Y'know what I hate?

[bluegargantua]

Wiki spam bots.

Grrr
Tom

p.s. New Lexicon game starting soon. Details shortly...once I clean up the mess...and lock stuff down...

p.p.s. GRRRRR

Comments

[mikecap.livejournal.com]

Me am IN!!

[kadath.livejournal.com]

If it's not more than about a 250 word a day committment, I am interested. What's the subject?

Lexicon!

[anselm23.livejournal.com]

At Ruggero I's conquest, the kingdom of Elymri held only the western third of the island of Sciela. By the time of the dissolution of the monarchy about AZ 952, it had been the greatest power in the Ocean, and also the pawn of the other great powers. Between the coronation of Ruggero I and the creation of the Kantrad, the scions of the Damiani, Urquardo, Meliflu, and Harono families were kings, queens, regents, artists, philosophers, sorcerors, despots, resistance fighters, courtesans and priestesses. Now, at last, their story can be told in The ENCYCLOPEDIA ELYMRIA!

New information from the Royal Archives, personal interviews with servants of great houses, and depositions taken during the collaboration trials of the scions of the Houses Lesser, bring you the true history of Elymri for the first time, using the new four-color manuscript process and the magic of daemonic printery!

[desiringsubject.livejournal.com]

Wow. I have no idea what you're talking about. But it sounds, I think, interesting. Are there more words you could use?

[mikecap.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicon_%28game%29

[desiringsubject.livejournal.com]

okay, maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't it be more interesting to make a game or race where you made wiki entries about things that are real? Do you just make them up out of your head? Is it like a fiction writing contest?

And I still don't know what a wiki spam bot is. That's one of those odd moments where I know all three words, I just don't understand what they're doing in conjunction with each other.

[desiringsubject.livejournal.com]

Okay, now that sounds snippy in my head. I didn't mean to be snippy. But I was reading the entry you linked to and it sounded really interesting until I realized that it was fiction. I study fiction for a living, so it's not like I have anything against fiction! But I just don't get where the fun is. So, perhaps less snippily: is it comparable to the fun of writing a story? Like playing an elaborate and written game of rigmarole?

[shiffer.livejournal.com]

Lexicon is a fiction-writing game. Writing fiction is pretty much the point. Some people enjoy writing fiction. Lexicon is a little like the fun of writing a story, but really more about creating a setting that stories happen in.

If writing fiction doesn't pique your interest maybe you should look into Lexicon's non-fiction cousin, Encyclopedia.

And a wiki spambot is a program that edits crap into your wiki - inserts adventisements and obscenities, deletes pages, and so on. Think of it as electronic graffiti and vandalism.

[mikecap.livejournal.com]

Collaborative fiction. Like improvisation, playing jazz with someone else's riff.

[desiringsubject.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Thanks for the elaboration. I've never played something like that, nor really even heard of something like that outside of Little Women, which obviously didn't have the benefit of Wiki! I guess the thing that confused me is the idea of writing fiction in the guise of non-fiction.

The books in my dissertation include 2 books written *as* fiction that actually contain a whole bunch of non-fiction, one non-fiction that contains many of the narrative markers of fiction, and one mixed genre piece that contains fiction and non-fiction mixed together with few markers to indicate which is which. So this is kindof a major issue that I spend a lot of time thinking about.

It's interesting to me, additionally, to think of writing as a game. Writing is a job to me, and an onerous one at that right now. I wonder if I could learn something about loving what I do from such a thing? I got into this because I love reading and writing, and five years in, I can't feel that love anymore. Sigh. I wish I knew how to get back to that!

(Except I clearly love overly loquacious posts to strangers in LJ!)