Promptly Generate Prompts

One of our favorite parts of running this site is expanding the stichomancy prompt generator. Stichomancy, if you’re new here, is a form of divination practiced by flipping to a random page in a book and then pointing to a random place on that page. Here at the Skelleyverse, we have not found it to be a reliable way of anticipating the future. But, we do find it quite entertaining. We thought you might like to know more about how we add new batches of material to the generator every few weeks.

Snippets of text are harvested at their peak of randomness, then arranged in a spreadsheet to cure in a virtual cheese cave. In lots of 100, the rows are sorted alphabetically and recited aloud for quality assurance. Always, there are portions of the list where the snippets chain together to form brief, quasi-coherent messages. (We think that cave is haunted by a nascent AI with a juvenile sense of humor.) When the spreadsheet grows heavier than the virtual cheese wheel on the other end of the see-saw, it cascades into the depduper-uploader which makes it available for your enjoyment here at the Skelleyverse.

This latest batch takes our hoard of weird little phrases up over 20,000. That’s a lot of writing prompts! If you choose to employ it for fortune-telling instead, just remember what we said about the juvenile sense of humor.