perchance – Dan Q

INSULTS.COM

Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, I had a collection of 5¼” and later 3½” floppy disks¹ on which were stored a variety of games and utilities that I’d collected over the years².

I remember that at some point I acquired a program called INSULTS.COM. When executed, this tool would spoof a basic terminal prompt and then, when the user pressed any key, output a randomly-generated assortment of crude insults.

Do you feel thoroughly insulted yet?

As far as prank programs go, it was far from sophisticated. I strongly suspect that the software, which was released for free in 1983, was intended to be primarily a vehicle to promote sales of a more-complex set of tools called PRANKS, which was advertised within.

In any case: as a pre-pubescent programmer I remember being very interested in the mechanism by which INSULTS.COM was generating its output.

Of course, nowadays I understand reverse-engineering better than I did as a child. So I downloaded a copy of INSULTS.COM from this Internet Archive image, ran it through Strings, and pulled out the data. Easy!

Wait for it, and you can be be insulted all over again!

Then I injected the strings into Perchance to produce a semi-faithful version of the application that you can enjoy today.

Why did I do this? Why do I do anything? Reimplementing a 42-year-old piece of DOS software that nobody remembers is even stranger than that time I reimplemented a 16-year old Flash advertisement! But I hope it gave you a moment’s joy to be told that you’re… an annoying load of festering parrot droppings, or whatever.

Footnotes

¹ Also some 3″ floppy disks – a weird and rare format – but that’s another story.

² My family’s Amstrad PC1512 had two 5¼” disk drives, which made disk-to-disk copying much easier than it was on computers with a single disk drive, on which you’d have to copy as much data as possible to RAM, swap disks to write what had been copied so far, swap disks back again, and repeat. This made it less-laborious for me to clone media than it was for most other folks I knew.

³ Assuming the random number generator is capable of generating a sufficient diversity of seed values, the claim is correct: by my calculation, INSULTS.COM can generate 22,491,833 permutations of insults.

Do-It-Yourself Country & Western Song

I saw a variation of this email back in the day, which provides a Mad Libs style approach to formulating a country & western song. When I was reminded of it today, I adapted it for Perchance. Give it a go!

COVID Ipsum

So I made a COVID conspiracy theory-themed lorem ipsum generator:

Can’t see the widget? Try <a href="/_q23u/2020/12/covid-ipsum.html">visiting it directly</a> or <a href="https://perchance.org/covid-ipsum">finding it on perchance.org</a>.

I blame my friend Bryn, who put the idea into my head while he was coming up with fake COVID conspiracy theories (I realise this sentence makes it sound like there are real COVID conspiracy theories) on a WhatsApp group we’re both in:

WhatsApp conversation: Bryn says that it's easy to come up with COVID conspiracy theories, Dan says somebody should make a Lorem Ipsum generator based on them. — This is about the minimum level of encouragement I need to do just about anything in tech.

It’s implemented using perchance, a platform for creating random text generators that I’ve been playing with – sometimes with the kids – lately. It’s really easy to use and provides a kind of instant-satisfaction that I think is important if you want to inspire the next generation of software engineers. This means, among other things, that you can clone, edit, and mashup my tool: perhaps you can make it better! Or perhaps you’ll use perchance to write some fiction, or poetry, or something else entirely. But regardless, I’d encourage you to have a play.

Mostly my generator comes up with meaningless gibberish, nonsense, and laughable claims. So it’s marginally more-trustworthy than your typical COVID conspiracy theorist.