Amulet scratchpad (multiverse edition)

Adapted from Robin Sloan's scratchpad by Sam Nabi. By using this app you agree not to create NFTs of the amulets you make here.


June 2021: Next to each amulet, you'll see a graphic. The graphic is a version of Conway's Game of Life, using the amulet's hash to create the initial pattern. The pattern mutates according to a simple set of rules. It may arrive at a stable pattern, or it might keep changing forever. Like amulets themselves, there's no way to reverse-engineer a particular pattern.

Let's call these graphical representations talismans. A talisman's pattern is a visual version of an amulet's text. We can look at how the talisman enhances or subverts the text, elevating the amulet to a new level.

About

Creating an amulet from scratch is no easy task. You might go through hundreds of versions of a poem, trying different variations of wording and capitalisation, before stumbling upon one that qualifies as an amulet.

We can use computers to help us generate amulets — feed a massive set of words into an algorithm and comb though the results to find one that's particularly poetic. But where's the fun in that?

This scratchpad attempts to strike a middle ground. As you write your poem, it will scan the multiverse for similar poems — these could use different capitalisation, or synonyms of the words you've written. The exact poem you wrote might not be an amulet, but a similar one could very well be.

If stumbling upon an amulet is like rolling dice, this scratchpad loads the dice in your favour.

This app uses the Merriam-Webster thesaurus API to find synonyms. If we hit the daily usage limit it likely won't work properly.

Found 0 similar poems in the multiverse.