barrl

After a couple years of making bots, I’ve made a fair few wordlists that I thought other people might be able to make use of, so I decided to release them. These are provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License; if you want to use them commercially, please contact me and we can work something out.

I’m just providing these as lists in txt files; I use delim.co to turn them into Tracery code.

body parts

goo

buildings that are full of secrets

unsettling gerunds

unsettling adjectives

cooking tools

ingredients

cooking styles

dishes (compiled from multiple cookbooks, mainly the Joy of Cooking, as well as suggestions from Twitter followers)

I’ve been talking about how easy it is to get started making bots for a while now, but I haven’t done a long-form writeup of all of the tools that I use that you might find useful. So here we go: a list of resources that I use for making Twitter bots.

Tracery Basics

Cheap Bots Done Quick This is the software that most of my Twitter bots run on. It handles the regularly scheduled posting as well as the replies

Tracery The language my bots are written in

Tracery Visual Editor

Another Tracery Editor

Tracery Interactive Tutorial

Non-Tracery Tools

Auto-fave/Retweet bots I use these for the honeybots

Zach Whalen’s SSBot

Word Lists

SCOWL Wordlist creator

Ashley Bovan’s Word Lists Includes words by syllable count, hyphenated words, words by parts of speech, and other lists

The Great Noun List

Corpora Lists of interesting words

List inspiration

The Noun Project I never use any of the Noun Project stuff directly, but they have a lot of lists of icons of various objects put in useful categories, which can be good for when you need to think about, say, common appliances, but it’s hard to name them all off the top of your head

Spellzone word lists These are for learning English, but can also be useful for when you need a bunch of words for certain things, like buildings, appliances, household objects, etc; I usually just keep a notepad tab open and write down a handful that will work for what I’m doing

Wordnik I often will pick a fun sounding word, look at what lists people put it on, and then look at those lists for more word inspiration

Text/List Editing Tools

Whitespace remover

Comma Delimiter Turns lists of words into code; use commas as separator and double quotes for Tracery

Find and replace In case the one in wordpad/notepad isn’t quite enough

Case Converter

Dolch Sight Words This is actually a word list for teaching kids to read fluently, but it can work well for basic bot vocabulary

Images/Graphics

Public Domain Photos

Vintage Printables This one’s particularly good for technical illustrations

Wikimedia Commons

Glitch’s game assets, PNG conversions

Miscellaneous Guides

Instant disposable Gmail addresses for signing up for Twitter

Hook, bait and camouflage: making a honeybot

Further Reading

Ethical bot-making An overview of bot-ethics with lots of good links

So you want to build a generator…

It’s been over a year since I started @thinkpiecebot, and it’s grown a LOT in the interim. The code is a huge, often unwieldy mess, there are over 100 formulas in it, and in the past couple of months the scope and the tone has gone through some… changes.

Holy Shit, a Suit-Wearing Racist

— Thinkpiece Bot (@thinkpiecebot) November 21, 2016

It was a rough election year, and since we elected a white supremacist sexual predator as the next president of the United States, it’s only gotten worse.  We’re watching a fascist gather military leaders around him and fuck up foreign policy for his own profit. Abortion bans gaining traction, hate crimes going up, reasons to crack down on the poor, on POC, on trans people, all going into overdrive.

It wasn’t good to begin with. At any given time, I know about a dozen people crowdfunding their medical expenses, and more people their other survival needs.

Meanwhile, the discourse has been absolute garbage. We keep seeing fawning profiles and photo shoots with the ringleaders of hate groups, normalizing them. A bunch of dudes on the left have managed to normalize a political environment that mostly consists of them taking screenshots of marginalized leftists on Twitter and making jokes about and/or harassing them; to add insult to injury, the jokes aren’t even very good. This happened. Political propaganda and coordinated disinformation campaigns are being called “fake news” and confused with The Onion, which also isn’t very good anymore. Dudes keep calling for “civility” and “respect” for the people who supported our fascist president-elect. The Daily Show gave a white supremacist a platform that got her a NY Times puff piece, then sent her cupcakes. That’s just a sample.

