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unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Unixronin

December 2012

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July 13th, 2010

unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010 11:49 am

...seems to be this site that claims to analyze what famous writer you write like.  On the evidence of my friends page, it likes to compare people to Steven King.  So I plugged a couple of writing samples into it.

First, I pasted two different sections of the outline of the same unfinished SF story, one outlining the opening events of the story, one a worldbuilding section covering the historical timeline, and got Douglas Adams and James Joyce.  The first piece was, in the words of Douglas Adams, 'almost, but not quite, entirely unlike' anything Adams ever wrote; the second bore no resemblance to anything James Joyce ever wrote, but contained the name Finn mac Cumhal.  Then I pasted in an excerpt from a second story, a cyberpunk work that bears — to me — visible resemblances to both William Gibson and Neil Stephenson, and got Dan Brown.

In short, I think it's utterly smoking crack.  I don't think it's doing any kind of style analysis at all, just picking out a few key words and matching them to lists.