope this explanation will be understandable to interested people who know how to program, even if they may not have much assembly or C64 experience.
To get Alphabit itself, download the program from nickm.com and run it in a C64 emulator or on some hardware Commodore 64. You can see a short video of Alphabit running on Commodore 64 and CRT monitor, for the first few seconds, for purposes of illustration.
starting here,
these bytes load
at: 02 08 01 00 00 9E 32 30
$0808 36 31 00 00 00 20 81 FF
$0810 C8 8C 12 D4 8C 14 D4 C8
$0818 8C 20 D0 AD 12 D0 9D F4
$0820 D3 8C 18 D4 D0 F5 8A 8E
$0828 0F D4 AE 1B D4 E0 F0 B0
$0830 F6 9D 90 05 9D 90 D9 AA
$0838 88 D0 E0 E8 E0 1B D0 DB
Load address. Commodore 64 programs (PRG files) have a very simple format: a two-byte load address, least significant byte first, followed by the machine code which will be loaded at that address. So this part of the file says to load at $0802. The BASIC program area begins at $0801, but as explained next, it's possible to cheat and load the program one byte higher in memory, saving one byte in the PRG file.
BASIC bootloader, $0802–$080c: This program starts with a tiny BASIC program that will run when the user types RUN and presses ENTER. When run, this program, a bootloader, will execute the main machine code. In this case the program is "0 SYS2061" with the line number represented as 00 00, the BASIC keyword SYS represented by a single byte, 9E, and its argument "2061" represented by ASCII-encoded digits: 32 30 36 31. When run, this starts the machine code program at decimal address 2061, which is $080D, the beginning of the next block of bytes.
Advanced note: Normally a BASIC program would need at least one more byte, because two bytes at $0801 and $0802 are needed to declare the "next line number." You would have to specify where to go after the first line has finished executing. But for our bootloader, any non-null next line number will work as the next line number. Our program is going to run the machine code at $080d (decimal 2061) and then break. So we only need to fulfill one formal requirement: Some nonzero value has to be written to either $0801 or $0802. For our purposes, whatever is already in $0801 can stay there. That's what allows this program to load at $0802, saving us one byte.
On the 6502: There are three "variables" provided by this processor, the accumulator (a general-purpose register, which can be used with arithmetic operations) and the x and y registers (essentially counters, which can be incremented and decremented).
Initialization, $080d–$081a: This sets up two aspects of the demo, sound and graphics. Actually, after voice 3 is initialized, it is used not only to make sound, but also to generate random numbers for putting characters on screen. This is a special facility of the C64's sound chip; when voice 3 is set to generate noise, one can also retrieve random numbers from the chip.
The initialization proceeds by clearing the screen using the Kernal's SCINIT routine. When SCINIT finishes, the y register has $84 in it. It turns out that for our purposes the noise waveform register and the sustain-decay register can both be set to $85, so instead of using two bytes to load a new value into y (ldy #$85), the program can simply increment y (iny), which takes only one byte. After storing $85 in those two registers, the goal is to set the border color to the same as the default screen color, dark blue, $06. Actually any value with 6 for a second hex digit will work, so again the program can increment y to make it $86 and then use this to set the border color. Finally, the y register is going to count down the number of times each letter (A, B, C … until Z) will be written onto the screen. Initially, the program puts 'A' on screen $86 times (134 decimal); for every subsequent letter, it puts the letter on screen 256 times — but that comes later. The original assembly for this initialization:
iny         ; $85 works for the next two...
sty $d412   ; voice 3 noise waveform
sty $d414   ; voice 3 SR
iny         ; $86 works; low nybble needs to be $6
sty $d020   ; set the border color to dark blue
Each letter loop, first part, $081b–$0826: This loop counts through each of the 26 letters. The top part of the loop has a loop within it in which some of the sound is produced; then there is just a single instruction after that.
Fortunately, the x register already is set up with $01, the screen code of the letter 'A', thanks to SCINIT. In this loop, the value of the current raster line (the lowest 8 bits of a 9-bit value, to be precise) is loaded into the accumulator. The next instruction stores that value in a memory location indexed by x; as x increases during the run of the program, this memory location will eventually be mapped to the sound chip registers for voices 1 and 2, starting at $d400, and this will make some sounds. This is what gives some higher-level structure to the sound in the piece, which would otherwise be completely repetitive. After this instruction, however many characters are left to put onto the screen (counting down from 255 to 0) goes into the volume register, which causes the volume to quickly drop and then spike to create a rhythmic effect. With the noise turned on it makes a percussive sound. All of this takes place again and again until that raster line value is 0, which happens twice per frame, 120 times a second.
After all of this, the value in x (which letter, A–Z, is the current one) is transferred into the accumulator, necessary because of how the rest of the outer loop is written. The original assembly for the beginning of the outer loop:
raster:
lda $d012   ; get raster line (lowest 8 bits)
sta $d3f4,x ; raster line --> some sound register
sty $d418   ; # of chars left to write --> volume
bne raster
Get random, $0827–$0830: This code does a bit more sound work, using the x register to set the frequency. Since this is the current letter value, it increases throughout the run of the program, and the pitch generally rises. Then, a random value (well, not truly random, but "noisy" and produced by the sound chip's noise generator) is loaded in that x register, with the program continuing to get the value until it is in the range $00–$ef (decimal 0–239). If the value has to be obtained multiple times, frequency gets set multiple times, too, adding some glitchiness to the sound. Because the random value is bounded, the program will place the characters in a 40 character × 6 line (240 character) region.