Personally, I’ve been dealing with a group of stalkers that a prominent “feminist activist” sent on me. I have various groups of people, some of them trans, showing up to tell me my gender isn’t real at least once a week now. Throw in some medical problems and mostly I’m mostly a ball of exhaustion and low-simmering rage that happens to take human form and make Twitter bots, and if I look at my friends, I see that I’ve still got it pretty good.

When I started thinkpiecebot, I was mostly making fun of terrible op-eds by baby boomers where they pretend they didn’t ruin the economy and fuck over our entire generation. Lately, though, I’ve been pretty much channeling all of my frustration and rage at the current state of political discourse, the utter failures of journalism to cover what this is– a full-scale fascist revival, and the mostly cishet white dudes with platforms who refuse to step aside and let people who aren’t so privilege-blinded that they don’t know what they’re talking about do their jobs. The total spinelessness of both the liberal media and the Democratic party has been predictable but disappointing, and I’m seeing a lot of the people I care about be thrown under the bus in an attempt to be conciliatory with neo-nazis. And, well, this bot is the platform I have, and the headlines are still terrible enough that I can riff on that.

Thinkpiecebot is built in Tracery, and it works by having a series of formulas with lists of things that get plugged in. For example, “[EXCLAMATION], A [MODIFIER] [BIGOT TYPE]” can make tweets like “Holy Shit, A Suit-Wearing Racist”. Most of my formulas have pretty long lists of words that can get plugged into them, but I’m at a point where I have over 100 formulas, so I can put in a few that have a more limited selection of possible phrases and not worry about them naturally coming up more than every few days. I’ve been putting in a lot more formulas that are extremely pointed criticism at specific types of stories.  

I Wrote Milquetoast Liberal Thinkpieces. Now I’m Collaborating With Nazis. — Thinkpiece Bot (@thinkpiecebot) December 1, 2016

This isn’t an accident, and it isn’t a bot that learns automatically picking something up. This is me, attempting to use satire to point out something that the media is utterly failing at, assisted by a random number generator. Sometimes it works really well. For example:

Well, The United States Electing A Sexual Predator As President Is Normal Now, Let’s Talk About Cupcake Shops Instead

— Thinkpiece Bot (@thinkpiecebot) December 7, 2016

What’s great about the evolution of thinkpiecebot is that a lot of the pieces I was originally mocking were about various forms of completely trivial bullshit, from cupcake shops to comic books, and I’ve been expanding it for over a year. That’s a year of reading terrible thinkpieces, taking suggestions from people on Twitter, and sending drunk emails to myself while my friends are in the bathroom to remind myself to put the stuff we were talking about in when I get home. It means there’s over 1,500 unique phrases in the bot that get plugged into the 100+ formulas.

I can’t hold all the stuff that goes in there in my head at a time; I’d never have thought to put “Cupcake Shops” in the above tweet. That’s the power of the random number generator. When you combine it with phrases like “The United States Electing A Sexual Predator As President” and “Headlines That Are Too Fucking Precious To Use The Word ‘Fascism'” that are obviously written by me in my voice, the bot starts to sound less like a bot and more like me.

The bot’s less funny now. But sticking with making fun of the kind of shitty thinkpiece that was bugging me in the middle of 2015 would have just made it slip into irrelevance, and from the beginning, thinkpiecebot has been a living project that expands and changes. I’m longing for a time when the thinkpieces that made me mad were just boomer nonsense about Pokémon, but I think this bot is gonna keep getting darker for a while ago. Maybe it will be funnier if we can fix the world.

Over the past few months, I’ve been making a handful of “honeybots”– bots that act as a honeypot for Twitter troll. There are a lot of people on Twitter who search for specific terms and then yell at people who mention them; they go on about topics that range from chemtrails and the flat earth to various alt-right people with cult followings to atheism. A handful of bullies particularly like to search for people who mention them negatively and then retweet those people to their followers, leading a harassment mob to their virtual door.

I’ve been documenting these on a Tumblr blog, and they caught the attention of the Washington Post, among other places. Sarah Nyberg made an advanced, improved honeybot that is even better at catching trolls and wasting their time than mine. It’s been a fun couple weeks for automatically wasting the time of assholes.

