I haven't linked this guy often enough yet.

[theweaselking]

oh by the way
fun fact
HP Lovecraft is a HUGE FAN OF ADJECTIVES
the more syllables the better
sometimes it can make reading his writing very difficult
but luckily i discovered a trick
which is that you can replace almost every single one of his adjectives
with "spooky"
without any loss of meaning
let's try it on one of the paragraphs from the sailor's account!
AHEM:

"I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the spooky, spooky citadel whereon spooky Cthulu was buried, actually emerged from the waters... Johansen and his men were awed by the spooky majesty of this spooky Babylon of spooky demons, and must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or any other sane planet. Awe at the spooky size of the spooky stone blocks, at the spooky height of the spooky, spooky monolith, and at the spooky identity of the spooky statues and bas-reliefs with the spooky image found in the shrine on the Alert, is spookily visible in every line of the mate's spooky description."

SEE?
now just delete every instance of the word "spooky"
and watch this paragraph magically transform into PRETTY GOOD WRITING
but anyway

- from "Boats: An Elder God's Only Weakness"

Comments

[kafziel.livejournal.com]

I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the citadel whereon Cthulu was buried, actually emerged from the waters... Johansen and his men were awed by the majesty of this Babylon of demons, and must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or any other sane planet. Awe at the size of the stone blocks, at the height of the monolith, and at the identity of the statues and bas-reliefs with the image found in the shrine on the Alert, is visible in every line of the mate's description.

Holy shit, he's right. That is pretty decent prose.

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

"Lovecraft? I'm all about Lovecraft! I'm amorphous -and- noneuclidian!"
--possibly my best drunken pickup line, not that it's saying much.

[maelorin]

how does that work out for you?

It a

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

it worked well, given realistic expectations for conversation starters. Subsequent conversation went south, and not in an anatomical way.

[faeriemuriel.livejournal.com]

...This should happen. There should be a "Lovecraft sans adjectives" website. 'Cause that's MUCH more readable!

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

It would almost be possible to automate. The trick is identifying the few adjectives that are necessary to the text (e.g. 'sane' in the example above).

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Automate, maybe. But like OhNoRobot, it would only take one person to do per phrase.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Ooh, hadn't seen that site. Nifty!

Now I think about it, for something that's already available as .txt, you could semi-automate the process. Every time it detects a possible adjective, pop up a dialogue with the word, a couple of sentences of context, and a single keystroke to accept/reject. (My work uses a similar setup for quality-checking OCR text capture.)

Probably overkill, but I like overkill. And there are plenty of other authors who'd benefit from the same treatment, especially if it's expanded to adverbs.

[kafziel.livejournal.com]

How about one that goes in and adds punctuation to Cormac McCarthy? Maybe his crap could be turned quasi-readable if you did that.

[maelorin]

but, why?

[jerril]

I apparently installed a mental filter to do this somewhere around grade six or so. He really is a good writer once someone viciously edits his work :)

[harper-knight.livejournal.com]

That guy's blog has been my favorite blog on the internet for a while now. He writes about both things I've never heard of and things I love already, and he makes them all hilarious.

[falconwarrior.livejournal.com]

This one time, I was such a big fan of a blog like this that I commissioned the guy to do some Lovecraft myths.

HEY WAIT, WHAT

[falconwarrior.livejournal.com]

On a related note, it was through this transaction that I actually recommended The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which is the next video myth he's doing. I've been putting money into getting it done as I am able, but if anyone else is eager for more of this, head on over to the donations page ;)