The Null Device

And now, interrupting regular (or even irregular) blogging to introduce a side-project I have recently been working on: The Postmodernism Generator for iPhone. This is an iPhone port of the venerable Postmodernism Generator, which has been around the web, in various forms, for a decade and a half. The iPhone edition runs on the same engine, albeit slightly extended and cleaned up (aside: stopping a 15-year-old command-line C program from leaking memory enough to run acceptably on a phone involves considerable work), with some improvements (you can adjust the target length of essays and, optionally, use surnames from your address book in authors' names). Additionally, the grammar has been updated somewhat, with new content (for example, it now knows about Lady Gaga, Slavoj Žižek and Quentin Tarantino films made after Jackie Brown); these changes will be ported to the web-based version shortly.

The Postmodernism Generator for iPhone is available from the App Store, here. It's priced at the lowest price point (US$0.99/£0.59/0,79€/AUD1.29), which gets you a virtually infinite cornucopia of dense verbiage at your command, with or without a network connection, for amusement, befuddlement or plagiarism*.

Note: The Null Device does not encourage the use of the Postmodernism Generator for plagiarism.

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This past November, Your Humble Narrator participated in National Solo Album Month; a challenge similar to NaNoWriMo, only involving recording an album's worth of music in one month. This time around, miraculously, I managed to cross the finish line. Granted, much of the album is unpolished and, given more time, some of the tracks would have more work done on them, but that's expected for such things.

Anyway, the album is here.

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Apparently a key difference between the British and the Americans is that Britain has eccentrics where America has exhibitionists:

The British enjoy eccentricity. Americans do not, because it is a quieter state, and to be quiet is to set oneself on the road to anonymity--arguably the condition from which Americans shrink most sharply. A good place to note this difference is in literature. I can think of no memorable eccentric character in American literature; yet from Ahab to Huck Finn, from the Cat in the Hat to Tom Wolfe's Rev. Bacon, there is no dearth of exhibitionists.

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Those reading this in Sydney can hear an ambient electronica track put together by Your Humble Narrator whilst commuting on the London Underground, using only a personal organiser*. I am told that The Random Numbers' "Fluffy Space Rocket" will be making its Australian radio debut tonight (Sunday night) on Utility Fog, on FBi (94.5 MHz), sometime between 10pm and 1am.

* actually, a Palm Tungsten running Bhajis Loops.

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I'm having an exhibition of digital photographs and autotraced prints thereof over the next month or so at the Empress Hotel, 714 Nicholson St., North Fitzroy. (Not a bad choice of venue; they also have some decent bands playing, fairly good food and Guinness on tap.) The exhibition is partly live-music themed, with a number of photographs from gigs, as well as some others. It opens this Sunday the 29th, and runs until the 26th of June.

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