Regruntled.com

Here is one of those “I wonder if I can do it” projects. I’m reading about background images and I see that the position can be adjusted pixel by pixel. If I can do that, I can make the image move. Already, I’m so focused on the technical details that I’m not even considering whether this is a good idea or not.

Of course, the Blogger platform doesn’t co-operate. But I’m also reading about inline frames, which is a way to display a piece of one web page on another. So I put the crawling image on another server, and display it in an inline frame in this post. Maybe I can use the same techniques for something useful.

There are 138,510 versions of this page. The background is randomized, as is the image to the right. Although Blogger, the platform, hosts zillions of people spewing mindless drivel, randomizing the images was surprisingly hard to do. I had to put the randomness on a different server and link to it.

Can I randomize the text of a blog post? Again, this is easy enough on another server, but not so easy on Blogger. But maybe there is a way.

In the literary world, the cut-up technique can be traced back to the Surrealists, but is mostly associated with Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs in the 50s. The name comes from cutting up newspapers with razor blades and physically juxtaposing pieces of paper.

The Dice Man, by Luke Rhinehart, is a novel about randomness. The protagonist makes life decisions by rolling dice. On the other hand, Secret Ballet, by Detlev Fischer, is a randomized novel. It is composed of example sentences from a dictionary, arranged with some assistance from the author. The resulting text is quite readable, and the effect is more aimlessness than randomness.

I put the computer to work generating web pages with plaid backgrounds. It looks like you can modify the plaids interactively, but this is an illusion. You are actually navigating through plaids that have been generated ahead of time. Try it and see:

Click here for the Plaidolyzer

I decided to do some variations on the rainbow plaid theme. I shuffled the colors a bit. It turns out that the colors don’t look right if they’re out of order. For example, if yellow is between orange and green, it looks yellow. If yellow is next to white, it looks white. This puts some constraints on the shuffling.

Next, I tried different backgrounds from white to gray to black. Non-white backgrounds bring out the yellow.