Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/02/folklore-generator.html
…
Amazing. I happen to be a fairy in the form of a sheep.
Mine was more popul vuh - I’m being pursued by a magic calabash!
Elementary spirits borne by human women.
They just wanna have fu-un.
“Punishment: head split into many pieces.”
Looks like my story is going to have a bit of a dark flavor.
Andy’s got a horror movie poster as well. See http://purviance.com/horrorinator/
I feel slightly bad about revealing the text file behind the curtain but it’s not really generative! Still great though.
“God deliberately has enemies kill him.” - hey, I think I’ve heard that one somewhere!
I’d guess that the generative part happened before the presentation.
The two word results also function as a pretty damned good alt-rock band name generator. (“Hostile Horse”, “Mighty Sleeper”…)
Sheldon Klein and his students were doing this in the early 70s:
https://minds.wisconsin.edu/handle/1793/57894?show=full
Klein’s MEta-Symbolic Simulation SYstem (MESSY) was written in FORTRAN (using punchcards) and run on a Univac.
Our very own @othermichael wrote a very similar folklore generator based on Vladimir Propp’s categorizations.
Online anywhere?
Here’s one: https://fairytalesbot.tumblr.com/
Also: https://twitter.com/NewGunMyths (which is, IIRC, a variation on a twitter version of fairytalesbot – whose URL I have forgotten – with certain key words replaced with firearm-related terms)
The thing was originally part of a NaNoGenMo project, and given some time I could dig up the novel-length version probably.
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