Technical issues

The Program

The article generator is a Novelwriting script. Novelwriting, written by Jepler, is a Python extension of the well known Dada Engine by Andrew C. Bulhak, who pioneered the generation of random texts following a structured grammar.

The script itself is based on Bulhak's Postmodernism Generator, the most well-known Dada Engine application. It was translated to Novelwriting, because the original Dada Engine did not run properly on our server.

The grammar has been adapted, introducing European issues and key European politicians. The grammar file can be found here.

The code has been optimised to generate html output allowing journal-quality printing straight from the browser.

 

Further work

Some functionalities of the original Postmodernism Generator have not been implemented yet, but are now under development. Furthermore, the grammar and vocabulary are continuously being refined and extended.

 

The Machine

These pages are served from a machine saved from Microsoft operating systems and now running Fedora Core 7. The http server is Apache 2.2.6, Python is version 2.5.

This humble configuration still makes an excellent web server, hosting several popular sites.

The Purpose

One might ask what is the purpose of setting up a website to generate nothing but utterly nonsensical prose. The fact of being impressed by postmodern verbalism (supposedly very serious and impenetrable by the layman, but often just wrapped-up air) on one hand, and by the sheer amount of documents produced by the European services (which, although referring to concrete and mundane matters, are also characterised by a specific usage of language one has to be acquainted with) on the other hand, made it an interesting idea to combine the two themes in the EUROPOMO script.

These articles may be nonsensical phluaria, but they can sound pretty good and often can deceive a hapless reader!

Dulce est desipere in loco!

Contact

For more information please contact us

 

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