Let’s say I want to make a sub involving 2 of the choices from a madlib, but one of them is only in the madlib by unfortunate chance – I actually want to say “a and @b”, but there’s a chance that ”@b” will pick “a” as the madlib choice, and it makes no sense to say “a and a”.

Is there any way to tell the system to pick randomly from the madlib choices, but exclude “a”?

Or for the case where only a subset of the madlib choices actually make sense… maybe you want a random time-unit, but “nanosecond” and “jiffy” and “half-month” don’t make sense or sound right.

I’m guessing the answer is probably no, but it’s worth asking.

handofg0d Posted:

but you could do ”@a[1] and @a[2]” to prevent duplicates.

This is actually a common misconception. ”@a[1] and @a[1]” will guarantee your choice will be the same. But ”@a[1] and @a[2]” has no effect on if the choice is different. The concept has been floated and suggested before, but like many good ideas, it’s fallen under the “Sorry but there are higher priority issues to address” category. Hopefully after Ep3 is out ET will have the time to get to some of those.

Yeah… first example I was thinking of something about crashing Earth into @planet, but @planet can return Earth, which would look silly.

Could solve both by allowing something like @[choice a::choice b::choice c] to let people specify their own madlibs. It’d be a bit of a timewaste to construct something like @planet-except-earth, but it could be done.