One of the groups of people who have been really easy to bait and really plentiful are “internet atheists”. If you’ve spent much time adjacent to the atheist community, you’ve probably run into these– their identity revolves around their atheism; they generally hate religion of all stripes, and they roam the wilds of the web trying to pick fights with people. They tend to have a personal philosophy that revolves around the idea of skepticism, but aren’t very good at embracing its principles themselves– they tend to have “scientific” justifications for all of their personal biases and often express a good deal of transphobia, racism and misogyny.

What these people seem to like more than anything else is to fight their idea of “theists” without actually having to engage in ideas. They want a straw Christian to use as a punching bag. So I made them one.

Enter @christianmom18, AKA “carol”.

Carol is a bit of an improvement on @good_opinions and @opinions_good. She has a lot more basic things to say as “bait”, and I made her reply occasionally with those instead of just with the 17 “argument” phrases– “you are wrong”, “check the bible”, “no”, etc. I also gave her a chance of “correcting” with “*your” anytime someone said “you’re” and vice versa, regardless of whether or not they were using the word correctly. (Another great Sarah idea.) I also set her up to auto-retweet some Bible quotes accounts and the official accounts of both Kellogg’s cereals and the New York Yankees.

I got some help from Sarah and some of my gaming friends to come up with this stuff and had “carol” stick emoji and random punctuation on the end of the phrases so that they didn’t get caught by Twitter as duplicates, and practically immediately started getting bites.

(I actually removed the “going to hell” thing from carol’s vocabulary after this– I realized that was kind of an asshole thing to say, even if the only people who saw it were jerks.)

A lot of these accounts are people who spend a lot of time searching Twitter for terms like “atheists” to find people to dunk on, and they often follow each other, so “carol”‘s posts quickly spread among that network, and people started talking to her.

At length.

That’s just the beginning. Richy went on to talk to “her” for about three hours— through several repetitions of her “arguments”.

Some people figured out that she was a troll, but not that she was a bot.

Carol’s maturity was called into question.

She was told she was a bad mother.

  She was insulted:

And this is just the beginning. After this, “carol” was quote tweeted by a popular atheist account that seems mostly to spend time dunking on theists, and her followers came in droves.

Check out how smug these people are:

She was ‘splained to pretty much endlessly:

After about a day of “Atheist Girl”‘s followers talking to carol– a few of them figured out that “she” is a bot, but not many– I started noticing that they were even taking the really obvious bait.

By this point, Twitter’s automated system had shadowbanned “carol”, so her posts weren’t showing up in Twitter search results– all the people talking to her found her via other people’s retweets, quote tweets and conversations. So I got some help from friends to come up with really wacky things to say.

This is just the tip of the iceberg: search Twitter to see all “her” mentions. I also shared her source code, though it’s not free for reuse without permission.

  By Urban~commonswiki; used under a CC licence.

  I wrote a piece recently for BotWatch that touched on this, but I wanted to give a brief explanation of why I use the word “tessera” when I talk about my bots.

A tessera is a single tile used in a mosaic; every tessera is suspended in mortar, and depending on where the mosaic’s viewer is standing and the lighting conditions, different tiles may be illuminated. Guy Gavriel Kay explains in Sailing to Sarantium:

“The curve and the height of a dome allow us the illusion of movement through changing light, my lord. Opportunities beyond price. It is the mosaicist’s natural place. His… haven. A painted fresco on a flat wall can do all a mosaic can, and-though many in my guild would call this heresy-it can do more at times. Nothing on Jad’s earth can do what a mosaicist can do on a dome if he sets the tesserae directly on the surface.”

Some of @thinkpiecebot’s tesserae.

My bots have lots of words and phrases in them and they’re set in formulas, what the bot says is chosen pseudorandomly, just like the flicker of a candle may psuedorandomly “choose” different tesserae to illuminate, and how their flickering and winking will be different for people standing in different places.

In some ways, I’m creating the illusion of human thought where there isn’t any; which of my tesserae is “illuminated” depends on what the random number picker that puts bot tweets together happens to land on. Just like changing light creates the illusion of movement, the random numbers create the illusion of a mind behind what the bots post.

