████ ██ Ishmael

[hugovk]

Inspired by @leonardr's ████, here's my quick get-something-out-of-the-way entry so I can spend the rest of the month on something else. Oh wait...

I have a feeling someone may have done something like this before, but this is my version, and I re-used my 50,000 Meows code but:

• added six lines of code
• changed one line of code
• changed three lines of comments
• Diff: hugovk/meow.py@105f9e8
• Code: https://github.com/hugovk/meow.py/blob/main/blackout.py

But what does it do? Black out all repeated words, preserving punctuation. We show each word for its first occurrence, but all subsequent appearance are replaced with █ characters.

Here's Moby Dick.

• Generated txt: https://github.com/hugovk/meow.py/blob/main/blackout.txt?raw=true
• Generated PDF: https://github.com/hugovk/meow.py/blob/main/blackout.pdf?raw=true

The book starts out with lots of words showing, and just a few blacked out:

Here's the first paragraph proper, on page 7:

Often there are many related words showing in a paragraph (page 55):

But it quickly obscures most of the common words (page 86):

Page 109:

The runs of two words are poetic: "unspeakably unsocial" (page 132):

"scrabble scramble" (page 153):

"juvenile eternities" (page 196):

"charging twopence ... threepence ... sixpence" (page 212):

Some of the remind me of @thisisparker's https://github.com/thisisparker/public_domains. "unmurmuringly acquiesced" (page 241):

"lipless, unfeatured" (page 262):

The final two paragraphs before the epilogue have "whelmings intermixingly", "ironical coincidings", "etherial thrill" (page 268):

And the epilogue, "halfspent suction", "Ixion", "liberated", "dirgelike", "padlocks", "sheathed", "retracing", "orphan":

[bensteinberg]

I wonder how many books would still have words on the last page. Maybe I'll find out next year.

[lizadaly]

halfspent.dirgelike.padlocks would be a good Mastodon instance name.

Edit: As you already noted!