Seasons

Are you Dracula, or the Spandex cow?

You’re right about the pattern and dirty words, OnyxFlame. But the verses depend solely of the input of the visitors… Usually the phrases in the French version sounds better than the English ones. On their links page I found this other page with crazy, randomly generated, headlines for medical stories: http://chanter.com/yves/medical.htm Very funny! And the phrases are well build. I tried to discover how it’s done, by isolating the building blocks. I think It’s more complex as it looks at first sight (or the programmer cheats and the phrases arte less random than they pretend to be).

I'm not at all surprised that a lot of people here like these kinds of things. We seem to be by and large linguistic enthusiasts with artistic and musical talents. In my writing, I like to explore the bizarre and make people laugh. For example, I wrote a story that you could read without understanding but could listen to and understand it completely. It was something like "Duh Why Lee Focks". It was hilarious to listen to because the reader would make sense but pronounce everything in a strange way.

Then there are ways to write that break expectations, like "He had an apple in each hand and a pear in the other."

I've been playing a sort of game with a few of my poet friends that just involves writing two-line poems. One guy will write about three dozen first lines and pass them over to the other guy (usually by email), who will finish the poems (or pass them to someone else to make three-line poems from). It's surprising what good results we sometimes get.

I've done "3 line stanza" poems with my cousin, similar to what you're talking about except since we're in person we generally make the poem tell a story as we go along. The last one was about a group of 40 sailors who went off in a ship to explore. They were carrying a cargo of kale, and everyone got really sick of eating it, so one night a sailor unveiled his stash of contraband celery. They all got drunk and the one gay sailor on board got sensory overload. Then a deserted and sinister-looking island came in view, but it had a lot of fruit trees so they were going to land anyway so they wouldn't get scurvy or something. Unfortunately, we never finished it, but it could've been really interesting.

Hmm, not too impressed with newzoid.com. It sounds TOO much like real news.

Here's some examples my own program has produced. WARNING: may include dirty words and/or adult stuff


DEFIANT CAMEL MOUNTS 821 COWS.
JENNIFER LOPEZ DONATES FIFTEEN IDIOTS TO "SUCK THE MISSILES" FUND.
OPERATION EROTIC GNOME FAILS WHEN 7 PROSTITUTES BEEP ANALLY.
WOMAN REPORTEDLY CHASTISES SATAN WITH A NACHO.
SCIENTISTS DISCOVER MENOPAUSAL NUNS ON THE STARSHIP ENTERPRISE.
UROLOGIST UPRISING IN BEIRUT LEAVES SNAKES PREGNANT.
WEATHERMEN SAY BEAN DIP ABUSE IS THE LEADING CAUSE OF INCONTINENT GRANDMOTHERS.
STONED GOLFER DENIES DRINKING KING KONG'S URINE.
ELVIS IMPERSONATORS RESCUE 69 ROMULANS FROM CRAPPING GRANDMOTHER.
FLATULENT MAN AVENGES SISTER WITH HIS ASS.

Yes, I have a twisted mind.

One of the best of our two-line poems:

Tell me of the land of my forefathers
and then shut up.

Onyx, isaacc, I love those!

Prof, that is so cool that you do stuff like that with your wife. It sounds like you're friends too. A lot of people (guys especially) want to get sucked into the whole knight/damsel construct (which is artificial anyway) at the expense of everything else.

I particularly liked this piece of medical news:

A report to the House Subcommittee on Mad Cow Disease, endorsed by the National Rifle Association, brazenly dares to suggest that a prediction made by Nostradamus increases the chances of religious extremism.

Patricia: I've figured out the pattern of the medical report thingy. It's really pretty simple, every headline has the same pattern.

DOCUMENT (a new CIA report, Martha Stewart's new bio-epic) MEDIA/GROUP (premiering tonight on Fox, hitting the newsstands later this week) INTENT DESCRIPTOR (makes it doubtful that, lays to rest the issue of whether) CAUSE (unsaturated fat, frequent computer use) CAUSAL RELATIONSHIP (helps prevent, contributes to) EFFECT (fascism, the common cold)

Guess all that random sentence programming *is* useful for something.

Onyx, isaac- hilarious! I wonder if we could create a similar news generator for the Forge using plug-ins. I just thought of something- we could build a bunch of "newspart" plug-ins, and then a sort of "meta" plug-in to generate different news. it could be called (headline) and have entries like:

(news-person) (news-action) (news-target), (news-event) leaves (news-person) (news-state), etc, etc

Butterfly- yah, we're good friends. It's nice. I had a damsel/knight relationship once, and it was the most messed up thing.

One of my friends wrote this short poem called Fancy Banana. It's one of my favorites:

Fancy banana
Not good to eat
Very fancy

OnyxFlame, Professor, in the meantime I figured that out too, but separated the verbs in those preceding by someone (experts), and those preceding in something (media) . I filled the plugins with phrases of that site and some of my own – I plan to add more of them later. I’m using a response like :

I have (read there is|seen|heard about|have been told there's) a (Med_source16832), ((Med_verb_by16832) by (Med_expert16832)|(Med_verb_in16832) in (Med_media16832)), that (Med_intention16832) (Med_cause16832) (Med_action16832) (Med_disease16832).

I haven’t shared the plugins because they are quite specific and I think it will be much less fun if all the bots start telling the same stories. But if you would like to use them too, I will share them .