I hereby present to you the following guest post, which incidentally, comes without an explicit title:*
In the interest of not having to appear at a certain location in Serangoon on a certain Saturday evening, this article explores the possible topics which may be interesting enough to warrant appearing in the future. In other words, another post ought to be appearing on Thursday! (“Which Thursday?” “Next Thursday!" ”Isn’t that today?” ”No, *next* Thursday!”)
Clearly there are a few classes of possible blog posts. The kind that probably occurs most frequently amongst most blogs simply talks about recent occurrences in one’s life. But, looking at the nature of the previous posts on this blog (as well as the other blog owned by a certain contributor), this is clearly not the way to go (unless you’re talking about recently occurring chess games). Why write about the trifling details of your daily happenings when you can write about the trifling details of your greatest chess failures/cheapoes? Maybe when the (immensely limited) audience begins tiring of annotated chess games (with pretty unsound annotations at that), we can start writing our thoughts on (gasp) other games, like GGbranch-ferrying DotA. (Actually, writing a blog post thinking of strange handicaps and games you can play on a DotA map might be pretty interesting. Next Thursday might happen earlier than expected yet!)
Other than the category of “things that have happened”, there’s the category of “things that are true without needing to happen to us first”** (also known as “facts”). Like maths. And more maths. And even more maths. However, as kindly pointed out, none of our names are “Galois” (who apparently, while younger than us, did something so imba*^3 I still don’t understand it), so we’re kind of short of interesting true things to talk about, even if they do happen to be true. Our work in this area is most likely going to be restricted to generic surveys and discussion of existing results, or reinventing trivial things that we haven’t seen before, but maybe can be found in one of Ramanujan’s notebooks somewhere (though probably too trivial for that). Maybe if we ask a particular penguin*^4 to write something algorithmy rather than pure maths-ish we’ll get something less trivial. Or maybe we can start attempting some original research in some area that hardly anyone’s touched before, which will probably begin not merely next Thursday, but next *next* Thursday!
However, on a more plausible note, I’ve seen quite a number of interesting and not-hardcore-researchy programs written in quite a few areas. The aforementioned penguin has done a couple of interesting machine learning / AI ones, and there are more, like the Twitter iambic pentameter generator, or the genetic algorithm Mona Lisa painter, or the text classifier for “that’s what she said” jokes. Perhaps when I go and read machine learning or AI or NLP or whatever stuff I’ll write some funny miniprojects up and stave off badminton for yet another week/month/year/millennium. Computer graphics projects are also pretty cool; got to learn that stuff someday.
Of course, instead of writing “facts”, we can instead be cheapskate and contribute our opinions on such facts. Like annotating our chess games. Or coming up with strategies for strange self-DotA-mods*^5. Or maybe writing the fail thought process of spending 5 hours solving some trivial maths/algo question. Or writing a scathing critique of a post detailing the fail thought process of spending 5 hours solving some trivial question. Scathing critiques of scathing critiques could probably be worth a week of writing by themselves!
The last category I can think of is “things that aren’t really constrained by trivial details like fact”. This doesn’t include just fiction (which I’m not really sure any of us are good at writing anyway, but maybe we’ll try someday), but other creative thingumajigs. If a text game ever gets round to being created (coming next next *next* Thursday! My, our Thursdays are going to be really busy, aren’t they?), some interesting aspects would probably end up here, like quest and storyline creation ideas. Art and music also spring to mind, except that we can’t draw and we can’t compose. We can do passable imitations of noob people playing certain instruments, though, but nothing we’d really dare to unleash upon the world online, lest civilization collapse. I suppose what we *can* do is make stuff like puzzles (ought to write another cryptic crossword someday too!), though that borders on fact instead of being pure unadulterated smoke. Also, come to think of it, we do have a decent poet, at least judging from the contents of his other blog. Maybe he can throw some on this side as well! In addition, next next next *next* Thursday I’ll probably write a series of articles attempting to formalize a magic system for fantasy settings, so you can wait for that as well.
Thus ends some thoughts on stuff that might appear on this blog in the future. If any of our limited audience has further requests for articles, written by guest posters or otherwise, he or she should feel free to contribute further ideas. Note that the list of banned topics include anything to do with certain units of pressure, especially pertaining to atmospheric pressure, as well as certain martial arts moves featuring in karate. Do will die, don’t ask why.
Happy waiting for future articles! Hope you’ve got a really thick book to read in the meantime.
*Annotations by pH42, yours unfalsely; changed some typos/speeling errors
**Read Anathem for a discussion about this at great length. Like, really great.
***Imbalanced, typically used to refer to something on the overpowering side. Alt. spelling: Imbar
****Preferred spelling: penquin, to better distinguish for penguins.
*****Note parallel to RJT Chess.
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