Filthy Ditty

It was quite a month. Thanks for reading! Here's a loosely-categorized list of everything that I posted on this blog in April.

My favorites

• Magic: the Gathering blackout poems ("You are the / trees. The / bark and branch / overhead.")
• The average unicode character, made by averaging together bitmaps of progressively larger subsets of the Unicode character set
• A Chrome extension that messes with poetryfoundation.org, replacing their boring taxonomy of poetry with a taxonomy that is randomly generated. (Why read poetry about "love" when you could read poetry about "winglessness and junketting"?)
• Randomly generated adjectives with randomly generated definitions. And they're arranged in rhyming couplets! ("toff-street (adj). wet through the axis of an ox / hastained (adj). subject to change in a box")
• Applying OCR recursively, with Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room" as the source text. ("1 am s1tt1hg 1h a room dlffereht from the one yod are 1h hom.")
• Generating letterforms from Markov chains of one-bit pixel columns. Difficult to explain, but makes for some weird-yet-familiarly-plausible letterforms.

Game-related

• Replacing words in Nintendo games: Faxanadu remixed. ("If elk ban going to the mug div some, nook cids dack.")
• Metroid Prime sonnets, made from a transcript of text that appears in the game. ("Quick to anger, / a lone figure shining in / the face of such horror, we Chozo / do little harm")
• LUCKY, a word game prototype, inspired by Canasta
• A simple design for a deck of playing cards with letters (later printed through the Game Crafter and used to prototype LUCKY)
• Conditionals, a ZZT poem made from parsing the hypertext options in every ZZT game ever made. ("If this game is too hard, / Add pork.")
• Rhyming couplets from ZZT-OOP ("But you're just a talking eggplant! / Did you come for an implant?")
• An alphabetical list of board names (drawn from my corpus of every ZZT game)
• A word list generated by playing a video game prototype

Visual, asemic, animated

• Ebook codec: words with horizontal symmetry fed into system of cellular automata
• Words on rotating cylinders, with the potential to combine to form over 1.5 million sentences
• Exploded letterforms made by feeding the pixel data of individual characters into a system of cellular automata
• Averaged images of every three-, four-, five-, six-, seven- and eight-letter word (using a program similar to the one I used to draw the average unicode character)

Drawn from social media and other public corpora

• Syllabus sonnets, created from lines in a corpus of syllabi that instruct students on what they should or must do
• What Internet RFCs say you must do, versus what Twitter says you must do. Created from the entire corpus of IETF RFCs and about fifteen minutes worth of Twitter search results. The protocol types MUST be Jamaican, because Jamaican me crazy."
• Famous poems mashed up with foursquare venue tips ("The woods are lovely, dark and deep conditioning treatment! / But I have promises to keep checking back yourself. Good luck!")
• Yfrog images, fed into an OCR algorithm, fed into a chapbook
• Repetition poems from Twitter search results

Procedural/constrained composition

• Cut-out poems with the Nook, made by reading the Nook through pieces of paper the same size as the Nook's screen, with holes cut out of them (inspired by Ron Padgett)
• Couplets made from a Markov chain model of the entire Filthy Ditty blog: "strings of remorse and her family of things. / Those students must check their text as strings"
• Generative gossip: randomly generated stories about people you don't know doing stuff you don't care about. ("It all started when Kayleen, Cristine and Mariann were clanking with Jake. Before that, Murray was scheming with Kaley.")
• How to cook "everything": a number of stupid/minimalist shell tricks to make the most of a ten-character string
• Randomly generated definitions of nouns, drawn from WordNet and arranged in rhyming couplets. ("a sailing vessel with a single story / a woman who works in a quarry")
• Poetry with Touchwords, a fascinating iPad application
• Lovecraft n-grams, curated and arranged