If you're looking to refresh your social media avatars for Halloween, use this generator by Olivia Haines to create ghosts, vampires, witches and more.  I went with bloody mummy:

(Via Kalonica.) Read the rest

lacroix.glitch.me is a Glitch app that generates delicious new flavors of calorie-free sparkling water—or perhaps just honest names for the ones there already are. Read the rest

Today Democratic Party presidential candidate Kamala Harris announced her version of Medicare for All, but over the weekend, she perked ears by issuing an oddly-specific policy proposal on Twitter:

student loan debt forgiveness program for Pell Grant recipients who start a business that operates for three years in disadvantaged communities.

Mockery of such thin-sliced bet-hedging came quickly—with about 7m Pell Grant Recipients and an approximately 8% total entrepreneurship rate with an approximately 60% failure rate within three years and then throw "disadvantaged communities" into the mix, it's ... not a great many people, especially compared to Bernie's promise of "everyone."

Enter The Neoliberal Project with the Oddly specific Kamala Harris policy generator, pefectly capturing her angel-dancing-on-a-pinhead blend of moderate wokeness that tries to appeal to everyone but ends up, well, you know.

Yesterday, I announced that, as president, I'll establish a basic income program for federal prosecutors who open a toy store that operates for 15 days in Silicon Valley.

Yesterday, I announced that, as president, I'll establish a school prayer program for single fathers who open a market that operates for 7 years in California.

Yesterday, I announced that, as president, I'll establish a net neutrality program for non-union members who open a drugstore that operates for 16 weeks in a food festival.

Photo: shutterstock / Karl Sonnenberg Read the rest

The Portmanteau and Rhyme Generator accepts two input words and produces weird coinages that are often surprisingly funny. "Rhino" and "Hospital", for example, produces "Boarphanage" and "hotelephant" among other things.

I tried "chaste caravaggio" and got "Vermeerotic". "Moist carpet" yielded "flavorniture". "Lube barrel" turned into "bluebrication". Magic. Read the rest

Foone Turing's Death Generator lets you create customizable "death" scenes from dozens of computer games. Foone painstakingly rips the media and fonts from old ROMs to create authentic recreations. Put in the text you want and the widget updates automatically. Some games have other options, and there's a button to upload your creation to imgur.

If you want more stuff like this, Foone has a patreon page.

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Kjetil Golid wrote code that generates high-definition space invaders for all imaginary Earth-defense needs. The javascript library p5.js is part of the magic. Read the rest

Andy Purviance's Purviance.com/myths generates (and beautifully presents) snippets of folklore: perfect for forming story ideas or oblique strategies.

Some I got:

Pursuit of game leads to upper world Tricksters feign death of their father King mourns so much at wife's funeral he goes on piracy every afterward Transformation by throwing ashes Trolls are skilled smiths Read the rest

The Planet Generator is a goldilocks of procedural generation: not too detailed, not too abstract, but just right. [via MeFi] Read the rest

The Medieval city generator does just that, with the right balance of abstraction and detail to give your imagination space to put it to good use. (previously)

This application generates a random medieval city layout of a requested size. The generation method is rather arbitrary, the goal is to produce a nice looking map, not an accurate model of a city. Maybe in the future I'll use its code as a basis for some game or maybe not.

Click one of the buttons to create a new city map of a desired size. Hover the mouse pointer over a building to see the type of the ward it belongs to. Press and hold SPACE to see all ward labels.

Toy Town is a 3d-visualizer for this generator. One day it may become a separate native application or a part of the generator, or both.

Want to hear a president talk again? Talk Obama To Me accepts up to 180 characters of text and pieces together a speech by Barack Obama. [via] Read the rest

Oskar Stalberg (previously) made Brick Block, a fun online 3D toy that lets you design surreal blocky houses. You can spin the scene to any degree and have it generate random houses. It's like the level editor for a Victorian-themed version of the classic cyberpunk game Syndicate.

Awesome 3d tile editor from @OskSta, check it out if you haven't already! So inspiring. https://t.co/UcjXHRMz8m #gamedev #indiedev pic.twitter.com/r42ILf0d2k

— Maurizio Frances (@MLFrances) May 5, 2017

Read the rest

Admiral, your fleet awaits! I don't fancy your chance against the Unicode Menace, but do what you can.

The game/generator is called Vortex, but apart from this Reddit thread where creator Huw Millward linked to the video, it doesn't seem to have a homepage. He's got other similar projects, too: I like the look of Feud, a seriously old-school text-based sim set in 13th-century England. Read the rest

The Seventh Sanctum is one of my favorite places on the web to find generators: code that produces everything from the names of wacky gadgets to fascinating writing challenges. My favorite: unusual jobs for fantasy role playing characters.

It's maintained by Steven Savage, a former software engineer who now writes on a variety of geeky matters.

Seventh Sanctum started somewhere in 1999 when I joked that attacks in various anime sounded like various strings of words put together by computer. Having fooled around with such generators over the years, I decided it'd be fun to make one. Then another followed. Then another . . . until we end up here.

I'm Steven Savage, an engineer turned Program Manager, speaker and writer on geek culture, and in the case of Seventh Sanctum, mad scientist. Or glad scientist. Whatever works.

Seventh Sanctum was created as a place for me to experiment with randomized tools and provide them to people, though needless to say it got a bit bigger than I expected. Also, it's a lot of fun so after years of work on it, it's still going.

Soundtrack turns your FedEx tracking number into music and an animated depiction of the package's journey. If you don't have one, you can generate one; it's like a synthy toy where the controls are weights, measures and coordinates. The results are kinda MOR—think library music tracks overlaid upon one another rather than the raw beauty of generative melody—but if you told me 61290980541920196578 was the new face of EDM, who am I to disagree?

Chances are you will have a 14-digit tracking number, which it will refuse due to the 12-digit limit. Skip the first two characters.

Also note that the animation of your ghostly package ends close to the address it was delivered to. It would be easy enough to determine the real-world locations, despite the abstract representation. Share your song URLs at your peril. Read the rest

I made a generator to provide images from Twitter after The Fourth Debate. It picks random frames from TV footage and draws conspiracies on them. Reload the page for another set! Read the rest

Garrett Finucane wrote a generator lets you create your own animated art in the style of the album sleeve for Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures. You can save your work as an animated GIF and check out the code from Github, too.

Previously: The story of the iconic cover art for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. Read the rest

Easypoem asks you a few questions, then generates a charming verse for your entertainment and that of your friends. Here's the one is made for me:

stood a space house

is this thing on

In the space stood a house, tardigrade looked through the window, saw a capybara disapproving past and he knocked upon the door "tardigrade, tardigrade let me in," "I would like to have a drink" "capybara, capybara come inside," "and let's have a cup of Sutter Home"