Slashdot Mirror

http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/suspended_mas k/suspended-mask.html

The earlier post was a slightly modified version of the output of the Postmodern Essay Generator.

That's the problem with all standardized tests. Instead of testing the actual subject, the tests check for certain "markers" that are correlated to skills in the subject area. People with good English skills most likely have a larger vocabulary than people with poor English, people good at math might be able to solve weird math puzzles in short time... You get the picture.

What happens next, is that people are getting trained for the markers. Especially bad, if this replaces learning the original subject. Learning stupid word lists doesn't replace writing and reading; and cramming past tests instead of trying to understand it might be the best way to deal with these tests, but you certainly don't get anything out of it.

Computer graded essays make this situation even worse, the content doesn't matter anymore, as long as the essay sounds intelligent.

Your score:

5 Overall 90.67 2.067 5
5 Content 88.882 1.8882 5
5 Creativity 88.647 1.8647 5
4 Style 80.343 1.0343 4
4 Mechanics 81.919 1.1919 4
5 Organization 92.523 2.2523 5

The score of the random computer-generated essay:

6 Overall 100 3.2384 6
5 Content 88.882 1.8882 5
6 Creativity 99.973 2.9973 6
6 Style 100 3.4543 6
6 Mechanics 100 3.6429 6
6 Organization 100 3.4075 6

Your post, though interesting, is, by its own standards, inferior to a randomly generated essay, which apparently approached perfection itself!

Looks like you didn't deserve that "+5" interesting after all. If only we used such software to moderate Slashdot comments as well as to grade papers!

By the way, this comment is only scoring a 2 overall. Maybe I shouldn't hit submi...

The postmodern essay generator

New innovation... like this one?

Remember the "microscopic space fleet" incident? It's triggered not by something Arthur says but by something his player types. Even the rather sad and serious (and beautiful, and beautifully packaged) Trinity has something like that in the form of a book (IIRC) recording player input. Oddly enough I didn't find that jarring in the least.

What would impress me is if somebody got the original version online where we could play it. No I don't mean the Infocom games. I mean the original MIT game that only ever ran on a PDP-10.

Try The Postmodernism Generator if you want more randomly-generated lengthy pieces that mean nothing whatsoever :P

Loads of money is wasted on market research to define products that large numbers of people want. But consumers are not monolithic clones.

I'm kind of amazed noone's mentioned that you can telnet to eldorado.elsewhere.org.

When you reached a certain point in the game, it would mention a smell, and you had to scratch the appropriate number on the card to see what it was... =)

http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/leather/leath er.html

Start with the books. i was first introduced to it/them through the Infocom game sometime in elementary school. I didn't quite understand the jokes or what was going on (why do i have to put the towel over my head again?) until I had read the book. Which I think I read concurrently with the game after I couldn't get past the introduction of the game. Haven't ever listened to the radio play...

One can play the game online here.

From The Postmodernism Generator (http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/) Here.

The Expression of Fatal flaw: The textual paradigm of consensus in the works of Rushdie
Hans Q. Dahmus
Department of English, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
1. Consensuses of failure

"Sexual identity is part of the paradigm of truth," says Derrida. But an abundance of dematerialisms concerning the textual paradigm of consensus may be discovered.

"Society is intrinsically elitist," says Lyotard; however, according to Hanfkopf[1] , it is not so much society that is intrinsically elitist, but rather the dialectic of society. Precapitalist narrative states that art is part of the failure of culture, but only if the premise of dialectic subdeconstructivist theory is invalid. Therefore, the main theme of Pickett's[2] analysis of neodialectic cultural theory is a mythopoetical paradox.

Hanfkopf[3] suggests that we have to choose between dialectic subdeconstructivist theory and the subcapitalist paradigm of context. However, Debord uses the term 'dialectic postcultural theory' to denote the defining characteristic, and subsequent genre, of capitalist class.

Marx's critique of dialectic subdeconstructivist theory holds that art serves to reinforce sexism. In a sense, the subject is interpolated into a subdialectic desublimation that includes reality as a totality.

