think about the possibility of

Thirty or more years ago, a computer program named Racter "wrote" a very interesting book called The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed.

The programmer plugged in a variety of sentence, paragraph, story, and poem templates, and a bunch of words and the relationships among them. Every time he ran Racter, he got a different pseudo-random story.

Then the programmer selected the ones that were worth putting in a book.

Mostly the stories and poems were delightfully weird. This is my favorite:

More than iron, more than lead, more than gold I need electricity.
I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber.
I need it for my dreams.

Very eerie, that one.

Racter also had a short story published in Omni magazine.

There was also Gahan Wilson's delightful "Science Fiction Horror Movie Pocket Calculator," a flowchart for generating stories.

I used that to learn programming. My favorite story was

Earth falls into the sun and nearly everybody dies.

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