I Write Like . . . a *ing con job

[lolmac]

Aha.

Remember the "I Write Like" meme, which looked like so much fun until we found out that no matter what crap you entered, it told you that you wrote like Somebody Awesome?

Spam, spam, spam, spam . . . it's a baited hook for vanity publishers.

I had mentioned to at least one person that I wondered what would happen if you actually entered the text of the authors themselves; the folks on Making Light went one better than that here, and then Revealed All in this later post.

On the other hand, I no longer feel ridiculous for having played with the thing -- not when such luminaries as Neil Gaiman did too.


July 2010

Comments

[kirsty841.livejournal.com]

Honey, your writing is nothing like Dan Brown!

[lolmac]

ROFL! Thank you! I am relieved. Now that I think of it, I got Dan Brown on Aftershocks -- maybe it's triggered by mentions of artists' names, or the word 'painting'.

I actually got Stephen King most of the time, so I suspect he was the default for standard sentence length and no special trigger words. I'm almost tempted to run another set of tests -- try re-entering more or less the same text, but change a few words each time, such as 'elf' and 'vampire' and 'wizard' and 'sparkle'.

I think Lothi got Ian Fleming on her Man From Uncle fics, so that's probably the result of spycraft trigger words. And I got Douglas Adams for Up a Long Ladder, which was probably triggered by the odd bit of specifically British vocabulary. Even though it's set in Ireland.

Ooo, I wonder what author's name you get if you enter porn.

No. *smacks wrist* I am not going to spend any more time mucking around with it . . .

[kirsty841.livejournal.com]

*holds hand up* Um...I fed it porn. Lol. I got Jack London for porn. :) Although it wasn't a particularly graphic piece. I think I'd die of shame if I fed it proper porn and it came back with Danielle Steel or Barbara Cartland... LOL.