Sartre uses the term 'dialectic subdeconstructivist theory' to denote not, in fact, discourse, but postdiscourse. Thus, the characteristic theme of the works of Burroughs is the role of the participant as artist.
2. Realism and capitalist presemanticist theory

The main theme of Abian's[4] essay on capitalist presemanticist theory is the difference between society and class. The subject is contextualised into a Derridaist reading that includes consciousness as a paradox. However, Foucault uses the term 'capitalist presemanticist theory' to denote the meaninglessness, and some would say the defining characteristic, of textual sexual identity.

Subconstructivist theory suggests that consensus comes from communication. It could be said that the subject is interpolated into a capitalist presemanticist theory that includes language as a whole.

If the textual paradigm of consensus holds, the works of Gaiman are postmodern. Therefore, Debord uses the term 'cultural Marxism' to denote the role of the poet as artist. Lyotard suggests the use of capitalist presemanticist theory to read narrativity. However, in The Books of Magic, Gaiman affirms realism; in Neverwhere, however, he denies capitalist presemanticist theory.
1. Hanfkopf, A. B. ed. (1978) Realism in the works of Burroughs. Panic Button Books

2. Pickett, V. P. A. (1981) The Genre of Narrative: The textual paradigm of consensus and realism. Loompanics

3. Hanfkopf, R. ed. (1996) Realism in the works of McLaren. And/Or Press

4. Abian, N. D. F. (1970) The Stone Sky: The textual paradigm of consensus in the works of Gaiman. Panic Button Books

Engineers just can't see the forest for the trees.

Here is an introductory text which might shed some light for you: le click

Consider the following paragraph from the article:

The essential paradigm of cyberspace is creating partially situated identities out of actual or potential social reality in terms of canonical forms of human contact, thus renormalizing the phenomenology of narrative space and requiring the naturalization of the intersubjective cognitive strategy, and thereby resolving the dialectics of metaphorical thoughts, each problematic to the other, collectively redefining and reifying the paradigm of the parable of the model of the metaphor.

Now read an essay by the postmodernism generator. Can you tell the difference? ;-)

I think we're basically in agreement on on the relative roles of linguists and anthropologists in language work these days. The main point that I meant to make was that it is for the most part linguists rather than anthropologists who now do the "bulk documentation" work.Secondarily, I think that it is true that anthropological involvement linguistic work has declined in two other ways. First, my impression is that it is considerably rarer than it once was for anthropologists to learn the language of the people they are studying unless their research is specifically on linguistic topics. Second, what some would call "cognitive anthropology", e.g., specifically, the study of such things as kinship systems, color terms, and folk biological taxonomy, is out of fashion with, indeed despised by, a large fraction of anthropologists. This isn't just my own perception: I know of very distinguished senior anthropologists working in this area who say that they feel that they no longer have any disciplinary home: their work is appreciated by linguists and psychologists, but, they say, not by most anthropologists. But, as the parent says, there is an active area of anthropology concerned with language use.

I am not so sanguine about Postmodernism, though in part it depends on what you mean, and Postmodernism is a slippery creature. If we're talking about what I would regard as the hard core of Postmodernism, with deconstruction at its core, I view it as wholly negative. The epistemological and linguistic foundation is infantile, the result is not "self-criticism" but intellectual nihilism ("there is no truth and nothing can be known"), and it replaces the search for fact and valid argument with a lack of concern for data and ad hominem argument and arguments based on putative political implications. On top of all this, Postmodernist writing tends to truly awful, its only virtue the fact that it exemplifies Chomsky's observation that there are grammatical sentences of natural languages that have no semantic interpretation. The Postmodernism Generator seems to me to be entirely realistic.

I don't accept the idea that Postmodernism has led to worthwhile self-criticism because Postmodernism doesn't actually motivate self-criticism. In fact, self-criticism is part of the standard scientific method of which Postmodernists are so critical.

Like this one?
Begone, bogon!

As someone else pointed out, if we're going to let computers grade the essays, we might as well let computers write them too. I grabbed a piece of gibberish from the Postmodernism Generator, and it got a whopping overall grade of 90.67.

