Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

14 Aug 2013, 18:04 p.m.

Uniform Light

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2013 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

I can be bad at remembering titles (e.g., misremembering "Silent Weapons" as "Distant Voices"). Part of this is because titles in specific genres blur together for me. You can come up with "this is about spaaaaace" titles pretty easily. Constant Gravity, Uniform Acceleration, Specific Heat -- anything from a physics book. You can just keep going. I'm sure some of these are actual books. Specific Gravity. Surface Tension. The Moment of Inertia. I'm reasonably sure that, along the lines of the Chinese restaurant name generator, you could mix-and-match some adjectives and nouns.

Adjectives

  • Constant
  • Specific
  • Uniform
  • Artificial
  • Surface

Nouns

  • Heat
  • Gravity
  • Energy
  • Mass
  • Velocity
  • Memory
  • Frequency
  • Force
  • Light
  • Vacuum

Rejected adjectives: "Star" (too fifties), "Perseid" (Leonard thinks it makes things sound more romance than interstellar), and "Stellar" (sort of tie-in sounding). "Quantum" unfortunately just sounds too cheesy to me, although Quantum Quantum holds a silly appeal.

Along the way I came up with kiddie titles The Moon War or The Luna War, and Leonard and I realized that Jerk could be a parody of Accelerando.

I couldn't possibly be the first person to do this, and I do not care.

Comments

Leonard
14 Aug 2013, 21:06 p.m.

Uwe Boll and Styrofoam will save the day in Quantum Quantum.

Kat
14 Aug 2013, 21:19 p.m.

I made a Chinese restaurant name generator in CS 101, complete with extra credit by having Chinese music load in the background. I'm tickled to see the idea shared.

(I didn't think to put mine online and I'm not sure why. Well, probably because I thought everything I wrote sucked. But other than that.)

Avram
http://grumer.org/
14 Aug 2013, 23:30 p.m.

I wonder if this would combine well with the formulas for murder mystery titles (take a well-known phrase, swap in a form of "murder", "kill", or "death" --- A More Perfect Murder, To Kill or Not to Kill, A Green and Pleasant Murder, He Who Hesitates is Dead) and/or techno-thrillers ("The" + a name from antiquity + a modern-sounding term from high-tech, military, or government --- The Prometheus Sanction, The Agrippa Protocol, The Demosthenes Network, The Ramses Initiative).

Sumana Harihareswara
14 Aug 2013, 23:59 p.m.

Avram, you may enjoy "Tonight's Episode".

Avram
http://grumer.org/
15 Aug 2013, 1:57 a.m.

I'd watch "Kiki's Assassination Service".