News You Can Bruise for 2005 December 11

I created a web toy that generates pairings for your romantic or erotic Star Trek fan fiction. No longer need fanfic authors fall back on the standard pairings in use since 1966. There are bold, new, arbitrarily complex romantic entanglements to be explored!

Sumana claims that people keep writing slashfic with the canonical pairings because they prefer those pairings. I think this just shows a failure of imagination. If I wrote Trek slash I would like an occasional challenge like trying to fit Phlox, Lore, and Yeoman Rand into the same story. At any rate, the generator comes up with some really funny pairings.

This is also my first Ruby CGI program. The code's pretty bad; I've decided I don't really like Ruby's HTML generator. It's very idiomatic, but it combines logic and presentation like... well, like the farewell embrace between Spock and Vic Fontaine that fateful day on Starbase 26.