The Bot is (Still) Alive

Funny thought: I’m manually checking an automated bot, as a kind of electronic “canary in a coal mine” for Twitter (a service whose icon is a bird).
Funny thought: I’m manually checking an automated bot, as a kind of electronic “canary in a coal mine” for Twitter (a service whose icon is a bird).
A long while ago, I made a Twitter bot named @theDesireBot. I was delighted to see that it made this very timely post:
I’m excited to announce my latest project, entitled I am the Internet: AMA. The site lets users ask the Internet questions, as though it were a real person. A real… crazy person who can’t spell for crap.
The villanelle is a really great poetic form, and has a really interesting structure. In the first stanza, the first and third lines rhyme… and are repeated throughout the poem. They alternate, and server as the final lines for the subsequent stanzas. At the very end of the poem, they come back together and finish the poem as a couplet.
“Another very large percentage of the things I won were tickets to events. I did manage to go to an event that I won tickets to, but the majority of them were for concerts and events in other countries that I obviously couldn’t go to […] I won a lot of cool stuff too though, and getting mysterious things in my mailbox each day was pretty fun.”
To top things off, I decided to make the app free. I sold a small amount, but honestly – I started to wonder whether I really wanted to charge or not for the app. I’ve spent a lot of time on it, but ultimately I decided that I’d rather have more people see it and use it. Obscurity being the bigger challenge, right?
Why Because Bot is another Twitter bot I just launched last week. The bot finds tweets starting with “Why is…” and also finds tweets containing a sentence that starts with “It’s because…” and pairs them together.
A large part of this is also the viewer, who fills in the narrative between the text and the image. Even if it doesn’t make sense, we’re natural storytellers – we want things to make sense. And so we try, looking for commonality even when none might exist.
Sometimes, the results are really funny. Sometimes, the photos are way off the mark. The joy and pain of bots, I guess. If you do the Twitter thing and are game for some silly updates every 30 minutes, I invite you to check out Desire Bot. And if you decide to follow the bot, I’d consider it a kindness.
Leaving this here, as a teaser for a future project. I’m currently messing around a little bit with Node, and learning how to create a Twitter bot. Hopefully I’ll have something to show in the near future. For now though, I’ll just leave this here.
An old woman in a fancy gown just cut in front of me at the pastry shop and ganked the last brownie. Senility or willful malice?
Though it’s a brief set of images, these Tweets in Real Life are a fun play on technology, curated by Ted Mikulski. Some seemed like they were easy to set up, others seemingly much tougher. I’d love to see more of these types of juxtapositions. I’m reminded a lot of my project for 20×2, where I presented a video combining…
I woke up this morning to find a comment left on blog: it was from MJ Kim, who was the mother in one of the Flickr photos I used in my 20×2 presentation. What a random and lovely surprise! Turns out, she knows some of the 20×2 folks to boot. How random is that? In case you missed the Chicago…
Twitter users @poeks and @sween asked some of their friends to film their favorite tweets. Each snippet is a glimpse of someone’s actual Twitter post, presented in a variety of manners: acted out literally, hand puppets, you name it. Brilliant little project, and I had a few genuine LOLs. Twitter: The Criterion Collection. My favorites are at 2:01 and 6:06….