I thought I’d just write a brief post to talk about some cool things that made their way through my production pipeline in the last few months. I wrote about the relaunch of my website in a post more than a year ago and Twitter Lib for Google Apps Script not long after. Then there hasn’t been much. I have lots of half-finished drafts in my Drafts folder that ran out of steam and kind of lost the original point (editing is hard), but I hope to get the majority of those out to you in the near future. In the meantime, here’s the things I’ve put together since I moved out of San Francisco.

Twitter Bots

• Baseball Nicknames tweets the nicknames of baseball players from a GSheet I compiled from Wikipedia. It was inspired by @DeathBot3000, a bot that Tweets the names of roller derby players.

• We Didn’t Start (the Fire) was an unexpected hit. Inspired by karaoke-ebooks.party, it takes Google trends and turns the hot search terms into new lyrics for We Didn’t Start The Fire. Quartz put in on their list of the 15 best bots of 2015 and that netted it a few hundred followers.

• Movie Mashups was inspired by an episode of Says You! where the panelists had to guess a mashup of two movie titles by clues leading to both. I took the IMDB corpus and did a lot of shell-script processing on it to make it into a tab-separated-values sheet indexed by one- to three-word terms that were shared between the heads and tails of movie titles. The processing to create the index merits its own blog post; it’s one of the drafts I have half-finished.

• Every NATO Spelling was a quick lark of a bot I created for Joel McCoy, when he mentioned that NATO drills were a needed practice for playing MechWarrior Online. It spells words using the NATO phonetic alphabet.

• Corpora Brackets is a bot that I created to experiment with Twitter’s poll feature. No API to create polls was thought to be available, but a brilliant person with the Github handle ZORARU, now vanished from the site, demonstrated how it was possible to mimic Twitter for iPhone and access the Twitter Cards API to create polls. I ported ZORARU’s Python source to Node.js and posted it as a Github gist, then proceeded to use my new knowledge to create a single elimination tournament bracket using collections from the Corpora project. The currently running bracket is for the elements of the periodic table, and caused a minor stir recently when it pitted carbon against silicon in the first round.

• Hottest Unicorns is the first time I created a bot using Cheap Bots Done Quick. CBDQ, as it’s colloquially known, is an amazing tool for bot making. It requires only a Twitter account for posting the bot’s output, and a Tracery grammar that you create in the Web interface to CBDQ. It then hosts your scripts and does the Tweeting automatically. The bot itself uses Tracery to create plausible-sounding startup and venture capital firm names, then creates fake headlines about the VC firm valuing the startup at some number of billions of dollars (making it a “unicorn” in modern parlance) and investing tens of millions of dollars into it.

• Pop Hexaptychs is the second in my art bot series, making hexaptycs (six-panel works) in the style of Andy Warhol’s screenprinting. The first one, @neoplastibot, provided much of the early content for this blog. In this case I didn’t feel the same about trying to document the process of creating the bot, because it’s almost entirely scripting ImageMagick to transform existing images. The output is cool, though.

Other projects

• Twitter lib on GitHub is a much-needed repository of record for Twitter lib for Google Apps Script, because Google Script is rubbish at version control. Also, since the blog post last year, several new versions with bug fixes and features have worked their way in. Currently version 22 is in development; it will feature some fixes to the search query and other niceties.

• Omnibots sampler will show you the timeline of a random bot on the Omnibots list, a collection mostly composed of the bots created by people in the #botALLY community, but with other interesting outside sources. Because the list is so large (currently 2,641 members), it’s hard to just point people to the list if they’re interested in finding out more about the bots that #botALLY artists and poets have created. A random sample is much easier to digest.

• Venn Diagram Generator is pretty much what it says on the tin. It allows you to create a Venn diagram with two, three, or four circles, and then save the diagram as a PNG file. I wrote it just to create a Venn diagram about the current chatbot fad not being a gold rush, because I found the existing free Web applications to create diagrams lacking. It was a fun project and I learned a bit more about both SVG and the File and Image APIs.

• Overzealous Autocomplete: This isn’t my project originally – it’s by Darius Kazemi but I converted it over to Bing search when Google put a sunset on its unofficial public autocompletion API. So hopefully it runs for much longer now, because it is a fun toy and one of Darius’s favorites.

• Wordfilter for Google Apps Script: Another Darius creation, this time just a straight port to Google Script.

What next?

I have a few things brewing right now. In addition to Twitter lib version 22, I’m laying the foundation for a “starter pack” to make it easier to get started with service workers in Web apps. My Twitter bot ideas sheet is looking a bit derivative at the moment, but I have maybe a few half-formed ideas that can be added there too.