# I Write Like (completely freaky result, OMG)



## jinxtigr (Jul 14, 2010)

http://iwl.me/

So I fed this thing the opening passages of my current book, of which I'm about 100K words into it and nearing the ending. This stuff here- http://www.tallyroad.com/Raw-1.html

It says I write like J.D. Salinger.

Here's the freaky part. Nobody else gets Salinger as a result, that I've seen. Kyell Gold got James Joyce, for everyone else and my earlier work it's all Steven King, Dan Brown etc (I did get Asimov for a sci-fi thing, which is cool).

Salinger lived like half an hour north of me, in New Hampshire. And right when I started writing those opening passages?

HE DIED.

Fucker haunted me because I'm as reclusive as he was. I'm all like 'keep your rye to yourself! And don't drink all my coffee, and no, you may _not_ have any _italics_...

Uh oh ;D


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## Altamont (Jul 14, 2010)

Not to say anything against your writing, of which I know nothing of, but don't put too much faith in teh internetz, my friend. Remember, this is the same place where Flat-Earthers spread their beliefs with tweets.


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## Jashwa (Jul 14, 2010)

I'm so sorry that you write like Sallinger. Maybe your story will inspire suicides and murders like Catcher in the Rye did? :V

One of the worst books I've ever read.


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## azurethedragon (Jul 14, 2010)

i think the site is just there to spit random famous people at you.  i tried it with my story and i got like five different people


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## reian (Jul 14, 2010)

It is a fun thing none the less...


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## jinxtigr (Jul 14, 2010)

Jashwa said:


> I'm so sorry that you write like Sallinger. Maybe your story will inspire suicides and murders like Catcher in the Rye did? :V


 
Thankfully it inspires suicides and cerebral hemorrhages among trolls and furry-haters, so at least it's fun to watch


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## Lobar (Jul 14, 2010)

jinxtigr said:


> Thankfully it inspires suicides and cerebral hemorrhages among trolls and furry-haters, so at least it's fun to watch


 
they're all a bunch of freakin' _phoneys_, man


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## Browder (Jul 14, 2010)

According to the site I write like Stephen King.

:|


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## Fenrari (Jul 14, 2010)

I write like Dan Brown....

Never cared to look at any of his works, but I might as well shoot it up and see.


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## Altamont (Jul 14, 2010)

Browder said:


> According to the site I write like Stephen King.
> 
> :|


 
Now there's someone to aspire to!!! Stephen King = My favorite writer EVAR


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## Altamont (Jul 14, 2010)

Hey! I got Chuck Palahniuk! Not bad if I do say so myself, lol


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## Klisoura (Jul 14, 2010)

James Joyce, consistently. 

Not so sure what to make of that one :\


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## FistofFenris (Jul 18, 2010)

Just a couple of names it spat out at me:

-Frank Baum (Wizard of Oz)
-Ray Bradbury
-J.R.R. Tolkien
-H.P. Lovecraft
-Dan Brown (wat?)

Also to the skeptics, I tested it by plugging in some excerpts from famous writings:

_Call of the Cthulu_ by HP Lovecraft, _All's well that Ends Well_ by William Shakespeare, and _Farenheit 451_ by Ray Bradbury.

All of these showed positive matches. So whether or not you really write like someone according to this thing, it is somehow set up to analyze the text, not just spit famous names out at you. My guess is that it's made to monitor grammar choices, syntax, wording, and things like that. I have no other explanation. I did look at the javascript behind it through, and it's really long and set up for a shit-ton of variables. So my guess is that it's legit enough to see your style, but not to really know what you write like on a subjective level.


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## Endless Humiliation (Jul 18, 2010)

I plugged in a research paper and it said I was David Foster Wallace 

and then i put in a short story and got cory doctorow (urgh)


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## Captain Howdy (Jul 18, 2010)

I'm currently roleplaying (non-sexual), and every single post I make has a completely different Author. So, this looks like another retarded program :v


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## Enwon (Jul 18, 2010)

Klisoura said:


> James Joyce, consistently.
> 
> Not so sure what to make of that one :\


 It means that you should never write.  James Joyce is the most boring writer whose literature I've ever had the displeasure of reading.


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## Endless Humiliation (Jul 18, 2010)

N106 said:


> It means that you should never write.  James Joyce is the most boring writer whose literature I've ever had the displeasure of reading.


