Produce! Produce!
Hi, I'm Corey Rosemurgy. It's Valentine's Day.
I read Harlan Ellison's Greatest Hits last year. I want, and should commit myself to making a tier list of the stories it contains. Tier lists are neat. Anyway, something I encountered in the short story "All the Lies That Are My Life" (1981), was a quote that has reemerged in my head on something like a weekly basis since I read its words. It is a quote from Sartor Resartus (1833-4) by Thomas Carlyle. It reads:
Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; for the night cometh, wherein no man can work.
This quote shouts at me and I want to find a way to have it invoke action in my off-hours vs. doom-scrolling
~ y o u t u b e ~ or otherwise. There is always plenty to do that one would be proud of once it's done...be it even "the
pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product."
Interesting thought...could this quote be inspiration for the iconic "The Nightman Cometh" Dayman vs. Nightman episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia?!? :thinking_face:
'Gotta pay the Troll Toll...' :D
Finally, in honor of production, here is a fun little variation I stumbled upon the other week for generating random
alphanumeric [A-Z,0-9] strings by using Base36 encoding. Makes perfect sense, but that star alignment there had never
occurred to me.
function getRandomBase36(length = "Produce! Produce!".length) {
let randomStr = '';
while (randomStr.length < length) {
const randomNum = Math.floor(Math.random() * Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER);
randomStr += randomNum.toString(36); // radix = 36...
}
return randomStr.slice(0, length);
}
And a little React widget to drum up some of those up. You never know, might get lucky and produce something worthwhile.