Apologies if you think this isn’t the right place. Also if you have seen this already and are rolling your eyes at my naivete. But here is a palindrome.
Maybe an inspiration for somebody.
Please let me know who the original author is. I haven’t been able to discover yet.
Dammit I’m mad.
Evil is a deed as I live.
God, am I reviled? I rise, my bed on a sun, I melt.
To be not one man emanating is sad. I piss.
Alas, it is so late. Who stops to help?
Man, it is hot. I’m in it. I tell.
I am not a devil. I level “Mad Dog”.
Ah, say burning is, as a deified gulp,
In my halo of a mired rum tin.
I erase many men. Oh, to be man, a sin.
Is evil in a clam? In a trap?
No. It is open. On it I was stuck.
Rats peed on hope. Elsewhere dips a web.
Be still if I fill its ebb.
Ew, a spider… eh?
We sleep. Oh no!
Deep, stark cuts saw it in one position.
Part animal, can I live? Sin is a name.
Both, one… my names are in it.
Murder? I’m a fool.
A hymn I plug, deified as a sign in ruby ash.
A Goddam level I lived at.
On mail let it in. I’m it.
Oh, sit in ample hot spots. Oh wet!
A loss it is alas (sip). I’d assign it a name.
Name not one bottle minus an ode by me:
“Sir, I deliver. I’m a dog”
Evil is a deed as I live.
Dammit I’m mad.
The IF world’s expert on palindromes is @nickm, if I recall correctly, but I don’t know if he’s around here much at the moment! Of course @aschultz also knows a thing or two about them.
The show starts with the actors onstage moving awkwardly and speaking an incomprehensible yet consistent language. They break and cut down a small tree and start building a civilization in its stead, complete with a huge statue of their Leader, a symbol of man's triumph over nature, the harnessing of nature's powers and man's mastery over all.
The actors go off-stage. A semi-transparent curtain drops and the whole performance is projected on the curtain backwards. The statue is still half-visible, looming behind the curtain.
The awkward jitterish movements from before become fluent. The language becomes understandable English. The audience sees the reverse of what happened live on stage: the dismantling of the statue and the civilization, until the last actor on stage re-attaches the last broken limb to the small tree.
To be clear about the skill and craft and preparation: the actors played and spoke the piece backward. This was filmed normally (“forward”) and then projected backward. This backward projection makes sense as if it was played forward.
I felt as if my perception was twisted through a cloth-wringer and put back together again. Form and content clicked. A-ma-zing experience.
This sounds pretty incredible. Did they record the performance live (while you were watching) and then reverse it, or was it played back from archive? I’m picturing that it would be like listening to a really long version of those scenes in the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks.
“Dammit I’m mad” is by comedian Demetri Martin. Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is a recent movie wrapped up with palindromes in many ways. Twenty years ago, I published a collaboration with William Gillespie that was a 2002-word palindrome, and is called 2002: A Palindrome Story. The most compelling recent palindrome-writing, as far as I’m concerned, is shorter, and by Mike Maguire and Anthony Etherin.
Have you ever realised where that came from? The Sator Square theory? If you read it back to front, or left to right/up to down, it reads the same. It also apparently means (in Latin) “The farmer, Arepo, works the plough.” Also see the Paternoster theory.
Did you see all the 5 words from the Sator Square in the movie?
It’s very impressive when people build a whole work around palindromes. I don’t have the time to play Kingdom of Loathing any more, but man, I loved the Palindome and all the items and enemies (taco cat, stab bats, etc.)
Building a work with palindromes woven in is extra impressive to me since I wrote a script that stuffed together two-word palindromes for Ailihphilia. I used brute force. That is creativity!
And it’s been 4+ years, but someone else pointed something out to me. One of the items that appears is a martini tram.
Now I have an account at webpbn.com which is for paint-by-number logic puzzles. I try to write a few of my own–part of the whole initiative for wriitng. A couple weeks ago, someone posted a bunch of them based on palindromes, and I thought, hey, I can do that, too!
One of my puzzles was a martini tram, and one person who solved it wrote “Martini mini-tram?!”
I totally missed that possibility. And it fits in that much better! So the end result is, I may try to squeeze in a minor update of Ailihphilia on 3/2/23 or 3/20/23-3/29/23 just to add that. I also have a lot of random text to add. The puzzle is here: https://www.webpbn.com/play.cgi?id=36434
So I’m trying to post one palindrome per day there. A few are ideas that didn’t fit in as items, which is really cool! (Protip: there are lots of neat hotkeys there. H and V make horizontal and vertical lines of a certain color. 2 = black, 1 = a dot, 3 = red, 4 = green, 5 = blue, 0 = reset. L = hint.)
Two maybe-spoilery palindromes related to Trinity:
O Gnomon, go!
Ha! Gnomon … gah!
How cheaty are interjections with palindromes? I’ve always wondered.
These refer to how you are hinted that you need to take the gnomon (I forgot to the first time. There was some guess-the-verb,) then how you may have trouble first putting the gnomon where it should be and consequently getting the suns to stay. I remember figuring out what to do in Japan, but the bird couldn’t find the exit, so I died a lot despite figuring good chunks of the game out.
I’m also pleased to note that online palindrome checkers exist. Of course, we can write our own, but it’s neat to see an interface.
First, I put out a new release of Ailihphilia on 3/29/23, because palindromic dates, ha ha ha. It contains really only minor touch-ups. I also included 29 paint-by-number puzzles of palindromes, or links to them, in an HTML file. I’ve since written 6 or 7 more, and I have several more planned.
As I went through my notes I realized that a lot I transcribed from my weekly notes files were, in fact, already in, or they were written down twice.
So I realized I had a few small questions.
how much slang or onomatopoeia is useful in standard palindromes? I thought of “I always yawl, ai” as a palindrome, technically, but “ai” sure is a stretch.
how much can we twist sentences to make a palindrome? For instance, a good book title would be “No, It Can: ACTION!” but it feels like it’s slightly abusing the concept, or it’s definitely lesser than
Also, https://english.stackexchange.com/ has been exceptionally good for me to find out new details of palindromes and palindrome-adjacent sentences and such. Maybe I should ask these questions over there, though they might not allow for a concrete-enough answer!
Maybe use “yawl” to describe a type of boat? For the second question, I feel one can push decently far. That one is cute. Though I’ve heard some people object to having too much punctuation in a palindrome.
Yes, for something that seems as concrete as palindromes (the letters work or they don’t) there are definitely rules we can’t quite define! I’m okay with lots of punctuation, but I do wonder about slang. I think, for instance, something like “Boo, NOOB!” is okay, as is leet steel, but there are edge cases.
In the case of yawl, I always remembered it as a sort of spin-off of yowl. And of course, ai and ay are exclamation marks of surprise. So we have some leeway there but we don’t want to abuse it!
I’d guess acronyms and abbreviations also fall into that grey area. it’s be hard to do without Mr. Alarm and Dr. Awkward, but stuff like SNAFU fans or SCUBA cubs may be a bit more of a stretch, even if those acronyms (along with RADAR) have come to be accepted as words.
A simple example of this would be OMG, Mo’! (Or, if we want to add proper and brand names, “Alli, ZOMG! Mozilla!”
