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

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...

looks like i only applied the 'add " to end of line' editor macro to the bottom of the file and didn't test it.

i think 0630 was also broken but i fixed it about 7:30. i have game files til the 6th, about 50 more that need uploading. and obviously i need to test them better than i have been (or at all)

i think the big plan for this is to do 366 files and drop the year from the filenames so it's playable on a year long loop (with the last month or so playable at any time via the 'previous' list (and more if you hack the url), does that seem reasonable?). are there 366 famous books? 8)

(i can actually do new books by ripping the first chapters from amazon kindle previews, but that's often hard work. or i can use things that i own)

(renaming done. that's introduced a bug where it'll break on the 1st january because it'll think the date has gone backwards but i have 6 months to fix that. the check is only there to stop people playing future games)

New books - or canonical non public domain ones anyway - would be fun but might make it harder.

ProjGut is hardcoded at the moment, but i guess that wouldn't be too hard to change.

book suggestions welcome, but i think i'll keep it ProjGut until i run out. i envisage legal problems copying huge swathes of non-PD books.

added games up to the end of the month, roughly, and checked them all

a bug with today's, I've guessed the title (with a little help for the fourth word) but it hasn't given me the win.

disappointed I didn't get yesterday's.

Same bug for me. Got it quickly, too (a great book, if that isn't too much of a hint), so it was extra disappointing not to have the win display.

um, thanks. yes, problem.

it's an odd one, it's included the ',' in with the word so your guess has to include the comma. and yet it still reveals the word without the comma. title parsing is obviously doing something different.

it'll have to wait until this evening now because i don't think it'll be a quick fix.

yesterday's was on tv whilst i was doing the initial list or i might not've included it for obscureness reasons.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0c2pwk6

btw, what font are you seeing for the main text? i get sans serif on the laptop (firefox), serif on the macbook (firefox, chrome)

serif on desktop (osx chrome), sans on phone (android chrome).

you wanna take out those quote marks round 'sans-serif'.

var tbits = t[1].split(/ /);

there's your comma problem...

done and done. thanks ledge.

(um does \W+ match digits? do i have any digits in titles?)

oh, that's broken apostrophes in titles 8(

fixed

it's redacting the 6 characters of   rather than printing a space. 8(

(that space there is an nbsp )

(font is better btw thanks)

Got today's on the strength of one of my usual starting words (after the 60-100 fillers): house. Not from the title which I try to avoid, but the ahem tell-tale capitalisation in the first para.

what can i do to hide the title? i guess it'd have to start hidden. i could put it as the actual page title, but not on the page.

I tried redactle once after this thread and thought it should have been by part of speech but maybe that would have made it too easy.

Is the code for bookish available? What language is it written in? (I am just curious about how it is constructed.)

it is very much 1999-style javascript, the only kind i know...

there's no server access past the initial page load, so ctrl-u will show you all the horrible code. and i think because it's on github.io and i don't pay them then the repo will be public as well.

My first time playing! Got it in 46 but totally used the title, am I not supposed to?

For insert, could you not include stopwords up to some cutoff or would that make it too easy? I am wondering how people do this!

(with lower counts for insertion)

> For insert, could you not include stopwords up to some cutoff or would that make it too easy?

you have a choice of inserting 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 of the most common words using the drop-down in the top bar. i need to write some instructions.

eephus, i think ledge thinks the title makes it too easy and i think he has a point so I'll look to making it an option.

But could you exclude words like 'the', 'and', 'to', 'by', etc. from the most common words inserted, with lower counts as options in the dropdown, so that the clues given are more meaningful?

(If after stopword removal, the differences in frequency counts are low, then insertions could be all occurrences of randomly selected unique words in the text and guesses could continue to be for all occurrences.)

not sure i agree with removing the *most* common words from the list of common words. and that was what the 0 option was for.

i could let people get 10, 20, 30 *random* words from the top 50, so they aren't guaranteed to get 'the' and 'and' or whatever but that moves away from everybody getting the same game.

The text could be generated once for each insertion count offered in the dropdown. The words selected could be randomized or not. If not, another option would be most frequently occurring after stopword removal. It's just that it is hard to guess from stopwords.

