The Internet Has Forever Changed

What was once an experiment for the exchange of information has become something different. Different may not be appropriate, perhaps dangerous is the term I’m looking for. We no longer search out interesting and educational sites.

We are force fed by an algorithm based upon a few discrete choices. Once you’ve chosen to search for subject X, it will be prevalent. Search for it again, it’s nearly all you see.

At first glance that certainly sounds useful. It becomes this echo chamber of beliefs. When all you see is propaganda where does it end? For years, there has been an industry that defined itself by making your site better than the next. Now there will be agencies defining themselves to do the same except for AI search engines.

Every year, it becomes larger and larger. A friend reads a conspiracy theory. Then another article. Doesn’t matter the subject. Whatever is their focus now will drive their truth. They do not have the ability to escape the technology entrapment.

Algorithms will force feed them the same information over and over again to maximize ad revenue. Keep them reading and the only way to do that is to only present what they’ve just read to them again in another view.

It’s incredibly difficult to find differing points of view in the modern age. The choices you make for reading one article will forever be fed to you.

It’s Broken

Upgrade caused most of the generators to be broken. There are no easy solutions. It’s under investigation but I suspect this will be the end of the end. Thanks for all the visits.

Fixes & Broken Bits

Latest upgrade caused a variety of code to be broken. I’ve put in some temporary solutions on many of the generators but know some code is still broken due to major version shifts deprecating some ancient code. I’ll be watching the error logs over the next few days to try to fix anything still broken.

Along with that, I’ll have to undertake a bit of modernization across the board which hopefully will eliminate some of these issues moving forward. My apologizes for the sudden breakage and thanks for your patience.

Seventh Sanctum Data Archive

Many of my users also frequent Seventh Sanctum. The site has an astonishing amount of cool random generators which I completely love. His ability has exceeded mine and I’m in his debt for many inspirations. As life progresses, he’s not certain he’ll be able to continue maintenance on the site (I’m in the same boat). As such he’s generously released his archive of data to anyone and everyone. That’s great. I’ll be saddened if the site disappears but life continues.

The archived data is also now available on github for posterity. I’m not going to fiddle with his data. It’s just a backup of the archive he’s generously released. As with all our approaches, it seems his has changed a time or two for the better. It’s always hard to find time to fix the older materials when you always have a grand new plan.

Thanks so much Steve for all the efforts over the years. You’re a legend in the random generator world and the release of the data is amazing.

Data is also here

Boot Hill (1E/1975)

Once again I’ve ventured back toward the origins of the hobby. This time it’s Boot Hill in the original form as a random generator. While it should be trivial to implement, I’m out of practice and the nomenclature of the book is like most releases early in the RPG hobby era – the lingo shifts as the book is written. Stat values for calculated values are not simply values but rather the artificial labels assigned to them. No big deal. It’ll take another couple of hours to get it working.

Final Additions to City Name Generator

The following countries were added to the City Name Generator today: Falkland Islands, Gambia, Gaza Strip, Guadeloupe, Liechtenstein, Macedonia, Malawi, Malta, Martinique, Mauritius, Mayotte, Micronesia, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Namibia, Nepal, New Caledonia, and Palau.

With those additions, the city/town random generator covers 159 countries world wide. Some countries are not included in the random generator just because they have so few towns or the data is not easily available. Some of the smaller data sets will be added to the browseable names in the near future.

More Cities Added

Another day, another update. Nineteen additional countries have been added to the City Name Generator including:

• Qatar
• Reunion
• Somoa
• Serbia
• Sierra Leone
• Singapore
• Slovakia
• Slovenia
• Solomon Islands
• Svalbard
• Tajikistan
• Timor-Leste
• Togo
• Tonga
• Trinidad/Tobago
• Turkmenistan
• United Arab Emirates
• Vanuata
• Western Sahara