stx $d40f       ; current letter --> freq
ldx $d41b       ; get random byte from voice 3
cpx #240
bcs random
Each letter loop, last part, $0831–$083a: In the bottom part of this loop, the characters are put onto the screen by writing to screen memory and color memory. Screen memory starts at $0400, and $0590 is the starting point of our 6-line rectangle in the middle of the screen. The corresponding point in color memory is $d990. Our current character (A–Z) is in the accumulator at this point, while the x register, used to offset from $0590 and $d990, has a random value. After putting the accumulator's value (as a letter) into screen memory and (as a color) into color memory, the accumulator is transferred back into the x register, a counter. Then the y register (counting down to 0) is decremented. The program keeps doing this whole process, the "each letter loop," until y reaches 0.
sta $0590,x  ; jam the current letter on screen
sta $d990,x  ; make some colors with the value
Outer loop, $083b–$083f: This is the code for counting from 1 to 26, A to Z. Since the x register stores the current letter, it is incremented here. It is compared with decimal 27; if the register has that value, the program is done and it will fall through to whatever is next in memory … probably $00, which will break the program, although anything might be in memory there. It would have been nice to have an explicit brk as part of this PRG, but hey, this is a 64-byte demo with a BASIC bootloader, written one day on a train. If the program has more letters to go through, it branches all the way back up to the beginning of the "each letter loop."
cpx #27     ; have we gotten past 'Z'?
Taper #2 Is Out
The second issue of Taper, a literary magazine featuring small-scale computational work, is now online.
The second issue was edited by Sebastian Bartlett, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Angela Chang, Judy Heflin, and Rachel Paige Thompson, working collectively. Bad Quarto (my micropress) publishes the journal.
The call for issue #3 is posted. The deadline is February 18 (2019).
Taper #2 features 18 works by six a., Sebastian Bartlett, Kyle Booten, Angela Chang, Augusto Corvalan, Kavi Duvvoori, Esen Espinsa, Leonardo Flores, Judy Heflin, Chris Joseph, Vinicius Marquet, Stuart Moulthrop, Everest Pipkin, Mark Sample, and William Wu. Go take a look!
Hard West Turn at Time Farm
For two weeks only (today through October 23), my limited-edition computer-generated book, Hard West Turn, is available for reading in an installation at Time Farm, underneath the MIT Press Bookstore, 301 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA.
Hard West Turn is a computer-generated novel about gun violence in the United States. The copy exhibited is one of three artist's proofs; only 13 copies (one for each of the original states) were made for sale. The generating program is free software, but the specific copy-edited text of this book has only been made available in print. Hard West Turn will be regenerated annually for limited-edition publication each July 4.
Consult the staff of the MIT Press Bookstore for access to Time Farm. Visitors are asked to remain for an hour without using devices such as phones or computers.
A Web Reply to the Post-Web Generation
At the recent ELO conference in Montréal Leonardo Flores introduced the concept of "3rd Generation" electronic literature. I was at another session during his influential talk, but I heard about the concept from him beforehand and have read about it on Twitter (a 3rd generation context, I believe) and Flores's blog (more of a 2nd generation context, I believe). One of the aspects of this concept is that the third generation of e-lit writers makes use of existing platforms (Twitter APIs, for instance) rather than developing their own interfaces. Blogging is a bit different from hand-rolled HTML, but one administers one's own blog.
When Flores & I spoke, I realized that I have what seems like a very similar idea of how to divide electronic literature work today. Not exactly the same, I'm sure, but pretty easily defined and I think with a strong correspondence to this three-generation concept. I describe it like this:
Pre-Web
Post-Web
To understand the way I'm splitting things up, you first have to agree that we live in a post-Web world of networked information today. Let me try to persuade you of that, to begin with.
The Web is now at most an option for digital communication of documents, literature, and art. It's an option that fewer and fewer people are taking. Floppy disks and CD-ROMs also remain options, although they are even less frequently used. The norm today has more to do with app-based connectivity and less with the open Web. When you tweet, and when you read things on Twitter, you don't need to use the Web; you can use your phone's Twitter client. Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat would be just fine if the Web was taken out behind the shed and never seen again. These are all typically used via apps, with the Web being at most an option for access.
The more companies divert use of their social networks from the Web to their own proprietary apps, the more they are able to shape how their users interact — and their users are their products, that which they offer to advertisers. So, why not keep moving these users, these products, into the better-controlled conduits of app-based communication?
Yes, I happen to be writing a blog entry right now — one which I don't expect anyone to comment on, like they used to in the good old days. There is much more discussion of things I blog about on Twitter than in the comment section of my blog; this is evidence that we are in the post-Web era. People can still do Web (and even pre-Web) electronic literature and art projects. As Jodi put it in an interview this year, "You can still make websites these days." This doesn't change that we reached peak Web years ago. We live now in a post-Web era where some are still doing Web work, just as some are still doing pre-Web sorts of work.
In my view, the pre-Web works are ones in HyperCard and the original Mac and Windows Storyspace, of course. (It may limit your audience, but you can still make work in these formats, if you like!) Some early pieces of mine, such as The Help File (written in the standard Windows help system) and my parser-based interactive fiction, written in Inform 6, are also pre-Web. You can distribute parser-based IF on the Web, and you can play it in the browser, but it was being distributed on an FTP site, the IF Archive, before the Web became the prevalent means of distribution. (The IF Archive now has a fancy new Web interface.) Before the IF Archive, interactive fiction was sold on floppy disk. I consider that the significant number of people making parser-based interactive fiction today are still doing pre-Web electronic literature work that happens to be available on the Web or sometimes in app form.
Also worth noting is that Rob Wittig's Blue Company and Scott Rettberg's Kind of Blue are best considered pre-Web works by my reckoning, as email, the form used for them, was in wide use before the Web came along. (HTML is used in these email projects for formatting and to incorporate illustrations, so the Web does have some involvement, but the projects are still mainly email projects.) The Unknown, on the other hand, is definitely an electronic literature work of the Web.
