#norareed

    rosario is no easily distracted woman.   recipe books are piled;  they are not splayed.  honed attention dissects the library book one at a time---  though, of each, there are many .    i know you urge to chide how sharing is caring.  so before you do,  consider how haunted the cooking isles are.  rose is,  perhaps,  the lone woman in phoenix to refuse google for kitchen aid.  ---  no,  she doesn’t want to hear about rebecca’s rustic shepard’s pie that keeps the kids happy!  featuring the half hour of scrolling past vain anecdotes before that subpar formula.      maybe she’s a pessimist...   at best, a dedicated one.    the one she flips through now?   obscenely littered with pictures.  is she a child?  with a huff,  rosario’s grabbed it from the spine,  the groan of her chair's dismissal demands eyes.   gliding towards the aisle from which it came for the sheer insult of it.       what was that about distractions?  the woman she can no longer call her best friend presents like a ghost,  unassumed and unseen by the rest. a moment of hestiation before rose is trespassing on shaky ground.  surging down the aisle.  moth to a flame.  what do you say in the face of betrayal?      for rose,   it’s:          “ ...ora? “      she can tell you anything about all the other things she does.   but don’t ask her about this.  she who examples instant regret brilliantly.

   when she runs,  she doesn’t run at night---   &.  this doesn’t surprise you!  she detours through a cemetery though...   that might.   and if i told you it’s where her daughter is buried?   the reader has left the chat,  probably.   although,  it isn’t like anybody knows.   her grave reads  𝐆𝐀𝐁𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐋𝐋𝐀 𝐂𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐖𝐑𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓,  after all,  and sid throws none more than a kiss to the air when she passes it.  yeah,  she’s got the time to stop and chat.   no.   she won’t.    not to a headstone,  at least.  but nora reed isn’t that.   she exists at peace here,  seemingly so with stretched legs,  paper-back in hand.  all of this and surrounded by graves;  is she a little too content?   who’s to say?   certainly not sid in her tank and yoga pants  ( which make her ass look incredible, in case you were wondering ),   hair stuck to sweaty forehead  ( not so incredible,  but we don’t talk about it ).          “  good book?  “  questions from behind,  followed by sid’s boisterous laughter when nora is,   on impact,  startled.

  when she runs,  she doesn’t run at night—   &. this doesn’t surprise you!  she detours through a cemetery though…   that might.   and if i told you it’s where her daughter is buried?   the reader has left the chat,  probably.   although,  it isn’t like anybody knows.   the gravestone is hard to read 𝐈𝐕𝐘 𝐒𝐀𝐌𝐔𝐄𝐋𝐒,  dust-covered in warmer months,  snow swallowed in the rest.  besides,  sid throws none more than a kiss to the air when she passes it.  yeah,  she’s got the time to stop and chat.   no.   she won’t.   not to a headstone,  at least.  but nora reed isn’t that.   she exists at peace here,  seemingly so with stretched legs,  paper-back in hand.  all of this and surrounded by graves; is she a little too content?   who’s to say?   certainly not sid in her tank and yoga pants  ( which make her ass look incredible, in case you were wondering ),   hair stuck to sweaty forehead  ( not so incredible,  but we don’t talk about it ).         “  good book?  “  questions from behind,  followed by sid’s boisterous laughter when nora is,   on impact,  startled.

    at first,    rose laughs at the idiot in the rain.    the one who appears, first, like a speck of something.   it’s a something that won’t be moved by the demand of her windshield wipers.  oh,  and it’s yellow.  a persistent yellow,  who begs to be mocked.   so yes,  she’s laughing.   and then she’s stopping.  and then she’s slowing.  now rose is the fool,  rolling down her window and hollering as if she can possibly be heard under a roaring weather,               “   NORA !   YOU TOTAL LOON,  GET IN ! “

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.

  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.