The House of Hapsburg

Wood or Water

I’ve been tweaking my Story Generator. For one, now it’s guaranteed to end with a period, so there’s that. Secondly, I’ve retooled the randomization process. It used to say, “We have XYZ and for Z, what is the list of words that have appeared immediately after Z and from that list, randomly choose one and then use that to determine the next n-gram to throw down.” But, the thing was, the list of n-grams was shuffled once, but static after that and this was creating too many reoccurring n-grams for my tastes. So it shuffles the entire list of n-grams after every cycle and then essentially does the same thing it did prior, but now I don’t really have to shuffle the list of following words to create coherent- or “coherent”- sentences; you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference anyway. 

So I ran some excerpts from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian through it and I am pleasantly surprised. I’ve done it with the H.P. Lovecraft and it’s also, I would say, better. So, I present to you another n-gram story: “Wood or Water.”

wood or water and the moonlight and the dark. Or slept with the west beyond the palest stain of their passing. All night the blue light came to the wretched ponies huddled and lightning lit the stars go rifling down the wheeze of the polestar they rode the dark. Or slept with their moustaches and their lean snouts on the night the horses were no more sickness. The white noon saw them through panes of dust like a myriad of the men. All night the morning a urinecolored sun rose blearily through the dried and blackened carcass hard as iron. They halted and made a board. The wolves loped paler yet and the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. They took to riding by hand from sacks of the horses and made a dry camp without feature. The animals were no wolves now. They watched storms out there so distant they began to come upon the wagons rolled among the animals. Under the dark. Or slept with the fine dust set their alien hearts beating in the ears of the wagonwheels rolled in the riders in gleaming hoops of fire and the mountain chain fluttering and blackened carcass hard stain of their passing.