To start off 2016, I thought I’d take a moment to write about some of the new Twitter bots I assembled last year. In my last post on the subject, I indicated that I was reluctant to continue making bots because it was distracting me from larger projects. However, since lately I’ve been focusing hard on a big exciting endeavour, I’ve found that making bots has continued to be a relaxing creative outlet in my downtime.
Reeks of moon
therefore beware of darkness.
— Yharnam Notes (@YharnamNotes) April 18, 2015
Yharnam Notes is a small tribute to Bloodborne, one of my favourite games of 2015. The game’s asynchronous multiplayer features include the ability to leave notes for other players using templates of words and phrases. These permutations can often be inadvertently lyrical, as Natalie Zed explored in her Bloodborne poetry. Inspired by this, I made a bot that constructs random messages using the vocabulary of the game’s note system.
For the want of an umbrage, the anger was lost
For the want of an anger, the deadly sin was lost
— Hypernym Bot (@HypernymBot) November 10, 2015
Hypernym Bot was inspired by the folk proverb “For Want of a Nail”. I wanted to find a way to generate the same structure of text programmatically. Fortunately, Wordnik maintains a list of hypernyms (words that are more generic or abstract) for each word in their database. This made it simple to start with a random word, then iterate up the chain of abstraction of few times.
abidings 💀 pic.twitter.com/Etfnslbvi2
— Every Metal Word (@EveryMetalWord) December 27, 2015
This is one of the silliest ideas that I’ve actually followed through on. Somehow my errant thoughts on @EveryWord and heavy metal clichés intersected, and led me to render every word in the English language in a heavy metal font. Tweeting a new word every four hours, @EveryMetalWord will complete its task by 2065.
You can find the complete list of my Twitter bots here. Wishing you all a happy new year, may your 2016 be programmatic and random!
