For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

February 14, 2006 12:35 PM

2 4 8 16 32 64... Storybytes, an ordered archive of nanofiction. It's been done before, by syllables (17), by the masters (Classic Short Stories), and by comedians (Book-a-Minute). But in a dense natural language, with a high meaning-per-word, perhaps bytes would value infodensity more objectively: 256b, 1k, 4Kb. But then again, isn't a spec as much of a cop out as a rigged dictionary? Perhaps the highest infodensities are achieved by works which will have no human readers.
posted by hoverboards don't work on water (8 comments total)

Um . . . . what?
posted by JeffK at 1:18 PM on February 14, 2006

OK, I get the brevity thing. So what's with the title?
posted by blendor at 1:41 PM on February 14, 2006

The entries with lengths of 2, 4, 6, and 8 words are all kind of lame. They remind me of that compression algorithm that compresses a file with arbitrary data down to zero bytes by copying the data into the filename.
posted by aparrish at 2:00 PM on February 14, 2006

I thought it was going to be a thread about Lost.
posted by chococat at 2:53 PM on February 14, 2006

So what's with the title?

Here's some background.
posted by maud at 3:07 PM on February 14, 2006

The two word story "Death of a Duck Hunter" was certainly good.
posted by Citizen Premier at 4:58 PM on February 14, 2006

good stuff, thanks.
posted by .kobayashi. at 5:29 PM on February 14, 2006

This is great. But the two word ones are cheating with their long titles, no?
posted by es_de_bah at 5:31 PM on February 15, 2006 [1 favorite]