Tom Murphy VII is not crazy. He just woke up one morning with an odd idea in his head: what would a movie look and sound like if you ordered every word of dialogue alphabetically? And instead of rolling over and going back to sleep like the rest of us would, he spent the next 42 hours making it happen. But, no, "Tom 7," as he goes by on Twitter, isn’t crazy—if he was, he wouldn't have been able to create the brilliantly futile Star Wars video we showed you Thursday.

When we first saw the movie, all we could think was, why does this exist? And then, how long did it take to make? And perhaps most importantly, why can’t we stop watching it?

“The video is meant to be provocative in its uselessness,” Murphy says. "I don't really know where it came from. I like to think of stuff like music or a book or Wikipedia or a movie as data—how can you take that and play around with it?"

Here’s how he made "ARST ARSW" ("Star Wars" rendered alphabetically):

First, he had to pick a film. He thought about Memento, a movie that is already out of order, but found the dialogue was too generic. After going through AFI’s lists of top movies, eventually he realized Episode IV was perfect. Once that was decided, he started with a simple C++ program (because he’s an old-school hacker), which only took 12 hours of his time to complete.

“The software loads up the audio from the movie and the individual frames and lets me edit where the words start and end," he says. "You adjust the start and end points as the word plays in a loop over and over, until it's perfect."

Easy, right? Not quite. First Tom 7 had to painstakingly go through the movie word by word and write each one down. Once he had identified all the words, he had to type each one in and cut around where it began and ended. That took 30 hours, he estimates. “Maybe more than that, actually,” he adds. “I don’t know, I wasn’t really keeping track.” From his 11,000-word transcript, his program then “assembled it into a movie in alphabetical order.” All this happened on his beast of a home computer, which he injected with 64GB of ram so that he could load the entire Blu-ray film into the memory.

“I kept myself from watching it that way until I was done," he says. "Mental fortitude, you know."

Tom 7 has a knack for elevating grunt work. By day, the engineer with a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon works at Google using machine learning “for things that matter,” but on his free time he likes “to take it and turn it on its head and do something whimsical."

Up until now, his crowning achievement had been the above video, which shows the results of four months teaching a computer how to play Nintendo. He’s happy with how "ARST ARSW" turned out but slightly disappointed that it's about to eclipse that project, which took much more time: "But that's the internet for you."

There's also his quest to run along every street in Pittsburgh, which he has carefully mapped. Sometimes this means he runs 30 miles just to reach a tiny side street he was missing. “It’s been something like 5,000 miles of running," he says. "It's good for me—well, usually. Sometimes it’s a little bit too hot and I’ll get stranded way far out and I could probably die from that."

A Decidedly Weird Thing I'll Never Do Again

So where does this appetite for provocatively pointless projects come from? Partially, it’s just Tom 7’s sense of humor. But it’s also more than that. Once he masters something, he grows bored and begins to wonder: what weird thing could I do with this skill now?

The best example of this is Tom 7’s penchant for running marathons in decidedly un-aerodynamic costumes. He once ran a marathon wearing handcuffs attached by a thick chain to leg irons, while his friend (who was dressed as a Keystone Cop) chased him.

And he finished it.

“I’m not gonna win any races," he says, "but I'm pretty sure I hold the world record for running a marathon in leg irons and handcuffs."

And also one, we'd guess, for making a 43-minute film entirely in alphabetical order.