I've been having remarkable success recently guessing sea, boat, ship, sails, etc. Though it hasn't worked so well today, lots of hits and I've eventually got the author but I guess I'm not familiar enough with his work.

it's an earlier novel (n fact his only novel), and not his usual genre. this was from the observer / guardian 1000 book list, so probably not as 'popular' as those from the top downloads list. i read it a couple of years ago. it goes a bit lovecraft in the last few chapters iirc

i should hope it does!

i'm consistently amazed at the nautical knowledge expected of pre 20th c readers. "At length I summoned up the resolution of despair, and rushing to the mainsail let it go by the run. As might have been expected, it flew over the bows" - of course!

Well, I managed to get the author, but as the entire text is in French I'm not sure I can get the correct title without cheating. (Assuming it's even one of his better-known works that I theoretically could get!)

happy bastile day!

unfortunately, due to terrible planning on my part, i'd already posted A Tale Of Two Cities and Les Miserables or i'd've made this the relevant sections of one of those. i went with this instead, which is well known in english, at least, but is a bit of a bastard because of the apostrophe in the title that you can't see but must enter

I thought it was something very experimental and Oulipo when only two of the top 30 words had any results, but on noticing they were "on" and "a" and spotting some suspicious hyphens scattered around before question marks I managed to work out what was going on and quite enjoyed typing words from my mostly forgotten GCSE French into it. (Eventually got the author purely by name length and then the title from the prepositions therein rather than any half-deciphered content, though!)

(Those elided clitic pronouns make French a bit annoying to guess - j'ai, l'ai, j'en, m'en, n'en, etc, are all separate single "words". Feels like good, fun exercise for one's language skills but it's already hard enough to piece together enough context to guess in English without resorting to title/author length a lot of the time and limited language skills definitely don't help there.)

PS it also appears to be chapter 207 and not the traditional first chapter, too

> PS it also appears to be chapter 207 and not the traditional first chapter, too

yeah, nobody said it was always going to be chapter 1! i think there's one soon / recently that's chapter 3 because the first two are preamble that are imo unguessable. i've also skipped some prefaces at times.

the numbering of the d'Artagnan Romances, of which this is part, is a book in itself. it was three or four volumes depending on the edition and modern copies split the 3rd (or 4th?) part into 3 parts themselves. but the chapter numbers aren't reset - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vicomte_of_Bragelonne:_Ten_Years_Later . specifically this chapter was chosen as it was the one that mentioned the prisoner's history in the bastille

Aha! Thank you, koogs! I thought it was a bug but I should not have doubted you; good to hear the explanation!

hidden tag more to assuage my paranoia than because of Bookish spoilers: I work in a library as a data/helpdesk monkey and some of the multi-volume works of this era have very nutty numbering, where things end up with three different numbering systems and flit between which one they feel like displaying on the title page, and then someone emails me to ask if there's a scan for an apparently undigitised volume, or that the scans don't match the right volumes, and it turns into a bit of a nightmare going through them all filling in an Excel spreadsheet of every number you might conceivably refer to them by and trying to label them on the system in a way which will make sense to readers...

btw, this'll be the first and last time i do this even though it went smoother than expected (people did try, did complete it even, no insults were hurled)

i do have vague plans for theme weeks though, mainly to give myself ideas of books to include. sci fi week, say, or grouped by decade. I'm about a fifth of the way through having a year's worth.

(i can do repeats, i guess, of i choose other chapters)

um, maybe a week of final chapters...

Today's is a game of guess the title even when you've guessed the title.

Well ok it wasn't that hard.

yeah, again made harder by hidden punctuation (c/f redactle unlimited where often 's' is a word because it splits on apostrophes). damned if you do, damned if you don't, really

and this way i can maybe use the later books as more games. or are they too obscure?

2.1 Volume One: Swann's Way
2.2 Volume Two: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
2.3 Volume Three: The Guermantes Way
2.4 Volume Four: Sodom and Gomorrah
2.5 Volume Five: The Prisoner
2.6 Volume Six: The Fugitive
2.7 Volume Seven: Time Regained

not gonna happen...