These violent delights | Hacker News Reader

These violent delights

blog.zarfhome.com

81 pointssp33215 comments

I was a bit disappointed that TFA doesn't expand its title quote. Here's the full verse of this Shakespearean aphorism, which was also used to great effect on Westworld:

"These violent delights have violent ends And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey Is loathsome in his own deliciousness And in the taste confounds the appetite. Therefore love moderately; long love doth so; Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow." Romeo & Juliet - Act 2 Scene 6

I'd love a machine learning powered shakespeare-to-modern-english translator because I feel that this is both beautiful and that I'm barely understanding it (but I'm also not really a literature guy).

> Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow

What is this trying to say, for example? When love is happening too fast, every moment apart feels like an eternity and thus the next time together always arrives "too tardy"? And... wait, what? I feel like I'm not quite grasping it

You might just be overthinking it. It means the same as “slow and steady wins the race”.

Yeah I felt something like

> The candle that burns twice as bright, burns half as long

a hot love burns itself out

Exactly. Specifically it is saying being too early/fast is just as wrong as being too late/slow.

There's a very limited corpus of Shakespeare, and so plenty of folks have already manually translated Shakespeare into "modern." Here's Sparknotes, hardly the best:

https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/romeojuliet/pa...

> These sudden joys have sudden endings. They burn up in victory like fire and gunpowder. When they meet, as in a kiss, they explode. Too much honey is delicious, but it makes you sick to your stomach. Therefore, love each other in moderation. That is the key to long-lasting love. Too fast is as bad as too slow.

These kinds of translations are so soulless. They are only good to be read along side to really get the meaning. I love the literal-ness but hate the word choice.

wow, lost all the artistry, but thank you!

> shakespeare-to-modern-english translator because I feel that this is both beautiful and that I'm barely understanding it

But if you translate it then it won't be beautiful; not unless the ML is as good a writer as Shakespeare.

Anyway, Shakespeare really isn't that difficult. It should be read aloud, declaimed with passion. Then a lot of it will become clear, while some will remain ambiguous. Translating it will not, or ought not, remove the ambiguity.

Anyway there are already simplified versions of Shakespeare. Here is one of Macbeth: https://www.academia.edu/6555385/A_Simplified_and_Concise_Ve...

if you haven't seen it, the 1996 version of Romeo and Juliet is fantastic, it's a re-setting of the story as a war between drug cartel "families" in "Verona Beach" (think 90s Miami). The whole thing is absolutely over-the-top and campy, yet actually manages to be probably the most accurate version of the story - it preserves all the dialog/etc and presents it in a digestible modern context.

The opening sequence is one of my favorite scenes of all time. Can't find a copy that is both good quality and full length but:

cut but good quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEzskNtFnIY

full but lower quality: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1kkig

Shakespeare was the "trashy pulp novel" of his day and I'd like to think he'd have loved it.

I absolutely love this movie. Swords in the original text are guns in the picture (but still called swords). Same with the helicopter on screen but never mentioned in the original words (because of course)

Go watch it, it’s great.

Well, sometimes violence is the answer ;)

It's a delightful change to read Zarf on technical matters; to me he is mostly one of the grand masters of Interactive Fiction (aka "text adventure games" in their most advanced form).

If you've never had the chance to work with Inform 6 / Inform 7, it's a neat little language. Very odd architecture, but Inform 7 has one of the most interesting methods of world modeling that I've ever seen.

At one point I did a project using Inform 7's world modeling as the underlying "details engine" for a game, to help make the game world feel more realistic. It was somewhat clunky, but the potential is there for someone to do something like this in the future :)

Reading Inform 7 code can be a weird experience. It starts very naturally describing rooms and items, but then you start to see the seams between the colorful language that authors put into the game and the strict syntax of the game engine itself.

There's a Twitter bot that posts snippets of Inform 7 code out of context. https://twitter.com/inform_dreams

I like the subtle Alice's Restaurant reference: Remember my bug? This is a song about my bug.

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