Tips and Tricks for Creative Writers, Randomize Your Words!

Respect to the PC, still the best platform for REALLY CREATIVE software applications:

In this new era of omnipresent hand-held digital connectivity we have gone one step beyond the ideal of the "electronic cottage" where you have all the means to participate in the information economy in the comfort of your own home: now your electronic office travels with you wherever you go - on a tablet or smart-phone. But a deeper look reveals that the kind of functionality on offer in this latest generation of portable computers is not all that it is cracked up to be. A lot of the available "apps" are little more than jazzed up advertisements - streaming a constant list of sales offers or superfluous news feeds about starlets spotted drunk and in a state of wardrobe malfunction outside of LA nightclubs. Sure you get your quota of digital stimulation in the sense that you can twiddle your fingers across a glossy screen while waiting in line at McDonalds, but what is the actual productive output of this constant scatterbrained henpecking and lowest common denominator titillation? This doesn't mean to say that there are not a lot of really good applications being developed and released these days - there are - but they may not necessarily fit onto an iPad or Android Tablet...
Is the Windows PC Now Only For Retro Geeks? Maybe, but that would mean the tablet-converted masses will miss out on a lot of functionality you just can't get on a 7-inch screen with no keyboard: This site hosts a couple of Windows applications which take the functionality of a word processor into hitherto unimagined realms of Dada poetry and postmodern art: the Cut'n'Mix Postmodern Word Processor and the ROBOCOLLAGE Automatic Collage Builder.
1.)Cut'n'Mix: A completed novel, story or poem might also be referred to as a "cut-up" if the end product reads as if it has been composed using the cut-up technique. As a genre of writing, cut-up has been described as "literary slapdash", "textual vomit" and even "pure esoteric sensationalism". Cut-up writing is often hard (or even impossible) to understand and those who admire it might find themselves in the same "dubious" category as the William S. Burroughs character who is fond of centipedes.
The process currently described as the "cut-up" technique is said to have originated at the beginning of the 20th century when Tristan Tzara, poet and co-founder of Dadaism randomly pulled words out of a hat to compose an on-the-spot automatic poem. The process of randomly rearranging words within sentences or letters within words became part of Dada and Surrealist theory.
Find out more about Cut'n'Mix...

ROBOCOLLAGE:
The first thing you will notice when you open the ROBOCOLLAGE control panel are the excess of buttons, dialogs boxes and faders - which may seem daunting at first, but in fact there is only one button that you really need to use to build automatic collages: The "Go!" button will build a collage page for your right away, but it will be composed of randomly-positioned images only. To start inserting text to make the collages look similar to those created by the dadaists, surrealists and futurists, you have to paste, type or fill any of the available text input areas with text. (Just hitting the salt shaker icon in ano of the top button menu bars will of any fill the corresponding text area with a jumble of randombly-selected text). Another main item of the User Interface to pay attention to is the two faders labeled "Text" and "Images". These control the flow of randomly selected text into the collage. If you want a collage which is primarily composed of images, drag the "Images" slider to a much higher setting than the "Text" slider. To get more information about ROBOCOLLAGE, go to the Automatic Collage Website Builder information page.