Four Letter Words is just a sketch - a little thing to look at for a moment or two and then pass by. It's one of a number of little ideas I'm trying in Processing - a programming language aimed at artists. The piece is technologically and artistically facile, but it's a beginning.
What surprised me about the piece was the way the mind attempts to construct narratives out of random collections of words. Again, not exactly new territory (order from chaos and all that), but it throws up some interesting ideas about how little you actually need to tell a story.
It's also made me think about font rendering, because despite setting the fonr and the runtime to smooth, it still looks pixellated as hell to me. I had envisioned beautiful anti-aliased typography. Instead, there's jaggies everywhere, which I attribute to Windows' font rendering. (It probably looks smoother on a Mac, but I'm not sure that means better. I always think that I'll like Macs more, but when I use one, I feel like I've got cataracts.) It contributes to my general sense of artlessness, which I'm having to come to terms with. I keep trying to make pretty things, but they come out... not.
See?