Twitterbots, as long as they last, are great examples of post-Web electronic literature, of course.
With this for preface, I have to say that I don't completely agree with Flores's characterization of the books in the Using Electricity series. It could be because my pre-Web/Web/post-Web concept doesn't map onto his 1st/2nd/3rd generation idea exactly. It could also be that it doesn't exactly make sense to name printed books, or for that matter installations in gallery spaces, as pre-Web/Web/post-Web. This type of division makes the most sense for work one accesses on one's own computer, whether it got there via a network, a floppy disk, a CD-ROM, or some other way. But if we wanted to see where the affinities lie, I would have to indicate mostly pre-Web and Web connections; I think there is only one post-Web Using Electricity book that has been released or is coming out soon:
The Truelist (Nick Montfort) is more of a pre-Web project, kin to early combinatorial poetry but taken to a book-length, exhaustive extreme.
Mexica (Rafael Pérez y Pérez) is more of a pre-Web project based on a "Good Old-Fashioned AI" (GOFAI) system.
Articulations (Allison Parrish) is based on a large store of textual data, Project Gutenberg, shaped into verse with two different sorts of vector-space analyses, phonetic and syntactical. While Project Gutenberg predates the Web by almost two decades, it became the large-scale resource that it is today in the Web era. So, this would be a pre-Web or Web project.
Encomials (Ranjit Bhatnagar), coming in September, relies on Twitter data, and indeed the firehose of it, so is a post-Web/3rd generation project.
Machine Unlearning (Li Zilles), coming in September, is directly based on machine learning on data from the open Web. This is a Web-generation project which wouldn't have come to fruition in the walled gardens of the post-Web.
A Noise Such as a Man Might Make (Milton Läufer), coming in September, uses a classic algorithm from early in the 20th Century — one you could read about in Scientific American in the 1980s, and see working on USENET — to conflate two novels. It seems like a pretty clear pre-Web project to me.
Ringing the Changes (Stephanie Strickland), coming in 2019, uses the combinatorics of change ringing and a reasonably small body of documents, although larger than Läufer's two books. So, again, it would be pre-Web.
Having described the "generational" tendencies of these computer-generated books, I'll close by mentioning one of the implications of the three-part generational model, as I see it, for what we used to call "hypertext." The pre-Web allowed for hypertexts that resided on one computer, while the Web made it much more easily possible to update a piece of hypertext writing, collaborate with others remotely, release it over time, and link out to external sites.
Now, what has happened to Hypertext in the post-Web world? Just to stick to Twitter, for a moment: You can still put links into tweets, but corporate enclosure of communications means that the wild wild wild linking of the Web tends to be more constrained. Links in tweets look like often-cryptic partial URLs instead of looking like text, as they do in pre-Web and Web hypertexts. You essentially get to make a Web citation or reference, not build a hypertext, by tweeting. And hypertext links have gotten more abstruse in this third, post-Web generation! When you're on Twitter, you're supposed to be consuming that linear feed — automatically produced for you in the same way that birds feed their young — not clicking away of your own volition to see what the Web has to offer and exploring a network of media.
The creative bots of Twitter (while they last) do subvert the standard orientation of the platform in interesting ways. But even good old fashioned hypertext is reigned in by post-Web systems. If there's no bright post-post-Web available, I'm willing to keep making a blog post now and then, and am glad to keep making Web projects — some of which people can use as sort of free/libre/open-source 3rd-generation platforms, if they like.
VIdeo of My PRB Reading
Thanks to host Joseph Mosconi, I read at the Poetics Research Bureau in Los Angeles from two recent computer-generated books. Sophia Le Fraga and Aaron Winslow read with me on this evening, on July 21.
I have now posted 360 video of my readings of both The Truelist and Hard West Turn.
Montfort's Poetic Research Bureau reading of July 21, 2018
I read from The Truelist (Counterpath, 2017). The Truelist is available as an offset-printed book from Counterpath, as a short, deterministic, free software program that generates the full text of the book, and as a free audiobook, thanks to the generosity of the University of Pennsylvania's Kelly Writers House, its Wexler Studio, and PennSound.
After this, I read from Hard West Turn (Bad Quarto, 2018), a computer-generated novel about gun violence in the United States, the first of a series. Each novel, copy-edited by the author/programmer, will be re-generated annually for release on July 4. Hard West Turn (2018) is available in print in a very limited edition, only 13 copies for sale + 3 artist's proofs. The short free software program that generated the text is available as well. The first draft of this project was done as a NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generation Month) program in November 2017.
Platform Studies at 10
The Platform Studies series from MIT Press is now about ten years old. The first book in the series, my & Ian Bogost's Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, was published in 2009. (We also edit this series.) Before our book on the Atari VCS/Atari 2600 came out, we launched the site and announced the series, back at the end of 2006, and Ian and I were presenting about it at conferences the next year. So, although the exact birthday is uncertain, let's say a (probably belated) happy 10th.
Pong compared to Hunt the Wumpus: The platforms, not just game structures and interfaces, fundamentally differ.
