a Remix MiniQuest
Choose a poem. Any source is fair game. There are plenty of poems online; just google poetry or list of poems or old poetry and you'll be swimming in the stuff. This experiment will probably work best if it's a poem you don't like, and it's pretty short. Copy it into a draft or your favorite text editor. Then play with it:
Add a word = 1 point
Remove a word = 1 point
Links and capitalization and punctuation changes are free. This includes linebreaks, but the order of words must be preserved. Of course, you can remove words from one place and add them somewhere else, but it will cost points.
If you want to get fancy, strike out words you remove (<s> tag), and bold words you add (<b> tag). If you don't do this formatting, please include or link to the original poem, otherwise I might not be able to score yours. If you have any trouble or questions, share a draft with me and send me a /msg about it.
At the end you should have a poem which you like. Post it in this node. Be sure to name the original author/source.
Your score is (upvotes + 3 * chings) * (number of words in original poem) / points. This formula favors a light hand---you are rewarded for successfully transforming a poem using only a few changes, but not penalized for doing more edits to a longer piece. The minimum change required is the addition of a single word; I won't have any division by zero on my watch. You don't need to calculate this yourself.
Here is my humble example, which uses 60 points worth of edits (27 additions + 33 removals) on a piece originally of 124 words. Thus the score would be (upvotes + 3 * chings) * 2.067.
"I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You" by Pablo Neruda
(English translation, from poemhunter.com)
I do not love you at thirty thousand feet. except because I love you
I go down the mountain away from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you---
My heart moves from cold to fire.
I love you only because it's you the one I
The wind comes right through the tent, Love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you I storm into town,
Bend to you and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see rivers of your blood. you but love you blindly
Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.
In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love in a roadside pool because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.
The numbers as of Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:45 GMT: