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:

If you can't write poems,
write me