When one creates a blog, it requests a few bits of information, and which topics to post about.

That information is used to generate a schedule for when articles are posted, with each article's posting time being used as a seed to determine the text for that article.

The text comes via The Dada Engine (which either is or uses a "recursive transition network"), and generates sentences from source material, which includes a database populated by a bot that crawls certain sites (e.g. movie info comes from IMDB).

With due respect, I feel that "creates a blog" is perhaps overstating the human operator's role ... instantiates?

Too many syllables. How about "spawns"?

Crude and gutteral. Unworthy of higher life forms.

where is today's post Peter. Time's running low!

You ever get that feeling when you wake up from a dream in which you'd just done something brilliant, only you can't remember anything except it was great...?

A week ago I was convinced I had plenty of interesting conversation ideas about a whole range of stuff - until I actually tried and felt like I'd forgotten all the ones that weren't dull.

I could easily go off ranting about systemd, Red Hat, Gnome, Mozilla, etc - but that'd probably be both boring to read and re-living the frustration.

I think I have a not completely rubbish idea for tomorrow though.

I almost never remember my dreams. There was a while when Tina would quite often interrogate me about it - she was having a bunch of good ones (best being a sort of muppet zoo scenario, quite a tense story). One time I finally woke up with what felt like an amazing dream! I was right there, it was really exciting! So I started to explain to my rapt audience of one that I was in a station. ...there was a train... it's all faded and gone already. I still occasionally get made fun of about that one.

Fire up the auto-generator thingy.

It's strange how some dreams you remember them really vividly when you first wake up, then half an hour later, nothing...

I'm also in the camp of not ever remembering dreams. Mine are gone moments after I wake up. I don't even remember them in the few minutes after I wake up, but then I don't sleep well anyway, always waking up and having to readjust pillow or duvet because I'm too hot or too cold, so that probably has something to do with it.

Rebecca takes great delight in telling me all about her dreams, especially the ones where I've been an asshole. I like to remind her that was her brain's interpretation of me, not actually me.

Well that was a super successful long weekend... :(

I'm hit or miss with whether I'll remember a dream past that initial moment - sometimes I think there's no way I'll forget that, and then the other side of weeing it's already gone, whilst other times I remember fragments/snapshots, though not if/how things transitioned from one scene to another.

I do sometimes get ones where others have been an arsehole; not only are they usually stressful, but it can take an effort to remind myself whoever it was didn't actually do whatever it was.

When I was a kid, my nightmares were far more vivid and distinct that any dreams I have now. These days they're usually confused, mixed up, forgettable. That's great, because the clearer ones often involve being back at work, and I seriously resent doing any more for those bastards. 

I get that from Constanze as well - she'll be in a mood with me one morning, then complain that she'd had a dream where I'd split up with her. I always have to remind her that in actual fact, I haven't left her at all. It's her brain that has made up this story, so she should be pissed off with her own brain, not me.

That sucks - especially if they're still happening despite being retired for several years?

I don't understand how the brain selects what to dream about.

Last night I had a dream that I'd discovered I had long hair growing from my feet - like several inches of head hair all over - and I didn't want to shave it because the stubble would be painful.

I'm guessing that came at least in part from getting stabbed in the foot yesterday by what was either a splinter or a short piece of hair, and then briefly examining the sole of my foot in case there were more - but why dream about that rather than any number of other trivial/unusual events... unless I did, and that's just one which happened to occur before waking... *shrug*

I don't know, and I'm suspicious of explanations, particularly those that say the reason is some particular thing, as various alleged dream-analysts do. I mean, we often dream about things that are on our minds. About 1000 years ago when I was learning COBOL I had a dream which appeared to make sense while I was dreaming it, that was actually a COBOL program. I've dreamed about places I've just been, video games I'm playing and so on. But as for why any given dream at any particular time, and how the subject matter, what there is of it, occurs - no idea. 

But I do find them interesting. The ones that create a mood of some sort that persists into the day and beyond are strange. Also, the ones where you wake up wondering whether something is true, often something very unlikely. I dreamed about my old university town and a shared house in particular where I was going to visit somebody. I couldn't remember where it was when I woke up and it took me most of the morning to fully realise that it never existed, and neither did the person I dreamed I was visiting.

 

Heh. I don't recall ever having made someone up - people are either strangers/NPCs or representations of people I do actually know.

I've definitely invented locations, but mostly they tend to be corruptions and/or combinations of real places - it's weird when it's somewhere I know well and can imagine with reasonable accuracy in my awake brain, but my sleeping brain renders those memories differently.

Have you given up already?

 (fail)

"It should be possible to make at least one post a day that is worth reading, right?"

Maybe not.

:(