Category: Words

Let’s write some Javascript to generate a writer’s prompt from a list of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, etc.

First, we’ll add some loading code. This code gets invoked two ways: first, we run it when the window is finished loading, so we get can update the DOM and give the user something to look at. We’ll also add a button to generate a new MadLib on demand.

window.onload = generate_prompt();

This is our workhorse right here, but it’s pretty simple. We have a bunch of arrays and we’re going to pick from them a random element and add it to the string.

function generate_prompt() {
	
     prompt_string = adjective1[random_0_to(adjective1.length)] + " " + 
          media[random_0_to(media.length)] + " " + 
          adjective2[random_0_to(adjective2.length)] + " " + 
          noun[random_0_to(noun.length)] + " " +
          action[random_0_to(action.length)] + " " +
          venue[random_0_to(venue.length)] + " ";
	
	if (random_0_to(10) == 0)
		prompt_string += ", in Latin."
		else  
		prompt_string += "."

	display_prompt(prompt_string);		
	}

Here are some sample arrays to get you going. You can add as many elements as you’d like to the arrays, just make sure they’re all separated by a comma.

var prompt_string = ""

var adjective1 = [
	"A gripping",
	"a frivolous"
]

var media = [
	"novel starring",
	"short story about"
]

var adjective2 = [
	"an anxious",
	"a pretentious"
]
var noun = [
	"duck",
	"bunny"
]

var action = [
	"dancing",
	"flying"
]

var venue = [
	"on the moon",
	"in my imagination"
]

We’re going to need a function to generate those random numbers.

function random_0_to(n) {
	return Math.floor(Math.random() * n);
	}

And lastly, a function to update the DOM.

function display_prompt(s) {
	document.getElementById("prompt").innerHTML = s;
	}

Cool, all done with the .js file.

This is from the HTML file that I use here at www.floatingpoint.pub. It defines the area in the DOM where the prompt gets updated by the display_prompt(s) function and contains a little self-contained javascript to update the prompt when someone clicks the (new) link.

		<p class=prompt><strong>PROMPT:</strong>
		<a id="prompt"></a>
		<a href="javascript:generate_prompt()" style="text-decoration:none !important;">(new)</a>
		</p>

That’s it! Have fun with it and be sure to email me to show off how you’ve used it to do something really cool on your own.

For three and a half years, I wrote updates on my recovery and posted them on the website Benzobuddies.org, mostly in the “Birthdays and Celebrations” sub-forum, but a few times in the “Exercise Support Group”. I was out of my mind a great deal of the time, but there was some beautiful writing that came out of it. It’s reproduced here, lightly edited.

First Post

October 22, 2014

Hello. 

Been reading this forum since I stared tapering off 4mg Klonopin (since 2003/2004, I think) a day in March/April of 2014. Last 1/4th of a 5mg of Diazepam was July 2nd and have been in Withdrawal Syndrome since then. I guess it’s been a almost four months and three weeks now. Over the time, everyone here has given me a great deal of strength and helpful information, so thank you all for that.

Most of the I’m Losing My Marbles Help Me feeling is down to a somewhat manageable level, so I hope I won’t be a huge burden. I suppose I want to help, if I can. I guess I’m one of the types of people who are strongest for themselves when I feel I’m helping someone else.

Thank you for your time.

A Short Story

October 22, 2014

So, I wrote a little bit today a bit of a Halloween story I wanted to write because I thought of how scary what I’ve been though (and still am going through) is and I thought I’d share with my Buddies. Like every good Halloween story it’s a little bit scary and a little bit funny. Hopefully just scary enough to give one goosebumps. Hopefully the funny parts are actually funny. Anyhow, not finished. Also, super first-drafty. While the spelling is as impeccable as modern computer technology can assure, please forgive the errors both in syntax and in judgment.

“A Mouse In The House”

A mouse ran into my apartment, twice.

Early evening, August, dank and rainy. One of those nights that makes people disbelieve global climate change. It should just be miserable. Instead, it’s miserable and wet and cold. 

