The End

No, this post isn’t the end of my blog. But it is the end of a long saga that began 123 days ago…

A while back, my friend Alek posted a story on his blog. A week later, I wanted to write a parody of it in the exact same style. And so I came up with the idea of using only words from Alek’s original story, where each word in my story appears no more times than it appears in Alek’s story. And thus, the short story series was born! Some of my friends helped continue the chain, where story $i$ only uses words from story $i-1$, counting multiplicity. We also considered making a chain where story $i$ only uses words, counting multiplicity, that were in story $i-2$ but not story $i-1$, so basically the words left over from story $i-1$. It’s kind of like the Euclidean algorithm but more cursed. I guess this would converge on a small set of words that can’t form a sentence, like a bunch of copies of “the”.

At the beginning, I thought the later stories would just be characters doing a yell-a-random-word challenge or something, but we had some creative ideas! That said, the later stories do trade off some logicalness and grammar for fulfilling the requirement.

Anyways, here’s the complete list of stories in the series:

A plot of the word count for each story

The end.

I wonder if there are any other story series with a similar writing constraint, but if there aren’t any, I’d encourage you to get some friends and try it out! It’s not particularly difficult, and you can blame your bad writing on the constraint. I also really enjoy having a friend, Alek, who also blogs so we can often talk about each other’s posts. (I should also have more guest posts. And I’m really excited for his upcoming Skyspace 3.0 rewrite of his blog! You should read Skyspace. I promise Alek didn’t pay me to say that.) Additionally, I think his prolific blogging has made me write more frequently. Of course, the number of blog posts doesn’t really matter but the important thing is to have fun and write and share with others. So yeah, you should also find a friend and start blogging!

For this series, we used this Python script to verify that we were satisfying the constraint. The script has a big loophole: it strips out all numbers before doing the check, so you get free numbers! This is exploited in Short Story 4 to spam 7-11. Another workaround was that several of the stories abbreviated “instant noodles” as “IN”, since the original story only uses “instant noodles” once while “in” is a common word. I generated the plot above using another Python script using Matplotlib’s semilogy, which sounds like a made-up word that means the study of Matplotlib or something. I guess I’m an expert semilogist now. The stories went from 1388 to 58 words, for an average decrease ratio of $\left(\frac{58}{1388}\right)^{1/5} \approx 0.53$ per story.

And of course Alek’s Short Story 6 is officially the end, but I just wanted to throw one more story out there:

And from that day onwards Zhou was a little bit better at actually cooking his flashcards like a cool instant noodles (IN) chef.