Beyond good ol’ Run key, Part 142

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I never heard of OBS (Open Broadcaster Software), until I saw this Twitter thread.

After downloading it, trying it, tinkering with it… I actually found it far more confusing than Screen2Gif, but this is because it offers a lot more advanced options, tweaking, and… supports scripting.

A-HA!

The moment I learnt about scripting, I immediately went to OBS’ Scripting Help section and started reading it with an intention of creating a small PoC. My thought process was: if I can write an OBS script that executes program or command of my liking anytime OBS starts, I am totally writing a new blog post in the series…

BUT

I also browsed the OBS Forum posts… and while doing so, I quickly discovered this OBS script that implements everything that I wanted to demo in the ‘I will write it when I can PoC it’ post.

Booooo to me actually learning OBS Scripting, Hurrah to you reader.

This script is a beauty. It executes programs of your liking at the time OBS starts, and kills them when OBS exits.

And now I feel terrible, because I have contributed NOTHING to this post other than describing other peoples’ work.

The words that go (.)[a-z]\1[a-z]\1[a-z]\1[a-z]\1[a-z]\1

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One of my old hobbies is playing with words. I love all sort of dad jokes, “the longest” words, “the weirdest” words, “foreign words”, homonyms, homophones, palindromes, synonyms, antonyms, metonyms, as well as limericks, haikus, stupid poems, lyrics, word clanging, and so on and so forth. I also used to create my own crosswords, and even wrote a software to generate magic squares. Believe it or not, I got some of this work published…

Now, for the topic of today’s post I decided to look for words that include the same letter at least 6 times and all of these letters must be interleaved with other letters forming ‘real’ words. Things like:

  • hohohohoho, or
  • banananananana, or
  • tralalalalalalalala

These are rare occurrences, unicorns amongst words, amongst world languages, hence… interesting.

However, the examples I have listed above are quite stupid, because these are not real words, really, even if you can find some ‘definitions’ of them online…

For a more real-world example, let’s look at the word floccinaucinihilipilificate – it includes 7 “i”s in a sequence. Yay! The words divisibilities and indivisibilities as well as dirigibilities are also interesting. So is monogonoporous. So is taramasalata. So is takamarahaga. What about humuhumunukunukuapuaa? Danish word degenereret also comes to the rescue. And Dutch spiegeleieren. And so does Hungarian félrevezetése (ignore accents). And a number of Swahili words: akawatazama, atawatawala, harakaharaka.

I know it’s all a silly game, but these words have one thing in common: they represent the complexity of our world, as seen via linguistical lenses, no matter how shallow…

Today is April Fool’s Day: if there is one lesson we can learn from research like this it is that we really know very little about the world… fooling around helps though, and should be strongly recommended.