Bookish. it's like redactle but for books. beta testing / bugs etc

i didn't get yesterday's (the secret garden), i've read it at least twice but nearly 40 years ago! i guess the author names was probably a big hint but i couldn't think of any to match. struggling with today's too! i wonder what a good strategy is, i'm just typing in loads of common words...

yeah, the standard full block character is wide so it tends to look larger. i'm trying to think of a way to make the blocks uncountable, maybe by making them images and maybe by making them word length +/- 1

don't obfuscate word length, it's a helpful tactic! does redactle use smaller blocks? it's definitely confusing when a huge looking word turns out to be four letters long.

just got today's in 79 - saw what looked like a two letter character name and entered the first that came into my head, which was enough to give it away.

> in 79

it does seem harder, except when the titles and authors are obvious - #### #### = moby dick, obv. maybe a middle way would be to obfuscate the titles, leave the rest alone.

i checked the block width and 20 blocks was as long as
123456780123456789012345
so 25% wider. i think i can change the letter spacing or use black on black letters rather than blocks.

just got bitten by the apostrophe as separate & redacted character for 20220601 - also it hasn't given me the win after guessing the full title.

20220602 was quite fun, working out the style of narration and getting it from there - still took about 70.

plans for storing state? i've lost progress a couple of times by accidentally pressing 'back'.

Couple of thoughts. Be able to click on words you’ve successfully guessed rather than having to scroll through the page.

Secondly don’t know what I did but it cleared and reset my guesses. Fairly sure I didn’t hit back.

I didn’t solve it, but is it just the title or title and author?

> plans for storing state?

save points are for wimps. (i will try and add a warning about navigating away, that might be easiest. cookies probably require sending something and currrently it just updates the current page, doesn't re-request anything)

dan, jump to highlights is tonight's coding task, i think i have a way.

yeah, just the title. but i may've messed up and included a reserved word in the title which it won't let you guess and if you can't guess it it then you can't win, as ledge has pointed out. (but i thought i'd tested all the games?)

ha, yes, 20220601, it's not the apostrophe, it's the 'in'. i have plans to sort that (and save myself having to specify the title separately from the text - by parsing the h1 contents)

have fixed 20220601, although getting your browser to pick up the new file is surprisingly hard

Got this one in two - the two it took to type in the title. Mainly because of guessing the author's name - a three-letter middle name isn't that common, so Louisa May Alcott came to mind right away, and then it was just a matter of counting letters.

oops sorry

was obviously supposed to be spoiler tagged, sorry about that

it's now mostly scrolling to highlight.

it needs to highlight both the current highlight and the related guess but that's harder than it sounds - because it means de-highlighting the previous value.

also realised that you can guess empty strings... 8(

0610 has 'façade' in it. do i dumb it down? would be unguessable otherwise, unless you type in the cedilla...

Fixed your spoiler tags, LD.

- stopped the empty guesses.
- changed the redacted squares.
- now warns when you try and navigate away.
- title is now calculated from the contents of the h1 tag, which saves me a job and lessens the mistakes.
- added ghost text in input box
- introduced new harder-to-fix problems...

I didn't get today's despite getting about half the words including the first word of the title. I like the numbering redacted squares on highlight though!

pure accident. i was hoping they wouldn't show (they are less clear on mac firefox i noticed)

yes, hard one today, not something i've read myself. and not one of the author's best known works. (or maybe it is, it's in the PG top 75 downloads at least.)

i noticed that there's no ?s in the text...

ok, not so much time tonight but... some changes:

entering 'answer please' as a guess will reveal the answer

now scrolls to the top when you win (whereas it used to scroll to the first instance of the new guess which was always the title, cutting off the WINNER message) ((i need to turn that off generally, it's not correct))

sets focus to textbox on load

#20220608 in 4, my first perfect :)

Are the guesses case sensitive? I assume so as title only accepted it when capitalised.

not for me.

no, everything goes through tolowercase before matching to catch words in titles and at the starts of lines

btw yesterday's was The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde which is a short story - that was the entire thing iirc

not so obvious today. and again something i haven't read.

spent yesterday evening trying to get the layout better but despite my efforts it's still about 105% the size of the screen and things move about in bad ways. i wonder if it's whitespace after the divs?

also fixed ampersands and converted a couple more books into games. getting to the point where it needs a refactor though.

#20220609 372 guesses! The era and location were pretty clear long before that so if I'd given more thought to possible authors I might have got it a lot sooner.

it's kinda of annoying that i don't get to try and solve them myself.

maybe when i've added a few more i'll be able to go back and do random backissues and not remember them.

more damage today. oh well.

did a noddy, dynamic Previous page, which should update daily - http://www.koogy.clara.co.uk/bookish/previous.html

surprisingly it wasn't much code because the data class is clever enough to know that date - 10 is the previous month (although date - 0 is yesterday, somehow). uses a *string* compare to make sure it doesn't go back beyond 20220601, which is lol.