As usual, I’ve made a few new Twitter bots since my last update, but I want to talk a little bit about how a particular one– @nerdgarbagebot— works.

I’ve been talking a lot on Twitter about how simple bots can be to set up. I use Cheap Bots Done Quick and the Tracery visual editor for mine, so I hardly have to look at code when I’m writing them– my screen actually looks like this:

Both of these are free tools that you can use to make your own bot; all you need to do is register a new Twitter account to get started.

The results of nerdgarbagebot are pretty varied and rich, but the code is really simple– it only actually has 13 variables in it:

Work titles (“Jurassic Park”, “The Sims”)

Creators (“George Lucas”, “Nintendo”)

Elements (“mermaids”, “a plot”, “interpersonal drama”)

Comparative adjectives (“grittier”, “with swears”, etc)

Formats/mediums (“tv show”, “installation art piece”, “webcomic”)

Genres (“gothic”, “cyberpunk”)

Settings (“on the high seas”, “in a modern high school”)

Story types (“coming of age story”, “mystery”)

Characters/People (“Yoda”, “Joseph Gordon-Levitt”)

Character roles (“mentor”, “president”)

Audiences (“tweens”, “atheists”)

“Imagine this” intro phrases (“Imagine”, “I need you to picture”)

“Fund this” intro phrases (“Crowdfund this”, “Please support my”)

For each tweet, Tracery at random chooses from a list of formulas, which are written like this:

It’s a #genre# version of #titles#, with #element#.

#imagine# a #format# version of #titles#.

#imagine# a #genre# #format# version of #titles#, but with #character# as the #role#.

I’m increasingly realizing that the reason bots like this work really well– compared to ones like @BuzzFiendNews, which I am still struggling with improving– is that even though the format is simple, every phrase is something that the bot’s audience brings their own baggage and associations to, so the tweets tend to be more unique in and of themselves.

BuzzFiend is a lot harder to add variation to, because even though each tweet has different words in it, every tweet using a specific formula tends to be similar to others. A joke about eating humans tends to be pretty similar to other jokes about eating humans, whether those humans happen to be sidekicks or princes.

Thinkpiecebot, nerdgarbagebot and some of my other bots, especially @likeuberbut, manage to capitalize on people’s existing ideas. Thinkpiecebot’s funniness in particular comes from the unexpected combinations that it produces being put into the recognizable headline format, but doing that ended up being complex– I have over 50 formulas in it and nearly as many variables, and I’m constantly updating it so that it keeps up with the zeitgeist.

Nerdgarbagebot is brand new, and I’ll probably have to continue updating it to keep things current, but I’m having a lot of fun with it– I hope you like the results too!

In case you don’t follow me on Twitter, I’ve made 4 new bots over there since I last updated: @roboromance, @full_of_eels, @haters_improved and @restartthevoid, which has an artist’s statement. You can see all my bots from the Twitter list; they’re also listed on my projects page.

So @hydratebot has become pretty popular, and people keep requesting different frequencies of tweets, having themselves @-ed in the tweets, etc, and I’ve been looking for a way to show y’all how easy Cheap Bots Done Quick is so you can set up your own bots. So I’m gonna kill two birds with one stone here and show you how to make your own @hydratebot, which you can modify as you want; just credit @NoraReed in the bot profile.

The first step is creating a new Twitter account. Log into it, then go to Cheap Bots Done Quick and click on the “Sign In With Twitter” button.

You’ll need to authorize the app to post from that account.

You’ll get a big text box. Copy and paste the following into it:

{ “please”: [ “please”, “i command you to”, “you must”, “go now and” ], “have”: [ “have some”, “drink some”, “consume” ], “water”: [ “some water”, “water”, “fluids”, “liquid” ], “address”: [ “human”, “friend human”, “human friend”, “hu-man”, “meat-creature”, “meat-friend”, “squishy human friend”, “biofriend”, “biological being”, “my friend”, “my hu-man friend”, “physical entity” ], “thanks”: [ “thank you”, “thank you #address#”, “thanks”, “thanks #address#”, “thank you from a robot who loves you” ], “hydration”: [ “become hydrated”, “put water into your mouth-hole”, “consume this \”water\” that humans require to live”, “drink hydration”, “put water into your body so that it will function”, “drink water so you can maintain your physical form”, “put liquids into your mouth-hole” ], “timeto”: [ “it is time to”, “you must” ], “standardorigin”: [ “#please# #have# #water#, #address#!”, “#address#! #please# #have# #water#. #thanks#.”, “#address#! #timeto# #hydration#.”, “#timeto# #hydration#, #thanks#.”, “#address#, #please# #have# #water#.” ], “origin”: [ “#standardorigin#” ] }

Now, set it to the frequency you want and click “save”.

