The Tale of A Misunderstood WU
Original pre-Node Heaven WU with explanatory note
infinite monkeys theorem
The whole idea of a million monkeys typing away for a million years and finally creating the works of Shakespeare is really a sort of backhanded compliment. Sure it took a long time -- but a monkey did it! So ol' Will shouldn't feel so special, now, should he?
Besides, how is this pertinent to E2? I haven't noticed many exquisite works of fiction emerging from the nodegel; mostly just monkeys, sex, and soy. The next node you read is far more likely to have been written by some embittered Libertarian or zealous anti-Christian than by a budding classic poet.
Yes, I'm probably talking about you, dear reader -- you complicitous little teenage bastard filling up the database with your illiterate angst. I don't care if she dumped you, they don't care if she dumped you, and she obviously didn't give a flying fuck either.
Where was I, oh yeah, there's no Shakespeare here. So, being that the average E2 node doesn't call Stratford-On-Avon home, it's at best a waste of time and at worst just lunacy to worry about how many monkeys...yak, yak, typewriters...mmeh...etc.
More appropriate here would be a whole new monkey-node rating scale. Nodes would be rated by the number of monkeys + writing utensil + time required that we estimate it would take to produce them. Most of this worthless shit would get something like 5 monkeys, a crayon, and maybe an egg-timer's worth of seconds.
5, 100, 1000, a million. Crayon, pencil , typewriter, word-processor. A minute, a day, a week, a year. Mix and match. Be creative. Let the sorry little shits know just exactly how worthless their nodes are.
I understand that literature and writing are somewhat a matter of taste. I'm not a big fan of Hawthorne: reading The Scarlet Letter in high school was torture. But if I ever run into some of you illiterate yokels at an E2 Gathering, be forewarned that I'm going to scrawl a big red "I" on your forehead. And you'd better keep your goddamn souvenir WorldCon keychain out of my face, you senseless geek.
Enough. It's dinner time. There's still some uneaten pizza left from last night. Besides, I've got crayons to sharpen and nodes to fill.
I fully intended to enter the above WU in
Demeter's
Great E2 Fin de Siecle Fiction Challenge. In fact the original WU had a
hardlink to the challenge identifying it as an entry.
I was pleased with the writeup even though it wasn't really a story; fiction has many forms. I thought this bombastic little rant very well done. In fact, my hands were getting sore from patting myself on the back.
So, I browsed over to The Great E2 Fin de Siecle Fiction Challenge to notify Demeter my entry was ready - only to realize that I had procrastinated too long; the entry deadline had expired five days earlier. Jesus did I feel like an idiot. So I went back to my finite monkeys theorem WU and removed the fin de siecle hardlink. I wanted it to just quietly go away and hoped no one would recognize my calendarical mistake.
I didn't think anymore of it until about 10 days later - when Gritchka C!ed it. Almost simultaneously I found out it was nuked, with penalty, and accompanied by a rather annoying Klaproth message.
Through some private messaging I've come to learn this misunderstood WU had a few E2 gods/editors fooled - but not Gritchka. Obviously the person who sent it to Node Heaven didn't realize the constraints I was writing under or that it was meant to be humorous.
So, given the obvious skill required to confuse the E2 gods and editors, I have belatedly awarded myself first prize in The Great E2 Fin de Siecle Fiction Challenge. So there1.
1 So there in The Boomer Bible is the equivalent of Amen in the Christian bible.