Word Galaxies

So, I've been reading Steven Hawking's Universe...

and I had a poetry assignment due today. Word Galaxies is what happened.

The inspiration behind the galaxy format was Scrabble, though I took a bit of liberty with the rules... but the crossword idea is the same: the program tries to find a place it can insert words on the structure, and otherwise it just finds a random place where the word fits. The results I find visually interesting, because you get "clusters" of words...

Another (minor) inspiration was Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. In the book there are Tralfamadorian novels which aren't meant to be read linearly (since the Tralfmadorians have no concept of time) but each page is a sprawl of points which, when read concurrently, gives insight into a Universal Truth... So I guess I wanted to sprawl words on the screen... to take a break from linear coherent sense... not that there's a whole lot of that around here, anyway...

The results of this experiment: