a bug with today's, I've guessed the title (with a little help for the fourth word) but it hasn't given me the win.
― dear confusion the catastrophe waitress (ledge), Thursday, 7 July 2022 13:25 (two years ago) link
disappointed I didn't get yesterday's.
― dear confusion the catastrophe waitress (ledge), Thursday, 7 July 2022 13:30 (two years ago) link
Same bug for me. Got it quickly, too (a great book, if that isn't too much of a hint), so it was extra disappointing not to have the win display.
― emil.y, Thursday, 7 July 2022 13:30 (two years ago) link
um, thanks. yes, problem.
it's an odd one, it's included the ',' in with the word so your guess has to include the comma. and yet it still reveals the word without the comma. title parsing is obviously doing something different.
it'll have to wait until this evening now because i don't think it'll be a quick fix.
yesterday's was on tv whilst i was doing the initial list or i might not've included it for obscureness reasons.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0c2pwk6
― koogs, Thursday, 7 July 2022 14:29 (two years ago) link
btw, what font are you seeing for the main text? i get sans serif on the laptop (firefox), serif on the macbook (firefox, chrome)
― koogs, Thursday, 7 July 2022 14:35 (two years ago) link
serif on desktop (osx chrome), sans on phone (android chrome).
― dear confusion the catastrophe waitress (ledge), Thursday, 7 July 2022 14:39 (two years ago) link
you wanna take out those quote marks round 'sans-serif'.
― dear confusion the catastrophe waitress (ledge), Thursday, 7 July 2022 14:41 (two years ago) link
var tbits = t[1].split(/ /);
there's your comma problem...
― koogs, Thursday, 7 July 2022 14:49 (two years ago) link
done and done. thanks ledge.
(um does \W+ match digits? do i have any digits in titles?)
― koogs, Thursday, 7 July 2022 17:07 (two years ago) link
oh, that's broken apostrophes in titles 8(
― koogs, Thursday, 7 July 2022 17:11 (two years ago) link
fixed
― koogs, Thursday, 7 July 2022 17:23 (two years ago) link
it's redacting the 6 characters of rather than printing a space. 8(
― koogs, Friday, 8 July 2022 09:10 (two years ago) link
(that space there is an nbsp )
― koogs, Friday, 8 July 2022 09:11 (two years ago) link
(font is better btw thanks)
― koogs, Friday, 8 July 2022 09:15 (two years ago) link
Got today's on the strength of one of my usual starting words (after the 60-100 fillers): house. Not from the title which I try to avoid, but the ahem tell-tale capitalisation in the first para.
― dear confusion the catastrophe waitress (ledge), Friday, 8 July 2022 10:14 (two years ago) link
what can i do to hide the title? i guess it'd have to start hidden. i could put it as the actual page title, but not on the page.
― koogs, Friday, 8 July 2022 12:44 (two years ago) link
I tried redactle once after this thread and thought it should have been by part of speech but maybe that would have made it too easy.
Is the code for bookish available? What language is it written in? (I am just curious about how it is constructed.)
― youn, Friday, 8 July 2022 14:29 (two years ago) link
it is very much 1999-style javascript, the only kind i know...
there's no server access past the initial page load, so ctrl-u will show you all the horrible code. and i think because it's on github.io and i don't pay them then the repo will be public as well.
― koogs, Friday, 8 July 2022 14:43 (two years ago) link
My first time playing! Got it in 46 but totally used the title, am I not supposed to?
― Guayaquil (eephus!), Friday, 8 July 2022 23:49 (two years ago) link
For insert, could you not include stopwords up to some cutoff or would that make it too easy? I am wondering how people do this!
― youn, Saturday, 9 July 2022 00:52 (two years ago) link
(with lower counts for insertion)
― youn, Saturday, 9 July 2022 00:54 (two years ago) link
> For insert, could you not include stopwords up to some cutoff or would that make it too easy?
you have a choice of inserting 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 of the most common words using the drop-down in the top bar. i need to write some instructions.
eephus, i think ledge thinks the title makes it too easy and i think he has a point so I'll look to making it an option.
