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A Long Walk #15

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savetz opened this issue Nov 4, 2024 · 3 comments
Open

A Long Walk #15

savetz opened this issue Nov 4, 2024 · 3 comments

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@savetz
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savetz commented Nov 4, 2024

A Long Walk will be the story of someone talking a walk from two distant (real) locations. Code will keep track of latitude and longitude, get the name of the place from a geolocation server. The character will ask a local which direction it is to destination, who will respond with a cardinal direction. The farther away the traveler is from the destination, less accurate the local's answer will be. Sometimes the traveler goes the wrong way.

Using faker to get common industry, worker type (e.g. farmer), a common name for that area. Maybe population? So something like "The walker is in a small town called WhateverTown. He asks a local blacksmith which way to DestinationTown. The blacksmith, a friendly guy named Rolf, points vaguely east."

Sometimes he takes a break or his leg hurts so a longer paragraph about their current location, less walking.

Something interesting happens when they arrive: we find the out the reason for his walk.

Here's output that I have so far:

Day 1:
Clouds gather, hinting at rain. Jason arrives in Inwood. He asks a local associate professor, a sarcastic person
named Jorge, which way to Washington D.C. The associate professor points east-southeast (Correct
direction: southwest).
Each step feels heavier than the last, but he presses on.
Distance covered today: 14.69 miles.

Day 2:
A light drizzle accompanies him. Jason arrives in City of New York. He asks a local commercial/residential
surveyor, a stern person named Jennifer, which way to his destination. The commercial/residential surveyor
points west-southwest (Correct direction: west-southwest).
Jason recalls the promise he made that set him on this path.
Distance covered today: 12.46 miles.

Day 3:
The crisp air invigorates his steps. Jason arrives in Inwood. He asks a local molecular geneticist, a
helpful person named Jasmine, which way to the place he seeks. The molecular geneticist points
east-northeast (Correct direction: southwest).
He wonders if the destination will bring the closure he seeks.
Distance covered today: 12.03 miles.

TODO: local names/industry, track total miles walked. Choose more interesting start/end points. Discuss real local sights? Show progress on a graphical map??

@MichaelPaulukonis
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What if somebody is chasing the protagonist?

@LuRsT
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LuRsT commented Nov 23, 2024

How does the protagonist feel about where they are and the path they're taking?

@savetz
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savetz commented Nov 30, 2024

I lost interest in this idea. I tried various things to make it more interesting along the way, but ultimately I think it's the least interesting of the NaNoGenMo projects that I have done. With that, here it A Long Walk, 51,535 words. It describes a walk from Caribou, Maine (the northeasternmost city in the United States) to Bend, Oregon (for reasons made clear in the final paragraph) over the course of 967 days.

long_walk_novel.txt

ChatCPT wrote most of the code and most of the text. I experimented with using a local LLM to generate descriptions of the places the traveller visits along the way, but ultimately that was unsatisfying so I disabled that, although the code is still there. This was my first time using wordnet, faker, and geopy, so that was cool.

Code at https://github.com/savetz/aLongWalk/tree/main

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