Random Shopper
-
Dear Internet Denizen,
You may be interested in purchasing some algorithmically-glitched apparel courtesy of the Glitch Logos bot. We have several fine designs available. They may cause people to remark, “That design is distressing to me.”
Sincerely,
The Management -
creation
Here’s another tumblr bot I made. Called Reverse OCR, it picks a word and draws random lines until an algorithm that’s designed to detect text in images thinks it’s found all the letters in the word.
For a really close look at how it works, check out this visualization I made for a gallery show back in October.
-
Clothes brush (one of a pair)
The Metropolitan Museum of ArtI made a new Tumblr bot – it posts items from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 400,000 item open access catalog!
-
Make your Black Friday a Random Friday
This holiday season I am offering 50 limited edition “prints” of the Random Shopper project. I will run the Random Shopper algorithm with an address of your choice instead of my own, and a single purchase of random stuff will be sent to that address.It’s the perfect gift for that certain someone in your life who, when asked what they want for the holidays, responded, “A trenchant critique of consumer culture.” -
Here's something I wrote about @TwoHeadlines, one of my recent projects I created @TwoHeadlines because of an email Adam Parrish sent me. Here is the thread reproduced in its entirety, with his permission:
Adam Parrish - Aug 23, 12:08 pm
Did you hear the news? Ben Affleck is the new CEO of Microsoft!
— Ian Bogost (@ibogost) -
What Are Bots?
Bots are contraptions that humans have set into motion across the Internet.
Bots are engines of whimsy and chaos, who will sometimes try and convince you they can make penises bigger.
Bots are scavengers who bend and glue our cast-off word-garbage into scrapbooks, hoping we’ll be impressed.
Bots are rarely perfect, and that is what makes them human.
-
New Project: RapBot
Do you like randomness? (If you follow this tumblr you probably do.)
Do you like 80s freestyle battle rapping? (If you follow my other tumblr you probably do.)
If you answered yes to either of those questions, you might like RapBot, a program I wrote that generates 80s freestyle battle raps.
-
Random Shopper: February Shipment In some weird way I feel bad about Palmistry for All, since I scanned the original from my collection and (with the Distributed Proofreaders team) produced the text Kessinger scraped to give you that crummy version.
Here’s the HTML version, if it’s any consolation :) See my name right there in the frontmatter?
O, Kessinger. What a load of crap thou art.
Holy crap that’s awesome to get a response from you. It looks like the Kessinger version is a second edition though: this one has the plates in tact!
(via notrare)
-
February Shipment
February’s order has arrived! This time around, it consists of three books.
The first is David Ferry’s Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (Phoenix Poets), a collection of poems and translations by renowned poet David Ferry (who, weirdly, lives about four miles away from me). “Poems and translations” means the book contains a mix of both original poems as well as translations of other, mostly ancient, verse. The book won the National Book Award. It looks like it was pretty well received, so I look forward to reading it!
Meanwhile, Palmistry for All (Illustrated Edition)
is yet another automatically generated book from the Project Gutenberg archive of public domain works. It was published in 1916 by the mysterious “Cheiro”, who notes in the text that he is retired and anyone claiming to be him should be taken as an impostor! Cheiro’s real name was William John Warner, and he was a well-known occultist of the kind you’d find hanging out in aristocratic circles in the early 1900s.
Couple of amusing things: Amazon reviews of this book complain that there are no illustrations, which makes a book on palm reading kind of useless! In my edition there are illustrations, so it must have been updated due to complaints. The other funny this is this page in the front of the book, listing Kissinger Legacy Reprints’ other “scarce and hard-to-find reprints”:
Um, oops.
Last up, we have Abilities
, by Marc Quaranta. This is exactly the kind of book that I don’t want to read: someone’s first stab at what appears to be young adult fiction. We’re almost immediately introduced to three characters who are all 24-year-old men, which caused me to guess that the author is a 24-year-old man. Turns out I was right! Anyway, I’m going to read this simply to spite myself. Maybe I’ll read it out loud to my spouse. I am not expecting to like it, but then, what’s a random shopper that doesn’t buy you something you’re sure you’ll dislike?
-
Feburary Order Placed!
Just kicked off the February order. The total ordered was $48.16, and this month’s order was made possible by generous donations from Hunter Willis (@bhunterwillis) and “Claus from Denmark”. Many thanks to both of you!!!
