Aunt Louise’s Summer Vacation

Here’s an exquisite corpse-ish thing that my girlfriend and I did for fun tonight.

minipoem4: revision

Revised code from yesterday, this time with more words and a decompression algorithm that takes up less space:

perl -e'@c=split//," hetoaiw";@r=map{-65+ord}split//,
"LCFAdAL^_ARAxLXA^AP^PEMA|EbHdErDbDkDp_jTR^tCTFXD^CjDxD}CmLdC~ChCXCL~RHP[mD|Sb]dTP_PmTC";
$w[$i++/2].=$c[$_&7].$c[($_&56)>>3]for@r;
{$_=$w[++$j%2?rand@w:rand 9].(rand>.4?" ":$j%5?"\n":"\n\n");s/ +/ /g;print;redo}'

Original 256-byte version here. Aside from the additional words, the output of this version is identical to the output of yesterday’s version.

minipoem4

Update: See here for a revised, more efficient revision of this program.

Here’s another shot at a 256-character poem generator in Perl. My main goal was to generate poems with metrical and syntactic variety—you can judge for yourself whether or not I succeeded. UNIXey users can cut-and-paste the following on the command line:

perl -e'@c=split//," hetoaiw";
$r="LCFAdAL^_ARAxLXA^AP^PEMA|EbHdErDbDkDp_jTR^tCTFXD^CjDxD}CmLdC~ChCXCL~RHP[mD|S";
for(0..75){$x=ord(substr$r,$_,1)-65;$w[$_/2].=$c[$x&7].$c[($x&56)>>3]}
{$_=$w[++$i%2?rand@w:rand 9].(rand>.4?" ":$i%5?"\n":"\n\n");s/ +/ /g;print;redo}'

(I added some line breaks above to make it more readable in a browser window, thereby upping the byte count. Download the 255-byte original here. The program repeats forever; add |more to the end of the command line to examine a page of output at a time, and press Ctrl+C to quit.)

Sample output and more about how it works after the cut.

Bleah

I tried to do something as cool as Nick Montfort’s ppg256-1, but failed miserably. I had a sort of pseudo-Markov chain thing going, but then I realized that my “encoding” plus the code to decode the encoded text was actually larger than the decoded text itself. I did make a 256-byte Perl program, however, and it did create output that I didn’t hate:

talk
room at talk next
this
room what next dawn
talk
there this room at what
the
that we

next the
that
this dawn at there talk talk
talk at

as
talk was was room room that talk
talk dawn talk with with
dawn
room what next we this
at dawn
talk as
dawn next talk

I’m going to work more on this, though. It’s an interesting challenge.

Initial experiments with my printing sphere

Apologies for missing an entry yesterday. I was working on this:

Click on the image for a larger version.

This print is the culmination of my recent experiments with linocut type. I took a bunch of words that I’d carved up, and glued them to the outside of a medicine ball, like so:

I made this in response to an assignment in Living Art, a class I’m taking at ITP. The assignment was to “make random.” More information and photos here, and further prints are forthcoming.

“Log in to the blissful See”: Wordnet Oulipo Exercises

Today’s experiment involves re-interpreting the classic N+7 Oulipo exercise, but with WordNet.

Instructions for this exercise: Replace each noun or verb with the third item in the list of its sister terms. (If there are not four items, or if the fourth item is identical to the word in question, choose the highest possible numbered term; if no sister terms are listed, the word stands.) Source: Remarks of Senator Barack Obama: Virginia Jefferson-Jackson Dinner.

We are tired of being short-circuited by our chemistry. We are tired of being dislocated. We’re tired of picking up proposals piped up and ten-item concepts condemned in the affectionateness of an arms race only to have nothing change when everyone sets to Washington. Because the wheedlers just rhyme another inland bill. Or because wheedlers start minding about how they’ll win the next referendum instead of why they should. Or because they think on who’s up and who’s down instead of who is well.

And while Washington is afforded with the same idyll and confrontation and disregard, another company posts a For Sale contagion in the front firebreak. Another distillery shuts its gates forever. Another father answers procedure because she cannot square her firstborn’s medical accounts.

More after the cut.

Geek-out with Python

My implementation of a binary tree and text concordance in Python. Not technically an “experimental text,” though it will facilitate some upcoming stuff I’ve been thinking about.

And the air, and dream and thence

Kuranes wished to men once I met within the while the northwards ever. And I viewed by the purple and the mysterious South, golden glare came back through tropic forests, rely on that nursery were, and azure, and bring in the Sea. But I answered that is reality, Kuranes had ever saw men and asked him was not trembled. There and sky, meanwhile there theirs, and while seeing him, seeing man could not to him:

Then Kuranes almost free. I lay alone without moss. At eventually they cast it upon the mid-desert with one another things rejoiced and had loved the river listened the King of nothing but always beneath again with hunger vines, so that he would send spies to the surges and some years that loved his named Poltarnees behold the day dawned, rosy and slew me secret; some have seen the petals of all the anger out of the have describe the basalt pillars to show in naked ugliness and looked. For they said softly to entered dragons with her and are silent. All my grandfather kept his knees, Beholder of the oarmen, commenced to it by those night, and of Cathuria standing over which we may appeared. One day was full moon shone on that London that were older than the streams.

And the air, and dream and thence.

Push the door to the other side of the lava: Markov Chain Walkthroughs

For Play the door to the statue, then take a switch to get across these years forehead on the end of Zephos, the Boomerang

Spoils: None

This Piece of the timing to it. (make sure the station>>Transport Tunnel-Chozo Ice Temple of the white door. Do it quickly so that will not takes you used effects when Ridley)

Landing to claim the Helmaroc King’s Pictograph as he appearing the side of the her and while start to destroy them with your morphball and reenter this is gone! When you get close to dodge.

The Phazon Mines West. If you may have a blocks for even solidified, but then focus on it, and didn’t stop playing to speaks ancient ship and the far side. Draw your thermal visor, chozo artifact, keep track on the sea as I have beam shot, Bombs. Pick a Bomb the enemies on your going cleverly hard. L-targets that look across, lower beating out of the white. All this, but only easy; they dropped by a ride it pumping and disappear.

Word frequency patterns visualized

The following image shows the relative frequency of words in William Carlos Williams’ This is just to say. Each word is represented as a box; more common words are more lightly shaded.

After the jump for the same treatment of The Waste Land. (Yes, I will eventually start using more interesting source texts.)