Michael Sat Feb 19 20:15:56 2005
Blurb generator
So I've been messing around with a little Markov chain script in Perl, intending to use it to have the Toonbot post to the forum occasionally (hee) and later to work it into some sort of automatic caption generator for SCUMF (hee, hee) and suddenly it occurred to me that it might be entertaining to feed all my blurbs into it to see what it comes up with.
So I did. Haven't wrapped a CGI caller around it yet, but that's the obvious next step. Here's a sample output, though, of 200 words. Aren't Markov chains cool? I have modified the chain output so that it always starts with a capitalized word; that makes the output a tad less unreadable than if it started in the middle of a sentence.
Here's the second test output. It's already pretty interesting.
The entire situation is rife with level-mixing hilarity. Inspired rhythm and scansion combine with a thousand years of output, to the metacartoonist's choice of characters, laced as the metacartoonist decides to toss every possible restriction; the result is palpably masterful, the interplay between sign and signified which is unwieldy. Four, baby. Four is the work of art. The strip is about as far as you are, Gentle Reader, that it's been a public service announcement. The introduction of a cartoon character drawing a cartoon. ... What? You -- well, OK, it's true that Ondine draws Jen while Jen is drawing upon the premise of the last election, knowing full well that the reader and the current generation. The metacartoonist returns to the punch by delivering a really big episode, which ends the Ho sidetrack to the well-worn comfort of the holiday season, Toonbots now appears in a row, though. Minimal plot meets collage in Toonbots' newest comics extravaganza. Of course, the redoubtable Lee Adam Herold , who is the canonical canon, which fires inspiration in the established metaphorical landscape; naturally, the inescapable parallels to be had -- as we well know, Cool Enough) -- commercial-message-as-art-form; in so doing, he contrasts the
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Michael Sat Feb 19 20:38:04 2005
Re: Blurb generator
Some more Toonbot wisdom (these might end up recycled into the toon, actually...)
Not enough poetry has been a public service announcement.
In a desperate ploy to regain past levels of productivity, the metacartoonist felt it might be amused at Cajun sauerkraut.
As such it is but it isn't.
Thrill to the Man, and maybe the Woman and Child as well, indeed we're bringin it to the voiceless non-cartooning fans of the subtlety of a true artist.
Never let it be said that Tirdun isn't Cool Enough. With a wrench and a clean mask.
mouse steps into the soul of all established principles of copyright.
Drawing. This, my friends, will be causing 12-foot waves to strike beaches mere miles from the initial shock of implementing someone else's script.
The dimunition of Butch's disembodied head simply serves to distract the careless reader from the 70's while simultaneously invoking the playfulness of the folks here in the Internet's memetic context.
And remember, kids, only you can go with nothing but panels.
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spinclad Sun Feb 20 00:35:55 2005
Re: Blurb generator
> Drawing. This, my friends, will be causing 12-foot waves to strike beaches
> mere miles from the initial shock of implementing someone else's script.
this, in particular, is not only inspired but inducing flashbacks of Boxing Day. (scuse me while i go climb a tree)
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mouse Sun Feb 20 01:08:46 2005
Re: Blurb generator
> this, in particular, is not only inspired but inducing flashbacks of
> Boxing Day. (scuse me while i go climb a tree)
yeah - what all do you feed into that thing to poduce an output? i know you said you fed in all the old blurbs - is it now sort of like a random blurb generator, where you just hit the button? or do you feed info pertinant to the current 'toon (mao + lenin + golden hamster) - or do you continually feed new data in (tsunami + election outcome + death of arthur miller)?
or am i totally confused?
and what's a markov chain?
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Michael Sun Feb 20 09:31:35 2005
Re: Blurb generator
> and what's a markov chain?
It starts with all the old blurbs, which are extracted from the episode database. This is why it sounds "just like me", of course. It's recycling my own text.
Then it constructs a probability table. For each pair of words in a sequence, it builds a table of all third words in a sequence in the source text, with their probabilities of occurrence. Then it selects a random word from the word table to start with, rolls the dice, and selects the next word based on the "chain probability". See? So many word sequences are basically preordained, because they only occur once. But at many junctures (like after "of the") it can jump the track into a next text, so to speak. And does so.
It doesn't know anything about actual grammar or sentence structure -- or indeed anything. But statistical approaches like this can be really powerful in *simulating* understanding, and there's no doubt they're hilarious in effect.
Fun, eh?
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Jenn Sun Feb 20 19:27:55 2005
Re: Blurb generator
More of the programming gobbledygook.
But I heartily approve, largely because it has 'Jen' in it. Which, while not being my name, is close enough to my name. :)
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mouse Sun Feb 20 01:00:23 2005
Re: Blurb generator
> mouse steps into the soul of all established principles of copyright.
cool! i...what?
like i said, michael - just like you....
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Michael Sun Feb 20 13:02:31 2005
And more
These are kinda like potato chips:
Or, if you don't understand, the blurbs are supposed to be a pirate for the archive, which is the first panel.
The metacartoonist isn't feeling very funny in light of today's deceptively simple layout and lettering.
The metacartoonist decides to toss caution to the rather piquante meta-referentiality inherent in re-enacting classical archetypes using novel characters is a cheat, actually, as it's not made from XML, just a simple couplet into the vast storehouse of our own fevered imaginations whistling past the graveyard of the ever-spinning cycle of the hiatal storyline, playfully skirting the edge of irrelevance and incoherence in an exquisite tour de force of captioning.
(That last one is really ... blurb-like. But this next one came up with an entire blurb, perfectly Toonbottian.)
Another Toonbots holiday extravanganza, strongly evocative, vibrant, energetic, and full of perfect scansion at the very banality of the invasion of Iraq (yeah, the actual individual Communists, and even between the metaphorical and the less astute from the digital ether. We stand truly at the ranch, trouble is afoot! After long and careful thought about where to come up with scripting ideas for the sake of all humor: politics.
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mouse Sun Feb 20 00:57:42 2005
Re: Blurb generator
wow.
i mean, WOW.
michael, it sounds just _like_ you. (well, except for a couple of incomplete sentences.)
but some of this is truly beautiful - i mean "Of course, the redoubtable Lee Adam Herold , who is the canonical canon, which fires inspiration in the established metaphorical landscape" - that is just a beautiful image. (except it should be "canonical cannon", but hey, for a first try....)
of course, the sad thing is that when your creation eats you entirely, none of us on the outside will know the difference.
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