Typewriter Monkey and ten Deadly Fingers

[divVerent]

The year is 2007 A.D. All the world is waiting for "Typewriter Monkey and ten Deadly Fingers" to be released. All? Not quite! A website inhabitated by impatient pirates is holding out, strong as ever, against the invader. Life is not easy for the British authors stationed in the fortified camps of Warthogs, Donlon, Irration Alley and Drivel Prive.

It all began months ago. As soon as the title "Typewriter Monkey and ten Deadly Fingers" became known for the infamous sequel of the Typewriter Monkey series, people started to conjure ideas about what may or may not happen in it, and discussed about it on forum, newsgroups, chatrooms. It went so far that they wrote FULL BOOKS with this conjectured and invented content, and uploaded it to certain distribution points (of the Foo Network). These were even released with the full final title, and distributed like nothing else.

None of these were real, of course, but people didn't care. They leeched and seeded, seeded and leeched, leeched and seeded. Two days before the real release, someone did something terrible: he "found" a copy that looks like the real thing, and photographed it using a mobile phone camera. Page by page. Sometimes sharp, sometimes not. Sometimes legible, sometimes not. It may be real, but it may be not. He then of course uploaded it to the Foo Network's distribution points, TCG (which lives in the lawless world of Capturecity, where not even murder is prosecuted) among others.

You think that's all? No! Apparently the Typewriter Monkey with his ten Deadly Fingers exists for real! One day later, a text version of it appeared on TCG and probably other places on the Foo Network! Yes, it has typos in it, so it must really have been typed and not OCRed. There is even proof that it used the camera images as its source. Some pages were less sharp than the others, and these are missing some words in the text version. Someone must really have retyped all of it! That must have been the real Typewriter Monkey, who has nothing else to do! The powers of the internet never failed to amaze the commoners.

While trying to type and make himself something to eat, he badly cut himself with his knife, but ignored his blood dripping finger. Later, after he has uploaded "his" work - which, again, may or may not be the real "Typewriter Monkey with ten Deadly Fingers", he fetched some band-aids out of his first-aid box, applied them to his wounded finger, and continued typing on the forums about his great achievement, ignoring the pain from his scar.

Disclaimer: Any similarities to real or fictional persons, companies, products and events are purely coincidental, unintended and for purposes of illustration only. You have been warned. Do not try this at home. No really, don't.

[divVerent]

Note: I may be "Site admin and keyboard killer"... but it wasn't me! Really!

[torus]

I don't read the series anyway. Maybe I'll pick it up in 5 years, when its not cool anymore.

[divVerent]

Just for the hell of it:

Code: Select all

$ pdftotext hp7__dsb_.pdf  - | tr -cd A-Za-z | wc -c
877028
$ echo $((877028 / 400 / 60))
36

So it took one person more than 36 hours to retype all that with 400 keystrokes per minute (not even including spaces), which already is quite much and unrealistic given the poor input image quality.

I conclude that more than one person must have retyped it.

A typical geek has more like 200 keystrokes per minute, and given the poor image quality, we should rather make it 150. Also, most English words are below 8 letters, so I can pessimistically increase the character count by 1/8. This results in 164 work hours then...

[torus]

I find it very hard to believe. Although I have seen said cell phone photos of the pages.

[divVerent]

Of course I am not sure if they are really cellphone photos, I concluded that when I saw them... very low resolution. Every digital camera from the last two years is better.

[C.Brutail]

So who the fuck will get killed?

[KadaverJack]

So who the fuck will get killed?

Who cares?!

[divVerent]

So who the fuck will get killed?

You know who.

(Expecting now one of: "Owl Rly" or "No shit sherlock")

[torus]