Nine books have been published in the series:
Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (2009) by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost
Codename Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform (2012) by Steven E. Jones and George K. Thiruvathukal
The Future Was Here: Commodore Amiga (2012) by Jimmy Maher
Flash: Building the Interactive Web (2014) by Anastasia Salter and John Murray
I Am Error: The Nintendo Entertainment System (2015) by Nathan Altice
Peripheral Vision: Bell Labs, the S-C 4020, and the Origins of Computer Art (2015) by Zabet Patterson
Now the Chips are Down: The BBC Micro (2016) by Alison Gazzard
Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (2017) by Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll
Super Power, Spoony Bards, And Silverware: The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (2017) by Dominic Arsenault
It's worth noting again that platform studies isn't a subset of game studies. You can see this from the above list, which includes books about two home computers (the Amiga and BBC Micro), a software platform used for different purposes (Flash), a national telecommunications system (Mintiel), and a peripheral used to connect computing to motion picture film (the Stromberg-Carlson 4020). On the other hand, its intersection with game studies is quite significant; four books are about gaming platforms while games play an important role in most of the other five studies.
As Ian & I have written, we have put forth platform studies, as a concept and (in capital letters) as a book series, simply as a way to focus an investigation of computational media.
It isn't a methodology or even a method. It doesn't require or preclude any particular sort of scholarship or analysis. We do think that since computational platforms are the focus in platform studies, some serious engagement with their computational aspects is needed, but this engagement can come from many different directions, from people with training in many disciplines and interdisciplines.
The point of the series and concept is to invite a focus on platform, just as we already have studies that focus on particular national contexts, particular historical periods, particular game/creative genres, particular games and creative works, and work done by particular organizations, collectives, and individuals. We describe this in, for instance:
Bogost, Ian, and Nick Montfort. "Platform studies: Frequently questioned answers." Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, 2009.
Bogost, Ian, and Nick Montfort. "New media as material constraint. An introduction to platform studies." In Electronic Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface. Proceedings of the First International HASTAC Conference, pp. 176-193. 2007.
That said, we have put forth a five-layered model to explain what a computational platform is and how it interacts with other layers of digital media. (This was introduced in Montfort, Nick, "Combat in Context," Game Studies vol. 6, no. 1, December 2006.) We do believe computational platforms can be defined and that they have significance. So platform studies is meant to be an inviting space, but it is not one that is completely unfurnished.
Several people have done critical writing about the platform studies concept in the academic literature:
Apperley, Thomas, and Darshana Jayemane. "Game studies' material turn." Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 9, no. 1, pp. 5-25, 2012.
Apperley, Thomas, and Jussi Parikka. "Platform studies' epistemic threshold." Games and Culture 13, no. 4, pp. 349-369, 2018.
Leorke, Dale. "Rebranding the platform: The limitations of 'platform studies.'" Digital Culture & Education 4, no. 3, pp. 257-268, 2012.
Plantin, Jean-Christophe, Carl Lagoze, Paul N. Edwards, and Christian Sandvig. "Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook." New Media & Society 20, no. 1 (2018): 293-310.
Others have taken a platform focus in their studies outside of the series, often in articles. These are a few that have come to my attention:
Friedhoff, Jane. "Untangling Twine: A Platform Study." Proceedings of DiGRA 2013: DeFragging Game Studies. 2013.
Helmond, Anne. "The platformization of the Web: Making Web data platform ready." Social Media+ Society 1, no. 2, 2015.
Loudon, Melissa. "A platform studies approach to the role of technology in the ICTD ecosystem: The SMS in M4D interventions." Information Technology for Development 22, no. sup1, pp. 7-25, 2016.
Švelch, Jan. "Platform Studies, Computational Essentialism, and Magic: The Gathering." Analog Game Studies. July 11, 2016.
Tobin, Samuel. Portable Play in Everyday Life: The Nintendo DS. Palgrave: 2013.
Ian & I continue to welcome inquiries from potential Platform Studies authors. We are available, as we have been, to help prospective authors develop book proposals for the MIT Press.
While we welcome books on all sorts of platforms, we want to particularly encourage writers to think about some of the platforms of major historical importance that are not yet covered in the series:
The Apple II series, successful home computers for which many games and business applications first were developed; also the basis for the success of Apple Computer.
The Commodore 64, the best-selling single model of computer ever made; highly influential in early online systems, gaming, the demoscene, and music.
The IBM PC, whose open architecture led "PC compatible" machines to dominate in home and business computing by the end of the 1980s.
The Macintosh series, influential in bringing the GUI into popular use; used in education and desktop publishing; the basis for the continued success of Apple Computer/Apple Inc.
Microsoft Windows, the operating system/desktop platform that has dominated in business but also many creative contexts and propelled the success of Microsoft.
HyperCard, the first widely-used hypermedia system before to the Web, included for free with Macs when it was released in 1987.
Again, books focused on any platform — or on a series of computers or a closely-related family of platforms — are welcome in Platform Studies. If a case can be made for studying a platform, it doesn't need to be a popular favorite throughout the world. And, even if a platform is very prominent, a proposal still needs to explain why a study of it will be valuable. I just don't want authors to shy away from these six!
Updated July 26 to add an entry for Samuel Tobin's book on the Nintendo DS.
Exquisite Corpses are Now on Display
In 1984, a type-in program appeared in the French Hebdogiciel—no surprise there, since this weekly publication was all about type-in BASIC programs! This one, however, was not entirely unlike the games and mathematical recreations that typically appeared; it did, however, have an explicit link to a French 20th Century avant-garde movement, Surrealism. The program, by Philippe Henri, was for the TRS-80 and called "Cadavres Exquis."
Ariane Savoire and I have translated this program to English (as "Exquisite Corpses") are very pleased that the Vassar Review has just published the edition we have prepared, which includes:
A working version of both French and English programs running in an in-browser TRS-80 emulator,
The BASIC code for both French and English programs, and
A high-quality scan of the program as it originally appeared in Hebdogiciel.
I spoke about our work on this program in my talk "Preserving Corpses with Emulation" at the Stanford Software Preservation Workshop, February 22, 2018.
