Re: What I really want.


Luna wrote:
> How can you like any stories? None of them entirely fit what you want.
> What you want is so specific, that many thousands of well written
> stories and books won't please you. Interesting characters, a tight,
> well-crafted plot, smooth and unobtrusive prose, and original ideas are
> all ruined for you if someone kisses someone somewhere in the story.
> Since the overwhelming majority, and most likely the entirety, of books
> and stories have something in them you don't like, you can't much like
> reading.

Excellent reasoning Luna. If I might generalize a bit: the more
specific the story criteria, the fewer matches you will get. Here's an
interesting question: for every new criteria I add, how do the number
of matches change? I'm going to guess, arbitrarily, that they are
halved. That is, for each criteria you have, it disqualifies half of
all remaining stories. (Frankly, I believe this is a very low estimate
for the types of criteria Tina has. A more reasonable assumption is
that each criteria reduces the remaining pool by 90%).

Let us assume that there are 10 million stories of all sorts in
existence. (This is almost certainly way too high). The number of
stories that match N criteria are: 10^10/2^N. Now, roughly speaking you
have 40 criteria (I'm guessing low - I didn't count). 2^40 =
1,099,511,627,776 (roughly 10^13). 10^10/10^13 = 10^-3 or .001.

In other words, there is much less than 1 story that fits Tina's
criteria. Indeed, even with only 20 criteria you'd be lucky to find a
single story matching all such criteria.

Kind regards,
Josh

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