Hey, Wait! This Thing On the Internet Is Inaccurate!

Someone sent me a link to this site, which lets you plug in a few paragraphs of your writing's finest and find out, via undisclosed web-based calculations, what famous writer you write like ("'cause it's fun!" you can hear the creators chirp in some inane face-smashingly annoying way). It's a gimmick, I know; the kind of gimmick dreamed up by people who think it's cool to be a dreamer of gimmicks and not, say, impossible sexual encounters. But it's also a gimmick that I spent about half-an-hour entertaining myself with because, you know, I was supposed to be working.

Long story short, after plugging in several of my longer posts on Dis Here Blog, I came to the kind of scientifically sound conclusion you can only reach after two hours' sleep and a kick in the tee-tahs. Namely, I write like David Foster Wallace.

Of course I do. Not only have I never read anything written by said famed writer, I have no fucking clue what he writes like, apart from this recent discovery that it's apparently in the same style as a half-assed blogger. Eight out of the 13 posts I logged into that infernal machine spat Mr. Wallace's name back at me, and I don't even have the faintest clue if that's a good or bad thing. Although I feel I can emphatically say that it's a completely inaccurate and guileless waste of time, and for that, or course, I adore it.

The odd names out in my research were James Joyce (who apparently used the term "WTF" quite a lot), Stephen King, Dan Brown, William Gibson, and H.P. Lovecraft. No mention of the million or so like-minded and like-talented schmucks working their way through life not as successful or critically-hailed professional writers, but, like me, running blog posts through a website that tries to make them feel better about their shitty, shitty, shitty selves. In a perfect world, a just world, or one where at the very least I wouldn't be spending so much time writing about this trifling little time-waster, it would spit out this declaration every time you hit the submit button: "You Write Like You Should Try Harder."

The only great thing about all this is you know that someone, somewhere, is going to transcribe Mel Gibson's insane racist rantings, plug it into this website, and find out he screams abuse in the same style as Joyce Carol Oates. How fucking enlightening.