Want it to @ you? Scroll down to the bottom, where it says “origin”. Insert your Twitter handle before #standardorigin#. This is handy if you want it to take advantage of Twitter’s @ notifications.

More Advanced Stuff

If you want to change it in other ways, Tracery’s visual editor is pretty easy to use; just click on “JSON” and copy and paste the code there, then click “JSON” again to get an easy interface:

GalaxyKate has Tracery tutorial if you want to do anything advanced with it.

This particular bot has only a single statement for #origin# so that it’s easy to add handles to it without having to modify every #origin# phrase.

You can also use IFTTT to easily connect your tweets to hundreds of other services.

That’s it! Feel free to contact me on Twitter if you have any questions. If you found this useful, consider buying me a coffee or supporting my Patreon. Thanks! Happy hydration!

I’ve been busy working on a bunch of projects, but I haven’t posted in a while, so here’s an update on what I’ve been up to!

I made several new bots:

@botalertnews, a scaremongering local news/tabloid news headline generator; this is a work in progress and is only funny like 20% of the time at this point

@infinite_bees and @infinite_scream, in case you need a bunch of buzzing or screaming on your Twitter timeline; @infinite_scream interacts particularly well with Twitter advertisements

@orcwanker, a Twitter port of my swear-generator

Three new health reminder/mental health bots: @hydratebot, @DOTHINGSBOT and @check-o-tron

I’ve also been adding a lot to @thinkpiecebot, which is getting HUGE– the code has over a thousand variables in it now– that means there are over a thousand different things that it forms into different phrases, all of which I put in there by hand. (There are a couple that are repeated to tweak the frequency so it doesn’t use “Whippersnapper” more than it uses “Millennial”, but still.) It’s also been getting a lot of attention: The Daily Dot used a bunch of its tweets for writing prompts, I talked to Slate and Recode for short features did a longer interview with PopMatters; it also got a writeup in Bustle.

I’ve also been having more success with Patreon and PayPal tips, which has allowed me to spend a lot more time making this art stuff: thanks to those of you who’ve helped me out with that! It’s nowhere near enough for me to do this as a full-time job in the long run, but it’s enough for me to think that might someday be possible.

I made @thinkpiecebot a couple weeks ago and it has really taken off; it already has more than twice as many followers as me. I’ve been interviewed about it twice already and have also gotten a lot of questions on Twitter, so I’m putting together the common ones so I don’t have to keep answering them over and over.

What do you use to make your bots? All my bots except @NoraReedEbooks and @NORBORG_ebooks use Cheap Bots Done Quick, which runs on  Tracery. I set up @NoraReedEbooks using this tutorial; @NORBORG_ebooks was built by @iglvzx; he made a tutorial on setting up your own.

How do they work? Each bot has a series of formulas that it picks from at random and inserts words from predetermined lists. @Thinkpiecebot actually has two levels of these: the main formulas, such as “Do [GENERATIONAL GROUP] Really Love [RANDOM WORD/PHRASE SELECTED FROM ANY CATEGORY]?”, and a top-level formula that puts a publication prefix in front of one in six tweets.

Could Magnets Cure Gluten Intolerance?

— Thinkpiece Bot (@thinkpiecebot) September 6, 2015

As of this writing, @thinkpiecebot has main formulas and 25 variables. Some of these variables don’t include very many options: the formula that created the above tweet grabs the verb– “cure”– from a list with only two available options, “cure” and “cause”.

