CTO Articles
Published in IT World
November 21, 2006
Six word stories for geeks
There is something about extreme brevity in the use of language that appeals to me. I suspect it comes from decades of fighting with command line interfaces of computer systems. How can I get this infernal machine to do complicated stuff using just a small number of commands? Anyone who keeps that question in their head for enough years becomes attracted to the arts of extreme brevity in language. ?
From time to time, a meme breaks out in which extreme brevity techniques are used to summarize well-known books and films or to create a yet-to-be-created book/film in a few words. Some years ago, I remember reading this great example which captures the magnum opus known as the Lord of the Rings in just 11 words:
"Short guy throws magic ring into volcano. Local lay-about becomes king." [1]
In the last while, the concept of a six word story has caught a wave [2]. Create a short story using exactly six words. It is hard to beat Ernest Hemingway's fantastic: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn.". Eileen Gunn has written a nice geek-centric one that I quite like: " Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer?"[3].
Eileen's six word story got me thinking about taking our interactions with computer systems and using them to tell a story of sorts. I have thought of three so far. The first is entitled "Existential Angst Of a Sys Admin" and it goes likes this:
who am I
rm -rf ~/*
The commands will run on most Unix machines but I would not advise it.
The second is not directly executable as it involves working with a possibly graphical application interface. It is entitled "Ode to writer's block" and it goes like this:
Edit. File Exit. Abandon Changes. Repeat.
My final contribution is entitled "Becoming a father changes everything" and it goes like this:
mv my_stuff /my_family/dads_stuff
ping cigars.com
No foray into the world of geeky brevity would be complete without referencing the phenomenon of Perl Poetry. I have purloined a personal favorite from that genre and edited it to suit my purposes to end this week's article. The piece is entitled "Jet lagged article writer" and it goes like this:
think, write, think,
do review (each word) if time.
close article. sleep? what's that?
[1] http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/22865#417472
[2] http://www.sineadgleeson.com/blog/2006/10/26/...
[3] http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html