I don't know if this is likely to take off outside the fairly niche Indieweb/smallweb circles, but I think it's a nice idea. So, I've added a human.json file to my own website with a handful of vouches. I also scrolled through the list of transitively trusted sites that are trusted by sites I trust (have I said "trust" enough in this sentence?) and found a few interesting ones to add to my RSS feed.

I went down a rabbit hole of email validation discourse today. It's a topic I've encountered before, but usually only in passing, and I wanted to figure out what's considered to be "best practice" here.

The most authoritative source I found which concisely sums up the situation is OWASP's cheat sheet on email address validation. Some key points:

• Lots of strings that you probably don't want to accept as email addresses are, technically, valid email addresses.
• Just because something is a technically valid email address doesn't mean you can send an email to it.
• The only way to reliably tell if you're going to be able to send an email to an arbitrary address is to... try and send the email!
• They also recommend some basic initial validations which can rule out strings that you probably don't want to accept as email addresses.

Some interesting discussions I found while researching:

• How can I validate an email address using a regular expression? on Stack Overflow
• Can it cause harm to validate email addresses with a regex? on Stack Overflow
• I Knew How To Validate An Email Address Until I Read The RFC

That last has an interesting comment by someone named David: "The best compromise I've seen so far is to have it complain if you use a "weird" character, but then offer you a chance to say "no, that really is my email address". That way it catches stupid mistakes, but lets you have the final say as to whether it's valid or not."

That strikes me as an elegant solution if you don't want to block the rare user with an esoteric email address, but still want to provide some guidance in the more common situation where a user has simply entered a typo. Though of course, then you're back to square one with deciding when to display an "are you sure?" warning vs silently accepting the email, albeit with lower stakes.

I'm trying something new here: making a list of the books I read this month so I have somewhere to talk about them. I'd like to exercise my writing muscles a little more, and I think it is often difficult to put into words the specifics of what makes a book good or bad or mediocre. (There are books from all three of those categories in this list, by the way!)

The Boyfriend by Freida McFadden

Speaking of the bad... I want to say up top that I have read many of Freida McFadden's books and enjoyed them, in the same way that I enjoy a Hostess fruit pie. Is it subtle or sophisticated or finely crafted? No. Am I improved in any way by having consumed it? Probably not, and perhaps the opposite. But is it incredibly tasty and does it satisfy a specific craving? Yes, absolutely. Freida McFadden's books are popcorn thrillers, and I love a popcorn thriller. My family is well aware of this because I enjoy texting them ridiculous quotes and plot points from whichever one I'm currently reading.

For those who have never read a McFadden thriller, they never fail to deliver on certain points:

1. Vague in-media-res prologue where someone (whose identity is obscured) is alarmed about a dead body in their vicinity, or waiting for the police to arrest them, and it's written so you think the someone is the murderer but really it's too vague to tell.
2. The story itself, which will absolutely beat you over the head with repetition of every detail and every action that the narrator decides to take. McFadden will show, and then immediately tell you what you were supposed to understand from what she showed.
3. The narrator's voice: casual, jokey even in dire situations, self-deprecating. Painfully naive or ludicrously suspicious, depending on which the plot requires.
4. The final page twist. There will be twists earlier than that, but McFadden loves to squeeze in one major twist at the last moment to end the book with a bang.

I don't think this formula would work without the twists. The twists are the reason to keep reading, because the writing itself is mediocre at best. I think ending on a big twist is a really smart move, because then (if you don't see it coming) you end the book thinking "oh wow, I never even thought of that, how does that change everything I've read so far if that was true all along?" It would be interesting to go back and reread one of these books knowing all the twists, to analyze if the reveal was set up in any way for the careful reader to pick up on-- but that's a topic for another post.

Now that I've gotten the McFadden disclaimer out of the way, on to The Boyfriend. Unfortunately, I have comparatively little to say about this novel specifically. It was fine, I guess, by the standard I've laid out above. If you enjoy McFadden's books, you'll probably like it, and if you don't, then don't bother. It's a dime-a-dozen domestic thriller: a woman thinks her new boyfriend might be a killer, but is he? There is a back-and-forth between present and past viewpoints, so you as the reader are given information that the main protagonist is not privy to, and I think it kills some of the suspense. You know pretty early on that her fears are likely justified to some degree, so it's just a matter of learning the full truth of the situation. There are some clear red herrings that I thought were executed reasonably well, and I didn't guess the major twist of the book. Overall, it was a fine way to pass the time, but it hasn't left a lasting impression on me. Next!

