twitter bots
all of these bots made with tracery and hosted on cheap bots, done quick!
a twitter bot that misattributes epithets of other american cities to new york city. https://twitter.com/oh_new_york
a few years ago i went to visit my brother in new york and when he picked me up at the airport, i declared “it's good to be back in new york! bean town! sin city! the windy city! the city of angels!” and just kept going until i couldn’t think of any more epithets of other major american cities. i still do this every time i go to see him because i still think it is hilarious. in early 2018, mouse reeve tweeted out the wikipedia list of city nicknames in the united states as a potential corpus for weird internet art and i immediately saw the potential and knew that i wanted to make a bot that would do variations on my dumb airport joke.
a twitter bot that is constantly introducing its large adult son. https://twitter.com/this_is_my_son
made shortly after reading jia tolentino’s the land of the large adult son. i thought the idea of a very powerful person introducing their large adult son to a business acquaintance or whatever was a hilarious conceit and went really deep in tracery; this is by far the most complicated bot i’ve built.
a twitter bot that tries to make short stories out of the harvard sentences. https://twitter.com/harvard_stories
several years ago i was thinking a lot about randomness and narrative and took a deck of cards and wrote out a different sentence or phrase on each one with the idea that you could shuffle the deck, draw two or three cards, and it would read like a short story. a few years later when i first found out about the harvard sentences, a series of phonetically-balanced sentences originally developed in the 1940’s to test radio equipment and expanded upon through the 1960’s, i thought it would be a good set of sentences to randomly combine to form stories.
