More Fun with Thing#10--The Generator Blog

The Generator Blog at http://generatorblog.blogspot.com/ may be one of my new favorite places to play. I'm having so much fun, I subscribed to its RSS feed so I can keep track of all the new ways to play on the web! Sadly, a number of the previously posted generators (A-Team Episode, anyone?) are dead links. Below you'll find a few of the viable generators I discovered. (BTW, for every generator I blog about...I checked out at least 3 more. This is...addictive. Penguin writing, customized cappuccino, sheep poetry, Simpsons' Church Sign Generator, Scribbler, The Neitsczhe Family Circus... their time will come.)



And lo, I looked into my pancakes and saw the face of ... cat?!
Make a Miracle! of your very own at http://glassgiant.com/miracles/
(I was hoping the miracle would appear in my toast. I'm not really a pancake person. And it would better advertise my allegiance to The Church of Toast.)

This one amused me...view the word "library" from the side and you get...
(For the record, that's "GHASTLY." It doesn't show up well against my template. Still tickles my funny bone, though. Click on it to see what I'm talking about.)

My name...
(That's "silly," BTW. It too refuses to play nicely with my template.)
Courtesy of The Side View Generator at http://en.genzu.net/sokumen/ where the word you enter is interpreted as dots which are then rotated so that they're seen from a different angle, giving you, voila!, a new word entirely.

¿ƃuılǝıɔ ǝɥʇ uo noʎ ǝɹɐ ʎɥʍ `sıɥʇ ƃuıpɐǝɹ ǝɹ,noʎ ɟı

The above was generated at Upside Down Writing at http://www.sherv.net/flip.html. Now if I can just find one that will let me do mirror writing...

I've always been amused by Despair.com. Their demotivator posters gave me many a not-s0-secret thrill when I was a supervisor. I have one of their coffee cups--"This cup is now half empty." And I adore their BitterSweets: Valentine Candy for the Rest of Us. So imagine my squee when I found the Candy Heart Generator by way of the Generator Blog. And I proceeded to make my very own bittersweets! I'm pretty sure this generator was intended for those romantically inclined, but me, I'm not that girl. Enjoy!





And I finally found a glitter generator that's easy to use AND free over at Glitter Graphics. At last I can let my inner 11-year-old girl run free. Look, this one even scrolls...and it sparkles!



(Sonia, I really hope you didn't just spew all over your keyboard.)

Make a word poem (the text is gibberish, it's the image that's supposed to mean something) over at Williams Words Generator by submitting a word 10 characters or less in length. (Oh, if it would only allow more characters...)

I liked the one I made for "my library" better, but couldn't manage a successful screen capture. Those screens, they're wily beasts, don't you know. You've got to sneak up on 'em...





I actually got this fortune once at a local Chinese restaurant. Amazing how well those cookies know the real me...




You can make your own over at the Fortune Cookie Message Generator.

Fun with fridge magnets over at the Fridge Messages!



I think I would've enjoyed this one even more if it included a greater variety of colors, capital letters, and more punctuation.

Found a new way to make picture mosaics over at the Image Mosaic Generator!


I'd mentioned in an earlier post I didn't care for FD Toys' mosaic generator because it required you have a large flickr photostream to draw from. I'd downloaded AndreaMosaic instead which included its own image gallery. Although this generator lacks the special effects capabilities of AndreaMosaic, you don't have to download anything to your PC. IMG draws images from all over Flickr for you. Pretty nifty, no? Try standing back a few feet or so to get the full effect.

Not quite sure what to say about this one, or what it says about me! This is my life as interpreted by Mondrian:
Input information about yourself over at my Data=my Mondrian. The information is converted into data...the data is converted into values...and the values are converted into art. Try it for yourself!

Here's a Dynamic Einstein Picture I created over at http://www.hetemeel.com/einsteinform.php


(Now if only I'd been able to think of something clever to write on the chalkboard. sigh.)