What inspired @thinkpiecebot? I’m a millennial, and I’m incredibly frustrated by articles written by people outside of our demographic attempting to explain us and doing so badly. You can’t throw a proverbial stone in the internet-news-o-sphere without hitting an article talking about how hypersensitive and vain we are. Boomers offer their Dunning-Kruger driven takes on trigger warnings, conveniently ignoring the freely available information on how PTSD triggers and exposure therapy actually work. They ask questions about why we don’t do things that require money, like have big weddings or buy houses, and come up with ridiculous reasons involving how we got too many awards as a kid as reasons instead of realizing that their generation completely ruined the economy. @Thinkpiecebot is a way to call out the predictability of these articles, as well as a lot of other kinds of ridiculous output, and the humor of it is a way to cope with the fact that people keep writing them and keep defining my generation by the trumped-up bullshit in them.

Are Trigger Warnings Why Millennials Can’t Graduate? — Thinkpiece Bot (@thinkpiecebot) August 24, 2015

You’re really down on Boomers and capitalism. What’s with that? Capitalist culture attempts to tie our ideas of self-worth to our economic output, and millennials have largely been forced into emotionally and physically draining dead-end jobs that underpay us, if we’re employed at all.

As a generation, we’re struggling to survive in the world that Boomers managed to completely fuck up, and they’re getting paid to write columns on how degenerate we all are for taking selfies. My whole life, I’ve been seeing the output of my generation shat on by people who can’t even be bothered to understand it.

From these people’s perspective, Twitter was a platform for self-obsessed 20-somethings to talk about what they had for breakfast, but after my generation figured out how to use it for large-scale political activism and to connect people to conversations that never would’ve existed, THEN they’re happy to get accounts to promote their “brand”. They’re happy to roll their eyes at fandoms that are creating enormous quantities of creative material and inspiring new writers and artists to make things for their own satisfaction and to share with their communities. They’ll complain about new gender identities and sexual orientations, never realizing how much of a balm to isolation it can be to have a word to describe how you are and to be able to connect to people who feel the same way.

How did you come up with the material for @thinkpiecebot? Most of it is words and phrases I came up with while looking at horrible thinkpieces, but I got a lot of help from my Twitter followers. They did particularly invaluable work with helping me phrase some of the issues regarding marginalization and privilege; I wanted to be sure that wasn’t falling into doing “ironic bigotry”, and they helped a lot with coming up with specific phrasings that wouldn’t harm groups who are already being targeted by actual thinkpieces.

Does it run on its own? I have it set up to post every hour, but sometimes when I add new stuff I have it post a handful of tweets using the new formulas/phrases, or when I’m messing with the code and it comes up with a particularly good sample tweet I will have it post that because it made me laugh.

So you’re still updating it? I keep thinking of new things to add, so yeah. I’m guessing I will stop eventually, maybe once my cutting satire becomes so popular that everyone stops writing thinkpieces in shame.

I would like to pay you! How do I do that? I have a Patreon and a PayPal tip jar. Thanks! Your contributions allow me to keep working on new bots and keep improving @thinkpiecebot!

How Patreon Is Millennials’ Fault

— Thinkpiece Bot (@thinkpiecebot) September 5, 2015

Is @thinkpiecebot open source? I’ve considered open sourcing my bots, but I am concerned that if I do that, men will do things with them. As soon as someone makes an open source licence that only allows use by women and non-binary folks and forces men to ask my permission to use my code, I’ll probably release it.

Update 5/4/16: I’m now sharing the code of TumblrSimulator for people to view to see how it works, and hydratebot is licenced to be shared if you’re interested.  I share code excerpts with people who ask, but after being updated for nearly a year, @thinkpiecebot is kind of a behemoth; it wouldn’t be very useful as a learning tool, because it’s kind of a kludgey mess on the back end.

Are you serious? Isn’t that… misandry? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Why did you block me? I share my personal blocklist with my bots so that it’s harder for people to harass me via those accounts. As an outspoken feminist, I’m a regular target for online abuse. I might notice if you tweet @ it asking nicely to be unblocked, but it’s my bot, and I get to choose if I don’t want people to have access to it.

DAILY MAIL: Is Women Not Smiling to Blame For Obesity?

