News You Can Bruise for 2025 January 3

You know that email you get when a website you like is acquired by a big company and you know it's going to get shut down? This is like that, only the website shut down first and then got merged into a bigger project.

In May 2003 I created The Eater of Meaning, a web proxy that changes the words on a web page and renders the results. It was popular for a while in the "blogosphere" and then I kind of forgot about it for 20 years, until it broke in 2024.

Throughout 2024 I got occasional emails from poets about the Eater of Meaning and could I fix it. Upon reflection I decided that while running a public web proxy on my personal website in 2003 was kind of fun, doing so in 2024 is a bad idea. So the CGI script breaking was a blessing in disguise. But I didn't want the Eater of Meaning to disappear entirely because, as I've found out, it's important to some poets' artistic practice.

So I've rewritten the Eater of Meaning code in modern Python, and added it to olipy, my pack of art supplies. With basic Python skills (or even Python package-installing skills) you can have access to just about all of the Eater of Meaning's old functionality, as well as some new eaters based on the other olipy tools. I realize that this isn't as convenient as having it as a proxy on a website, but this is the best I can do for now.