 

whhhoooAAAAAa _SOMEONES_ a critic!


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## FurryWurry (Jul 18, 2010)

sadly, it has a limited number of responses (~40) and is a shill for a vanity publisher. See http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archi...502.html#012502


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## M. LeRenard (Jul 18, 2010)

This is kind of amusing, but you can never exactly trust algorithms for this sort of thing.  I posted three different samples of my writing, and I got:
1.) Chuck Palahniuk (I've never read a book by him)
2.) Dan Brown (ack... that's insulting)
3.) Arthur C. Clarke (and this is flattering!)
So apparently I write like both Dan Brown _and_ Arthur C. Clarke.  Because you know how similar those authors are.
It says at the top that it goes off of word choice and 'style'.  So, what...?  Number of paragraphs, punctuation frequency, use of italics or bolds, things like that?  I'm trying to imagine what a computer program would consider a writer's 'style'.

And pasting the text of this post into there, it tells me now that I write like Cory Doctorow.  What, the writer for the New York Times Magazine?  Okay....


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## FistofFenris (Jul 18, 2010)

M. Le Renard said:


> This is kind of amusing, but you can never exactly trust algorithms for this sort of thing.  I posted three different samples of my writing, and I got:
> 1.) Chuck Palahniuk (I've never read a book by him)
> 2.) Dan Brown (ack... that's insulting)
> 3.) Arthur C. Clarke (and this is flattering!)
> ...



It's javascript, not the elctrobrain (or whatever the hell they call it) that's in 20Q's game. Cut it some slack. Honestly, if you look at the code, it's really complex and not just a bunch of "if-then's" so I say it deserves a little more respect. All in all, this should be taken as something fun, like an internet personality quiz. Does it mean anything? No. Do you get a kick out of it? Maybe.


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## Alstor (Jul 18, 2010)

Apparently, the poem I put in said I write like Stephen King. I call shenanigans on this site.


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## Captain Howdy (Jul 18, 2010)

Yeah, pretty much every piece of writing is a different author, regardless of how similar it is. If you change one word (i used the word 'demon' and it said I wrote like Dan Brown. I removed Demon, and now I write like David Forest Wallace)


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## Altamont (Jul 18, 2010)

M. Le Renard said:


> This is kind of amusing, but you can never exactly trust algorithms for this sort of thing.  I posted three different samples of my writing, and I got:
> 1.) Chuck Palahniuk (I've never read a book by him)
> 2.) Dan Brown (ack... that's insulting)
> 3.) Arthur C. Clarke (and this is flattering!)
> ...



Off topic, I know, but you should definitely read some of his books, Renard  They're quite excellent


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## Stawks (Jul 18, 2010)

It says I write like Kurt Vonnegut.

:33333333333333


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## FistofFenris (Jul 18, 2010)

Lastdirewolf said:


> Yeah, pretty much every piece of writing is a different author, regardless of how similar it is. If you change one word (i used the word 'demon' and it said I wrote like Dan Brown. I removed Demon, and now I write like David Forest Wallace)



Try changing other words. Theoretically, that could just be that "Demon" was what pushed the response from "Dan Brown" to "David Forest Wallace," but this is indeed strange.


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## Klisoura (Jul 18, 2010)

N106 said:


> It means that you should never write.  James Joyce is the most boring writer whose literature I've ever had the displeasure of reading.


 
But... but my dreams D:

Realistically, I'm not sure how you'd put together a program like that without very simplistic algorithms. I'd guess Joyce probably comes mostly from sentence length and paragraph length. If I put more periods in it says Cory Doctorow or William Gibson. Is the source available?


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## Captain Howdy (Jul 18, 2010)

FistofFenris said:


> Try changing other words. Theoretically, that could just be that "Demon" was what pushed the response from "Dan Brown" to "David Forest Wallace," but this is indeed strange.


 
That was just one example, this happens with pretty much anything. Just put in a block of text, delete or change a few words (try flipping words into negatives (like can, to can't), and you'll see it I'm sure)

This thing is just throwing random results, I imagen.


"[13:03]  CCS - MTR - 1.0.2: CCS SYSTEM MESSAGE: 6/23/10 - CCS 1.0.2 is  LIVE - Check http://reference.ccs-gametech.com for change information. A  global optional respec was issued with this release. You may use it to  get the new skills, or keep it til later. The choice is yours."