Since when could computers write Essays? I dont know about this technology.

-Tez

So I went to the demo site at http://testing.tc.iupui.edu/fipsedemo/ and c&p'd an essay generated by the Postmodernism Generator and guess what -- it got a nearly perfect score!
Overall: 100 3.2384
Content: 100 3.0584
Creativity: 99.973 2.9973
Style: 100 3.4543
Mechanics: 100 3.6429
Organization: 100 3.4075

The code appears in the excellent classic UNIX book "Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th edition" on lines 2528-2547 (sheet 25).

For those who may not be aware of the significance of the book, check out this entry on the Lions Book in The Hacker's Dictionary. The book has been around since 1976.

Here's the proof

Not only is poetry machine driven. Take a look at This Post-Modern Research Paper Generator.

Go ahead and read it...It looks just like the garbage I had to read and write in college...

Then hit the reload/refresh button.

More useless machine driven garbage.

As an added bonus, If you are in college and you need to impress that good looking Literature TA...then print off a copy. She'll never know.

There is nothing interesting here. No reasearch. No unique ideas.

The trick in appreciating works such as this in understanding what subject they claim to be in. This lady, who, incidentally, seems to have done sterling work on herself in reducing the difference between men and women, at least in terms of her intro pic[1], is actually working on a PhD dissertation on feminist metaphysics.

Now, do you what that means? I don't. A google search returned some might find interesting, but for mere mortal CS majors like me, even the intro paragraphs, which generally are the easiest, will take some time in parsing.

In particular, the first sentence itself is a stumbling block.

The very term "metaphysics" is repudiated by many feminist philosophers, especially those engaged primarily with twentieth century French and German philosophy, because it connotes a pretension to ahistorical universalism, as if philosophical accounts of the real could transcend the whole cloth of our cultural, historical, and embodied rootedness.

Note that, the ignorant reader, such as me again, will again have to google for terms such as "ahistorical universalism", on twentieth century French and German philosophy and on how "the modernist conception of the self has been "made strange" by a number of feminist philosophers". In particular, I will probably have to read up on on a collection of essays on post-modernism.

So, is (the going-to-be) Dr. Yasmin doing some ground-breaking research? For sure, post-modernism is, after all, the cutting-edge of liberal arts. Does it make any sense to me? Of course not. Is this why I shifted from liberal arts to comp sc? Yup. Am I procrastinating from doing my comp sc project? Definitely. Should I care? Yes, but only about the project being procrastinated against. Should you care about any of this shit, post-modernism, feminist metaphysics, ahistorical universalim or even my project? Nope, not really.

Why is it always with the feminists that we find such blatant cluelessness and absolutely ZERO sense of humor?

Dude, are you sure it was a feminist, and not some troll looking for, uh, exactly the response that you gave?

As they said back in the day, YHBT YHL HAND.

(essays generated with The Postmodernism Generator)

(essays generated with The Postmodernism Generator)

(essays generated with The Postmodernism Generator)

That would be Infocom Cornerstone. The point was that since Infocom had experience in getting their games to run on many micro platforms, that could leverage that technology into making business products that also ran identically on many platforms. CS was not an internal tool--it was always intended as a product.

Unfortunately, they underestimated the knowledge of *business apps* that would be necessary to make this work, and the extra costs of expanding the company for this development eventually overwhelmed them. Today we know that the technology for a single development platform that is itself retargeted to host systems can be a product in and of itself. That might have been a way for Infocom to have avoided such a deep commitment to the business environment, although even that road has its share of wrecks.

If I want "a sea in which a gnat may drink and an elephant may bathe," I'll play chess. And a monolithic tool that needs a 2,560-page manual and a 17-week qualification period is no fun. Give me robust but lithe and agile tools that I can string together with a minimum of grunting and get out of my way!.

Years (decades?) ago, I was one of the fringe-warriors in the various editor holy wars, but as I grew older and wiser I realized it had less to do with the tool and more to do with the craftsman. Now, I prefer to craft my code myself, not let an IDE do too much for me. (How much is too much? "I can't define it but I know it when I see it" [Quoting Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's comment on obscenity.] As soon as the tool spends less time helping me and more time being in my way, it's out of here.

