This week for our assignment on cut-ups, I decided to mash up the text of about 30 Magic the Gathering Artifact, Enchantment, and Instant cards and the recipes from Student’s Hand-book of Mushrooms of America, Edible and Poisonous by Thomas Taylor. I picked arguably the best cards from these categories from the Magic Card database, because of their language around spell-casting. I thought they would work well with recipes since both are essentially instructions.
I think I had spells on the mind because of the hexes witches have been placing on Trump, MTG because a friend recently gave away his entire collection, and I just loved all the sounds of all the mushroom names from this book while searching through Gutenberg and wanted to find a way to incorporate something about them. Even though I selected specific text to begin with by cutting and pasting, I struggled to cut down the text to what I wanted. I don’t think I’m quite there (mushroom language or structure-wise) but I was pleased by how couldron-y some of the products were.
Before cutting down lines and reducing length more intelligently I was getting a lot of text as output. There was something very nice about the repetition in a later version, but I refined this a bit more before settling on the final code. Right now I am picking out every other line I create, and there’s probably a better way to do this. My source text and final code are here. Each time it runs you get something a bit different. I thought this one was okay.