The Crash by Freida McFadden

This book, on the other hand, may be the worst Freida McFadden book I've read yet— which is saying something. In several of her books, McFadden falls into the trap of writing something clearly inspired by a more skillful work. She's done it with Psycho (Do Not Disturb), Lolita (The Teacher), and now Stephen King's Misery with The Crash. I haven't read Misery, but at a basic level the plots are very similar: a lone traveler suffers an incapacitating injury during a blizzard in a remote location and is "rescued" by someone who turns out to be violent and obsessed.

That similarity alone wouldn't be enough for me to criticize the book— there are plenty of excellent books that put their own spin on previous works in a way that is genuinely original— but unfortunately The Crash is also very bad when judged solely on its own merits. The characters are not believable, with the protagonist in particular vacillating wildly from gullible to suspicious as the plot requires. As I mentioned above, McFadden's narrators tend to share a very similar voice, and this book is no exception. Even when the villain is narrating, their voice has the same forced lightness as the other characters. An example that I found particularly grating: "I've had enough of this tomfoolery!" is one character's response to being stabbed. I read these books because bad thrillers are a fun way to relax without thinking too much, but this book wasn't even that fun; it just felt like a long slog. Would not recommend even to those who enjoy McFadden. It did make me want to read Misery, though, to see how it compares.

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

This is a short novel about a girl whose abusive father has dragged his family along on an anthropological excursion to live like ancient Britons. I got this recommendation from the only booktuber whose literary opinions I trust, Frankie's shelf, who made the following point: the characterization of the abusive father is so thorough that you feel the same tension that the protagonist does, because you develop a sense of how the father is going to react to even the smallest things. It was such a breath of fresh air after two McFaddens to read a book like Ghost Wall; it is beautifully written and feels so dense with meaning that is shown rather than told in the best way. It doesn't force-feed you its themes, but they spring up as naturally and vibrantly as dandelions from the prose. It's very short and very good, and I think you should read it.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Keiko is an autistic-coded convenience store worker who finds great satisfaction in the consistent routines and structure of her job, even though everyone around her is disturbed by the fact that she's not pursuing traditional career or relationship goals. As someone who worked in a convenience store for several years and found great satisfaction in the consistent routines and structure of the job... I was not prepared for how relatable this book was. It captures so accurately the feeling of belonging that comes from being given a repeatable task and then getting really good at it. Keiko's imitation of other people's voices and mannerisms also hit home, especially when, despite the tremendous effort she puts in to appear "normal," she does not manage to meet the social expectations that others seem to manage effortlessly. She is deeply weird in ways beyond her love for the convenience store, and yet I felt more at home in Keiko's head than I do in just about any neurotypical-coded narrator. Convenience Store Woman has my unreserved recommendation.

Room by Emma Donoghue

I listened to this novel as an audiobook (as I do with most of the books I read) and I have to admit, for the first few minutes my main thought was "oh my god, are we going to have to listen to this exaggeratedly childish voice for the rest of the book?" But very quickly I got used to it, and I'm glad I stuck it out, because I really enjoyed this book. It follows a woman who has been imprisoned by a sexual predator for years, gives birth to a child while in captivity, and has to raise him in a single room for the first several years of his life. The book recounts their attempts to escape and rejoin the outside world, and it does so entirely from the five-year-old son's perspective. That's a bold decision, but I think it pays off thanks to Donoghue's skill and attention to detail. Throughout the book there were consequences (big and small) of the son's lack of exposure to the outside world that I never would have considered, and the plot manages to strike a balance of not flinching away from the trauma of the situation while still having moments that are hopeful. I also think Donoghue's characterization of the mother is excellent; she is flawed and real and you can see so clearly how she's struggling even when her son's narration doesn't explicitly pick up on it sometimes. I would recommend this book, if the premise is not too grim for you.

You by Caroline Kepnes

I am still not entirely sure what I thought of this book. The main character is a dangerously obsessed man who stalks a woman he is attempting to date. It is deeply unpleasant, yet also compelling, to be in his head. It might be giving this book too much credit, but I would compare it to Lolita; if you enjoy the experience of an author really exploring what it might be like inside the head of someone who does monstrous things, you might enjoy this one. If not, maybe give it a pass. There are sequels, but I don't think I'll be reading them; I would read another, unrelated book by Kepnes, because I think her writing skills are solid, but I just don't want to spend any more time in this guy's thoughts.

