….No kidding.
Irradiated by LabRat
Sorry for the ultralight content this week so far; I am working on something, but right now almost all my intellectual productivity for the past several days is sitting in my e-mail’s sent and received folders. I have other stuff I could blog, but once I’m done gnawing on this I’m really only good for sticking my brain in a metaphorical bucket of ice. So I’m borrowing a meme from LawDog.
It’s I Write Like, a little analyzer that will chew on text you have produced and tell you what major author or authors your writing resembles. Lawdog got a big bucket of vaguely related authors, and I assumed I would too.
Nope. Apparently there is only one person in the history of literature that I write like, and it is Margaret Atwood.
I am vaguely mortified by this.
July 20th, 2010 at 7:28 pm
…Who? XD
I looked her up. Canadian Environmentalist. You should consider that a dire insult, and respond accordingly.
July 20th, 2010 at 9:11 pm
Well, it thinks that I am channeling Dan Brown.
Hmm. If that gets me his income…
July 21st, 2010 at 2:15 am
But Margaret Atwood is amazing. I’d be delighted to write like Margaret Atwood. I apparently write like Cory Doctorow. For the lose
July 21st, 2010 at 6:21 am
Not being much of a writer, I started feeding it other writers’ works. So far Robert Service writes like Stephen King, H. P. Lovecraft writes like Jack London and Mark Twain writes like H. P. Lovecraft. I am starting to doubt the accuracy of this machine. It said L. Frank Baum writes like himself, but I think that’s because I used Wizard of Oz and it was probably verbatim what they had for him.
July 21st, 2010 at 10:09 am
Yeah, it said my correspondence read like Dan Brown. This really cheesed me off because Dan Brown is a horrible writer. My college essays (I’m a wildly overage undergrad) were better; the ones I submitted all got tagged as either H. P. Lovecraft or Stephen King.
This might or might not be an advertising scam by a vanity publisher. There’s a lot of current discussion about that possibility at a blog called Making Light, which I won’t actually link to because then I’d be writing like a spammer, albeit a preternaturally subtle one.
July 21st, 2010 at 11:46 am
I get, variously, Cory Doctorow, H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Stephen King.
Mostly Doctorow, but then I’ve just been feeding it blog posts, ’cause most of the other text I have handy is more or less confidential.
July 21st, 2010 at 11:51 am
Tam: I love Cory Doctorow. I’ll meet you out back and trade you.
Yes, the thing is probably not much more than a random number generator… it was still occupying for five minutes and I really didn’t have much better to post.
July 21st, 2010 at 3:27 pm
I too find the results questionable. One of my blog posts returned Cory Doctorow and another got HP Lovecraft. Then I put in just two paragraphs of the latter blog post, and it said Mario Puzo.
A good system would give several matches for each entry of text, and a percentage score saying how close you are to each one.
July 22nd, 2010 at 10:04 am
Wow, for a minute I thought I must have commented while screaming drunk and said shit that made no sense, and then I realized that it was some other “Tam”.
For the record, I write just like $RANDOM_AUTHOR, too!
July 22nd, 2010 at 7:03 pm
Apparently I write like Anne Rice. God help me.
July 23rd, 2010 at 12:20 pm
‘Rat- five pages of my work in progress- which you probably knew deals with my dogs, my travels in Central Asia, and dog origins, yielded:
Vladimir Nabokov.
Hmmmm….
July 24th, 2010 at 6:53 pm
We know what yer up to in Asia, Humbert.
July 26th, 2010 at 5:33 pm
Not that it will be much consolation, as you don’t know me from Eve, but your writing, unlike Margaret Atwood’s, does not make me want to gouge out my eyes with a dirty spork.