DgtizeD

So these six word stories seem to flow quickly as soon as some thought is put into them. Manfred and I thought of a few ones this evening (in order of their creation):

1. Floating skyward, scientist discovers anti-gravity again.
2. Asphyxiation, Boiling, and Decompression, package deal.
3. Leaving for Andromeda, ETA last week.
4. Arguably the end, or the beginning
5. Eulogy for Google, number still finite
6. Plot. Deus ex machina. The end.
7. Copyright enforced, do not plagiarize this.
8. Patriotic suicide bomber redeems lost democracy.

The second one had a bunch of variations, I still haven’t determined which works best. Some of the variations removed the and, and replaced the ending with “triple combo move”, or hmm. Actually how about:

• Boiling and Decompression replace burial rites.

I still think it needs some tightening up, anyone have any suggestions?

Jacob’s comment made me think of one that is stolen from a voiceover in some psi-trance music —

• Computer out of alignment with future

In other news: In the spirit of being link happy, I present another amusing article.

The Age of the Universe is a Function of Time

Essentially the theory is, as time and science progress, not only does the age of the universe increase, but it’s age prediction follows an exponential curve. Hence the universe grows exponentially older with respect to time. Well sort of anyway — just read damn article!

This wired article is a set of 6 word science fiction stories.

Various examples I thought amusing:

• Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so. – Joss Whedon
• We kissed. She melted. Mop please! – James Patrick Kelly
• The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly. – Orson Scott Card
• I’m your future, child. Don’t cry. – Stephen Baxter

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Anyway at the risk of making a complete fool of myself I thought I would try my hand at a few:

• Computer’s never understood figures of speech.
• Alien spaceships, series of cliche endings?
• It traveled that far for lunch?
• Planet construction, seven days, lowest bidder
• Mommy, what species was daddy from?
• Will the recently deceased please stand?
• We traded earth for glowing beads?
• Next Exhibit: Was humanity actually sentient?
• Travel warning: Natives use nuclear weapons.
• Next: Hot Vacation spots on mercury!

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It’s kind of a weird art form, I think it requires one to be vaguely cliche in order to convey any information at all.

Update:

Thought of a few silly meta ones:

• The future is six words long.
• From the future, came 6 words.

and some time travel ones that may have been overly influenced by some in the wired article:

• Time travel destroyed hope for future.
• Before time travel, paradoxes didn’t happen!
• For sale: lifetime guarantee on future!

This post was written using the writely word processor (http://docs.google.com). Basically I wanted to do a test post using the new publish system to see if writely would make a suitable replacement to the textile backed text editor in Typo. So this is going to be a feature testing post.

Features I like thus far:

• Revisions are pretty cool. This document auto saves every couple of seconds, and generates a new revision for every one of these saves. The advantage to this is I can later go back and rollback to any prior revision if I mess something up.
• Drag and drop image placement from a browser interface. I don’t think I need to comment on this other then that it exists and is thus awesome.
• The ability to publish to this document to a blog from the word processor interface.
• Collaborate is cool, though I don’t know as I have as much use for this. If I there was a way to collaborate and use Latex instead that would be cool. Speaking of which, if you can embed pictures in these documents, then it should be possible to embed math images. I wonder if it would be possible to get MediaWiki style equation editing? That would definitely be very nice. I guess MathML probably works.
  

Problems thus far:

• While save to word, pdf, open document, and rtf are all cool, it would be really nice if I could preview this document at a sensible column width so that page breaks, page count, and other standard “what is the format of this document on a physical medium” type of things worked.
• Obviously the font problem is by virtue of the list that browsers guarantee. Can’t something be done about this though? Why is there no pleasant format for automatically installing cross platform fonts from the web?
  

Features from word that are missing:

• Grammar checking — as much as it may or may not suck it does catch some things and is therefor kind of nice. If you can spell checking in the browser it ought to be possible to do grammar checking.
• Auto-spell checking every time it auto saves instead of every time I hit recheck.

I think this would be even more awesome if say open office allowed one to edit documents and save each revision in this document list. I like the idea of a central document repository with versioning. I just wish I had a better editor then the web interface. The web interface is very impressive given that it is a web interface, but it remains a web interface.

The real question in my mind then, is when the presentation/powerpoint replacement is coming? Or are they too worried about the storage space necessary for that?

Update:
Well the post worked, however tags and extended post are clearly not working. That is to be expected, tags aren’t too much of a problem, but perhaps I can hack the extended content to work by looking for Google page breaks when posts are submitted. I could probably do something with the tags issue at the same time.

Would that Google had a web api for this app like the one it has for calendar!