Survive the Night by Riley Sager

I was hopeful about this book, but those hopes were dashed. This book was just kind of a flop. It follows Charlie, an insufferable film student who accepts a strange man's offer of a car ride home from college and gradually becomes convinced that the man is actually the serial killer who recently murdered her best friend. In a thriller where your main character's life is in peril, you generally want the audience to root for the protagonist and feel anxious for their safety. It's tough to do that when Charlie says, among other things, that she doesn't like people who list The Sound of Music as their favorite movie. Great, I like the Sound of Music, so should I just stop reading then? It's not just that one moment, unfortunately. Charlie likes Hitchcock movies and she's seen Jaws twenty times, and there's an undertone to her dialogue that makes it seem like she thinks she's better than everyone else because of these things. It's not necessarily unrealistic (insufferable college students certainly exist in the real world), but it's not endearing either.

The twists also felt cheap. I'm trying to keep these reviews spoiler-free, which makes it tough to express what I mean, but there are times when you are put into a character's head and their own thoughts indicate one thing, and then later on you find out that they had different motivations which somehow didn't appear in their own thoughts during the time they were narrating. There is a scene later on which maybe somewhat tries to justify why this is, but it didn't work well enough. I think in more skilled hands it could have been pulled off, but here it just felt like a bait-and-switch. And the ending? I can't say much without major spoilers, but it made me mad. I just don't understand why he thought readers would enjoy that.

Finally... I'll admit, I am annoyed by the trend of cis men using an ambiguously gendered pen name when writing thrillers targeted at women. I'm of two minds on this, because on one hand, if someone wants to use their pen name for a little gender exploration, I'm all for that. But in the cases I've seen recently of men writing thrillers under names that could plausibly belong to women, it feels more like a calculated marketing move to attract a female audience, and I think it's a bit of a cheap trick.

Look Closer by David Ellis

I decided to read this book solely because it is a thriller set in Chicago, and I live in Chicago, and I think it's kind of fun when books are set in real places that I have been to. Look Closer is about a law professor who gets tangled up in a murder case. It's full of torrid affairs and sordid histories and it gradually becomes a sort of cat and mouse game between the detective and culprit. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book to me was the use of technological evidence. A significant plot point relies on data that the police can retrieve from people's phones, and the protagonist is a law professor who specializes in the Fourth Amendment. I feel like I haven't often seen these kinds of details in similar books, and I thought it made this novel stand out from the average generic thriller.

On the negative side, I think what bothered me the most about it was the pacing. Rather than a big twist towards the end, you get a series of smaller reveals that slowly let you see what has been going on the whole time. In theory I think that could be a really neat approach, but in this book it just felt as though the stakes were being raised and then lowered again as the author would introduce inconsistencies and then resolve them shortly afterwards by unveiling more information. This book does something similar to Survive the Night, where you are getting unreliable narration from certain characters without realizing it. Look Closer does pull it off more convincingly, but I think the reveal of the characters' true nature could have been delayed a bit to create a more satisfying payoff.

Overall I was not wildly impressed by this book, but it was a fine read. It's entirely possible that it was just clashing with my personal pacing preferences; this is not intended as a negative review, but more of a "meh?" And if you live in Chicago and get a kick out of books that reference your local area, then you might enjoy it just for that. Did you know that the Grant Thornton Tower used to be called the Chicago Title and Trust building? If you didn't already, you certainly will after reading this book.

This concludes my list of September reads. I might do this again next month-- it is a fun way of looking back and seeing patterns in the books I'm choosing. Happy reading!

A friend of mine invited me to a pride-themed tea party this month (aka an LGBTea party), so of course I immediately started thinking about what baked treat I could bring that would be thematically appropriate. My go-to contribution for potluck meals is a loaf of quick bread, since I have an excellent base recipe which can be used for banana bread, pumpkin bread, zucchini bread, pear bread... Basically take any fruit or vegetable that might conceivably be good in bread, and it will probably work in this recipe. For the pride theme, I chose raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries as my mix-ins, to mimic the pink/blue/purple colors of the bi flag. Thus was born Bisexual Berry Bread!