Please visit the site and run this classic program for yourself. When you do, note that you must click on the black emulator area to give it focus and press a key each time you want a new sentence. That's how the original program ran; we have not modified the way it functions. In some ways the program does seem a bit obsolete. It refers to Czechoslovakia, for instance. You can see from the included snapshots that almost 25 years later, however, "Exquisite Corpses" maintains some relevance!
"Bullet" and Poem without Suffering
Discussed in this review: "Bullet," David Byrne, American Utopia, Nonesuch, 2018; Poem without Suffering, Josef Kaplan, Wonder Books, 2015
David Byrne's earworm takes a distant yet close perspective, describing a bullet's fatal encounter with a human body. Did he know about Kaplan's similar short, rapid, book-length poem? Byrne's song sets its sights on an adult man, Kaplan's poem on a child. The life of the child is hinted by describing what a warm maternal relationship is like, and by mentioning injuries from falling off a bunk bed and being hit by a baseball. We hear about the man's life because of what the bullet cuts through: "Skin that women had touched," "Many fine meals he tasted there," "his heart with thoughts of you." The general description is very effective. There are striking metaphors — positive associations — for the bullet itself, also. In Poem, it is a triumphant runner (such as Usain Bolt, who bears the name of a crossbow's projectile) dragging gore from the body as if it were a trophy or banner. In "Bullet," it is "Like an old grey dog / On a fox's trail." Perhaps America's reliable old dog cannot be taught new tricks.
American Utopia · Poem without Suffering
Concise Computational Literature is Now Online in Taper
I'm pleased to announce the release of the first issue of Taper, along with the call for works for issue #2.
Taper is a DIY literary magazine that hosts very short computational literary works — in the first issue, sonic, visual, animated, and generated poetry that is no more than 1KB, excluding comments and the standard header that all pages share. In the second issue, this constraint will be relaxed to 2KB.
The first issue has nine poems by six authors, which were selected by an editorial collective of four. Here is how this work looked when showcased today at our exhibit in the Trope Tank:
"Weights and Measures" and "for the pool players at the Golden Shovel," Lillian Yvonne-Bertram
"193" and "ArcMaze," Sebastian Bartlett
"Alpha Riddims," Pierre Tchetgen and "Rise," Angela Chang
"US" and "Field," Nick Montfort
"God," Milton Läufer
This issue is tiny in size and contains only a small number of projects, but we think they are of very high quality and interestingly diverse. This first issue of Taper also lays the groundwork for fairly easy production of future issues.
The next issue will have two new editorial collective members, but not me, as I focus on my role as publisher of this magazine though my very small press, Bad Quarto.
Using Electricity readings, with video of one
I'm writing now from the middle of a four-city book tour which I'm on with Rafael Pérez y Pérez and Allison Parrish – we are the first three author/programmers to develop books (The Truelist, Mexica, and Articulations) in this Counterpath series, Using Electricity.
I'm taking the time now to post a link to video of a short reading that Allison and I did at the MLA Convention, from exactly a month ago. If you can't join us at an upcoming reading (MIT Press Bookstore, 2018-02-06 6pm or Babycastles in NYC, 2018-02-07 7pm) and have 10 minutes, the video provides an introduction to two of the three projects.
Rafael wasn't able to join us then; we are very glad he's here from Mexico City with us this week, and has read with us in Philadelphia and Providence so far!
Author Function
The exhibit Author Function, featuring computer-generated literary art in print, is now up in MIT's Rotch Library (77 Mass Ave, Building 7, 2nd Floor) and in my lab/studio, The Trope Tank (Room 14N-233, in building 14, the same building that houses the Hayden Library). Please contact me by email if you are interested in seeing the materials in the Trope Tank, as this part of the exhibit is accessible by appointment only.
There are three events associated with the exhibit happening in Cambridge, Mass:
February 7, 6pm-7pm, a reading and signing at the MIT Press bookstore. Nick Montfort, Rafael Pérez y Pérez, and Allison Parrish.
March 5, 4:30pm-6pm, a reception at the main part of the exhibit in the Rotch Library.
March 5, 7pm-8pm, a reading and signing at the Harvard Book Store. John Cayley, Liza Daly, Nick Montfort, and Allison Parrish.
In addition to a shelf of computer-generated books that is available for perusal, by appointment, in the Trope Tank, the following items of printed matter are displayed in the exhibit:
2×6, Nick Montfort, Serge Bouchardon, Andrew Campana, Natalia Fedorova, Carlos León, Aleksandra Ma?ecka, and Piotr Marecki
A Slow Year: Game Poems, Ian Bogost
Action Score Generator, Nathan Walker
American Psycho, Mimi Cabell and Jason Huff
Anarchy, John Cage
Articulations, Allison Parrish
Autopia, Nick Montfort
Brute Force Manifesto: The Catalog of All Truth, Version 1.1, Series AAA-1, Vol 01, Brian James
Clear Skies All Week, Alison Knowles
Firmy, Piotr Puldzian P?ucienniczak
for the sleepers in that quiet earth., Sofian Audry
From the Library of Babel: Axaxaxas Mlo – The Combed Thunderclap LXUM,LKWC – MCV – The Plaster Cramp, Christian Bök
Generation[s], J.R. Carpenter
Google Volume 1, King Zog
How It Is In Common Tongues, Daniel C. Howe and John Cayley
Incandescent Beautifuls, Erica T. Carter [Jim Carpenter]
Irritant, Darby Larson
Love Letters, Letterpress Broadside, Output by a reimplementation of a program by Christopher Strachey
Mexica: 20 Years – 20 Stories / 20 años – 20 historias, Rafael Pérez y Pérez
My Buttons Are Blue: And Other Love Poems From the Digital Heart of an Electronic Computer, A Color Computer
My Molly [Departed], Talan Memmott
no people, Katie Rose Pipkin
Phaedrus Pron, Paul Chan
Puniverse, Volumes 32 and 38 of 57, Stephen Reid McLaughlin
Re-Writing Freud, Simon Morris
Seraphs, Liza Daly
The Appearances of the Letters of the Hollywood Sign in Increasing Amounts of Smog and at a Distance, Poster, David Gissen
The Poiceman's Beard is Half Constructed: Computer prose and poetry by Racter
The Truelist, Nick Montfort
Tristano, Nanni Balestrini
Written Images, Eds. Matrin Fuchs and Peter Bichsel
Here are some photos documenting the exhibit:
Sentaniz Nimerik, E-Lit in Haitian Creole
A week ago, on October 2, we put Sentaniz Nimerik online. This is an electronic literature work, an example of digital storytelling and digital poetry, that is by Sixto & BIC and was facilitated by Michel DeGraff & Nick Montfort. It is in Haitian Creole — Kreyòl, as the language is called in the language itself. This language has a community of about 12 million speakers worldwide and is the language shared by everyone in Haiti. It is not the same as Haitian French or mutually intelligible with Haitian French (or any other kind of French).
