ThinkStank

- April 7 -

Random William Carlos Williams Generator

Poetry-generation machine that uses word lists and randomization to create new riffs on WCW’s perennial “This Is Just To Say”, such as:

I have regurgitated
the nuclei
that were below
the satchel

and which
you were probably
building
for evening

Forgive me
they were bewildered
so bloody
and so ceaseless

Go make your own, at the William Carlos Williams generator.
 

25 notes link

- April 20 -

Amazon Amazon Pants On Fire

A greasemonkey script that automatically makes amazon links weirder. 

The script takes advantage of the mungibility of amazon.com product links’ descriptive content to create alternate, but still functional, urls with entertaining or surreal or troubling fake descriptions.

Some examples of what the output might look like:

http://www.amazon.com/Emulate-Hitler/dp/B000I1TNBS/

http://www.amazon.com/I-Must-Go-To-The-Dentist-Soon/dp/B00005AKZI/

http://www.amazon.com/The-Children-Are-Screaming/dp/B002ZXMZBM/

3 notes link

- April 15 -

Automatic Madlibs

A web app or greasemonkey script that uses natural language processing to turn any webpage into a madlib. 

Using a collection of syntactic-analysis heuristics, Automatic Madlibs parses the content of a given url, identifies specific parts of speech, and replaces words with their category prompts, prompting the user to enter nouns and verbs and adjectives and so forth to rewrite the webpage.

So far example:

Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

…becomes…

[greeting] to Wikipedia, the [adjective] [noun] that anyone can [verb].

…becomes…

Holla back to Wikipedia, the fugly porcupine that anyone can poop. 5 notes link

- April 14 -

Bene-Drill

Drowsiness simulator, for when you want to do a dry run before actually taking drowsy-making medicine to figure out whether it might lead to injury or death or social regrets.

Enter your weight, your dosage, and hit start.  Every few minutes it generates progressive status updates on the onset of your simulated meds:

- “mouth is a little dry”

- “man, you seem to be blinking a lot”

- “you just missed thirty seconds of that conversation because you were staring at the far wall”

- “hey okay its pretty much time to take a nap I guess, pull over”

Basically a kind of trial-run pharmacological GPS for Do Not Operate Heavy Machinery situations.

link

- March 30 -

One-Word Threads: Autosummary

A web-based tool that, when pointed at a given discussion thread (or comments section, or forum post, or what have you), will parse it into individual comments and then replace the content of each comment with the single most “interesting” word in that comment.

The result: a one-word-per-comment reduction of the original thread. 

Essentially an extremely restricted word cloud mechanism applied on a per-comment basis.

The metric for “interestingness” is open to interpretation: 

- Simple solution: just the word in a comment with the lowest frequency value compared to some baseline English language frequency table (for English-language discussions, natch; the concept is fundamentally internationalizable). 

- Local context: use a modified frequency table that takes into account the local distribution of words, to avoid having every comment that mentions some uncommon-in-general word that is a theme of the specific conversation represented by that word.

- Avoid repeats: if a word has already been used as the “interesting” representative of a given comment in the thread, weight the interestingness value for that word somewhat negatively to favor other words that might be less interesting in an absolute sense but are more interesting in context for being novel to the autosummary-in-progress.

1 note link

- March 21 -

Webcam Fleshguard

A plugin for webcam software that will monitor your outgoing camera signal for specific flesh tones (ideally calibrated by the user, to avoid the Crayola Dilemma re: “flesh”) and fire off a pop-up window warning you that you appear to be kind of naked before you start broadcasting, for those occasions where you’re hanging out naked in front of your webcam but not on purpose.

An optional feature would add a small chyron to your outgoing feed with the message “IS AWARE OF NUDITY” should you choose to proceed anyway, just to keep things clear for your interlocutors.

Additional optional feature: two user both transmitting that AWARE message would be shown an additional message congratulating them for practicing nudity-awareness and encouraging them to high five.

5 notes link