
Ask HN: What side projects are you working on? - max0563
I&#x27;m curious about some of the side projects that you guys and girls are working on.
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enkiv2
Every year I do NaNoGenMo, so I have a couple narrative-generation projects in
planning stages for that.

I'm working on a VN involving time loops, which is essentially an attempt to
integrate the typical completionist play style of hardcore VN players (wherein
people will often try for 100% completion of all dialogue and game devs will
often hide the canonical plot threads behind options that only open up when
you get all the good ends or all the good & bad ends) with the narrative --
i.e., the plot only progresses when the character dies and restarts.

I also write small projects periodically. (For instance, recently I wrote a
script that superimposed Jenny Holzer quotes in white-on-red on black and
white images, aping Barbara Kreuger's iconic style.)

~~~
_jdams
Oh my, I've had an idea for a long time to code a procedurally generated story
of some kind. Didn't know there was already an internet community doing
this!!!

First had the idea when I stumbled upon the game called Dwarf Fortress.

~~~
enkiv2
The procedurally generated game community is huge. The procedurally generated
prose community is much smaller.

NaNoGenMo has been going since, like, 2013. Every year, a bunch of us get
together in the issues section of a github page and discuss attempts to
generate long-form narrative. (We've been able to generate passable poetry for
years, but we have yet to figure out a way to get prose that remains engaging,
coherent, and human-like for more than about a chapter.) There are a lot of
very different techniques being used. (For instance, a couple years ago I
wrote a planner that emitted debug output in the form of a first-person
hardboiled heist story; somebody else that year produced a really good
simulation of bad star trek fanfiction using a mixture of templating and
object-oriented state tracking; somebody else made a great comic book by
picking random sentences from public domain detective novels and then finding
creative commons licensed photos on flickr based on tags taken from key words
in those sentences and post-processing them to make them look hand-drawn.)

~~~
_jdams
Interesting. Thanks for sharing, I'm excited to take a look at some of the
examples you mentioned!

Side comment, but somewhat related: I just started getting into reading and
the most recent book I finished was Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. I
just started 1Q84, also by Murakami. Those books really do something to my
brain when I read them. Ever since I got into it, I've had these strange
desires to write a book of my own, but since I have no experience in the
matter, I was thinking of clever ways to procedurally generate plot points,
then let a randomizer run in a loop until it generates something interesting.

For example, in multiple arrays, you could create lists for different plot
elements: ex: "main character is a " [student, engineer, pilot, detective].
You can do something for physical features as well, and personality traits,
and generate completely randomized characters. Then, you could do something
for the plot as well... If I were able to do this as a starting point, I could
write a story by filling in the blanks, so to speak...

So, is there a popular forum or perhaps Twitter that all of these enthusiasts
hang out at? =D

~~~
enkiv2
There's a mostly-dead generative art mailing list and slack
([http://generative-art.slack.com](http://generative-art.slack.com)), and the
official stuff is on github
([http://nanogenmo.github.io](http://nanogenmo.github.io)), but most of the
off-season discussion is actually on the botally slack (despite that actually
being oriented toward twitter artbots) because of a big overlap between the
two communities.

The story generator idea you described above is an example of templating, &
it's used pretty often. It's easy to make a good looking chunk of story that
way, but difficult to make a 50k word novella that's readable (the target of
nanogenmo).

------
Findeton
I'm working on a small solidity/Ethereum project.

~~~
max0563
Do you have anymore info you can give on that?