You can read more about Maurice Sixto, a famous Haitian storyteller who died in 1984, on Wikipedia, in English — of course there is an entry in Haitian Creole as well. His story "Sentaniz," well-known in Haiti, is the storytelling basis for our digital work.
BIC is a singer, songwriter, and poet who is also known as B.I.C. (Brain. Intelligence. Creativity.) He came to MIT to work on this project with us and to do a concert, which was very well-attended. His songs and poems are mostly in Haitian Creole; some in French; not in English — although BIC is fluent in English and has worked as an English teacher.
Professor Michel DeGraff is a linguist and is my colleague at MIT. Among other things, he heads the MIT-Haiti Initiative and works to advance STEM education in the Boston area in schools where education is in Haitian Creole.
We (BIC, Michel DeGraff, and I) sat down together and looked at and discussed several simple JavaScript poems, some historical, some of mine, some done by others recently. We settled on "Through the Park" (a work of mine from 2008) as a starting point for our collaboration. We changed several things about the workings of the page, and the text used in this piece is also a new text related to "Sentaniz," not any sort of translation of anything I have written.
To make concrete a few of the formal and conceptual differences: The final result has two generated versions presented one after the other. The underlying "story" is not only an story that originated in Haitian Creole, but has been elaborated into its digital version with frame statements and questions that do not correspond to anything in "Through the Park." The visual design is simple, but also a bit different from the simple earlier version.
To be more specific about our roles in the project, for the most part I dealt with the JavaScript code, Michel typed in what was to be written in Haitian Creole (using my different keyboard layout), and BIC said what lines we should use. But Michel and BIC consulted about particular phrasings, as you might expect, and all of us talked a bit about the types of sentences that could be used, the linguistic constraint (no reference between sentences), and the design and functioning of the page.
We spent a while in discussion beforehand, and did some work to polish the project after the three of us met, but BIC was only at MIT for one full day. It took us about an hour to actually do the core creative and development work on Sentaniz Nimerik. The project was thanks to many people and offices at MIT, with the main support for BIC's trip coming from CAMIT, the Council for the Arts at MIT.
I recorded a video of Michel DeGraff explaining the piece (in Haitian Creole) and have posted that on YouTube with a CC license. He explains how to "view souce" and that the piece can be studied and modified. The piece itself, although very short, is released under an explicit all-permissive license to make it clear that it is available to everyone for any purpose. I hope people in Haiti and speakers of Haitian Creole elsewhere will enjoy it and develop many new ideas, stories, and poems.
The Gathering Cloud
The Gathering Cloud, J. R. Carpenter, 2017. (I was given a review copy of this book.)
J.R. Carpenter's book is an accomplishment, not just in terms of the core project, but also by virtue of how the codex is put together. The introduction is by Jussi Parikka, the after-poem by Lisa Robertson. While social media and ethereal imaginations of the network keep us from being lonely as a cloud these days, they obscure the material nature of computing, the cost of linking us in terms of wire and heat. Carpenter's computer-generated Generation[s] was concerned with the computational production of text; The Gathering Cloud also engages with the generation of power. This book and the corresponding digital performance, for instance at the recent ELO Festival in Porto, yields up the rich results of research, cast in accomplished verse. As with Carpenter's other work that is rooted in zines and the handmade Web, it is personal rather than didactic. Deftly, despite the gravity of the topic, the book still affects the reader with a gesture, not a deluge of facts — more by waving than drowning.
C-Creativity, my talk at the KDD workshop on ML and Creativity
Update: I have posted 360 video of my talk with subtitles. If you rotate it, you don't have to look at the large brown pillar that is in "front" the whole time. Previously: Here are my slides from "C-Creativity: Cultural Creativity or, Why is there no middle C?," the talk I just gave in Halifax. There are no text notes, and they don't represent what I said very closely, but if they remind people who were there of my comments, that's great. And if they provoke any questions, feel free to get in touch on the blog or by email.
"Renderings" article now online
"Renderings: Translating literary works in the digital age" by Piotr Marecki & Nick Montfort has been published, and is available online.


