Ceramic Nation
Project announcement! Last night I built a Markov Chain-generated novel, titled Ceramic Nation.
It’s presented as a robot named Ellis Champlin, who is diligently composing one chapter a day based on a corpus of classic public-domain novels and philosophy texts. Here is the site and source code.
This was an exercise in rapidly building an MVP, styling, testing, Dev Opsing, and Markov-chaining. I’m curious what this bot will produce as the days go on, and am hoping for greatness. I plan to refine the logic slowly to produce better and better chapters, and rotate the source documents as I am inspired by new books and ideas.
A side goal is to break out the MarkovChain class into its own gem. That is a task I find myself repeating on side projects, and it would be nice to encapsulate the logic and release it to the open-source community.
Update (1/4/23)
I have retired Ceramic Nation after seven years of nonsense! The project endures as a Middleman-powered static HTML website, but it’s no longer producing new chapters. Heroku’s decision to sunset free PostgreSQL dynos helped me decide that the project had reached a conclusion.
Also, I extracted the gem I described; it’s called Remarkovable.