The benches in Riverside Park, like most parks in NYC, have small plaques attached to them. People have the option to buy these plaques in the form of donations to the park, and write whatever they like on them. Quotes, dedications, messages, etc., are common themes. I collected over 100 of these entries and used them as the text source to generate Markov chains.

These are strings of words that are assembled by a program. Unlike AI text generation, Markov chains create text by picking a word from a text source and calculating the likelihood of any given word coming after it. This results in mostly coherent text samples that can come across as poetic, foretelling, or introspective for the user.

When I am confronted with a difficult decision or a perilous path forward, I sometimes consult with The Oar. It helps to ease my mind. This is my giving tree.