*I write like*
Margaret  Mitchell

[14:01]  CCS - MTR - 1.0.2: You have correctly answered the CAPTCHA  challenge - Enjoy your play.

*I write like*
Stephen King

[14:14]  Emerald Viewer: Items coming in too fast, automatic preview  disabled for 10 seconds

*I write like*
David Foster  Wallace

[14:14]  Emerald Viewer: Items coming in too fast, automatic preview _*enabled*_ for 10 seconds

*I write like
* Vladimir Nabokov


Damn. Second life and CCS (combat system in Second Life) are really  professional!


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## FistofFenris (Jul 18, 2010)

Lastdirewolf said:


> That was just one example, this happens with pretty much anything. Just put in a block of text, delete or change a few words (try flipping words into negatives (like can, to can't), and you'll see it I'm sure)
> 
> This thing is just throwing random results, I imagen.
> 
> ...



Aaand that's all it takes for my faith to be shaken. So clearly javascript does not have literary analysis capabilities. Although... what if we introduced this on the writing forum? Like a thread where someone submits one or two paragraphs and people come in and try to figure out who they write like? That might be interesting.


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## M. LeRenard (Jul 18, 2010)

FistofFenris said:


> It's javascript, not the elctrobrain (or whatever the hell they call it) that's in 20Q's game. Cut it some slack. Honestly, if you look at the code, it's really complex and not just a bunch of "if-then's" so I say it deserves a little more respect. All in all, this should be taken as something fun, like an internet personality quiz. Does it mean anything? No. Do you get a kick out of it? Maybe.


I should hope it's not just a bunch of 'if--then' statements.  For something with this many variables, that program would be insane to write.
All I'm saying is that trying to judge something as abstract as 'style' with an algorithm isn't ever going to make sense, so the results you get are pretty much worthless.  Like trying to have a computer determine if a picture would be considered pretty.  It is kind of amusing, but nobody should put any stock in it.  This strikes me as something someone did on a whim, a project to fill their spare time that they spent a couple weeks putting together just for the fun of it.  Or maybe a class project.
I wish I really did write like Arthur C. Clarke, though.



			
				Altamont said:
			
		

> Off topic, I know, but you should definitely read some of his books, Renard  They're quite excellent


I've read the occasional article of his in the NYTM, which is the only other place I've ever heard his name.  I suppose I should give him a try one of these days.  Right now I'm slogging through *The Cruel Sea*, which is taking me forever because it's one of the dullest books I've ever read.

Edit: Okay, this is hilarious.  I posted the first chapter of _Eragon_ into this, and it said Chris Paolini writes like Anne Rice.
Hyuk hyuk hyuk.


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## Murphy Z (Jul 18, 2010)

I tried a few of my stories:

"Murder in Heaven," "Moving Mountains"

Cory Doctorow 

"Hellflower"

Anne Rice

I'm guessing is that, at least in part, it looks for certain keywords. I don't think I write like Anne Rice, it just picked up some words like "demons."

I took a really bad writer (no, I'm not saying who) and that one writes like Mark Twain

I also picked an adult Pokemon cub porn story and got David Foster Wallace. Sorry Dave.

I found another Pokemon story that was bad, and that one was like Cory Doctorow. Ergo, I should write Pokemon stories, but not porn.


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## FistofFenris (Jul 18, 2010)

M. Le Renard said:


> I should hope it's not just a bunch of 'if--then' statements.  For something with this many variables, that program would be insane to write.
> 
> All I'm saying is that trying to judge something as abstract as 'style' with an algorithm isn't ever going to make sense, so the results you get are pretty much worthless.  Like trying to have a computer determine if a picture would be considered pretty.  It is kind of amusing, but nobody should put any stock in it.  This strikes me as something someone did on a whim, a project to fill their spare time that they spent a couple weeks putting together just for the fun of it.  Or maybe a class project.
> 
> I wish I really did write like Arthur C. Clarke, though.


 
Good point. And actually someone above pointed out that it's basically just a page meant to bring people in so that a company can continue to find people to show banner ads and such to. At least that's what I took from it.


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## Xaybiance (Jul 19, 2010)

Anybody know a Cory Doctorow?
That's who I got when I typed in random shit that popped up at the top of my head:



> _An emancipation exlcuded the proper inclusion of origination of materialistic goods. An exacerbation would only worsen the deterioration. My pertruding scrotum would defy and diverge into a dominatingly illusive position. Soon, only a carbonated drink tab would exist in the hollowed burrow of the sky. The same sky in the ground, like my excrutiatingly fractured factory of pain_.


