Consider Cthulhu

Today I found out about a web site called, "I Write Like."  It will analyse a sample of text and determine which author your writing style is most like.  Needless to say, that was an hour of productivity out the window.  I put my most recent blog posts in, and these are the authors it chose:

• I Still Think Digital Watches Are A Pretty Neat Idea - David Foster Wallace  
• Advanced Tweetology - David Foster Wallace  
• Well York U Too - H. P. Lovecraft  
• It Won't Work - HP Lovecraft
• One Of My Biggest Pet Peeves Is - David Foster Wallace
• Politics From the Fifth Dimension - David Foster Wallace

...thus giving me the third time in recent weeks that I've name dropped David Foster Wallace.  That may sound pretentious, but I deserve it dammit; I read all of Infinite Jest, even the endnotes, so I deserve some post-modern literary swagger.  And just to see if my writing style has changed in the year-and-a-half that I've written this blog, I tried one of my earliest posts, and the author gave me was Dan Brown. So then I tried some other sites:

• Wired - Cory Doctorow
• The Onion - Dan Brown
• Stereogum - David Foster Wallace

So Dan Brown is really taking a beating in this post.  I also compared news sites, each of them on a report of today's shutdown resolution:

• BBC - William Shakespeare
• CBC - David Foster Wallace
• CNN - William Shakespeare
• Fox News - Mario Puzo

Speaking of authors I've name dropped recently, this all started with a post on John Scalzi's blog in which he asked fans what authors he has a similar style to.  Someone fed a sample of one of his book Old Man's War into I Write Like, and the result was James Fenimore Cooper.  I put the blog post itself in, and it chose H.P. Lovecraft.

And finally, I put the first page of David Foster Wallace's essay, Consider the Lobster in for analysis, and the author chosen was, again, H.P. Lovecraft.