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Home > Libraries and Archives > Rizal Library > Theses/Dissertations > Browse All > 401
Theses and Dissertations (All)
Implementation of an On-line Domain-Specific Handwriting Recognition Interface for Electronic Medical Records
Viktor Mikhael Dela Cruz, Ateneo de Manila University
Master of Science in Chemistry, Straight Program
Information Systems & Computer Science
Ma. Regina Justina E. Estuar, PhD
The Philippine Republic Act 11223 of 2019 sees electronic health systems as a primary tool in the implementation of the UHC Law. This poses a challenge to physicians who need to include the use of electronic medical records in their practice. This study looked into the usability of an EMR and the feasibility of adding handwriting recognition feature as an alternative mode of data entry. Open-source technologies were uti- lized and embedded in a local EMR for testing. Iterative development phases were practiced to achieve human-centered design. The EMR ob- tained a passing score of 70.76 on the System Usability Scale (SUS). Handwriting recognition was augmented with a medical lexicon and on- tology to expand its basis for recognition. Devices used to test the feature included a laptop with a digital pen and tablet attached to it and a tablet PC with a pen. Accuracy, efficiency, and usability tests yielded positive results with decreased word and character error rates as well as faster encoding speed compared to traditional typewriting. The medical lexi- con was shown to increase recognition accuracy. However, the medical ontology did not yield significant improvements to efficiency. Recommen- dations for future studies include optimizing the lexicon and ontology, creating a lexicon of medical abbreviations, studying the user's end of handwriting input, ensuring readiness of equipment before testing, and remembering the human in design and development.
Dela Cruz, V. (2020). Implementation of an On-line Domain-Specific Handwriting Recognition Interface for Electronic Medical Records. Ateneo de Manila University.
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The Status of All Things by Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke
What would you do if you could literally rewrite your fate—on Facebook? This heartwarming and hilarious new novel from the authors of Your Perfect Life follows a woman who discovers she can change her life through online status updates.
Kate is a thirty-five-year-old woman who is obsessed with social media. So when her fiancé, Max, breaks things off at their rehearsal dinner—to be with Kate's close friend and coworker, no less—she goes straight to Facebook to share it with the world. But something's changed. Suddenly, Kate's real life starts to mirror whatever she writes in her Facebook status. With all the power at her fingertips, and heartbroken and confused over why Max left her, Kate goes back in time to rewrite their history.
Kate's two best friends, Jules and Liam, are the only ones who know the truth. In order to convince them she's really time traveled, Kate offers to use her Facebook status to help improve their lives. But her attempts to help them don't go exactly as planned, and every effort to get Max back seems to only backfire, causing Kate to wonder if it's really possible to change her fate.
I've heard many great things about these co-authors and was so impressed that they produce one voice when they write together. You would never know that two people became one in Kate.
I found the plot interesting and didn't mind the angel/fairy/guidance councillor in Ruby that appeared as if by magic to help Kate on her voyage. There was no fuss made about Ruby which could have distracted a lot from the plot- that was good thinking because having a "magical" entity can throw a bit of a wrench in a story and has to be done very well to still be convincing.
The Status of All Things is an interesting concept because of the age of social media we live in. There is certainly an aspect of this new era that compels us to only display a positive image to our network- everything should appear humorous or brilliant and not reveal much of our true feelings. To have the option to go back and try and correct a path is tricky- there's a great line by Kate's father towards the end of the novel that sums up my feelings perfectly on this though I can't say I wouldn't be tempted, as Kate was, to try and win back the one who has drifted away. But I think, like her, I would always have that niggling doubt that he wanted something else. Could I ever live with that knowledge? Probably not…
I warmed to Kate immediately but actually liked Jules and Liam more. Kate became so self-involved in her mission that she almost forgot about her friends and they were so sweet and supportive that I felt more for them than for her at times. That being said, I did like Kate and still empathised with her, especially towards the end when she was coming to certain conclusions. It helped too that Max was so likeable.
I really enjoyed the writing style of The Status of All Things, a great easy read to make you think.
Thank you to Simon & Schuster for our review copy. All opinions are our own.
Connect with Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke:
Labels: * Kathryn, 4 Star, Single Girl Lit


Conventional wisdom dictated that straight women would never use a dating app similar to Grindr. 11% of American adults have used an online dating site or a mobile dating app. We'd attribute Zoosk's following to the fact that they were one of the first dating apps on the scene.
Their integration with Facebook, and recently.
Fact Tank - Our Lives in Numbers. Online dating sites and dating apps enjoy widespread popularity, and not just among young adults.
The online dating market has grown fiercely competitive. Sometimes, the roles would be reversed, where a bachelor did the asking, while the bachelorettes did the answering.
Interesting facts about dating apps However, the mating paradigm is shifting: Match was launched in However, that number has gone down a good bit.
Observers are split on their attitudes and perceptions toward online dating.
Related Fact Tank Feb 11, Survey findings show that about quarter 21 percent of Americans believe that online dating is for the desperate.
This is especially true for online dating. If you're a baby boomer, you're just as likely to be an online dater as a young adult. Those seem like pretty decent odds to us.
If you're not an online dater, you probably know someone who is. Online dating use among to year-olds has also risen substantially since the last Pew Research Center survey on the topic. Along with key review factors, this compensation may impact how and where products appear across the site including, for example, the order in which they appear.
Free couple dating sites meet It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts.
Monica Anderson is a senior researcher focusing on internet and technology at Pew Research Center. Most people know an online dater or someone who used online dating to find a spouse or to form a serious relationship. Online Dating Share this link:.
It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts. Aaron Smith is an associate director for research at Pew Research Center.
Around that time, only 14 percent of American adults were internet users.


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Q: Let $P=\{x\in\mathbb{R} \mid f(x)>0\}$, $f$ on $\mathbb{R}$ is continuous. If $c\in P$, show that there exists a neighborhood $V_\delta (c)\subset P$. Let $f:\mathbb{R}\to\mathbb{R}$ be continuous on $\mathbb{R}$, and let $P=\{x\in\mathbb{R} \mid f(x)>0\}$. If $c\in P$, show that there exists a neighborhood $V_\delta (c)\subseteq P$.