This gives me the perfect opportunity to splay myself in the beanbag. To read. Perhaps have an apple later. The Honeycrisps are on sale and I have a fridge full of them. Four of them, but they’re very large. And sweet. So sweet. Each bite is a melted liquor mouthful of cotton candy; the kind that comes in the paper foil bag, always slightly stale and firm but almost painfully sugary.

On the radio — except it’s not a radio, it’s digital, delivered over the internet instead of the airwaves, though in one of those ironic twists that spice up daily life, the internet is delivered through radio waves now — through the speakers of my ancient, analog stereo system that once complained of being overdriven to distortion in the neighbor-disturbing amplification of Paradise Theatre or possibly The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars painstakingly distorted clicks and bleeps tumble out into the room, clip about like ponies in a clover field, then reassemble about the beanbag with smirks on their faces to assure me they mean business and what would I think if they clawed about the labyrinth for a while and upset some grocery carts and possibly put the compost in with the recycling. How would I feel about that?

© 2019 Jonnie Wilder

“People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf” — Richard Grenier paraphrasing George Orwell

In the fictional near-future, I’m standing overwatch on the wall of the Haunted House Control Point near the present-day Octagon Museum, about two blocks from the White House, watching a group of men burn to death in a fire I set with a portable flame-thrower turret. It’s a beautiful sight. 

Some of them drop their weapons and I walk in to take them for myself as the fire dies out, then I roll behind a jersey barrier and fire off a few rounds of suppressive fire toward a heavily-armored man weilding a chainsaw. He’s barely phased by the bullets that pancake on his ballistic armor and he revs the chainsaw menacingly as he runs at me.

I’m rebuilding society in the shadow of a biological terror attack, making America great again. I’m playing Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, a video game about killing people who kill people and take their stuff, and then taking their stuff so you can kill even more-well-armed people and take their stuff too. I kill people to show that killing people is wrong.

Much has been written about the ham-handed politics of violent video games and simultaneously, the timidity of game publishers to take what might be seen as political stances in their video games. 

©2019 J. Wilder

I’m surrounded and the enemy is closing in.

Backing away from them, I look over my shoulder at the edge of the futuristic Egyptian garden wall and imagine myself leaping into the mists below, where I will surely perish. 

If I don’t, I will either be crushed by a well-dressed man with a giant cybernetic fist, poisoned by a one-eyed grandmother, or nuked by a South Korean esports legend. But more likely, the overly polite climatologist with a reputation for freezing her enemies, will blast me with her freeze gun and then stab me in the eye with an icicle.

I choose to rob them all of the satisfaction and step off into the void.

Multiplayer combat-oriented video games have been an growing popular form of entertainment over the last decade. With names like, “League of Legends”, “Overwatch”, and “Fortnite: Battle Royale” they rake in billions of dollars and strike fear into traditional and new media alike.

Netflix recently explained to its shareholders that it’s biggest competitor is the online multiplayer game Fortnite, not HBO.

These games are addicting, stressful, violent, and insanely fun. Parents are increasingly wary of their potential to engulf their children’s free time; to the detriment of face-to-face social interaction, outdoor time, and performance of household chores. 

©2019 Johanna Wilder

For most all of my childhood, and quite a bit of my young adulthood, I was bullied. Growing up in rural Indiana in the ’70s and ’80s was a challenge that required a child be either rugged brute or resilient target. Target I was, but I was neither resilient, nor rugged, nor brutal.

While I was being hunted down by my menacing peers, I was scoping out alleyways for safer routes to school. I didn’t want to fight. I wanted to be left alone so I could focus on what was important to me at the time: reading fantasy and science fiction, orchestral symphonies, track and field, the neighbor girl with the pretty brown hair who seemed to like me, and the Doctor Demento radio show. All of these apparently anarchistic thought-crimes that would bring about the demise of the heretofore incorruptible moral traditions of Terre Haute, Indiana.

I was a twelve-year-old enemy of the state that needed to be dealt with extrajudicially, so as not to sully the impressionable.

Classic front page story from The Onion, from the Jonnie Era. Christine Wenc found the whole batch of microfilm at the Wisconsin Historical Archive.