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## Klisoura (Jul 19, 2010)

Xaybiance said:


> Anybody know a Cory Doctorow?
> That's who I got when I typed in random shit that popped up at the top of my head:



Doctorow is one of the BoingBoing editors, but he's also a science-fiction author (_Down and out in the magic kingdom_ and _Little brother_, the latter of which was nominated for a Hugo last year, and the former for a Nebula in 2004). He's ok, but I venture to say more people know him because he publishes all his work under a CC license than anything else.


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## FistofFenris (Jul 19, 2010)

OK. I put in the lyrics for _Magical Trevor_, a song by famous internet animator Weebl and got "Cory Doctrow." Lyrics here: http://www.hotlyrics.net/lyrics/W/Weebl/Magical_Trevor.html 


And then I put in _Poker Face _by Lady Gaga and got "Johathan Swift" (who's Irish). Lyrics here: http://www.elyricsworld.com/poker_face_lyrics_lady_gaga.html

Finally, I put in Kesha's _Tik Tok_ and got Raymond Chandler (an author who the only picture of I can find happens to be in black and white). Lyrics here: http://www.elyricsworld.com/tik_tok_lyrics_ke$ha.html

I think that pretty much removes any validity left in this stupid thing...


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## Klisoura (Jul 19, 2010)

No, that just means that the algorithms aren't capable of producing a prose author from a few lines of poetry. Not only is that not surprising, it's not even meaningfulâ€”garbage in, garbage out. It even says to paste "at least a few paragraphs." Small number statisticsâ€”especially when you're comparing apples to orangesâ€”is always going to screw you.

Raymond Chandler is, with Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane, one of the towering figures in the hard-boiled detective genre that begot later hacks like Frank Miller. I would venture to say that Chandler's _The Big Sleep_ is perhaps the best known work in that field. I'm not sure what his picture has to do with anything.


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## Xaybiance (Jul 19, 2010)

Klisoura said:


> Doctorow is one of the BoingBoing editors, but he's also a science-fiction author (_Down and out in the magic kingdom_ and _Little brother_, the latter of which was nominated for a Hugo last year, and the former for a Nebula in 2004). He's ok, but I venture to say more people know him because he publishes all his work under a CC license than anything else.



Sounds like a _BIIIIIIG _nerd :3


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## Klisoura (Jul 19, 2010)

Have you seen him? He looks kind of like Chuck Klosterman, but... geekier, somehow. His writing is pretty distinctive, and not bad. I'd say it's sort of a more accessible William Gibson? He's the more literary Charles Stross who is not Neal Stephenson. Also, reading Doctorow is made a lot easier by the fact that it's all online, hence the CC thing


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## Kaine Wuff (Jul 19, 2010)

I apparently write like Stephenie Meyer... I had to look up who it was; thought I'd heard the name, but had to confirm. I've never even read any of Twilight. >.>


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## FistofFenris (Jul 20, 2010)

Kaine Wuff said:


> I apparently write like Stephenie Meyer... I had to look up who it was; thought I'd heard the name, but had to confirm. I've never even read any of Twilight. >.>


 Must... resist... urge to kill.


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## Kaine Wuff (Jul 20, 2010)

FistofFenris said:


> Must... resist... urge to kill.


 
Whaaat? D: 
Is it because I wasn't familiar with the name at first, or that a silly online test decided I write like her based off of one small paragraph?


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## Lobar (Jul 20, 2010)

FurryWurry said:


> sadly, it has a limited number of responses (~40) and is a shill for a vanity publisher. See http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archi...502.html#012502


 
Echoing this.  This thing is a scam, people.


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## jinxtigr (Jul 21, 2010)

...if you ever expected it to act like a human, that is. I always figured it was counting sentence lengths, personally 

Apparently it counts sentence lengths, use of punctuation like semicolons etc. and might recognize some words, and has advertising. I think that's just the internet being the internet- 'scam' is putting it a mite strong


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## Lobar (Jul 21, 2010)

jinxtigr said:


> ...if you ever expected it to act like a human, that is. I always figured it was counting sentence lengths, personally
> 
> Apparently it counts sentence lengths, use of punctuation like semicolons etc. and might recognize some words, and has advertising. I think that's just the internet being the internet- 'scam' is putting it a mite strong


 
It exists solely to inflate your ego and make you want to buy their vanity publishing services.


