[_jdams]

Interesting. Thanks for sharing, I'm excited to take a look at some of the examples you mentioned!

Side comment, but somewhat related: I just started getting into reading and the most recent book I finished was Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. I just started 1Q84, also by Murakami. Those books really do something to my brain when I read them. Ever since I got into it, I've had these strange desires to write a book of my own, but since I have no experience in the matter, I was thinking of clever ways to procedurally generate plot points, then let a randomizer run in a loop until it generates something interesting.

For example, in multiple arrays, you could create lists for different plot elements: ex: "main character is a " [student, engineer, pilot, detective]. You can do something for physical features as well, and personality traits, and generate completely randomized characters. Then, you could do something for the plot as well... If I were able to do this as a starting point, I could write a story by filling in the blanks, so to speak...

So, is there a popular forum or perhaps Twitter that all of these enthusiasts hang out at? =D

[enkiv2]

There's a mostly-dead generative art mailing list and slack (http://generative-art.slack.com), and the official stuff is on github (http://nanogenmo.github.io), but most of the off-season discussion is actually on the botally slack (despite that actually being oriented toward twitter artbots) because of a big overlap between the two communities.

The story generator idea you described above is an example of templating, & it's used pretty often. It's easy to make a good looking chunk of story that way, but difficult to make a 50k word novella that's readable (the target of nanogenmo).