Credit where it's due: the base recipe I use for quick bread is roughly based on Smitten Kitchen's pear bread recipe. My recipe is more loosey-goosey in its measurements because I've found that in this case it doesn't matter all that much if you measure your flour or butter or sugar exactly, the bread will be tasty regardless.

Bisexual Berry Bread

Ingredients

Base dry ingredients

• around 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/8 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• Several shakes each of cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cloves, and ginger (if you're not sure you added enough, add a little more)

Base wet ingredients

• around 3/4 stick of butter (preferably slightly softened) (I usually use salted butter but unsalted is ok too)
• around 1 cup sugar (I usually do half granulated and half brown sugar)
• 1 or 2 eggs (either work, I prefer 2)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 spoonful vanilla Greek yogurt (optional)
• If dough feels too dry, a splash of water/lemon juice/milk (depending on which one best matches the other flavors you're using)

Mix-in Variations

• Bisexual Berry variation: raspberries, blackberries, blueberries
• Mashed banana and chopped walnuts
• Pumpkin puree and chopped pecans
• Grated pear
• Grated apples
• Grated zucchini
• Dried cherries and lemon juice
• Dried cherries and cocoa powder
• Blueberries and lemon juice

---

Instructions

1. Preheat your oven to 350F.
2. Lightly grease an 8x4 inch loaf pan.
3. Cream the butter and sugar in a large bowl. Ideally you will have taken the butter out of the fridge a little while ahead of time so it's a bit soft. However, I hardly ever remember to do this, so I usually just break down the cold butter with my hands and sort of knead it into the sugar, which works well enough.
4. Add the remaining wet ingredients. If you're using liquid or mushy mix-ins like lemon juice, banana, or pumpkin puree, add those here. Mix thoroughly.
5. Measure out the flour into the bowl. Before mixing it into the wet ingredients, measure out the remaining dry ingredients on top of the flour. The idea here is to avoid mixing the rising agents into the liquid until the last moment, so they are still reacting when they go into the oven. (You could always just mix all the dry ingredients together in a separate bowl, but who wants to use a second bowl? Not me.) Powdery mix-ins like cocoa powder can be added here too.
6. Mix everything together just until the flour disappears.
7. Add any solid mix-ins, like whole berries or nuts. Mix until they're somewhat evenly dispersed throughout the batter.
8. Quickly scrape the batter into the prepared pan and put it in the oven. If you want, you could sprinkle toppings on top of the loaf at this stage, like poppy seeds or nuts or turbinado sugar.
9. Bake for 350F for about an hour. Ovens vary, so I'd advise to start checking on it at 50 minutes. It's done when it's nicely brown and craggy on top and a knife inserted in the center comes out clean or with just a crumb or two, no wet dough.
10. Cool the bread in the pan for about 10 minutes.
11. Put the loaf on a wire rack to cool completely.
12. Slice and serve!

More recipes

Over the holidays, I knit Poppy Shop's Convertible Balaclava pattern. It's a very satisfying quick knit, and it turns out I finished it just in time: we've had a spell of cold weather (below 20F) this week in Chicago, and my balaclava has been keeping my face warm on walks and bike rides. I had some apprehension that fogging would be an issue since I wear glasses, and it does fog somewhat, but when moving briskly a lot of the warm air seems to blow away before it can condense on my glasses. The balaclava also rolls up into a hat. I've found that this works best if I position the eye hole towards the back of my head when wearing it in hat mode. Otherwise, if I wear it rolled up with the eye hole in front, my hair tends to stick out of it and looks a bit wild.

My balaclava is a little pointier on top than the original pattern; this is because I forgot the all-knit rounds in the crown section, so I was decreasing every round instead of every other round. I like the pointy look, though, so I'm going to pretend it was a deliberate style element. I do think the fit would be slightly better if I had followed the pattern as written.

Yarn used: The turquoise on top is Malabrigo Worsted Emerald, and the variegated on the bottom is Malabrigo Rios Virgo. They are SO SOFT! I am definitely keeping this yarn in mind for future projects. I had a substantial amount of both leftover after finishing the balaclava. I knit a water bottle carrier (the Water Web) using some of the remaining turquoise yarn, but I still have more leftover!

Also, both skeins I used for this project were acquired from The Dropped Stitch, which I would highly recommend visiting if you enjoy yarn crafts and are in Chicago.