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## Klisoura (Jul 22, 2010)

jinxtigr said:


> ...if you ever expected it to act like a human, that is. I always figured it was counting sentence lengths, personally
> 
> Apparently it counts sentence lengths, use of punctuation like semicolons etc. and might recognize some words


 
The basic technique is fairly common... I think the biggest problem is that to draw assumptions you need a larger body of text. The software's knowledge of the statistics of the authors in the database is presumably pretty good, particularly for those on Project Gutenberg or like Cory Doctorow, where essentially all of their work can be plugged in. You can imagine, for instance, counting up the cylinder count, colour, and make of all the cars in, say, Colorado, California, and Connecticut. This is a large population, and the numbers are therefore rigorous. 

Now I show you a breakdown of the cars parked at, say, a shopping mall. Or your street in a subdivision. A little skew one way or the other can wildly shape the results. Even if there are only six cars in your sample, if one of them is a blue Ford four-cylinder, and there are none of those in all of Colorado, then you know that the sample is _most like_ either California or Connecticut. But suppose 10% of cars in California are green Toyota six-cylinders, and only .05% of cars in Connecticut are. If you have no green Toyota six-cylinders, your analytical box is going to tell you that your sample is most like Connecticut, even though the odds are better than half that even a random sample of California cars would have no green Toyota six-cyls.

This isn't to say that such analysis is completely worthless even with small samples. If you use words in the sample you give it that half of the authors have never used, then they can be ruled out (strictly speaking, it is more significant that they do _not_ use that word than it is that you _do_ use it, if you follow). But you can imagine that if .1% of the characters in Cory Doctorow's writing is a semicolon, say, but only .005% of James Joyce's are, then the fact that you randomly chose the one chapter in your book that uses a semicolon puts you closer to Doctorow's camp, even though a survey of _all_ your writing might track you closer to Joyce. 

That just means you should take it with a grain of salt, though XD and you already know that.

Many years ago, running a chatroom plagued by sock puppets, I wrote some software to do analysis like that. If you gave me a lengthy body of textâ€”say, a page's worthâ€”I could tell you more or less reliably where it came from. Giving it just a sentence, that was hit or miss. Discounting the website because it returns results from a poem, or gibberish, is meaninglessâ€”especially because the result, which at its core says "this body of text shares more similarities with this author than it does any other, given the rules of this algorithm," is an objective truth. But "you are closest to [   ] than to any of the authors in the database" isn't as catchy as "I write like [   ]." If you give it enough text, however, the first formulation is, if not particularly meaningful, at least true.


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## Lobar (Jul 22, 2010)

Of course you _can_ write a decent literary analysis program, but there's nothing to suggest that this site is even doing anything more than picking an author by an RNG seeded by your submission.


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## Klisoura (Jul 22, 2010)

Possibly, but I doubt it. There are very simplistic ways you could do thatâ€”hashing the input text in some fashion, sayâ€”but that would imply that changing the text superficially would vastly alter the output, which doesn't seem to be the case. For instance, no matter what chapter I use, any chapter of the novel I'm writing comes back James Joyce. But it's also not just tracking my IP, because if I give it something written by somebody else, it returns a different result. 

This suggests a couple of things. It suggests there _is_ an underlying logic to itâ€”not surprising; it's not especially computationally intensive. It also suggests that there _is_ something about the way I write that is, if not actually related to one another or another, internally consistent. That isn't surprising; it's what you'd expect. This says nothing about the validity of the analysis being performed here, except that, of a body of analysed authors, my work is consistently most similar _based on the rules that are important to that program_ to one of them. I suspect my consistent results also come from putting in several thousand words at a time, instead of only a couple hundred; that's going to damp out a lot of variation. 

It doesn't mean that the results are meaningful in any way, but I really doubt they're random. There's just no reason for them to be.


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## Lazarus (Jul 25, 2010)

William Gibson for me. Must be my love for fragments.


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## Zenia (Jul 25, 2010)

According to that thing I write like "Cory Doctorow"... I don't know who that is.


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## skunkspray03 (Jul 29, 2010)

It says that I write like Dan Brown. Never read The Da Vinci Code... Maybe I'll try it some time...


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## Alekz (Aug 7, 2010)

I got Stephenie Meyer T-T


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