Comparative Illusion (opens in new tab)

Every new major patch of Path of Exile, someone runs the patch notes through a markov chain generator and comes up with new notes. If you're not familiar with the game they may not make sense. If you are familiar with the game, they bounce between things which almost make sense like in the linked article and things which could actually be in the patch notes.

"Blood chieftains can now hurl blood apes at you." -- I think this was highly requested after the fake notes came out.

link to a previous set of patch notes: https://www.facebook.com/pathofexile/photos/we-ran-the-patch...

I don't understand how "In Michigan and Minnesota, more people found Mr Bush's ads negative than they did Mr Kerry's." is an example of this. To me, that unambiguously parses like this:

   peopleInMichiganAndMinnesota.filter(foundMrBushsAdsNegative).length() > peopleInMichiganAndMinnesota.filter(foundMrKerrysAdsNegative).length()

The linked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_embedding is also interesting. German is famous for its centre embeddings of Nebensätzen, where you end your whole sentence with a pile of verbs.

These remind me of other writing techniques (without names) I use to create surprise, leverage presumptions, structure jokes, and even inject new ideas. If you think of someones train of thought like the staves or horizontal lines in musicial notation, but each line is a layer of attention or abstraction, notes outside those lines aren't obvious, but they have a resonance or dissonance with the base ideas between them, and then a sentence or a paragraph can play over them, creating and resolving tension and leading to the conclusion you had hoped to express. A comparative illusion in this view would be something you would use as a transition, for a change of conecptual key, or to bend the ends of an idea into an loop, inescapable without extra cognitive load, and the mind prefers to accept what it is being presented with instead of epstein didn't kill himself. Comparative illusions can have a very hypnotic and distracting effect, and they are an effective tool of persuasion.

"Nachts ist kälter als draußen." Not sure if this really works in English: "At night is colder than outdoors."

I didn't know the term at the time but I experienced something like this from Karl Pilkington years ago. He was talking about how two examples of a newly discovered species were found at the same time and: "They were discovered the same distance apart from each other."

I don't see how "More people have been to Russia than I have" can initially seem acceptable. I assume it's being parsed as something that makes sense, but what is that? "Many people have been to Russia, but I haven't" or what?

Similarly in computer programming some code just seems like it should work, but it does not compute

More people have been to Russia than I’ve.