Automated Rant Generators and Letter Generators

At 7:35 AM 7/17/95, Martin Hamilton wrote:
>MONTY HARDER writes:
>
>| Anyone who has read MAD Magazine could put such together. As an added
>| bonus, use variable margin settings, and none of the letters would be
>| exactly the same. Appropriate Imail => FAX software on a puter in DC
>| (local call that way) with the phone number of the sender filled in on
>| the top line for ID (izzat legal?) so it doesn't look like a form letter
>| at all.
>
>Plus - choose the fonts & point sizes at random too ? :-)

Yes, make your letters to Congressmen look like ransom notes...it really
gets their attention!

Seriously, I have no doubt that the next generation of "direct mail" will
be geared toward automatic generation of personalized letters, using
various natural language parser generators (a la the "rant generator" many
of us have used), variable fonts and margins, and so on.

This will further "flood the channel" and will ultimately make letter
writing mostly meaningless. IN my case, I skip most letters to the
editor--at least for local newspapers and weeklies--as they look to be
automatically written ("I am outraged at your article about converting
Lighthouse Point into a nuclear-powered whale-packing plant...").

Cypherpunks could probably have an effect on hastening this "denial of
service" attack on the efficacy of letter-writing by releasing an
easy-to-use package that does all this letter writing at the click of a
button....just type in some key words, for the topics, and it does the
rest.

An interesting project, actually.

--Tim May

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> 
> Cypherpunks could probably have an effect on hastening this "denial of
> service" attack on the efficacy of letter-writing by releasing an
> easy-to-use package that does all this letter writing at the click of a
> button....just type in some key words, for the topics, and it does the
> rest.
> 
> An interesting project, actually.
> 
> --Tim May
> 
    A final step might be to interface the output to old pen plotters
    like my HP7470A with an ascii-to-handwriting program.  Akin to
    the White House souvenir signature generator, but with a set of
    parameters to mimic different "hands".  Knuth's Metafont tricks 
    come to mind.