:-) Sorry about before.

The page you linked to has a link for the Invisiclues(tm) at the bottom. You probably arleady know what they are. If you don't, go back to that page, and click on the Sample Question "How do I fold a piece of paper to make it look like a bird?". Ivisiclues are pretty cool because the hints always go from vague and general (only partly giving away the answer) to really, really precise (tells you exactly what command to type).

If you're not playing this from an actual C128 Trinity disk (or maybe even if you are), you may not have gotten all (or any) of the feelies that came with Trinity. Feelies were a special thing that all Infocom games had, but maybe you alreay know this in which case, I feel stupid. But if you don't have them and you'd like to see what Trinity's feelies were, you can get them here:
(warning: no spoilers, but huge graphics)
Trinity feelies.
The map at the bottom will be helpful later in the game, and the sundial's neat. :-)

I really find it hard to believe that someone would have gone to this much trouble just to play Richard and Alan's Escape From Hell or Hillsfar.

But as for your suggestion for using an Atari or Calico -- there was no Bard's Tale for the Calicovision, nor Space Quest. For DOS, however, we had Wing Commander, and a whole series of Leisure Suit Larry. By 1991, we had the original BattleTech and BattleTech II, not that wierd MechWarrior similator thing.

Hmm...I wonder what I did with the scratch and sniff card from Leather Goddesses of Phobos?

Hmm...it's times like this when I'm glad there's places like emulation.net so I can find something interesting to play with.

(yes, this is partly sarcasm...it's up to you to determine what part)

Basic: A toy language that has ruined more good programmers than sleepless nights. It should never have lived more than 6 months...thank gates for keeping it around, so it could stink things up, like a dead woodchuck, laying lifeless under the back porch in the hot noonday sun.

"BASIC /bay'-sic/ n.
A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which for many years was the leading cause of brain damage in proto-hackers. Edsger W. Dijkstra observed in "Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective" that "It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." This is another case (like Pascal) of the cascading lossage that happens when a language deliberately designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on the order of 10-20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer (a) is very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros in the 1980s. As it is, it probably ruined tens of thousands of potential wizards. "

S

Are you sure you're not confusing the Postmodernism Generator with Alan Sokal's article in Social Text? If not, can you provide a citation, I'd be very interested to read more about this.

here is an amusing postmodernist essay generator.

John Leo, in US News and World Report, wrote in an article about Postmodernism, "A professor once wrote this about Tonya Harding's attack on Nancy Kerrigan: 'This melodrama parsed the transgressive hybridity of unnarrativized representative bodies back into recognizable heterovisual codes.' Possible English translation: Maybe Tonya had Nancy's leg smashed because she was attracted to her. If so the media wouldn't tell.
The professor was writing in 'pomobabble' - the jargon of postmodernism'..."

The Postmodernism Generator Leo cites in the article (create your own Postmodern article!) has been moved.

...the postmodernism generator...

Nice...

Any chance you could be coaxed into sticking Suspended up there as well? I'm pretty sure it's an Inform game as well. That's one of the first games I can recall playing. My mom brought me into it and got me started. Actually, she got me started on a lot of games. She used to copy code out of the back of Compute's Gazette to give me games to play with and to teach herself BASIC. Oh, the good ol' days. That had to have been circa '83 or so on the ol' C64. The premise was that you were a computer/robot operater in cryonic suspended animation. You're waken up when some nasty things start happening in your complex and you have to get to robots (one representing each sense) to sort things out. I remember that Poet was one craaazy dude!

Hmmm... Got me curious again, now. letsee. (Google, Google, Google...) Well, I guess there is this :

Ohhh! VERY COOL! And this.

