Projects posts tagged with words

POWER VOCAB TWEET

aparrish — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 06:19:57 -0800

Boost your vocabulary with these fiercely plausible words and definitions. Every two hours, a randomly generated word is posted to this account along with a randomly generated definition. It's the "Word A Day" Twitter account Marco Polo might have described to Kubla Khan. More information and technical details.

Lexcavator

aparrish — Wed, 09 May 2012 16:15:12 -0800

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). Here's the trailer. You can also download the soundtrack from Bandcamp. I've been working on the game for the past year or so. The goal was to make a fast-paced word game that rewards wits and tactics, but doesn't rely on having memorized every three-letter Scrabble word. Internally, the game uses n-gram analysis and Markov chains to ensure that the board is always filled with meaty, satisfying words. One reviewer called it "Words With Friends as an action game," and I am not going to argue with that characterization. The game was programmed entirely in Python (using the excellent processing.py framework).

The Long Bleep, a podcast and blog about taboo language.

Mo Nickels — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 15:35:07 -0800

The Long Bleep will be a public forum for discussion of four-letter words, "dirty" words, swearing, cursing, obscenities, and more. The first step is a questionnaire. Its results will be used to create podcasts and blog posts structured around things that really happened when taboo language was used: confrontations, first encounters, eureka moments, learning situations. Those stories will lead us down cultural and historical paths as we tease out the complicated relationship English-speakers worldwide have with "dirty" words. More information on the blog.

Gibberish Generator

jpburns — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 15:44:57 -0800

I'm proud to announce my first iPhone App: Gibberish Generator. This app allows you to generate pseudo-random sentences from lists of verbs, nouns, and the like. Optionally, you can enable your contacts, to allow them to be used in the random fun. The result can be tweeted or emailed to your friends. I can't imagine a more useful app than that. Perhaps I need a better imagination. Mostly created using PhoneGap. The visuals and interface, as well as the logic, is all HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. Free, by the way.

Characterror

aparrish — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:22:08 -0800

"You are CAPTAIN S. PELLER, starfighter pilot extraordinaire. Your mission: defeat the CHARACTERRORS, evil space aliens bent on galactic dominance. Their only weakness: a CHARACTERROR will subsume any letter fired into it. CHARACTERRORS forming English words can be detonated and thus destroyed." A word game made for February's Experimental Gameplay Competition. Downloads are available for Windows and OS X. The source code is available on github. Two points of interest: (1) The game keeps track of what words can be formed from the strings currently on the left side of the screen, and will only ever allow letters in the magazine that can be the next letter in a valid English word. It's technically impossible to get stuck, though you may find yourself stretching your vocabulary to its limits. (2) The game is written with processing.py, Jonathan Feinberg's excellent Python port of Processing (via Jython).

Building a Photo Library by Offering a Cash Bounty for Word Photography

wmeredith — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 11:25:58 -0800

My creative agency is looking to build a photo library of certain words printed out or otherwise manifested in the real world. So we're offering a cash bounty for photos of said words if they get posted on our FaceBook. I came up with the campaign, I hope it does well. I think it's a pretty cool way to crowd source this task. More details through the link. If it falls flat we'll probably send an intern around the city with a camera, but we're hoping this works. It would be much cooler. Let me know what you guys think!