Let $\epsilon >0$. Since $f$ is continuous at $c$, $|f(x)-f(c)|<\epsilon$ when $|x-c|<\delta $.
I'm not sure where to go from here, it seems like the idea is that since $f$ is continuous, any $x$ close to $c$ will result in $f(x)$ close to positive $f(c)$ and so must be positive itself.

A: You had the right idea. You just needed to choose $\varepsilon$ appropriately.
If $c \in P$, then $f(c) > 0$. Let $\varepsilon = f(c)$, then by the continuity of $f$, there is $\delta > 0$ such that $|f(x) - f(c)| < f(c)$ whenever $|x - c| < \delta$. That is, for $x \in V_{\delta}(c)$, $-f(c) < f(x) - f(c) < f(c)$ so $0 < f(x) < 2f(c)$. As $f(x) > 0$ for every $x \in V_{\delta}(c)$, $V_{\delta}(c) \subseteq P$.

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Soap Opera Digest November 1, 2021
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stacy haiduk back to days
Stacy Haiduk, whose Kristen was last seen in Salem in May, returns to town this week, which was welcome news for the actress. "They mentioned that I would be back," says Haiduk, who taped a couple of episodes that aired in June and July. "It was just not knowing when exactly, so when I got the email that said, 'You're coming back,' I was kind of curious to know how. I was told that I would get to meet Kristen's daughter, which was exciting." Haiduk, who has come and gone several times since assuming the role in 2018, reports that she slips back into her alter ego easily. "For me, it's just getting into the headspace of where she's at at that time," she explains. "Once you get through the process…
amc alums in new show
OUR KIND OF PEOPLE is FOX's latest nighttime sudser from Executive Producer Lee Daniels (EMPIRE), and it's a special treat for fans of ALL MY CHILDREN, as it reunites Yaya DaCosta (Angela; ex-Cassandra, AMC) with her Pine Valley mama, Debbi Morgan (Aunt Piggy; ex-Angie, AMC). "That was at the very beginning of my career," marvels DaCosta of her time on the soap. "I played Debbi Morgan's daughter on ALL MY CHILDREN [in 2008] and it's such an honor to be working with her again in such a different capacity, not as mother and daughter, but as niece and auntie, who are really more like sisters." Morgan was also thrilled to reconnect with DaCosta. "I was so excited," she says. "Working with Yaya back on ALL MY CHILDREN, it was like working…
days preview: special abe episode
In a special episode celebrating portrayer James Reynolds's 40th anniversary in Salem, Abe — his life hanging in the balance after he is shot — reunites with his late wife, Lexie, and must decide whether to remain with her in the afterlife, or return to the land of the living. Reports Reynolds, "Albert [Alarr, co-executive producer] told me about this one day after we finished taping: 'Ron [Carlivati, head writer] wants to dedicate a show for your 40th anniversary.' And I was kind of blown away. I called my wife and told her. I was so pleased, so warmed by that, by the fact that I'm apparently thought well enough of and respected enough to have this show dedicated to me. And I hope I did it justice! It's not all…
y&r: chance is presumed dead
Abby's world is turned upside down when Christine delivers the news that the area where Chance was residing was bombed and there appears to be no survivors. "It's horrible," says Melissa Ordway (Abby). "They've found personal items that belong to Chance, so it's Abby's worst nightmare. Everything that she had so much fear and anxiety about while Chance was on assignment is now coming true. She's really hit hard." Nevertheless, Abby doesn't want to believe it's true. "Despite how bad it sounds, there's still hope that maybe this is a mistake because they haven't found a body," Ordway points out. "That could mean Chance is still alive somewhere. Maybe he wasn't even there when the bomb went off, or if he was there, maybe he got out in time and has…
(Dante, GH) Dante has had fraught dealings with the Cassadines in the past, so how does he react to Victor being alive? "He thought Victor was dead six, seven years ago or whenever that was, so his first reaction is that it's messed up that he's not! The most surprising thing about Victor, for Dante, is that he seems to really care for Obrecht. That throws everybody for a loop. The actor playing him, Charles [Shaughnessy], is an awesome guy, and it's so cool working with him. He's such a class act and a great actor." Dante and Jason briefly cross paths in Greece before Dante returns to Port Charles with Sam. How would you describe their dynamic at this point? "It's kind of interesting. Dante knows that Jason has had…
b&b: sheila and deacon kiss
When Sheila spots Hope and Finn dining at Il Giardino, she makes a bold move with Deacon. "Sheila is always looking for an opening to be a part of her son's life and her grandson's life," begins Kimberlin Brown (Sheila). "So, who better to work with than Deacon, who is looking for the same opportunity with his daughter? Sheila has always been a person to say it's better with numbers, so maybe a wonderful alliance can be formed between the two of them so they can both get what they want." And having a partner in crime is just what Sheila needs at this point. "Steffy keeps putting more flies in the ointment and it makes it that much worse for Sheila, the actress notes. "As much as she has truly…


Scorpion, Sub-Zero, you got a new challenger. Check out the unnecessarily tragic origins of Rain, the new DLC character for NetherRealm Studios's Mortal Kombat.
A new challenger that seemed more like an alternate color scheme for oh-so-generic gang of colorful ninjas like Sub-Zero and Scorpion, Rain is a new DLC character that is in fact a purple colored version of the Mortal Kombat ninjas.
Slated to arrived tomorrow on the PlayStation Network (for five bucks) and Xbox Live (for 400 Microsoft Points), NetherRealm Studios has released a special clip detailing the origin of Rain (not that South Korean prince of pop in James McTeigue-helmed film, Ninja Assassin).
Hit the jump to check out the new trailer.


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