rose_cat | Calculated randomosity

Due to some recent discussions at

randompictures, I've been thinking about the nature of random pictures and random posts. (I'll leave out the existential stuff because it didn't get me anywhere useful.)

I played around a bit and this is what I came up with.

Details of how I did it are

First, I Googled images for “random pictures.”

To select the pictures, I adapted a method from a field biology study in which I took part in college, involving facing away from the beach and tossing a coin over one’s shoulder into a tidepool. Throwing coins at the monitor seemed like a really bad idea, so what I actually did was to close my eyes, scroll up, down or some combination of the two, move the mouse in some direction or other, and click. If I got the same image twice, or something ridiculously small to post, I’d go again. I’d intended to keep it to 10 results, but somehow I ended up with 22 (which I didn’t notice until much later).

Then, I Googled images for “random picture generator.” I must have been looking for a useful site – I did use a couple -- but for some reason I picked 10 images from that as well, using the scroll method above.

Next, I tried out a couple of sites I’d found.

First was Creative Combinations. For added randomness, I click-clickety-clickied the “Generate another pair” button, copied the result into Google, and selected 10 pics using the scrolly method.

Then I went to Lorempixel and took the first 10. (And played with the site for a while :) )

Finally, I shuffled the 59 files with Random.org, randomly picked 25 for the post using a site I’ve lost the link to (but it was basically like picking names out of a hat), and uploaded the resulting group in bulk to my photobucket. They were uploaded alphabetized by file name, and I’ve posted them in reverse order to how they were uploaded.

This may sound tedious, but actually it was a lot of fun :)

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