Making fake word searches

While Elon's purchase of Twitter 1 And subsequent rename, and "acquisition", and "acquisition". knocked me off the platform for a bit, I returned for bad political takes, mediocre housing takes, good energy takes, and a surfeit of memes. This tweet recently caught my eye:

I figured it would be pretty easy to bang out a generator for rigged word searches myself, using PHP's GD extension with imagecreate and imagettftext to dynamically build the images—and indeed it was! I had used a similar approach a while back for generating OG 2 Open Graph, the protocol for showing an image as part of rich link formatting. Thanks Facebook™! images for my Harry Potter 'Guess the Book' game, 3 You can check out the blog post on it from way back when if you're interested. so I just copied and tweaked it. With a quick UI, it was up and running at https://alexbeals.com/projects/wordsearch/.

I stuck with the Tom Selleck version that the original tweet sourced for the landing page, but feel free to generate your own impossible word searches or if you're curious, check out the code. And if you're looking for some advice... 4 *cough* *cough*

  1. And subsequent rename, and "acquisition", and "acquisition". ↩︎

  2. Open Graph, the protocol for showing an image as part of rich link formatting. Thanks Facebook™!  ↩︎

  3. You can check out the blog post on it from way back when if you're interested. ↩︎

  4. *cough* *cough* ↩︎