— Thinkpiece Bot (@thinkpiecebot) August 24, 2015

Is this really a bot?/Don’t you at least hand-pick the best ones and schedule them? Yeah, it is, it just seems more coherent than lots of the bots you’re used to because it’s formula-based, not using Markov chains or other, similar techniques. The hourly tweets– the ones that tweet at :11 after the hour– are totally automatic. I do occasionally do tweet-bursts when I add new content, and I pick which of those tweets go up; I also sometimes tweak the code a bit so that new stuff is more likely to come up. The only tweets I hand-write are the ones where I ask for money.

Where else can I follow @thinkpiecebot? I recently set up a Tumblr for it; it cross-posts tweets from Twitter over there too.

Why did @thinkpiecebot just tweet a bunch of times in a row? I sometimes do tweet-bursts when I add new content. It’ll stop in a minute.

Will you add ________ to @thinkpiecebot? Maybe; I do take suggestions that are tweeted to @NoraReed. However, there are a lot of places I don’t want @thinkpiecebot to go because they end up way too close to just parroting the people the bot is meant to make fun of. I’ve taken things out that make jokes that are too close to punching down and/or being “too real” before– namely “AIDS”– because they just felt like what happens when you play Cards Against Humanity or MadLibs with assholes.

What other work do you do? I run a both my personal blog at barrl.net and What Is GamerGate Currently Ruining; I also tweet as @NoraReed and have a bunch of other Twitter bots. (Here’s a full list of my essays, games and other projects.)

Do you take interviews? Usually yes! If you aren’t paying me– which is fine– I’ll want you to include links to ways your readers can do so, because I’m an artist, and I need money for burritos, which I metabolize into more bots.

I’ve been writing here less because I’ve mostly been doing work on Twitter and What Is GamerGate Currently Ruining for the past few months. I started the #RooshIsARapist hashtag, which quickly turned into calling on Amazon to remove his books from their store (more info on Roosh from WIGGCR). I wrote a Twitter essay yesterday on Roosh, GamerGate, Men’s Rights “Activism”, Pick-Up Artists and the relationships between them, male entitlement, and rape culture.

In bot news, I made @wigglebunch, which comes up with great things to call your pet, for Pet Jam.

I also put together a page on here for all of my projects, so you can view them in one place, and I’m putting some of my essays that I write here on Medium as well.

So everyone on the Queer Internet– or at least Queer Twitter– has been talking about this awful article in XOJane, and there are a few things I want to say about it.

The first is that this is biphobic as hell. Bi people get our queerness policed all the time. I get that people are mad that we have passing privilege, but the privilege to pretend to be something you aren’t and have a part of your identity unrecognized unless you are constantly reaffirming it isn’t fun. In addition, we’re disproportionately subjected to violence and suffer from higher rates of mental illness and suicide than lesbians. (spidey_j, over on Twitter, did a great round-up of the facts on this.)

I saw responses on Twitter that were attempting to turn this around by saying “well if you’re really bisexual you aren’t who the article is talking about”, sometimes actually including that maybe we’re the biphobic ones by thinking it was.

Here’s the thing: when a bunch of bi people read a thing and say “hey, this contributes to a culture that explicitly marginalizes and excludes us”, you should fucking believe us.

The second thing is that this is yet another thing that is trying to place gayness at the center of what it means to be queer, and that’s fucking bullshit. Queerness is an intentionally big umbrella because there is room for a lot of different people under it. For all that the article drops some stuff about dating non-binary folks, it’s explicitly about women who, for whatever reason, don’t date women, and saying they’re co-opting queerness by claiming that identity.

There’s a ton of women who absolutely have claim to queerness if the want to, even if they don’t date women. Transgender women, asexual and/or aromantic women, women who don’t date or fuck at all for whatever reason, women who aren’t able to publicly out themselves because of danger, and a lot more kinds of women who aren’t– however they present themselves, since many people have been coerced into the closet– cisgender and/or heterosexual.

