On 09/05/2020 16:59, Brad Klee wrote:
It’s perfectly fine to have an opinion, and I don’t care who you like more. It wouldn’t hurt my feelings or stop me from writing. Alan’s is the original, and that is important.
The only thing relevant to the list is what is your procedure for deciding P2 << P1 for two similar poems P1 & P2?
I run them both through a large and complex neural network trained on a modest-size of highly relevant data and a colossal amount of other training data that presumably informs the weights in the net somehow. Understanding the reasons for a neural network's judgement is notoriously difficult even when the network in question is implemented in wetware and coupled to sophisticated communication hardware, but I think some of the things that make the difference for me are: - "These COVID" is not grammatical. - "COVID" is the name of the disease, not the germs. (Allan has "the COVID virus", which I think is OK; the virus that causes COVID[-19].) - Antecedent of "they" in line 3 is unclear. I guess it's meant to be the germs? "Attend" seems a weird word to use for them, even with humorous intent. - Too many syllables in line 3. - Metre of line 4 is completely wrong. - "mightn't commence any at all" seems ungrammatical to me (but this may just be a usage I'm not familiar with; do universities commence students, rather than students commencing intransitively?)
Please also notice that I did not say “my poem >> Alan’s”, because first of all, it is rude to say such a thing, and even then it isn’t provably true.
I thought that was the clear intention, and it was exactly because it seemed kinda rude that I felt OK offering my contrary opinion, quod erat disputandum. -- g