You crapper encounter...

[Brad Roberts]

On Sunday, 26 February 2012 at 14:47:53 UTC, Lars T. Kyllingstad 
wrote:
> On 26/02/12 11:24, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> On Sunday, February 26, 2012 11:05:33 simendsjo wrote:
>> I know that there's at least one site out there which will 
>> generate random
>> research papers for you, but even those are way better than 
>> this, because that
>> sort of thing takes real, valid sentences and puts them 
>> together in way that
>> its AI thinks will sound good (and the result with the 
>> research papers is stuff
>> that sounds good until you start trying to figure out what it 
>> actually means)
>
> Someone actually managed to get a paper like this accepted to a 
> conference. :)
>
> http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
>
> -Lars

There's a group of sci-fi authors that took this concept to a 
whole new level (to demonstrate how awful a publisher was).  The 
result of their work is nothing short of amazing:

     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights

An excerpt from that page:

==========
In retaliation, a group of science fiction and fantasy authors 
under the direction of James D. Macdonald collaborated on a 
deliberately low-quality work, complete with obvious grammatical 
errors, nonsensical passages, and a complete lack of a coherent 
plot. The effort was partly inspired by another collaborative 
"hoax" work, Naked Came the Stranger, as the working title of 
Atlanta Nights was Naked Came the Badfic.[6]

The distinctive flaws of Atlanta Nights include nonidentical 
chapters written by two different authors from the same segment 
of outline (13 and 15), a missing chapter (21), two chapters that 
are word-for-word identical to each other (4 and 17), two 
different chapters with the same chapter number (12 and 12), and 
a chapter "written" by a computer program that generated random 
text based on patterns found in the previous chapters (34). 
Characters change gender and race; they die and reappear without 
explanation. Spelling and grammar are nonstandard and the 
formatting is inconsistent. The initials of characters who were 
named in the book spelled out the phrase "PublishAmerica is a 
vanity press."[7]

Under Macdonald's direction, the finale revealed that all the 
previous events of the plot had been a dream, although the book 
continues for several more chapters.
==========

I've tried to read it, several times.  The first chapter is so 
horribly perfectly wonderfully bad writing.  I've never made it 
to chapter 2.

Later,
Brad