And now for something completely different! As I used google-fu to find it rather than The Generator Blog. You, too can write just like Leonardo! Da Vinci, that is. Not Di Caprio. Found this at Boston's Museum of Science whilst googling mirror writing. I'm planning on using it in a future Clue Done It program as a clue, just watch and see if I don't. Doesn't look much like SCLD's official brand, now does it?
One last image to share, this one brought to you by Coraline the Movie (more about its awesomeness in a later post). Your name in mice, here at the Bobinsky Theater.


Isn't the Mouse Circus just amazing?

I am in awe of the creativity evidenced by all of these software developers. Most of these folks are coding for fun not profit and look at all the toys they've come up with. Isn't this cool?

**Editor's note: Grrrr. Arrgggghhhh. How much do I hate the fact that preview in no way reflects how this looks when actually posted into my template?! Let me count the ways. Again with the Grrrr.**

Playing With Image & Text Generators

Yes, I know. I'm tackling the Things out of order again. (Hangs head in shame.) What can I say? I like to play. And image generators are a lot of fun to play with... Don't believe me? Check out what I've been up to lately...

Create your own beautiful word cloud at Wordle . Plug in any text you like, a delicious username, or the url of a page with an RSS feed & away you go! The only downside to Wordle is that there's no easy way to save the code for your creation or the image itself--screenshots are your only option. (Hello MS Paint, my old friend, how've you been?)

Here's my first attempt at Wordle art, created using Neil Gaiman's short story "I Cthulhu."



Wordle's awesome. It lets you change the appearance of the layout of your cloud (this one's half and half with straighter edges), the color scheme, & the font. And boy are there some exotic fonts (Grilled Cheese, anyone?) to choose from.

Here's another, created using tags from my bookmarks at http://delicious.com/holyexplodingshark:


Seeing as how any Wordle image is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution License, Wordle's got some neat programming & publicity possibilities for the library... (And yes, I actually followed the link about licensing--so long as we give credit where credit is due, e.g. the source of the text & the program used to generate the image, we could even make money off of our wordle art! How cool is that?) Me, I want to make up some manga & graphic novel posters for the teen area...

And speaking of manga...here's a WordHeart I made using some of my favorite manga and anime titles:

You can create WordHearts of your own over at http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/WordHearts/. WordHearts is yet another site that has no built in tools to save your image--screenshots are your one and only option. I really must learn to take better screen captures. I hear Firefox has some great plug-ins...

Here's an eyechart I created using Custom Eye Chart Maker over at http://www.eyechartmaker.com/:

I was pretty disappointed in this--I wanted room for more text. And it took me a while to realize that I didn't need to put spaces between words... (It also made me wonder why if eye charts are this easy to generate, why does my opthamologist insist on showing me the same chart for both my right and left eyes? I mean, my short term memory isn't so bad that I can't remember the line from one eye to the next. But I digress.)

I had much more fun following a link from Custom Eye Chart Maker to Custom Road Sign over at http://www.customroadsign.com/. This appealed to my sense of humor:

I'll say this for both the road sign and eye chart makers, though--they're the first image generators I've played with today that allow me to right click and save the image directly to my PC. Flash is fun, but it's not easy to save.

It was suggested by TPTB that we explore a few "Discovery Resources," the better to get a handle on image generators. I'd already spent a considerable amount of time playing over at FD Toys (see my previous posts RE: fun with Flickr) so I thought I'd check out LetterJames. The following were created using the E-Card Service, right clicking on the finished image, and saving to my PC.






(Don't mind me. I'm having a Stephen King/Stanley Kubrick flashback here. It'll pass. Just give it a moment.)