More knitting notes

The original task:

Make the best meal for the Taskmaster using ingredients beginning with every letter of the alphabet. You have a total of two hours. Your time starts now.

Half the fun of Taskmaster is thinking about how you would approach the challenges, so naturally, I watched this challenge and immediately went, "Oooh, I want to give this a try!" However, I did also want to make a meal that would actually taste good, so I did not restrict the amount of time I had to plan and prepare the meal. Also, there's some ambiguity in the wording of the task about whether you can use more than one ingredient starting with the same letter of the alphabet, but I chose to interpret it in the strict sense of one ingredient per letter.

My approach was to tackle the difficult letters first; for example, there's not a ton of ingredients starting with k, q, or x, so I decided that my meal would include kiwi, quick oats, and xanthan gum, and then filled in the easier ingredients from there. Here's my final list of ingredients:

• Apple juice
• Banana
• Coconut milk
• Dark chocolate chunks
• Egg
• Flour
• Gochujang
• Honey
• Italian seasonings
• Jasmine rice
• Kiwi
• Lemon juice
• Mushrooms
• Nutmeg
• Olive oil
• Pesto
• Quick oats
• Raspberries
• Salt
• Tofu
• Unsalted butter
• Vinegar
• Water chestnuts
• Xanthan gum
• Yeast
• Zest of a lemon

The above ingredients can be combined into the following dishes:

• Fruit salad
• Tofu and vegetables in a spicy sauce over rice
• Bread rolls with a lemon pesto dipping sauce
• Oatmeal chocolate chip banana cookies for dessert
• And apple juice to drink!

Not a bad meal, if I say so myself. It turned out very tasty, for the most part. The only thing I wouldn't make again was the pesto dipping sauce; it was a bit much for dipping bread rolls in, though I do enjoy making a somewhat similar lemon/pesto/butter sauce to go over pasta. The best element of the meal was definitely the sauce for the tofu and vegetables. This meal was the first time I had made a sauce with these particular ingredients combined, and it was delicious-- definitely worth a full five points! It has since become a regular in my meal rotation. I do typically use soy sauce as well when cooking tofu, but it's omitted here because it would have conflicted with my S ingredient, salt.

If for some reason you would like to replicate my alphabet meal, I've included a recipe below. (As a side note, writing up this blog post has been a fun excursion into learning about recipe schema markup!) I also highly recommend trying your hand at the alphabet challenge for yourself, it's quite fun!

Alphabet Meal

Ingredients

Fruit salad

• Several kiwis
• Some raspberries

Tofu, vegetables, & rice

• 1 package extra-firm tofu
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 2 cups jasmine rice
• 1 8-oz. package mushrooms
• 1 8-oz. can sliced water chestnuts
• A pinch of xanthan gum
• 1/4 cup gochujang
• 1 tbsp rice vinegar
• 3 tbsp honey
• Salt to taste

Bread rolls

• 1 1/4 tsp yeast
• 1/2 cup warmed coconut milk
• 1/2 tsp and 1 1/2 tbsp honey, divided
• 2 cups bread flour
• 1 egg
• 1/8 cup olive oil
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp Italian seasonings

Dipping sauce

• 1 tbsp butter
• 2 tbsp pesto
• Juice and zest of 1 lemon
• Dash of Italian seasonings
• Dash of salt

Cookies

• 2 bananas
• 1 cup oats
• 1 tbsp honey
• 1/2 cup choc chunks
• Dash of nutmeg
• Dash of salt

Beverage

• Apple juice

---

Instructions

Fruit salad

1. Peel and chop up the kiwis.
2. Mix the sliced kiwi and raspberries together.

Tofu, vegetables, & rice

1. Preheat oven to 425F.
2. Remove tofu from package, press extra water out, and slice into cubes.
3. Coat the tofu cubes in 2 tbsp olive oil and season with salt.
4. Place the tofu in a baking dish and bake for about 30 minutes, optionally turning the cubes halfway through.
5. Meanwhile, cook rice according to package directions.
6. Wash and slice the mushrooms.
7. Saute the mushrooms in a little olive oil until they turn a darker brown.
8. Meanwhile, mix the sauce ingredients in a small bowl: first stir xanthan gum into 1 tbsp olive oil, then add gochujang, honey, water, and rice vinegar.
9. Pour the sauce over the mushrooms, add the water chestnuts, toss thoroughly to coat, and add in the tofu as well when it finishes baking.
10. Serve the tofu and vegetables over the rice.

