Projects

This list is haphazard and poorly curated. If you want something prettier but less extensive, visit my portfolio page.

Bots and procedural writing

twitter.com/everyword: tweeting every word in the English language (or, at least, every word from an extensive English word list). At the current rate of one word every thirty minutes, the project will be completed in 2014. Here’s an essay I wrote on @everyword’s goals and motivations.
POWER VOCAB TWEET, a Twitter account that posts randomly generated words and definitions. Infinite generative sniglets.
Filthy Ditty: one experimental text a day during the month of May, 2011 (previously: Texty Text: one experimental text a day during the month of February, 2008)
twbasic: a BASIC interpreter for Twitter
@eventuallybot, which generates short narrative films in GIF format, sourced from randomly selected YouTube clips. I wrote about my motivation and methodology.
I Waded In Clear Water, a generative novel created for NaNoGenMo 2014. The source code and a write-up of my methodology are available, as well as a blog post that links to a presentation I gave at WordHack about the novel.
smiling face withface: infinite glitchy variations on Twitter’s open source emoji
A Travel Guide (commissioned by Turbulence): randomly generated, persistent travel guides for every location on Earth (including your current location)
Deep Question Bot: contorts facts from ConceptNet into mind-blowing challenges to human perception and the status quo
The Ephemerides: a Twitter bot that pairs randomly selected images from outer planet space probes with procedurally generated poetry. I wrote about my motivation and methodologies. The bot is also available on Tumblr.
Icebox Breakfast is a bot that rewrites William Carlos Williams’ famous refrigerator poem by replacing only certain words with randomly selected semantic and syntactic equivalents. Source code and more information here.

You can find more of my bots here.

Textual interfaces and physical devices

Gutenberg Poetry Autocomplete
Semantic Arithmetic (in collaboration with DBRS Innovation Lab)
New Interfaces for Textual Expression (my masters thesis project at ITP)
APxD mkII: Autonomous Parapoetic Device
Analog Text Display: an experiment in alternate text display and encoding technologies

Open source software

pronouncingpy: a simple and friendly interface to the CMU pronouncing dictionary. Making rhyming easy since 2015.
pronouncingjs: a Javascript port of pronouncingpy. Easy to use on the server or in the browser!
pycorpora: a pip-installable Python interface for Darius Kazemi’s Corpora Project.
Everyword Bot: a Python framework for making @everyword-like Twitter bots.
My Dinosaur: a simple way to generate RSS feeds in Python; intended for bot authors.

Books

Getting Started with Processing.py (co-authored with Casey Reas and Ben Fry). A gentle introduction to Processing’s Python Mode. Maker Media 2016.
Everyword: The Book. Instar Books 2016.
Introduction to Tornado (as co-author), a beginner’s guide to the much celebrated Python web application framework, published by O’Reilly

Video games, game design and game criticism

Lexcavator, an arcade/word game for Mac/PC/Linux
Earl Grey, a game about word play, co-written and developed with Rob Dubbin (Baf’s Guide review)
Rewordable: a word-building card game
Characterror, a word game that you can play on your computer!
Winter: I made this ZZT game when I was still in high school and I’m still pretty happy with it.
Speaking of ZZT, I made a ZZT game with Rob Dubbin called International Jetpack Conference. It was featured on IndieGames.com, and received an “honorable mention” in the Nuovo Award category in the 2015 Independent Games Festival.
Legend of the Tomb of Fate: a generative old-school BBS door-style dungeon crawler
Frotzophone: making music with interactive fiction
Critical Responses to Cave of Time: What would a Choose Your Own Adventure book look like without the choice? What would it look like with too much choice?
The Invention of Murder: a Big Game
Which describes how you’re feeling all the time, a short piece of interactive fiction (?) made for Apollo 18+20, the They Might Be Giants IF tribute album
Snaquia is a “cover version” of Skip Ltd.’s Aquia, made with PuzzleScript. Written up by Forest Ambassador!