Show HN: Using GitHub to tackle Ray Bradbury's 1,000 Nights Challenge | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Using GitHub to tackle Ray Bradbury's 1,000 Nights Challenge

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64 pointskqdreger19 comments

To clarify what exactly the 1,000 Nights Challenge is:

In 2001, Ray Bradbury gave a speech at the University of California where he encouraged young writers to read three things every night:

- One short story (Dahl, Hemingway, Matheson, Cheever, Kneale, Collier), Warton, Irving)

- One poem (Shakespeare, Frost, Pope)

- One essay (Huxley, Eiseley)

Bradbury's goal is to make you into a collector of the metaphor -- filling your head with thoughts, theories, and ideas before bed, rather than completing another level in Angry Birds.

This repository is to help me 1.) follow Bradbury's advice and 2.) create a list of reading material to fill those 1,000 nights.

Since "Ray Bradbury" is the only hint as to what this could be (unless you're familiar with the mentioned challenge), and since I often look to comments to get a feel for the link's subject before even following it, I'll just say what a great idea this is: that you become a "collector of metaphors" (love this) by reading one short story, one poem and one essay every night before sleep, which is a great time to do it because your brain can then best absorb the new info while you sleep.

Arguably though, I'd place the time before the first sleep and the second sleep as even better (for those not aware, called segmented sleep and supposedly a natural thing for humans before electricity), since you have a couple hours still to comtemplate and/or get inspired by the material while in a quasi-meditative state. I got to sleep this way during a few weeks and I've easily written my best fiction passages in these hours, they came so naturally and effortlessly, like my mind and focus were sharp as a razor whereas normally I'm all around the place (as you can see in this comment.)

The whole segmented thing sounded interesting to me, so I did some research and it really does seem like a "real thing"... And for me, it truly is a wonder when it happens. I feel the most refreshed I could possibly feel, and (TMI warning) making love between the two sleeps is absolutely amazing. I've gone out of my way to remove blue light from my living areas for this reason, and it has helped a lot. The best part is, I manage my depression much better now that my sleep cycle and sleep hygiene is improved.

/offtopic

I never knew about the challenge, now I know, so thanks! Great idea!

I was wondering for a few moments what's the point of GitHub here. My first thought for such a thing would be a wiki (I know, I'm so 2000s). But I guess GitHub is simply there, capable, and with readily available contributors, opposed to some random wiki site?

For me, GitHub was the easiest thing to get up and running. Another nice addition later on will be GitHub Pages -- a website generated off of the contents of the repository, which will help broaden the reach of this project beyond those who can navigate GitHub.

Once I get 100 days worth of content, I'll buy a domain and make it look pretty.

- David Foster Wallace's great essays fill 25 nights: http://tetw.org/David_Foster_Wallace

- Billy Collins was on Stephen Colbert not too long ago, and when I looked him up, it turns out his poetry is awesome: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/flames/

- I like Bukowski the poet. (Bukowski the person is kind of an asshole) http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-aliens/

- I like to find new essays daily at Longform. This could probably sustain you forever. http://longform.org/

These are really fantastic, thank you.

If you flesh this out with 1,000 nights... First off: Awesome! That's a hell of a lot of grind. Secondly, I'll totally do it. Or at least try it.

Would be cool to see a simple web app that let you check them off as you went. The preset list of them, that is. So, if you put together this list also in some consumable format like JSON, I'll write the app to read this list format and record progress. Go!

GitHub allows you to check things off in their GitHub Flavored Markdown.

https://help.github.com/articles/github-flavored-markdown#ta...

My thoughts exactly! This is a great resource, and the audience is probably very big (but the cross section who also use Github is probably not quite so big). I'd love to help as well.

I like this idea but how long does it roughly take to read a short story, poem and essay? It sounds like a significant amount of time every night.

The longest short story I've seen so far has been around 5,000 words, which will take about 38 minutes to read [1]. Most of the poems are very short, and the essays are quite varied.

Assuming you don't have two hours to dedicate to reading each night, you could always still use the guide but break one night's content into two nights worth of reading. Provided that you read something each night, I'd count the endeavor as a success.

[1] - http://www.speechinminutes.com/

Perhaps obvious, but why not add some of Ray Bradbury's own short stories to the list?

Limiting myself to one each:

Short stories – Flannery O'Connor

Poems – Edward Thomas

Essays – George Orwell

Thanks, I'll add them to the list of resources we have in the repository.

Would you ever consider putting the text of these pieces of literature into the repo? There is always the chance that links break and all that.

We're actually discussing what structure the entire repo should take here: [1].

What I think I'll do is create directories for each type of content (short story, poem, essay) and then another directory within those for each author. Finally, inside each author's folder will be individual .txt files, named after the title of the piece, which (without violating copyright) will hold the actual text. If we can't put the full text into the file, a single line with a link to the best online version will be used.

[1] - https://github.com/kyledreger/1000-nights/issues/3

Isn't this basically what the Arabian Nights book is?

1001 stories and poems to read before bed.

I really enjoy O'Henry's short stories.

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