For my birthday, my brother-in-law gave me a 4992-digit hex number that, when used as a seed for Python’s random number generator, makes it so that printing a sequence of “random” ASCII characters actually prints a birthday greeting. I find it rather amazing that this is possible! This is the program he sent with the seed: with open("seed.txt", encoding="ascii") as handle: seed = int(handle.read().strip(), 0) r = random.Random(seed) pending = "" while True: character = chr(r.randrange(128)) if pending + character == "\x1e\x1f": break print(pending, end="") pending = character print()