I didn't have as much time as I usually do for National Novel Generating Month, but I think the less time I spend on it, the better the results. I started out with a plan to do a complex, procedurally-generated parody of Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili but only got as far …

Last year I went right over the top for National Novel Generating Month and wrote a dynastic succession simulator and blogged about it at length. Where did I get the time for that, I find myself asking.

This year I made something simpler. Formations is a parody or homage to …

The third of three posts about the details of my NaNoGenMo 2016 project, Annales

1. Vocabularies | 2. TextGen | 3. Events

The event loop is the least interesting part of Annales, but it took the most effort and time. The basic idea is that there's a structured variable which describes the …

The second of three posts about the details of my NaNoGenMo 2016 project, Annales

1. Vocabularies | 2. TextGen | 3. Events

I'm proud that Annales is the only representative of Haskell in 2016's entries, but there's a reason that it's the only one: knocking together quick text generators is really a …

This was the first time I submitted a NaNoGenMo entry which aimed at being readable, in contrast to my previous efforts, Everywhere Dense and Neuralgae, which were really abstract. Annales is a generated parody of a very ancient genre, the chronicle, which tells history as a sequence of reigns, deaths …

My entry for National Novel Generating Month 2016 is a procedurally-generated chronology of rulers, courtiers and tribes, using a nonsense vocabulary generated with the neural net which drives my twitter bot, @GLOSSATORY.

The full text is available on GitHub:

• ANNALES
• ANNALES.pdf

The source code is here

I'll be blogging …

As an exercise in Haskell, I wrote a monad which threads random-number generation state through a context-free grammar, allowing the creation of arbitrary yet valid sentences. This was kind of clever.

Then I used it to generate a series of descriptions of bands of warriors along the lines of Homer's …

The fourth and last in a series of posts about how we think about coding and functional programming. The first three are The Homunculus, State and Immutable and pure

An algorithm is a procedure or formula for calculating a result, an idea which predates the invention of the computer by …

"Everywhere Dense is a novel generated by the principle of recursive acronym expansion, in which this sentence is repeatedly interpolated with random words."

NaNoGenMo, or National Novel Generation Month is a fun parody of National Novel Writing Month (which I also tried one year, but more on that later). Everywhere …