― koogs, Saturday, 9 July 2022 02:56 (two years ago) link
But could you exclude words like 'the', 'and', 'to', 'by', etc. from the most common words inserted, with lower counts as options in the dropdown, so that the clues given are more meaningful?
― youn, Saturday, 9 July 2022 08:25 (two years ago) link
(If after stopword removal, the differences in frequency counts are low, then insertions could be all occurrences of randomly selected unique words in the text and guesses could continue to be for all occurrences.)
― youn, Saturday, 9 July 2022 09:35 (two years ago) link
not sure i agree with removing the *most* common words from the list of common words. and that was what the 0 option was for.
i could let people get 10, 20, 30 *random* words from the top 50, so they aren't guaranteed to get 'the' and 'and' or whatever but that moves away from everybody getting the same game.
― koogs, Saturday, 9 July 2022 10:57 (two years ago) link
The text could be generated once for each insertion count offered in the dropdown. The words selected could be randomized or not. If not, another option would be most frequently occurring after stopword removal. It's just that it is hard to guess from stopwords.
― youn, Saturday, 9 July 2022 11:28 (two years ago) link
I've been having remarkable success recently guessing sea, boat, ship, sails, etc. Though it hasn't worked so well today, lots of hits and I've eventually got the author but I guess I'm not familiar enough with his work.
― dear confusion the catastrophe waitress (ledge), Tuesday, 12 July 2022 08:22 (two years ago) link
it's an earlier novel (n fact his only novel), and not his usual genre. this was from the observer / guardian 1000 book list, so probably not as 'popular' as those from the top downloads list. i read it a couple of years ago. it goes a bit lovecraft in the last few chapters iirc
― koogs, Tuesday, 12 July 2022 08:57 (two years ago) link
i should hope it does!
i'm consistently amazed at the nautical knowledge expected of pre 20th c readers. "At length I summoned up the resolution of despair, and rushing to the mainsail let it go by the run. As might have been expected, it flew over the bows" - of course!
― dear confusion the catastrophe waitress (ledge), Tuesday, 12 July 2022 09:10 (two years ago) link
Well, I managed to get the author, but as the entire text is in French I'm not sure I can get the correct title without cheating. (Assuming it's even one of his better-known works that I theoretically could get!)
― emil.y, Thursday, 14 July 2022 11:31 (two years ago) link
happy bastile day!
unfortunately, due to terrible planning on my part, i'd already posted A Tale Of Two Cities and Les Miserables or i'd've made this the relevant sections of one of those. i went with this instead, which is well known in english, at least, but is a bit of a bastard because of the apostrophe in the title that you can't see but must enter
― koogs, Thursday, 14 July 2022 15:07 (two years ago) link
I thought it was something very experimental and Oulipo when only two of the top 30 words had any results, but on noticing they were "on" and "a" and spotting some suspicious hyphens scattered around before question marks I managed to work out what was going on and quite enjoyed typing words from my mostly forgotten GCSE French into it. (Eventually got the author purely by name length and then the title from the prepositions therein rather than any half-deciphered content, though!)
(Those elided clitic pronouns make French a bit annoying to guess - j'ai, l'ai, j'en, m'en, n'en, etc, are all separate single "words". Feels like good, fun exercise for one's language skills but it's already hard enough to piece together enough context to guess in English without resorting to title/author length a lot of the time and limited language skills definitely don't help there.)
PS it also appears to be chapter 207 and not the traditional first chapter, too
― a passing spacecadet, Thursday, 14 July 2022 15:28 (two years ago) link
> PS it also appears to be chapter 207 and not the traditional first chapter, too
yeah, nobody said it was always going to be chapter 1! i think there's one soon / recently that's chapter 3 because the first two are preamble that are imo unguessable. i've also skipped some prefaces at times.
the numbering of the d'Artagnan Romances, of which this is part, is a book in itself. it was three or four volumes depending on the edition and modern copies split the 3rd (or 4th?) part into 3 parts themselves. but the chapter numbers aren't reset - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vicomte_of_Bragelonne:_Ten_Years_Later . specifically this chapter was chosen as it was the one that mentioned the prisoner's history in the bastille
― koogs, Thursday, 14 July 2022 15:41 (two years ago) link
Aha! Thank you, koogs! I thought it was a bug but I should not have doubted you; good to hear the explanation!
hidden tag more to assuage my paranoia than because of Bookish spoilers: I work in a library as a data/helpdesk monkey and some of the multi-volume works of this era have very nutty numbering, where things end up with three different numbering systems and flit between which one they feel like displaying on the title page, and then someone emails me to ask if there's a scan for an apparently undigitised volume, or that the scans don't match the right volumes, and it turns into a bit of a nightmare going through them all filling in an Excel spreadsheet of every number you might conceivably refer to them by and trying to label them on the system in a way which will make sense to readers...
