MeFi Projects

A Travel Guide generates random travel guides for all points on the globe using sentences wrenched from Wikivoyage. Its goal to give its visitors an alternate reading of place, through the serendipitous juxtaposition of their current location with evocative procedural text. [more inside]
posted by aparrish on Mar 24, 2015 - 2 comments

@eventuallybot is a Twitter bot that generates short films in GIF format, sourced from shreds of random YouTube clips. The films all tell stories, but sometimes the stories don't make a lot of sense. [more inside]
posted by aparrish on Nov 23, 2014 - 2 comments

We all know that many new emoji were recently added to the Unicode standard. What we don't know is what emoji will be added in the years to come. Library of Emoji is a Twitter bot that speculates, several times each day, on what new emoji might appear in future Unicode revisions—emoji that today may seem unreasonable, but someday may be commonplace: COOKWARE SYMBOL. MOUTHPART. PRIAPIC SYMBOL FOR UNICYCLIST WATERLOO. [more inside]
posted by aparrish on Jul 18, 2014 - 3 comments

You've heard this one: "Every pizza is a personal pizza if you try hard and believe in yourself." Pizza Clones is a Twitter bot that attempts to imitate this joke and elaborate on it, replacing the noun, adjective and condition with stuff it randomly finds on Twitter. Examples: "Every house is an open house unless you have NO pants on"; "Every weekend is a normal weekend if you regret at least one decision"; "Every time is an appropriate time if it wasn't for my aunt Barbara." [more inside]
posted by aparrish on Nov 25, 2013 - 2 comments

Boost your vocabulary with these fiercely plausible words and definitions. [more inside]
posted by aparrish on Apr 22, 2013 - 5 comments

Lexcavator is an arcade/word game for Mac, PC, and Linux. The goal: guide your guy (@) deeper into an infinite of letters by clearing words from the board! Multiple game modes, detailed record-keeping, online global leaderboards—there's something here for everybody! Pay what you want (even $0, if you are so inclined). [more inside]
posted by aparrish on May 9, 2012 - 5 comments

A Minecraft-themed parody of @horse_ebooks.
posted by aparrish on Nov 10, 2011 - 0 comments

Nominally in celebration of National Poetry Month, I challenged myself to make one experimental text a day in April 2011. It was a lot of fun, and I wanted to share the results with my fellow mefites. I thought these experiments in particular might be of interest: blackout poems made from Magic: the Gathering cards; dithered bitmaps of the average Unicode character; a Chrome extension that randomly scrambles the poetry "subjects" on poetryfoundation.org; and Nintendo ROMs with words replaced at random (Faxanadu, in particular---with video!). [more inside]
posted by aparrish on May 2, 2011 - 2 comments

Click and click again to generate random new years resolutions for 2011, based on a corpus of tweets collected yesterday and today. Sometimes nonsensical, sometimes absurd, sometimes even plausible. "Be more dedicated to achieve. It avoids disappointment. which means you'll have to be." (potentially NSFW) [more inside]
posted by aparrish on Jan 1, 2011 - 8 comments