CidTheKid said
An analysis on long-windedness, by CidTheKid.Part 1: Defining Long-windedness.Before we can begin, let us define this term(long-windedness) so that we may work with it in a clear, objective manner. Long-windedness is obviously very subjective, but we can take steps to remedy that. Generally though, it could be agreed upon to be a description of overly-long text with very little actual content. We can work with that, so that we may eventually end up with something that we may use to accurately quantify the long-windedness of of a text. Let us look at the deciding variable of long-windedness in more detail, then.The first is length, as it is clear that being long-winded is a case of being too long for it's content. This brings us to our second defining variable, content. While length, could easily be measured as characters, syllables, words, sentences, paragraphs, or so on, content is a much more nebulous subject. It is not the same to mash out 4000 characters of utterly random nonsense, as it is to make a careful poem, exactly 4000 characters in length, or to hold a key down for 4000 characters. The content would be utterly different in each case. One way to define content, used in information theory, is to measure how predictable a text is. The actual term is entropy, and we will not be using it rigorously, mind you, but it is a somewhat helpful concept to use.One way to explain entropy, in information theory, is the predictability of the content of a certain message, given a partial sample of prior messages. So for example, the string of characters 'aaaaaaaaaaaaa' has less entropy than the string 'abaababababaaa', as we can easily make the assumption that any character in the first string will be 'a', while the second string may either contain an 'a' or 'b'. We can expand this to words, and the principle remains the same. So, the more predictable a text is, the less content it contains, we may say. For our definition of content, we will use words as they are a much better way to convey meaning than characters or syllables; each sentence on it's own carries meaning, while the same is not true for characters, or syllables.So, longwinded-ness could then be quantified as length over content. Or entropy, should the reader prefer the term, as much as we have butchered it so far. More specifically, let:L = total amount of words / The entropy of the textwhere L is the long-windedness of the text.We run into a problem then. Imagine a book, 5000 pages in length, the text of which is nothing but the word "Butterfly" repeated over and over again. Should such a text be considered long-winded? Certainly, it has great length, and very little content. However, it can hardly be considered to be comparable to natural language, it is far more predictable than the spoken word, or any form of communication. Were to use our definition for judgement, any text whose entropy is less than that of natural language should be cast aside.However, for our purposes, it is good enough.Part 2: Long-windedness as regards to judgement.At the end of part 1, we briefly touched upon what happens when a text is too predictable. Another problem is text that is completely random, totally unpredictable. For our purposes, it is best to compare the entropy of judged text to that of natural language, and see that it is somewhat similar. This is to avoid the aforementioned copypasta technique, or the mash-keyboard technnique.However, this runs into the opposite problem, where truly long-winded text is indifferentiable from non-long-winded text. So Fuck it. Just imagine I typed out the longest shit ever about absolutely nothing and it was all total bullshit, and it was awesome and shit. Half the crap here isn't even true, it's just a mixture of pseudo-information theory mixed with utter wankery in an attempt to sound somewhat smart and shit. But really, it's not all that great. Like yeah, it's total bullshit. If we actually used this definition, then it would be trivial to write a program that generates incredibly long, unreadable swaths of text that would totally be more long-winded than Jorick. We could make them war-and-peace sized texts. We could make Ayn Rand look like fucking brief. Anyways, length isn't the best measure of a writer anyway, in my opinion brevity is. Because it's to make really long, winding, endless and neverending strings of text, but making short stuff is much harder.But with this quantifiable definition of long-windedness, it should still be no problem at all to consider judging a contest. It could be easy to judge it, and create it, as all competitors could work on a single theme, while however wrote the most long-winded text as we have just defined, would be the winner. While long-windedness as regards to certain subjects is relative, or may seem subjective, it really isn't all that important, as the most long-winded would be in relation to other competitors, not in terms of some absolute value.Part 3: Long-windedness as regards to Jorick.fuck if i know, i never read his posts.there all to longpart 4 long-windedness as a good idea.its fucking notlike foreals this is total bullshit. ive said it before its not so hard to type out 5000+ words of padding and bullshit that is still sorta meaningful, and it could even be automated, im just not up to doing it, and very few people wanna do useless crap so it isn't all that common. but whatever. seriously, padding is easy, im doing it right now and im not even thinking too hard about it. because for reals its easy to almost repeat yourself, but not really, making it seem like everything you say is new and different even