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Wedding Speech

For my sisters wedding, I put a good amount of effort into:

and it was fun to deliver, so I figured I'd put it online. What I actually said deviated from the script a little, but it's more-or-less what I said.

Nobody's pulled me off this lecturn yet, so I'm going to do some more talking. I wasn't actually allocated a speech, but I'm doing this anyway.

Anna and I, and our parents Chris and Val, were Laura's first roommates. We all lived together for ~20 years, while Mum and Dad fed us and taught us to be the model citizens you see before you. I'm an engineer. I like maths, computers, and rules. My Myres Brigg's personally test results have at the top: "Good order is the foundation of all things", so you can probably imagine that Laura and I didn't always get along.

Both Laura and I have both previously worked at wedding venues like this, and seen hundreds of wedding speeches before. Some good, some bad, some gross... so coming up with something unique was sorta my goal here. So while everyone else has shared some nice personal stories and anecdotes about Laura - about how loud, energetic, and chaotic she is - I was thinking I'd do a more factual "Laura by the numbers".

So, to do that, first, I needed some data. Luckily, Facebook lets you download all the messages you've ever sent anyone, which is something I like to do for fun, so I collected gigabytes of data until I found all the messages Laura and I have every sent eachother, in a single file.

Laura and I sent our first message to each other in 2011. In just our personal chat, and not any of the MANY group chats we're in, we've sent 13984 messages, 1196 photos, for a total of 94415 words. To put this into perspective, this is over 1.2 "Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stones". And we really don't even message each other that much. There are probably a whole lots of you in the audience, and especially in the bridal party, who've talked to Laura FAR more than me. So when you think about it, compared to people maybe 100 years ago, Laura really is a prolific author.

The earliest mention of Dallas in Laura's messages is on Christmas Eve 2016 when she said: "I have to give Dal his present!". Considering they met in 2014, this was a bit of a slow start really.

In our messages together, Laura has mentioned "Mum" 73 times, "Dad" 114 times, and "Anna" 75 times. But she's said "Dallas" 123 times, topping everyone, even though we've old had half the time to gossip about him... So Dallas really has sorta been a part of our family for some time now.

I wanted to do a little "cute thing", and I searched to see if Laura used the words "love" and "Dallas" in the same message at all. I was hoping to find a message that said something like: "I love Dallas with all my heart" or something, and everyone would sob uncontrollably. Instead I found:

Now, I could tell you what I think about Laura, but that's just an opinion, and this speech is about facts, so I wanted to use an "industry standard" vibe checker, and give our entire chat history to chatGPT and ask it to distill Laura into 5 words. Due to technical limitations I could only give it the last year or so of messages, but I think it got the gist of it. ChatGPT described Laura as "Enthusiastic", "Humerous", "Sociable", "Supportive" and "Resourceful". I think I agree with the first 4, and the last one is because Laura talks about Facebook marketplace bargains a lot.

At this points, I'd love to do a similar analysis on Dallas, but we mainly text, and on Facebook we have a total of 4 messages. Which I think speaks volumes about the difference in communication methods between men and women rather than our relationship.

Now, I'm by no means good at judging relationships, and compared to everyone here tonight, I'm not wiser or more experienced enough to really have an opinion at all. But when I see Laura and Dallas together, I think: "Yep, that makes sense." and I think that's a really good thing. It makes me incredibly happy to be here to see my little sister get married to a fabulous man, and I'm incredibly happy to welcome you to the family Dallas. Cheers!