Amulet version 1.1
2021-2-21

Definition

An amulet is a kind of poem that depends on lan­guage, code, and luck. To qualify, a poem must sat­isfy these criteria:

• Its complete Unicode text is 64 bytes or less. [1]
• The hexadecimal SHA-256 hash of the text includes four or more 8s in a row. [2]

There are no other rules! An amulet can be written in any lan­guage and any style. It can be composed, generated, or “discovered” in any way.

The number of sequen­tial 8s in the hash deter­mines the rarity of the amulet:

• 8888: common
• 88888: uncommon
• 888888: rare
• 8888888: epic
• 88888888: legendary
• 888888888: mythic
• 8888888888+: ???

And, while this isn’t part of the formal def­i­n­i­tion, it’s impor­tant to say that an amulet of any rarity should be judged by its overall effect, with con­sid­er­a­tion for both its lin­guistic and typo­graphic qualities. In particular, an amulet’s whitespace, punctuation, and dia­critics should all be “load bearing”.

A poem doesn’t become inter­esting simply by sat­isfying the con­straints of some obscure form; likewise, an amulet isn’t col­lectible simply because it’s rare.

But... it doesn’t hurt.

A few stray con­sid­er­a­tions:

• Spe­cial appre­ci­a­tion is reserved for the amulet that is, in any sense, “aware of its circumstances”.

• It is tempting to stylize “amulet” as “amul8”; this, unfortunately, is too dorky.

• There is sig­nif­i­cant luck involved in the pro­duc­tion of amulets; you might con­sider them bouillon cubes of fortune, useful as ingre­di­ents in other recipes, dig­ital and occult.

Footnotes:

[1] Uni­code (UTF-8) char­ac­ters often require more than one byte; most pro­gram­ming lan­guages pro­vide a func­tion to deter­mine the byte size of a string.

[2] For most programmers, the SHA-256 hash func­tion will be familiar and close to hand. For other readers inter­ested in seeing how it works, this scratchpad might be useful.

Discussion

The SHA-256 hash func­tion is ubiq­ui­tous in cryptography. In Zora, for example, it’s used to verify the iden­tity of a piece of media, like a fingerprint. That media could be an MP4 movie, a PNG image, or a poem in plain text; if you change one frame, one pixel, or one comma, you change the SHA-256 hash entirely.

The hash is a cold hexa­dec­imal spew –

9a120001c­c88888363fc67c45f2c52447ae64808d497ec9d699d­ba0d74d72aab

– and, like a fingerprint, it doesn’t tell you any­thing about the entity it identifies. That’s by design, but even so, it feels strange for a value so piv­otal to be totally dis­con­nected from the under­lying content, espe­cially when it is this value that’s being col­lected and traded in cryp­to­graphic marketplaces.

Ostensibly, the hash pro­vides an immutable link between unique cryp­to­graphic object and free-floating dig­ital media.

The amulet asks: what if we took that link seriously?

In a sense, the def­i­n­i­tion of the SHA-256 hash func­tion created, at a stroke, all amulets of all rarities. Common to mythic, trashy to lovely, they have been hiding in the man­i­fold com­bi­na­tions of lan­guage; we just didn’t know we ought to be looking for them. Until now!

How should we feel about this? I will invoke an amulet of uncommon rarity; you saw its SHA-256 hash above, five 8s in a row, lucky indeed: