Filler/excuse: The perils of simplicity in The Amalgamated Aggromulator

There should have been a long, wide-ranging, and very good entry awhile back. There almost was, but it vanished. I wrote it on a webpage that forces you to write in only the most commonly used thousand words (or ten hundred words) in the English language. It was created by Randall Munroe, the guy who writes the xkcd comic.

The constraint opened the wellsprings marvelously, as constraints frequently do. I spoke much better than I expected about a number of deeply felt things and current goings-on. I wrote the equivalent of about five pages straight…

… and, the whole time, I was continuously backspacing whenever I found that a phrase I had written included a disallowed word. And, suddenly, Google Chrome, for reasons known only to itself, chose to interpret one of those backspaces as the Go Back command, even though my cursor was in the text field, so that the browser went to the previous web page it had displayed. When I came back… I found that the Simple Writer page had no memory buffer. It was all gone.

I really ought to be using it again now - while obviously very frequently copying and pasting my text into a Wordpad file, paragraph by paragraph, to be safe - but I’m still gun-shy from having a couple of hours of my brain extended and chopped off. I really should again. The results were terrific. Here’s the link, if you want to play. Just click at the top of the green field and start typing. (And, yes - do keep copying and pasting and backing up what you’ve written.)

Last updated November 20, 2015