Okay, so I’ve been messing around with this “pirate entertainers” idea for a while, and I finally got something kinda cool working. Let me walk you through it.
First, I brainstormed what exactly a “pirate entertainer” would even do. Like, are we talking jugglers? Musicians? Storytellers? I figured, why not all of the above! So I decided to create a little program that generates random pirate entertainer profiles.
I started by making a list. A big, messy list of pirate-y things. Stuff like:
- Skills: Singing, playing the accordion, sword swallowing, telling tall tales, juggling cannonballs (carefully!), doing magic tricks (badly), knot tying, parrot training (mostly unsuccessful).
- Names: One-Eyed Jack, Peg-Leg Pete, Salty Sue, Captain Cutlass, Mad Maggie… you get the idea. Just went wild with the names.
- Backstories: Lost at sea as a child, ran away from a circus, former navy officer gone rogue, always wanted to be a pirate, terrible gambler in debt to a sea witch.
- Props: A rusty old cutlass, a chipped mug, a tattered treasure map, a one-stringed fiddle, a parrot that only says “Arrr!”
Then, I figured I’d use Python, ’cause it’s pretty easy to pick stuff randomly from lists. I whipped up some code that basically grabs one item from each of those lists and mashes them together. It’s super basic, but it works!
Here’s the gist of how I did it, although I’m not gonna paste the whole code here, ’cause it’s kinda messy:
- Use the random choose function.
- Create pirate entertainer’s name.
- Create pirate entertainer’s skills.
- Create pirate entertainer’s backstories.
- Create pirate entertainer’s props.
I ran the program a bunch of times, and it spit out some hilarious combinations. Like, “One-Eyed Jack, who juggles cannonballs and ran away from the circus because he was in debt to a sea witch, and his only prop is a parrot that only says ‘Arrr!’” Gold, I tell ya, pure gold!
It’s definitely not perfect, still a work in progress. I might add some more lists, like “catchphrases” or “terrible jokes.” Maybe even try to make it generate a little story instead of just a profile. But for now, it’s a fun little project that makes me laugh. And honestly, isn’t that what pirate entertainers are all about?
