This week we were tasked with creating our own poetic form. I went to Yosemite over Spring Break so I was thinking about Sequoias–I was kind of amazed when I found this Sequoia National Park guide from 1937 on Project Gutenberg. I was stuck on how to create a poetic form from this when separately, I was researching passcode and password best practices. I thought it might be funny to create passphrases with the Sequoia guide as a seed text (har har). I didn’t really like this, but realized that some of the guidelines for passcodes result in old-school AIM-y looking text. Instead, I decided to create screen names. I also figured this could be more easily generalized to any text.
I was amused, but I also wanted to play with the pronouncing library we used in class. I wondered if rhyming screen names might be interesting? Instead, I created some lame but sometimes funny conversations. One person/screen name character initiates the conversation, and the response is something random and generally long (an entire line). The response is a rhyme. This happens again but then the second character continues the rhyme, and then they switch roles.
My code is on github. My final program is AIM.py and my final output is parksOutput.txt. I tested out the generalizability using the mushroom recipes text I used in a previous week, but this sometimes gave me errors. It would also be nice to create dynamic timestamps!