― a passing spacecadet, Thursday, 14 July 2022 15:53 (two years ago) link
btw, this'll be the first and last time i do this even though it went smoother than expected (people did try, did complete it even, no insults were hurled)
i do have vague plans for theme weeks though, mainly to give myself ideas of books to include. sci fi week, say, or grouped by decade. I'm about a fifth of the way through having a year's worth.
― koogs, Thursday, 14 July 2022 21:07 (two years ago) link
(i can do repeats, i guess, of i choose other chapters)
um, maybe a week of final chapters...
― koogs, Thursday, 14 July 2022 21:08 (two years ago) link
Today's is a game of guess the title even when you've guessed the title.
― dear confusion the catastrophe waitress (ledge), Thursday, 21 July 2022 07:17 (two years ago) link
Well ok it wasn't that hard.
― dear confusion the catastrophe waitress (ledge), Thursday, 21 July 2022 07:20 (two years ago) link
yeah, again made harder by hidden punctuation (c/f redactle unlimited where often 's' is a word because it splits on apostrophes). damned if you do, damned if you don't, really
and this way i can maybe use the later books as more games. or are they too obscure?
2.1 Volume One: Swann's Way 2.2 Volume Two: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower 2.3 Volume Three: The Guermantes Way 2.4 Volume Four: Sodom and Gomorrah 2.5 Volume Five: The Prisoner 2.6 Volume Six: The Fugitive 2.7 Volume Seven: Time Regained
not gonna happen...
― koogs, Thursday, 21 July 2022 07:34 (two years ago) link
yeah I only got it because of the famous opening line.
― dear confusion the catastrophe waitress (ledge), Thursday, 21 July 2022 09:25 (two years ago) link
tbh, it is the only part i've downloaded. and three years later i haven't started it...
― koogs, Thursday, 21 July 2022 11:48 (two years ago) link
I never knew that book had that subtitle (or was written like that) so I didn't get today's. Though I've just realised the first word is one of the words I usually always guess, and didn't today. Is it children's book week or something? Two E Nesbitts then this.
― dear confusion the catastrophe waitress (ledge), Wednesday, 10 August 2022 08:13 (two years ago) link
children's book 12-days iirc, in honour of school holidays (and because it gives me ideas of books to convert - after 2.5 months i'm struggling to think of suitably well-known things). pity about the nesbitts though, i'd've spread them out a bit if i'd noticed
― koogs, Wednesday, 10 August 2022 08:23 (two years ago) link
i think there's some leeway on sub-titles because wikipedia has an even longer one
― koogs, Wednesday, 10 August 2022 08:27 (two years ago) link
wait... autobiography? that'd need a large keyboard...
quill pen stuck in hoof surely
― dear confusion the catastrophe waitress (ledge), Wednesday, 10 August 2022 09:15 (two years ago) link
the first editon cover page on wikipedia included another revelation that didn't make it into the PG version
― koogs, Wednesday, 10 August 2022 10:12 (two years ago) link
new theme starts today. there's a curious part of project gutenberg that is a bit more contemporary and so this is taken from those.
i think that's > 100 i've done now and i'm really struggling for new ideas. that said, i can always revisit the old ones and choose different excerpts.
― koogs, Tuesday, 6 September 2022 09:20 (two years ago) link
it also looks like i missed an hr tag 8(
― koogs, Tuesday, 6 September 2022 09:42 (two years ago) link
How do you put possessive nouns in e.g. David's struggling to work out how to do that.
― Dan Worsley, Tuesday, 6 September 2022 10:03 (two years ago) link