The only result will be making the bible less creepy.
Mr Stross is pretty cool
Old testament plus Lovecraft please. Straight up no ice.
Really the new testament language is just wrong in the combo heās got going.
Straightening out the chapter and verse numbers would be simple enough, and add charm.
Itās all an act. Heās just trying to sell you more of his books.
And itās working! Except when itās also an awesome way of procrastinating. Then I get sad.
The Lovecraft is not the only way to complete the equation, King James Bible/new testament = old testament horror. That leaves us with the new testament = H P Lovecraft, then, the New Testament = the word, therefore, H P Lovecraft = The Word.
āAnd the word was made flesh and the word was Squamous!ā
Procrastinate? If setting yourself a target of writing 2000 words a day is procrastinating, I need to upgrade my procrastination.
To complete the possible combinations, I just did the sameāblending HP Lovecraft with the Programming Book.
I got Windows 8!!!
Dratted favorite authors takinā all tha razzafrazzin credit: I was fiddling with Markov chains (and Google Translate for that extra element of random deliciousness) almost THREE whole days ago. I chose advertising copy samples, the worst comments from youtube I could find, and the intros/theme song lyrics to 80ās television shows. Feed my script text, and it runs it in and out of a couple languages via Google Translate, then takes the result and runs it through the Markov chain analyzer.
Itās cranking out delicious bits of weirdness like:
The life support system due to lost souls can find them through a back alley abortionist back to the city, the relevant class of young men and one contemporary man himself dirty garbage to survive as a cloud freezes.
Your work and expect us to be more precise, you should feel distractions in the background fading light. You can add users to the bereaved ā tell us about the mowerās work. Youāve done that. Easy sex, or just coated ā steel wire, plastic clamshell cases cut links and untwisting, a dozen sealed. Each case is more comfortable.
We have been producing gum disease. Symptoms should not be ignored. Nothing is more peaceful.
They own, where the number of pregnancies at risk trying to play a free download, then good old boys, 500 years, the government designed entirely for 30 days, mutilated.
More details on the history of this silly hobby of mine (seriously, Iāve been fiddling with this sort of thing for years) at http://medianoretornable.net/2013/12/07/better-poetry-via-the-power-of-science/
Extreme kudos to the Strossman. Iām stealing the Lovecraft corpus bit, and then Iām gonna run this sucker till it spits out the pilot episode of Dukes Of A-Team Vs. Cthulhu in the 25th Century (for only $29.95)
Iām seriously thinking of building my own Markov chain generator using KJV and tweets tagged #tcot. I wonder what youād get from this project if you used two-word keys; I did that with some Mark Twain and it got weird, but still readable. Maybe the differences in 500-year-old English and 100-year-old English are too great for it to be effective.
After working on another project not related to Markov chains, Iād point out that if you snag KJV off of Project Gutenberg, all the verses end with a newline and begin with a CHAPTER:VERSE marker. Easily parseable in Perl or (in my case) Ruby.
Here you go Sir :
3:26 Then Nebuchadnezzar came near to the ominous and malodorous wharves.
89:15 Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD; we have waited for him, and he will make my feet like hindsā feet, and he was lifted inconsiderately up and swung about in space.
90:15 Make us glad according to the number of the window at night. He would, he consecrated him, and he set Ephraim before Manasseh.
31:21 So he fled with all that he learnt was not much to fear from those things now that they were used as a cipher in a modern language.
1:44 And the roof of thy mouth for the people had dwelt and kept festival in the street.
26:22 And Jehoiakim gave the seeker some passwords of great value among the churning zenith-clouds, of what I saw.
5:8 I would seek unto God, Who am I, O Lord GOD, and his sonsā daughters, and all stood trembling and nearly grazed me.
And for longer outputs :
27:10 Will he delight himself in the God of truth; because the former troubles are forgotten, and because they all told me to pay no attention to old Ammi Pierceās crazy tales, I sought him out the next morning, having heard that he had defiled Dinah his daughter: now his sons were with his cattle in the gutters, that they might not serve nor worship any god, except their own God.
42:17 And he put five bases on the right side as one cometh into the house of the LORD, and blessed the prospect of flying over the sea, and kept the galley standing about a mile off the jagged rock in the hill pass north of Inganok, for such was its size that a man on the throne of Israel.
32:15 For if ye turn unto me, and those that have not sought the LORD: therefore they shall not be lamented; neither shall they be sorely pained at the report of a pair of revellers who had been walking past the mouth of that abandoned well I passed. I hope the end of March. Voodoo orgies multiply in Hayti, and African outposts report ominous mutterings.
32:30 This same Hezekiah also stopped the upper watercourse of Gihon, and brought it into the palm of his own library, and wading night after night to lean out and peer aloft to glimpse some fragment of things beyond the waking world and the fulness thereof, thou hast founded them.
16:25 And Moses said, This is wickedness. And he cast stones at David, and at all times he devoured avidly any doctrine or theory which seemed to promise escape from life. Only on closer view did he mark the starved fancy and beauty, the stale and prosy triteness, and the owlish gravity and grotesque claims of solid truth which reigned boresomely and overwhelmingly among most of its professors; or feel to the full the awkwardness with which it would be in the midst of the fire.
80:4 O LORD God of Israel, Amend your ways and your doings; if ye throughly execute judgment between a man and his wife. But all agreed on one thing: that the refusal of all the cats into a snarling panic and caused them to behold through the clouds that strange eclipse of the moon and of the stars to the ground, and stamped upon them.
(3 words keys. I had too choose those extracts, not everything was that interesting)
More like the other way round- Lovecraft was heavily influenced by the Bible. For those unfamiliar, Iād recommend Revelation, Ezekiel, and bits of Job as the parts most likely to appeal to Lovecraft fans.
I guess that restricting the Markov chain input to the most appropriate parts of the Bible might give even more interesting resultsā¦
Since my perl installation went horribly wrong-- itās complaining about uninitialized values in join, I decided to go back to the King James Programming source; which seems less buggy. (Itās also in Python, which may please some of you).
But the corpuses Iām using seem rather dissimilar. HP Lovecraft writes of demons and doom, and so does the Bible, but he uses a more modern dialect of English, so shared stretches of three or four words are not very common. (you may correct me if Iām misunderstanding the algorithm).
I think kingjamesprogramming gets away with it because the bible is numbered, and so is the programming textbook.
Youāre right, shared sequences of three words (let alone four) are not very common, but some constructs like āwas in aā, or āof in theā, āI have noā, āhe was theā, āin all theā, āthe daughter ofā , āthat it wasā , āthe end ofā, āwall of theā are common enough in both texts to get Iād say about one mixed sentence for about 10 sentences coming out of a program. I guess it should be possible to automagically filter the output to get only those sentences.
3:20 And Adam called his wifeās name Eve; because she was the natural daughter of some Marsh of prominenceāshe certainly had the true Marsh eyes.
!!
13:28 Nevertheless the people did sacrifice and burnt incense on the high ground. They were glad of the speed with which Portsmouth and Newburyport flashed by.
Damn heretics.
I wonder if it would be possible to identify source texts for each sentence, and filter out utterances that are primarily associated with lovecraft.txt or primarily associated with kjv.txt, leaving behind the ones that show good miscibility.
Before the comment window closed I wanted to say thank you so much. That was very good of you. Here is one in return:
A living malodorous ichor oozed upon the face of the deep. Formless chaos and unknowable madness swirled beyond the firmament.
A high inhuman voice like a whistle screamed in an unintelligible language āLet there be darkness!ā.
And there was darkness.
And Shoggoths crawled the bowels of the earth.
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