Suspended(1983), a science fiction story by Michael Berlyn.
As described on the box:

They said you would sleep for half a millennium -- not an unreasonable length of time, considering you'd be in limited cryogenic suspension. Your body would rest frozen at the planet's nerve center, an underground complex 20 miles beneath the surface. Your brain, they told you, would be wired to a network of computers; your mind would continue to operate at a minimal level, overseeing maintenance of surface-side equilibrium. And you would not awake, so they promised, until your 500 years had elapsed -- barring, of course, the most dire emergency.

Then, and only then, you would be awakened to save your planet by strategically manipulating six robots, each of whom perceives the world differently. But such a catastrophe, you have been assured, could not possibly occur.

Good morning.

I also remember being really intrigued by the box. Follow the link above. I found it really disturbing but I was still somehow quite drawn to it. Kinda like when I first discovered DOOM, I guess.

L8,
T

Nice...

Any chance you could be coaxed into sticking Suspended up there as well? I'm pretty sure it's an Inform game as well. That's one of the first games I can recall playing. My mom brought me into it and got me started. Actually, she got me started on a lot of games. She used to copy code out of the back of Compute's Gazette to give me games to play with and to teach herself BASIC. Oh, the good ol' days. That had to have been circa '83 or so on the ol' C64. The premise was that you were a computer/robot operater in cryonic suspended animation. You're waken up when some nasty things start happening in your complex and you have to get to robots (one representing each sense) to sort things out. I remember that Poet was one craaazy dude!

Hmmm... Got me curious again, now. letsee. (Google, Google, Google...) Well, I guess there is this :

Ohhh! VERY COOL! And this.

Suspended(1983), a science fiction story by Michael Berlyn.
As described on the box:

They said you would sleep for half a millennium -- not an unreasonable length of time, considering you'd be in limited cryogenic suspension. Your body would rest frozen at the planet's nerve center, an underground complex 20 miles beneath the surface. Your brain, they told you, would be wired to a network of computers; your mind would continue to operate at a minimal level, overseeing maintenance of surface-side equilibrium. And you would not awake, so they promised, until your 500 years had elapsed -- barring, of course, the most dire emergency.

Then, and only then, you would be awakened to save your planet by strategically manipulating six robots, each of whom perceives the world differently. But such a catastrophe, you have been assured, could not possibly occur.

Good morning.

I also remember being really intrigued by the box. Follow the link above. I found it really disturbing but I was still somehow quite drawn to it. Kinda like when I first discovered DOOM, I guess.

L8,
T

If the parent post doesn't make any sense to you, don't worry: it was generated using the Postmoderism Generator, a script that produces nonsensical papers in the style of postmodern writing.

The scary thing is that the output of the Postmodernism Generator is often indistinguishable from the actual papers coming out from academe.

Some exciting, bleeding edge, next generation games already bring this advancement in scratch n sniff technology to you.

I could be wrong, but I swear this article was "written" by the Postmodernism generator.

Blah.

I knew I'd seen this before - you can play all the classic Infocom games via telnet; see http://infocom.elsewhere.org/ for details.

Sh00z is correct though - Lurking Horror, like many other Infocom games, requires information provided on trinkets included in the retail box. However, the Zorks don't require external information to complete, IIRC; incidentally, the original series has been released to the public domain: http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/download.html

There's Infocom's excellent text adventure The Lurking Horror, which is a horror story based on G.U.E. Tech (Great Dome, anyone?). It is an excellent story, and it can get scary as hell as you play it.

You can download it here (direct link), as well as pretty much all of Infocom's adventures. You can also find these high-quality scans of the manuals that came with original Infocom games very helpful -- you should always read them before actually playing the game, as you'll discover with The Lurking Horror.

Sidenote: in order to play these games, you'll need something like frotz. Good luck.

At the risk of being redundant, here's where to play online INFOCOM games...
http://infocom.elsewhere.org/ Telnet mode
http://www.saturn.powerup.com.au/ddesoto/infocom.h tm Java
---

http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/ - the postmodern essay generator.

Try this link for auto-generated post-modern mumbo-jumbo.

And if you want something more sophisticated I would highly recommend the http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/the Postmodernism Generator, that generates a post-modernistic paper randomly. It makes as much sense as true papers written by post-modernists....