when it isn't. it doesn't even matter whether the end result is meaningful, because even if it is, i doubt anyone has read the whole thing without their eyeballs falling out of their sockets, because jesus seriously, not even i would read this crap and i typed it all out. which makes me an idiot for doing so, especially as i did to look cool on the internet.because the endall beall of approval is looking good on the internet. which is why theres so many camwhores out there, why people like nat have imitators and whatnot. attention is a real commodity nowadays, especially as everyone has a limited amount to use on various crap. its true, its why not everyone becomes a doctor/musician/poet/actor/phycisist, unless they are insane or something, or have access to a timetravel machine or are immortal or somecrap.part 5 conclusionby now, in case you can't tell, ive stopped caring and im typing just to increase the word count and character count, even though it's already pretty long as it is, but because i want to do some oneupmanship i need to make it longer. its still not long enough. but it will be soon enough. hopefully. man this was a pretty good use of my time. i could've done something productive, but instead i did this. which only further cements my status as a total idiot. but whatever. i started this crap, im sure as hell gonna finish it. up to here is like 7000 chars, lets see if i can make it 10000 with just some more padding. so yeah, in case you couldn't tell, long-windedness seems easy enough to define, but actually using it is kinda hard, as you can see by the various problems we've had and yeah. im not gonna be the one to solve them, and i don't feel like doing it, but i bet it's totally possible. its like knowing is half the battle. which brings to mind an interesting thought. you know how the nazis kicked ass up until they got their asses kicked? its a gross overgeneralization of what actually happened, but it doesn't matter. what does matter is why. so, they had this super cool machine called the enigma, which is like, some super secret codebox that made wicked hard to crack codes using a series of rotating cylinders. it was essentially a pseudorandom number generator.and it was really hard to crack. like, really really hard. you couldn't do it by hand, unlike say a ceasar cipher. which is the schoolyard thing where you replace every letter with some other letter, and you get your message back by doing it backwards. the problem with it, is that language isn't random, and some letters come up more than others. if you are a writer, then you probably know e is the most common letter used in text. so, obviously, if you have a message in code, than the most common letter in the message is probably going to be e, and you can work your way from there to decode the message.so, the nazis knew this, and they knew the allies knew this. so what happens next is they make enigma in order to make the problem go away. the way enigma worked, was that it went down from an initial setup, such that every letter would get turned into some other letter, and the same letter got turned into different letters. it's complicated, and i aint explaining shit that ill probably explain wrong. go look it up. anyways, the problem with enigma was that it was not a wholly random machine. if you had the initial state of the machine, you could easily translate any message you got from it. and if you had some non-random message from enigma, with words you could easily figure out without decoding you could also work your way backwards to the initial state. so the allies, well, mostly the british and polish radio operators, to be precise, worked out a machine that code decode messages from enigma in a matter of hours. which is important, because the cylinder settings were changed on a daily basis.so this happened about midwar, and once the allies knew what the axis powers were doing, strategy-wise, they could easily plan counter-offensives and whatnot. so you know, knowledge wins wars, as does not attacking russia in the winter, and that's why you should stay in school and work on your degree. unless it's a useless degree that doesn't teach you any useful skills, which won't help you very much. also, not attack russia. for reals, it does not work out, ever.and that was >10000 chars.I'm done with this bullshit. like seriously.TL;DR: I have no clue. Don't write posts while drinking firewater, kids.

Dervish said
This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Smiral said
y'all motherfuckers have way too much time on your hands

Doivid said
sometimes I imagine hypothetical arguments between you and jorick.

Dervish said
This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Jster said
Jorick: "Multi-paged thesis"Smiral: "Stupid youtube video"Jorick: "Several paragraph critical analysis"Smiral: "Dolphin tits gif."

Awson said
Lately they've been going:"Fuck you" video."Fuck you Remix" video."Fuck you Remix" video x3.Etc.

ImANargleHunter said
What if the post was literally never ending? Could something be considered long winded if you can't physically finish it?

ImANargleHunter said
Her well of inanity is running dry.

Awson said
Lately they've been going:"Fuck you" video."Fuck you Remix" video."Fuck you Remix" video x3.Etc.

natsumehack said
Which is magic.

ImANargleHunter said
Her well of inanity is running dry.

Jorick said
That was a one time thing. I'm not quite lame enough to pull that same maneuver more than once.

Smiral said
can emptiness run dry

ThreadJackPolice said

ThreadJackPolice said

Shy said
How did this get stickied?

Shy said
How did this get stickied?