The third is that this article made me feel less welcome in queer and/or lesbian spaces, and the women who posted agreement with it made me feel less safe, even though I’m doing the “correct” things that the author wants me to do, like outing myself all the time and shoving my queerness in the straights’ faces all the time. This kind of piece gives people permission to play Queer Police, to make us have to make sure we’re Gay Enough to occupy queer spaces, that we’re passing the You Must Be This Gay To Ride test. Knowing that well, I’m not one of those bisexuals doesn’t help, because my queerness isn’t a condition that can be erased just because the “real gays” don’t approve of it.

I made another Twine game. INTRODUCING

Selected Interactions With Men

or

Patriarchy Simulator 2000

or

“I don’t get it, why do you have such a problem with Dan Savage”

Trigger warnings are listed in the piece. I recommend paying attention to them.

Bots that I think would be cool, but do not yet have the skillz to make (if you want to make one of these feel free to! just credit me in the bot’s Twitter bio or something):

a bot that grabs descriptions of videos on pornhub and replaces all the sex-related words with business buzzwords

a bot that grabs parts of two sets of quotes, Headline Smasher/Two Headlines style, and mashes them together, attributing them, incorrectly to a third person

a bot that grabs a list of 12 related nouns (such as 12 different vegetables, 12 fictional characters, etc– maybe using Wikipedia categories?), assigns each one to a horoscope sign, and posts them on Tumblr, a la the zodiac meme. This would also work with images. Hell, you could probably just grab a dozen images from giphy and end up with something surprisingly coherent at least half the time.

Bots that I totally could make but haven’t yet that I might make someday and which I could absolutely make if someone wanted to pay me to make them:

terrible names for bad guys in RPGs

a bot version of Orcwanker

a Tumblr aesthetic generator

a bot that says nice or encouraging things

artisinal beer name generator

creepy Lush products generator

terrible workout tips

travel/vacation ideas

a (pseudo) Markov bot that grabs tweets from all of my bots and smashes them together

a random horoscope generator (maybe for every sign?)

a random tarot reading (with or without interpretation)

I’ll add links if I make any of these. You can support me on Patreon to get me to make ’em a lot faster; once I get to the $250 mark I’ll be doing an extra project a month, and that can be an essay or a bot.

I made yet another bot. This one invents names for colors. I picked the words in its corpus mostly by taking apart existing lists of colors (“yellow”, “eggplant”, “jade”), combined with one list of interesting words that aren’t color-related at all (“goat”, “grace”, “madam”) and one list of words that can be used to modify many different colors (“vivid”, “zany”, “baby”). There are a few different combinations that these can appear in, some drawing multiple entries from the same list.

I observed some interesting things while building the bot and while watching what it comes up with.

Most color names that aren’t just for the color (like “yellow”) come from plants (especially food plants) and stones.

Because of this, most of the stuff that @colormaton comes up with sounds more like a weird description of a rock and/or food than an actual color.

The things it comes up with that ARE plausible colors sound sort of ridiculous, but seem, at least to me, like they wouldn’t be out of place on, say, a dollar store bottle of nail polish.

You can follow @colormaton on Twitter.

I made yet another Twitter bot, @luxe_products; it’s my most complex one yet, and I’m really proud of it. I got a lot of help from my best friend, who is wonderful in many ways and consistently willing to get drinks and brainstorm lists of nouns while making fun of the Williams-Sonoma and SkyMall catalogs; she was also incredibly helpful in the creation of @lady_products. I also made @wrongben, which is a really bad joke, but it makes me laugh.

I suffer from chronic depression and have a sleep apnea related condition that isn’t really under control yet, and I’m finding that these bots are the perfect kind of project for me. It’s easy to pick up and put down work on them; there are lots of supportive people who will help if you can’t figure something out, and there are pretty accessible tools for making them.

The big thing with them that makes them work for me, though, is that they’re an investment against future mood slumps and periods of exhaustion, which for me can last from days to, occasionally, weeks. Because they’re on Twitter, they keep pumping out little pieces of art for me even when I’m not capable of doing that. Since I made them largely to amuse myself, they are making jokes that make me smile, and I feel less like an unproductive failure of a human being, because these little bot-babies I made are still out there doing work for me. It’s a good feeling.

I made 3 new Twitter bots: @man_products and lady_products, plus @medrobot for medication reminders.

Don’t forget: you can help fund these ridiculous products.