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Anapest Generator: a JavaScript Poem Maker

February 17, 2019

My JavaScript iambic pentameter generator is among the most popular articles on this blog. If you liked that, you’re gonna love today’s article. I decided to make an anapest generator with a rhyme! It’s a JavaScript poetry generator using an anapest, that is, a poem with anapestic meter.

anapest generator
Could the pen really write with the might of the sword?
(see what I did there?) 😉

An anapest, or anapestic meter, is a metrical foot consisting of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one. Perhaps the most famous example of an anapestic poem (also mentioned in my article on poetry) is Lord Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib”.

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

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Mansion Escape – a Text Adventure App for Android

January 22, 2019

Note: If you’re interested in Mansion Escape, check its brand new iteration, available for PC, Mac, or Linux, on desktop or mobile.

Please note that none of my Android apps is any longer maintained – and they’re not even available on Google Play anymore – for reasons you can read about here. If you still have any of the Home for Fiction Android apps installed on your phone, you’re advised to uninstall them. The post below should be seen purely as a snapshot of history.

Mansion Escape is a text adventure app I’ve developed for Android phones and tablets. Mansion Escape pays homage to the text adventure genre of the early computer era, as well as to the “dark mansion” genre of films, board games, and narrative in general.

After all, a text adventure app is first and foremost a narrative! That is, a text adventure app is a piece of interactive fiction, where the player/reader follows a story actually participating in it, deciding which path to take.

Mansion Escape: a Text Adventure App where Clue meets the Cold War

I’ve talked in the past about the devolution of video games, and how today’s games can sometimes be a bit too easy. Text adventures were a kind of adventure games in the early computer era, where the player had to actually read (the horror, the horror) the descriptions, as there were no graphics.

text adventure app

Of course I realized that this is not 1985, and an entirely text-based Android app would not be well received. So, instead of (old-school) typing commands, we use buttons. But make no mistake! This is still a text adventure game.

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What If – Random Quote Generator Widget

December 23, 2018

Please note that none of my Android apps is any longer maintained – and they’re not even available on Google Play anymore – for reasons you can read about here. If you still have any of the Home for Fiction Android apps installed on your phone, you’re advised to uninstall them. The post below should be seen purely as a snapshot of history.

Besides GhostWriter and Narrative Nods, I’ve also published a third Android app about which I haven’t talked in this blog. The app is called What If – Random Quote Generator Widget.

As the name probably reveals, it’s a simple widget that lives on your screen and shows random what if quotes. It’s an entirely random quote generator, which means it can produce some inadvertently hilarious phrases.

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