Fun one today, got it in 70.

Got it in the end, 217 guesses. Unlike Redactle, where you can try topics (book, country, animal etc) finding it a lot more difficult to narrow these down. Would like to see a lot of the two letter words (it, to, by….) filled in already.

yeah my first 20 or more guesses are usually pretty much the same - all two letter words, pronouns, is/can/have & conjugations, there, then, say, said, why where who etc...

i was worried they would make the titles too obvious too often. but i could easily add some more. might do some analysis this weekend. (plan is to define enough games to fill out the rest of the month and then i can use that set as input)

227 today, cheated in the end when I got a half completed sentence. Would never have got it otherwise as I didn’t know the book or the author.

these are all still from the top 75 downloads at project Gutenberg. yes, one i haven't read, but, oddly it was mentioned in the podcast i was listening to this morning.

I got the authors name straight away, struggling to remember the title.

I remembered. definitely an odd entry for the top 75 and not one you could work out if you didn't know it.

the weekly top 100 or so can be a bit faddish, i find. and there are some obvious things that aren't in it.

anyway, i have another 20 games ready to go, another 20 or so downloaded and awaiting editing. another 20 things on my want-to-read list 8(

     1	   6373 the
     2	   3757 and
     3	   3144 of
     4	   2730 to
     5	   2633 a
     6	   1876 in
     7	   1773 i
     8	   1523 he
     9	   1483 was
    10	   1358 it
    11	   1320 that
    12	    881 his
    13	    874 with
    14	    871 for
    15	    853 as
    16	    832 is
    17	    781 had
    18	    772 you
    19	    764 not
    20	    698 at
    21	    683 but
    22	    664 on
    23	    577 be
    24	    569 all
    25	    564 we
    26	    548 her
    27	    536 have
    28	    520 my
    29	    491 they
    30	    468 by
    31	    457 there
    32	    453 she
    33	    450 him
    34	    442 so
    35	    437 which
    36	    427 this
    37	    426 me
    38	    397 one
    39	    392 from
    40	    388 were
    41	    383 said
    42	    359 no
    43	    352 are
    44	    344 or
    45	    326 when
    46	    325 out
    47	    323 would
    48	    310 what
    49	    305 who
    50	    301 them

again i'm thinking about difficulty levels... top 45 for easy mode, 30 for medium, 15 for hard...

yeah Carmilla, i guess the easy way in was the author's name, which is quite odd given the 4 words.

today's is easier

I got today's in 7 after rattling off some two letter words without thinking, should've been a bit sharper.

> today's is easier

especially with the 30 free words now. 8(

(i think ledge got in before the update)

Honestly, as a player who just plays for the fun of it, rather than getting the best score, I'd actually prefer *no* words filled in at the start. I don't mind typing in filler words, but trying to work out which ones are needed and which ones aren't is slightly annoying to me.

ha, that's like the opposite of what other people want...

i will add options (eventually). need to learn how to store options first though...

(i don't disagree, i mean today's had 60% of the title in the free words)

Yeah, I figured I'd be in the minority in that opinion. It's just a bit weird if "he" is already filled in but you still have to put in "his" etc. One option is to fill in more of the words, but another option is to fill in way fewer. Maybe just the articles, the basic conjunctions ('and'/'but') and participles of 'to be'. That would still risk giving away some titles ('The _____ is a ______ ______' for instance) but would be an understandable format for why those particular filler words are given.

And I will say that 'The ____ of the ____' is fairly nondescript and could apply to several titles! Obviously the lower-score seekers will pinpoint those possibilities and do the letter-counting thing to narrow it down, but I played happily for a good while before even attempting the title (it was fairly simple to get, true).

I wonder if you could leave the title fully redacted even if it has free filler words in, or if that would be too confusing.

yeah, i did think of a fully redacted title but it'd require you to enter reserved words to reveal them, which is currently trapped.

(um, could also remove reserved words from the internal title array, you won't be able to enter them and won't ever see them until it's solved, which seems a bit off)

today has mostly been trying to stop the unwanted scrolling. turns out the page width isn't 100% because of the vertical scroll bars. and using that space adds a horizontal scroll bar... i am getting there...

(and adding games up to the end of the month, and beyond)

wait... autobiography? that'd need a large keyboard...

quill pen stuck in hoof surely

the first editon cover page on wikipedia included another revelation that didn't make it into the PG version

new theme starts today. there's a curious part of project gutenberg that is a bit more contemporary and so this is taken from those.

i think that's > 100 i've done now and i'm really struggling for new ideas. that said, i can always revisit the old ones and choose different excerpts.

it also looks like i missed an hr tag 8(

How do you put possessive nouns in e.g. David's struggling to work out how to do that.

