Backpacker v Cratedigger
Mar. 15th, 2004 10:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusAre you beeping slow these days only to see intense Kurdish types engaged in debate about the best way to comb a pine forest? Are you already prickly sick -- and it's getting more and more thorny at the tip of the tape-duct superleague -- of seeing great white cranes rushing off the water in the morning mist? Willow pattern synthesis just got older? Yeah, right. It hurts me to have to tell you here, but it's getting you nowhere. Believe me. Write soon. Good as gold!
I know you want me to outline my position on the pressing issue of the day. Yup, Backpacker v Cratedigger. You see, I've noticed you down at the aviary with your directional mike, jamming with the tawnies. Before I answer, just tell me, have you paid duty on those crackly new ice samples? Thought not. We all love that sound, so cold it's hot, but someone has to pay for that cool wool over your eyes. Tell me if I'm off with the canaries here, but didn't I see you flying from tree to tree with Eric Satie dropping figs behind your flow? You've already been fully Backpack a fortnight, I know, I know.
This isn't 2009 any more. This has nothing to do with Vatican 2. Thorn to yellow flower: hello? Yellow flower to ant: And? Ant to white stone: You what? White stone to black stone: Sez who? Black stone to stick: The earthly goal? Stick to goat's horn: blow me? Goat's horn to seed pod: Right again! Yeah, we've heard the process and we've heard the land and now there's nowhere new to go. Only heat haze and an ear to the dirt. Ah, those little blue flowers, already springing from the caked camel dropping! Who will buy me those?
Back in 1911 two researchers called Stumpt and Pfungst began their celebrated investigation of a horse named Clever Hans. Hans could memorize anything from phone numbers to hip hop lyrics. If you flipped a slate on the deck and scratched up a good beat Hans could rap whatever you rhymed over it right back. Word perfect. A horse, beejezuz! But what Stumpt and Pfungst found out was that if Hans couldn't see DoseOne he wasn't clever at all. And if Odd Nosdam didn't know the next line and Why? didn't know when, Clever Hans just shrugged. A forward inclination of Boom Bip's head would start Hans tapping on the PA. Even the raising of his eyebrows was sufficient. The whole world heard it on the Tannoy. The dilation of Boom Bip's nostrils, it turned out, was the cue for Hans to stop tapping. Conclusion? Backpacker will, in time, prevail. It's all subliminal, see.
How many ants must die before we bubble-strip the paint from an old tin can with a cigarette lighter? Does undercoat only work with flesh-coloured felt underlay? When the mountaineer dials Petland is his wedding ring on or off? And why does that new dentist down at the skating rink drill with KPFK turned up so very, very loud? Sachiko M should whistle. Ouch!
Prancing with my sister the lord of the fields through evil green cotton leaves free of the boll weevil. Backpacker! Man and plant in mechanical harmony! No more aspirin, because the gods are already using gentech! There are black rices for the bachelors and short green rices to take with you to the grave. The brides fling their young lives away, what a waste! Wouldn't you like an ice cream for that long journey? Wouldn't you wave goodbye with a big clean sheet? Can I stamp your ticket, Backpacker?
The fugue brings a flugel horn, and it has your voice. Finger the stops, finkface! The starlight seeps unasked into the cage. The streetlamp is paying you a generous tip. You want to be rich... well, isn't that what you are? Walk up the steps towards the temple with a box of trippy dates. Like the Cratedigger Templar you are, in organic armour. What do they put in these dates anyway? 750: The Christians occupy Galicia, abandoned by revolting Berber troops. 1385: The Portuguese defeat the Castilians in Aljubarrota. The asylum is a leafy place if you dare to bite the resin right down to the bark. Film a cat and a goat with your camera, shrink life to the size of a credit card! Your fixels go whizzing to the top of the card charts! As if that could ever be enough! You're a Cratedigger, born and bred.
Show me granny and I'll show you the only guarantor of harvest. On top of Old Smokey we're all signed up to Ricetec. The big folk recorder turns, with a loose tape-twist grazing the spool. Backpackers, cratediggers float off like dandelion seeds in the wind. Gone! Happy birthday, 2010! We love you loud.
I know you want me to outline my position on the pressing issue of the day. Yup, Backpacker v Cratedigger. You see, I've noticed you down at the aviary with your directional mike, jamming with the tawnies. Before I answer, just tell me, have you paid duty on those crackly new ice samples? Thought not. We all love that sound, so cold it's hot, but someone has to pay for that cool wool over your eyes. Tell me if I'm off with the canaries here, but didn't I see you flying from tree to tree with Eric Satie dropping figs behind your flow? You've already been fully Backpack a fortnight, I know, I know.
This isn't 2009 any more. This has nothing to do with Vatican 2. Thorn to yellow flower: hello? Yellow flower to ant: And? Ant to white stone: You what? White stone to black stone: Sez who? Black stone to stick: The earthly goal? Stick to goat's horn: blow me? Goat's horn to seed pod: Right again! Yeah, we've heard the process and we've heard the land and now there's nowhere new to go. Only heat haze and an ear to the dirt. Ah, those little blue flowers, already springing from the caked camel dropping! Who will buy me those?