Honestly, I found LetterJames to be disappointing. Yes, the images are exceedingly easy to save--three cheers for right-click save-as! Yes, it allows you to superimpose your own text over a gallery of 300 images (a huge plus for those of us who don't have digital cameras) to create cards, calendars, posters, and more. The AlphaPictures technology is really neat--it makes your text appear as skywriting, letters in the sand, spray painted grafitti, etc., whatever's appropriate to the image. Just like this:



Can't fault the end product at all. But the process...well, I've got a few complaints about that.

For starters, I reallly would've appreciated a search feature for the gallery. Some of the categories are huge, and I really didn't want to waste my time browsing through 20+ screens. And speaking of wasting time... In order to create each and every image, you're required to type in a super secret security code! I hate those things. I fail utterly at those things. I really don't understand why you're asked for a code just to create. To purchase? Sure. To send? Ditto. But just to make the image? I wasted a lot of time trying to correctly enter codes. (Although not as much time as I wasted setting up my blog...blogger's security code check wouldn't take a single thing I typed. Honestly, I'm not that bad of a typist or a speller. Seriously.)

I also encountered a number of "error during the image processing" messages of doom whilst creating an image AFTER I'd successfully entered the security code and proved I wasn't a 'bot. Sometimes I could successfully "process" the image after repeated tries. Others I abandoned as a lost cause. I'd be interested in hearing if anyone else had similar experiences--maybe it's just my dinosaur of a PC or my DSL's speed.

Another problem I ran into at LetterJames was that with some images, the placement of text on the image had little (if anything?!) to do with the order in which the text was typed into the generator. My street sign took some playing with. Despite all the manga I read, I still think in terms of left to right, top to bottom. The image generator doesn't consistently follow this pattern. In this example, it seemed to equate text entry with the SIZE of the text in the final image, not its vertical position. Most prominent (the middle sign)--came from the the 1st & top text box. 2nd most prominent (the one at an angle at the TOP of the image)--the 2nd box in the middle. Smallest--the 3rd.


The ransom note below is another example. To create the image, I could place text in up to 8 fields. I only had enough text to fill 4...so I filled in the 1st four and the 1st 4 only. And retrieved a blank image. Filling boxes 5-8, OTOH, created this warning to any hooligans with designs on despoiling my library's manga collection:

Who knows what would have happened if I'd filled in all 8 fields?

The amount of text that could be entered in a text field varied from "card" to "card." Some were seemingly infinite, others not...as you'd discover when you ran up against the wall of the box at 60 miles an hour. Still others would take scads of text in the box...only to then "hide" it behind the picture.

I really think this site could be improved with some instructions. I expect a commercial site that's trying to sell a service (photo albums, calendars, etc.) to be a bit more user-friendly. Of course, the e-cards were free... I love the special effects, but the site required more trial & error & effort than I'm entirely comfortable with.

Exercising my google-fu, I went hunting for more text & image generators.

I'm fascinated by the typoGenerator. You input text and the generator performs a google image search matching whatever you typed and mashes whatever it finds into something that, according to the FAQ, isn't necessarily readable but "looks nice." It's random, but you can elect to save certain elements (style, colors & background)as you experiment. Here are a few of my experiments/artworks, generated using the tags from my delicious account:













Hit the jackpot with this nifty little collection of links to text generators: http://educationalsoftware.wikispaces.com/Text+Generators! It's where I grabbed the 3D Text Maker that is (supposed to) be animating "Welcome to Thing #10!" at the top of this entry. (Why isn't it animating, why? It should be sliding endlessly to the left.)

And The Graffiti Creator:

And the Logo Maker (in honor of the upcoming Trek movie):

(Hmm. The code button doesn't work for Logo Maker...and no matter what "size" I generate the image in on the screen, if I right click save I just get this itty bitty logo. Which doesn't show off the lovely twinkly stars of deepest outer space the way I'd like it to. Maybe this is a job for...print screen! Or maybe I'll just let it go.)

And finally, because it wouldn't be my blog without another gratuitous mention of "the z-word" (as the niece & nephew have come to call it), I present...Spelling with Zombies!


You could learn a lot from a zombie.