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

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)

new version at new url - https://acdean.github.io/bookish/ - let github do the hosting, also easier for me to update - no ftp...

cracked the layout, i think. boxes are the right size and scroll as they should (nice new purple scroll markers too). some of the text needs resizing (the guesses list) and the about and previous buttons are placeholders. html still not great for this layout stuff.

this version also has the hard redacting. no counting characters for you!

and all of a sudden it was a quarter to midnight...

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

now with options - add as many words as you like, choose the redacting block type (3 different styles). choose from the previous games. marvel at the finally centred list of guesses.

https://acdean.github.io/bookish/index.html <- same link not hindered by ilx hyperlink bug!

I like the options! Yesterday's was a gimme, today's... not so much. I guessed le and la at 230 but forgot about les (and didn't linger on the title or author) for another 250 guesses.

these aren't obscure books by any means and it still takes hundreds of guesses, unless the title's obvious.

(although this one starts a bit atypically iirc. the fact there are 3 levels of numbering is maybe a clue that it's a long book, but, yes, it is a bit sneaky)

the recent penguin classics version translates the title, at least in the intro, but the cover is the usual. would 'The Wretched' have helped though?

bookish 20220615
total guesses: 36
total hits: 34
total misses: 2
percentage correct: 94

the 30 words i added at the start really up the percentage because they are pretty much guaranteed to be hits (but not always). in redactle they wouldn't count towards the total or the percentage. maybe i should do the same.

Took me 337, and I got it only after I decided to guess possible authors.

i had to remove the accent 8(

You usually get a bit of a "vibe" off the work after a while (is it spooky? Stuffy? Romantic?) but it took me ages to get anything off this one - took me guessing until I'd revealed "I beheld his black eyes" and then I had it straight away.

I definitely play pretty differently to other people but I confess I did get a great satisfaction out of getting Crime and Punishment in only two guesses.

updates at https://acdean.github.io/bookish/index.html - be sure to hit ctrl-f5 because its a bit stubborn about using the old version otherwise.

no visual changes (oh, i really need to add a version number) but better behaviour of the guess list - click on a previous guess to re-highlight that word. re-entering a word does the same. redactle has this nailed, i am slowly getting there.

20220616 - after nearly 300 guesses I don't know what the hell this is but I like it. (Hope I haven't read it before and forgotten!)

> I don't know what the hell this is but I like it

i predict: you will regret saying this

Just gonna hide my entire response.

fucking lol! I also thought "I don't know what it is but I like it", because it seemed particularly dark and dystopian, and I enjoy dark and dystopian. But then my eyebrow started to raise when I was uncovering that the Bad Big Brother element seemed to be communal life, and I wondered if it was some old right-wingy perspective... took me a long time to work out that it was VERY much a right-wing perspective, and oh the shame of being intrigued by it. The shame, the shame.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

I had a feeling that since it was so distinct but ringing no bells that it might be bad. But not so bad. So bad and wrong.

Oh well at least it wasn't mein kampf.

particularly hard because non-english name - ??? ???? - looks like it should be easy to guess but...

i think mein kampf is also in the list

Didn't get todays, I haven't read it in 30+ years; title/author formatting threw me, I thought the title was the author and the subtitle/author the title.

i did toy with making the (little known) subtitle part of the title, so you had to guess it, but am kinda pleased it threw people off anyway (sorry)

i went to test tomorrow's and found i couldn't remember it and got about 200 words in before i did remember. wouldn't've got it otherwise tbh.

(fwiw i always put a br between (title (and subtitle) and author) and (the rest of the text). but not always between book/volume/part/chapter+their names and the next thing)

<h1>title
(<h2>subtitle)
<h2>author
<br/>
<h2>part x
<h2>whatever
<p>it was the best of times, it was the blurst of times...

I don't mind really, it's more fun trying to guess without using title/author - I might start not looking at them at all at the beginning.

have up after 200 today, worried that there was a bug. turns out i just can't remember famous book titles i spent 10 minutes editing about a week ago.

That took me far longer than a book I know and like should have done!

such me as difficult because the title was a name - you weren't going to chance upon it whilst entering English words

struck me as...

I went for 250 guesses without looking at the author or title. Too hard. I guessed don at 296 but got no hits - maybe there was a space at the end, do you trim the input? it worked 30 guesses later, after I tried la and then mancha.

> maybe there was a space at the end

yeah, don't do that!

(fixed. now restricts input to a-z 0-9 and apostrophe)

also fixed something i noticed yesterday - it should scroll to the word in the guess list if you've entered it before

today's obviously by some kook, got it from the title in 68 (I never studied him in philosophy, didn't even recognise the title as one of his)

today's in 287 without ref to title or author, man riding in carriage to strange place with someone warning him of untoward happenings 'to-night'. could've been a bit quicker, i find it usually takes at least 100 boilerplate words before i can start narrowing it down though.

i know the phrase Beyond Good And Evil from the Pop Group song more than the book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JySQE4axlJY

Something up today, page won’t load correctly.

https://github.com/acdean/acdean.github.io/commit/7e9b18c3eed818163ad7553906beb297f509b8a4

fixed...

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)