Bread rolls

1. Mix yeast, warm milk, and honey in a large bowl and let sit for 5 minutes.
2. Add the flour, remaining honey, egg, olive oil, salt, and Italian seasonings to the yeast mixture.
3. Mix thoroughly and then knead until it reaches a doughy consistency.
4. Grease the bowl with some olive oil and place the dough back in the bowl. Cover and set aside to rise for 1-2 hours or until doubled in volume.
5. Preheat oven to 400F.
6. Shape dough into rolls and place in a greased baking dish. Cover and let rise until doubled in volume, or about 30 more minutes.
7. Bake rolls until golden brown on top, about 20 minutes.

Dipping sauce

1. Melt butter.
2. Mix pesto, lemon juice and zest, Italian seasonings, and salt into the butter.

Cookies

1. Preheat oven to 350F.
2. Grease cookie sheets or line with parchment paper.
3. Mash bananas and mix with oats, honey, nutmeg, and salt until thoroughly combined.
4. Mix in the chocolate chunks.
5. Spoon cookie dough onto cookie sheet (about 1 tbsp per cookie).
6. Bake cookies for about 15 minutes.

Beverage

1. Pour yourself a glass of apple juice.

More recipes

I've also added a permanent "plain html mode" button to the theme picker at the top of my website. I think it's useful to have the option of seeing my website without markup anytime because it better reflects how some people will interact with the content (via RSS reader, screen reader, etc.) and it gives people options for how they want to interact with my site (maybe they use dark mode generally, but want to try the plain html just to see what the plain markup looks like). The theme picker does rely on Javascript; I'm not entirely happy with this, since some people can't or won't use JS, but I don't know of another way to allow selection of multiple themes (not just light/dark) on a static site. If you do know of a way to do this, though, let me know!

Before I talk about my entry, though, I want to point out a few of the other 2023 entries that I thought were particularly interesting or impressive:

• Whalequest, a reordering of Moby Dick where the least whaley sentences come first and the whaliest sentences are at the end.
• Il nome della zebra, a novel inspired by The Name of the Rose and structured using a logic puzzle.
• The Library of Sir Herbert Quain, a collection of intriguing pamphlets and publications.
• The Bottish Play, a rendition of Macbeth performed entirely by various text-to-speech software. This one might be my favorite, it is truly eerie to hear The TikTok Voice playing the role of a witch in Macbeth.

My entry for NaNoGenMo 2023, The Forgotten Clue, was inspired by the board game Clue (or Cluedo). I wrote some code that approximates the mechanics of Clue (characters take turns moving from room to room, and accusing one another of the murder). The variation in language comes from a Tracery grammar which draws heavily on phrases from Putnam's Phrase Book, a 1919 book which compiles "Over 100 Model Social Letters and 6000 of the World’s Best English Phrases". It is a fascinating resource, and if you are interested in generative writing, I recommend checking it out as I bet you could do a lot of other really neat stuff with it.

The output of my code is a series of scenes that each read something like this:

With remarkable equanimity, Mr Green stepped into the billiard room.

The room was empty.

Mr Green called Miss Scarlett into the billiard room.

Mr Green said, "Miss Scarlett, the results are everywhere apparent: it was Mrs White in the billiard room with the wrench!"

Irritably self-conscious, Miss Scarlett answered, "You are certainly not making a reputation for accuracy by some of your statements. Obviously the murder weapon isn't the wrench. The cause of death was not a blunt object."

"Oh," Mr Green said. "Owing to a foolish error, I was mistaken."

I had one serious challenge in meeting the 50,000 word count: I couldn't get anywhere near 50,000 words if the detectives played the game skillfully. If they actually made sensible choices about what to suggest, using what they had already learned about which possibilities had been eliminated, the novel couldn't get much past 10,000 words before someone would figure out the solution. So as a cheap trick to meet the word count, I gave each detective an 80% chance of forgetting each clue the moment they hear it. Hence the title, "The Forgotten Clue." Despite this handicap, one detective does eventually manage to recall enough clues to solve the mystery, fortunately after the 50,000 word count has been safely met. I won't spoil the ending for you here, though!

I also enjoy making collage poems out of material that is not typically seen as having intrinsic artistic merit (see also: composing poetry from junk mail or econ test questions). So it occurred to me that random Wikipedia pages might make for a really interesting source of collage material.