Haven't played in a while, holidays etc. Never heard of todays, nevertheless had no clue after 400 guesses that is wasSF.

> David's

apostrophe's were a problem because where they are used 'for quoted speech' they should appear unredacted but if i do that for "they're" or "david's" or whatever then it would split the word into two, meaning that "re" and "s" would be words. (redactle-unlimited does this, i don't like it)

the compromise was to use smart quotes, 6s / 9s, lsquo / rsquo, ‘ / ’ for quotes that i wanted in the text, straight quotes for the others. meaning you need to include the ' in your guess for things like "David's" and "they're"

but this is something that i have to do manually and i make mistakes. is there a specific example you are struggling with?

re the theme yeah, there seems to be a copyright loophole in that a lot of short stories previous published in Astounding or other pulpy mags from the 40s and 50s are public domain, wheras normally you'd see nothing after 1924. search for SF in gutenberg and you see *lots* of these, incl some very big names, alongside the hg wells and stuff. i've basically picked the most obvious of these for 10 or so authors, avoiding stuff that had unguessable stuff in the title, like "Thuvia, Maid of Mars"

It was the one a few days ago, got the title but couldn't input it. Forgotten what it was called.

https://acdean.github.io/bookish/index.html?0902 has an apostrophe in the title and seems to work ok. it's lady audley's secret

That's the one I couldn't complete, odd.

text seems small today. i don't know why

Haven't got any of these batch, have scarcely heard of them let alone read them. Wonder if I'll have some luck with today's after revealing 12 Rocket ____! ___ __ Rocket _____! Rocket ________! Rocket ____! Rocket ________ for the ____-___! Rocket, Rocket, Rocket! ___!”

https://www.ebooknetworking.net/books_detail-084873646X.html

(^ jokes)

turns out it's not the one in martian chronicles, just shares a name with it

(^ spoiler)

i've read a few of these. i think the first thing i did when i got the kobo was to look for free SF on PG

I cheated. And then read it - not one for the ages.

first non-gutenberg book tomorrow. am surprised they didn't have a copy, but i found one somewhere else.

prompted me to make some more changes to index.html - minimal instructions.

I’ve got the title today I think, The Death of Ivan Ilyich but won’t take the last word. Any idea what I’m doing wrong.

i did notice variations in the spelling when i was trying to find a copy, mine has an extra t in it (the letter count would be a clue)

That makes sense, I did wonder if the spelling was wrong. Interestingly Wikipedia doesn’t suggest an alternative spelling.

it's the public domain translation from 1900 or so by Constance Barnett so it might be that. it's all over archive.org (albeit as scans)

got todays in three, (typed the title as one word instead of two), very memorable opening line.

i was surprised but that's how it is.

https://github.com/acdean/all_the_year_round/blob/master/atyr_1866_mugby_junction/1866_mugby_junction.txt

line 3109... that said, the toc has it as one word

oh, that's more spoiler-y than i imagined

Comes up as "something's gone wrong" for me today.

um, you might've run out. I've been putting them up only a few days in advance and whilst the laptop does have 1008 on it i may not have uploaded it.

yeah, was exactly that. pushed now...

Ah cool! I got it straight away but I think it might be one of those ones where the punctuation messes with it realising that you completed the title.

No worries if this is a project you don't want to be tied to forever, but I will say that I play daily and enjoy it a lot.

oh, you are right

i've typed in all the words in the title and it's still saying i have the following left to type:

Array [ "", "" ]

so, yes, a genuine bug (and i should've checked that). i do wonder if the other bug report from above is apple converting an input ' to the curly version, because i couldn't reproduce. but this isn't that.

october's theme has helped with any ennui i may've had given that i have more ideas than i have days. but, yeah, that's 130 i've done now...

bug fixed - the opening and ending quotes confused it. the fix is to not add empty words to the title words list.

rats, i thought i'd done up to the end of the month but there's a hole on the 28th -31st.

i've added one for today and 1101 - 1103, will try fill the gap appropriately later. (all october was horror stories of some stripe or other, including an entire week of vampire stories)

calamity. did a bunch of new games the other day and didn't push them so it's been broken the last week.

and i checked the 'previous games' page and there was a bug - using "+" to concat two numbers added them instead (which i didn't see when i wrote it because of the way i padded single digit mm and dd numbers which converted them to strings)

All the recent games come up "Something has gone wrong..."

yeah, i ran out of books / enthusiasm. there are about 10 month's-worth, so anything from 0601 to 1231 and 0101 to 03xx will work.

ie

https://acdean.github.io/bookish/index.html?0328

(0404 is the latest)

https://acdean.github.io/bookish/

ok, tidied that up now - if it can't find a game for 'today' then it'll link to the new archive page that lists all available games so you can choose.

if anyone has ideas for books to add then let me know. (the full list of 306 (spoilers!) is at https://acdean.github.io/bookish/titles.txt)