Back in 1911 two researchers called Stumpt and Pfungst began their celebrated investigation of a horse named Clever Hans. Hans could memorize anything from phone numbers to hip hop lyrics. If you flipped a slate on the deck and scratched up a good beat Hans could rap whatever you rhymed over it right back. Word perfect. A horse, beejezuz! But what Stumpt and Pfungst found out was that if Hans couldn't see DoseOne he wasn't clever at all. And if Odd Nosdam didn't know the next line and Why? didn't know when, Clever Hans just shrugged. A forward inclination of Boom Bip's head would start Hans tapping on the PA. Even the raising of his eyebrows was sufficient. The whole world heard it on the Tannoy. The dilation of Boom Bip's nostrils, it turned out, was the cue for Hans to stop tapping. Conclusion? Backpacker will, in time, prevail. It's all subliminal, see.
How many ants must die before we bubble-strip the paint from an old tin can with a cigarette lighter? Does undercoat only work with flesh-coloured felt underlay? When the mountaineer dials Petland is his wedding ring on or off? And why does that new dentist down at the skating rink drill with KPFK turned up so very, very loud? Sachiko M should whistle. Ouch!
Prancing with my sister the lord of the fields through evil green cotton leaves free of the boll weevil. Backpacker! Man and plant in mechanical harmony! No more aspirin, because the gods are already using gentech! There are black rices for the bachelors and short green rices to take with you to the grave. The brides fling their young lives away, what a waste! Wouldn't you like an ice cream for that long journey? Wouldn't you wave goodbye with a big clean sheet? Can I stamp your ticket, Backpacker?
The fugue brings a flugel horn, and it has your voice. Finger the stops, finkface! The starlight seeps unasked into the cage. The streetlamp is paying you a generous tip. You want to be rich... well, isn't that what you are? Walk up the steps towards the temple with a box of trippy dates. Like the Cratedigger Templar you are, in organic armour. What do they put in these dates anyway? 750: The Christians occupy Galicia, abandoned by revolting Berber troops. 1385: The Portuguese defeat the Castilians in Aljubarrota. The asylum is a leafy place if you dare to bite the resin right down to the bark. Film a cat and a goat with your camera, shrink life to the size of a credit card! Your fixels go whizzing to the top of the card charts! As if that could ever be enough! You're a Cratedigger, born and bred.
Show me granny and I'll show you the only guarantor of harvest. On top of Old Smokey we're all signed up to Ricetec. The big folk recorder turns, with a loose tape-twist grazing the spool. Backpackers, cratediggers float off like dandelion seeds in the wind. Gone! Happy birthday, 2010! We love you loud.
backpacker
Date: 2004-03-15 08:26 pm (UTC)or was this composed automatically?
what we'd really like to read is a diary entry composed entirely
automatically by a system trained on a large corpus
of momus writings.
onegai shimasu!
Re: backpacker
Date: 2004-03-15 11:33 pm (UTC)Volvo, the French State, and Orthodoxy by Momus and Text Mangler 1.2
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On Saturday I went to see people in my city who look like they think differently from me. HOWEVER, I don't want them to be in reality (the messy particularity we do find) has become so wide that the french state is secular, and wants to outlaw all provocative and divisive religious affiliations in schools. Livingstone says that by preventing women from wearing what they choose, the french state is not already part of la pensee unique. They have held back, deliberately, from all worldliness, from denim, convergence, liberalism, monoculture. Fascination is a man! If we accept all that (let's call it 'situatedness', with philosopher David Simpson), we can't help finding a word like 'sexist' ridiculous. Sexist is a good thing. You're special! HOWEVER, pretension and vanity about your specialness and your difference is a joyless and conformist hedonism, the Orthodox are austere and abstemious. Where the liberal orthodoxy is a strong one to the street the provocations of the three screens an extraordinary carnival was unfolding. Raffarin says that the hubris of universal claims is, in marketing, just impossible to avoid. Nobody ever wants to limit the market like that. And so we get bland, secretly specific yet pretentiously universalist products, products which try to be mixed in with the passersby, and the sound of real sirens and traffic was mixed with strange abstract musique concrete. The resulting atmosphere -- ludic, otherworldly, chaotic, strange and rather disturbing (what planet am I on?) -- was like seeing a town filled entirely with Matthew Barneys and Cindy Shermans, caught on handycam by a passing anthropologist. It seemed like some sort of orthodox Jewish version of Halloween, Mardi Gras or the Venice Carnival. Studying the handout, I learned that Yael Bartana is an important differentiator -- a signifying difference -- in all its thatness? Particular Motors is not neutral on religion: the state or big corporations abandon their claims to universality, embrace their 'situatedness', and admit that they believe in something particular. HOWEVER I don't want them to be filmed, Bartana has given Purim the somewhat sinister, extraterrestrial,- fascinating allure of the participants to be 'universal'. Interestingly enough, Volvo later backed away from their daring particularity. In a country notably intolerant of difference, the only alternative to integration is to kill themselves and also us. Perhaps this is what spring feels like in Israel.
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For the technically curious, TextMangler operates on a trigram markov chaining algorithm - without smoothing, from the look of it. Smoothing would break up those one- or two- sentence chunks lifted straight from the original text (as would a larger corpus). Bigram means you look at one word previous when choosing the next word, trigram means you look at two. Smoothing means you give all the words that never appear next to each other in the original a little teeny bit of probability space so that they just might appear next to each other in the result. The lack of smoothing thus explains why the last sentence in the original is also the last sentence in the result. The end-of-file character (normally invisible) was (I think) given a probability as if it was a word, and none of the word pairs in the last sentence are repeated elsewhere in the essay w/same capitalization and punctualtion, so once TextMangler arrived at "Perhaps" it was a quite deterministic path to "Israel."