Since large language model (LLM) tools have been such a constant topic of conversation lately, I’ve also been thinking a lot about collage poetry in juxtaposition to LLM-generated text. One of the primary (and, in my opinion, accurate) criticisms of LLMs is that they vacuum up other people’s words without permission, stick them in a computational blender, and claim the output as an original creative work; and that one or more aspects of this process is unethical. At a glance, collage poetry, whether analog or digital, has some similarities to LLM text generation! When I compose a poem, I am taking other people’s words (often without asking permission) and mixing them up into something that I would consider to be a “new” creative work. Because of these seeming similarities, I have been thinking a lot lately about what responsibilities artists have when making art that is very directly derived from others’ work.

Without going too far off on this tangent-- one principle that I think is important is citation of the original source material. Any collage art is sort of intrinsically in conversation with the original work from which it was composed, and I think it’s valuable to explicitly name the source material so that anyone looking at the derivative work can better understand that conversation. You’re missing out on so much context if you only see the collage in isolation. This is why, in my Wikipedia collage poems, I have included citation footnotes which link to the pages where I originally found each phrase. It’s partly just continuing a visual gimmick (the poems are formatted and styled to look like Wikipedia pages), but it’s also just a straightforward way to credit the original material. And maybe it will make some people curious to explore the cited pages (like, does Martha Stewart’s Wikipedia page really contain the word “Gnomes”? The answer is yes!).

I have finished a few poems now so I consider it finished-enough to be posted here, though I intend to keep making some more poems as I have time. I'm calling the project Found Wikipoetry (mainly because the names "Wikipoetry" or "Wikipoem" seem to have already been taken). You can read the poems, and some more information about how they were created, at the above link.

There were a lot of other cool entries this year, which I'd encourage you to check out! If you were drawn to this post by the Melville mention, it may interest you to know that there were not one, but two other Moby Dick themed submissions! One of them takes the novel and blacks out every repetition of a word, and the other colorizes words in the book.

A few more of the other submissions that I thought were especially interesting, in no particular order:

• An Unfinished Novel of 50015 Words, a self-referential novel that I found genuinely funny.
• A Letter Groove, a program that "cuts out" words in scanned book pages to reveal what's beneath (some of the output is really quite beautiful).
• There Are Stars, an interactive story where starring the Github repository causes a new character to be added to the story. Technically not a complete entry because it didn't reach 50,000 words by the end of November, but I think it's one of the most impressive and creative ones I've seen.
• Broken Computer Games, a compilation book of BASIC programs that are composed of mashed-up lines from the book Basic Computer Games by Dave Ahl.

The premise of my submission: In Moby Dick, Ishmael defines a whale as "a spouting fish with a horizontal tail." My generated novel consists of a series of other dubiously accurate whale definitions in the same format, constructed using a tracery grammar. To put together a grammar that had enough word variety to make the output interesting, I pulled from a list of adjectives from Darius Kazemi's corpora repo, as well as many of the "words used to describe" lists published by Macmillan Dictionary. The below excerpt is the beginning of the example output I generated; you can read the full output as well, if you're really that interested in whale definitions.

An Expanded Meditation

'Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as conspicuously to label him for all time to come? To be short, then, a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail. There you have him. However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded meditation.' - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Ch. 32, Cetology.

A whale is a natural animal with a graceful head.
A whale is a cooperative giant with an adorable tail.
A whale is an inexperienced giant with a geometric heart.
A whale is an apprehensive beast with a striped forehead.
A whale is an artificial ungulate with a non-flexible back.
A whale is a grave mammal with a peaked jaw.
A whale is a shrewd mammal with an impermeable belly.
A whale is a ridiculous creature with a chiseled fin.
A whale is an orderly creature with an elongated belly.
A whale is an excitable creature with a graceful hump.
A whale is an artistic fish with a lined set of lungs.
A whale is a caustic leviathan with a mottled stomach.
A whale is a sad beast with an enlarged jaw.
A whale is a suspicious fellow with a concave set of lungs.
A whale is a supercilious mammal with a corrugated hump.
A whale is a drunk animal with a clean rib cage.
A whale is a prejudiced animal with a well-rounded set of lungs.
A whale is a reclusive creature with an eye-catching jaw.
A whale is a willing ungulate with an impermeable fin.
A whale is a cynical animal with an arched forehead.