Literary Twitter bot, done quick?

February 11, 2020 10:10 PM

I'm intrigued by Twitter bots that tweet small, random fragments of stories. I wish to create such a bot, but I'm not a coder and don't think like one. Help?

I have been to Cheap Bots, Done Quick and read the documentation there, and I am still pretty confused. It seems like it would be easy for someone who thinks like a programmer, but I am not that person.

What I am basically wondering is if there exists any kind of program I can feed my literary fragments into, which would analyze their structure and break them down into something I could paste into an editor. I wouldn't expect it to do ALL the work for me, just give me something to work with. Does this exist?

posted by all the light we cannot see to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

So for CBDQ, if all you want to do is randomly post different phrases, you can just use:

{
	"origin":["fragment 1","fragment 2","etc"]
}

This will randomly choose one of the phrases
fragment 1
fragment 2
etc
to post to the connected Twitter account at the relevant frequency.

The other part of the question I can't help you with (something that will automatically chop up your text into "fragments"), but ultimately you need the story fragments to be in the format
"x","y","z"
i.e. in quotes with a comma between them. Then you can just paste the big list of fragments into this part of the CBDQ code

"origin":[PASTE_HERE]

posted by EndsOfInvention at 1:26 AM on February 12, 2020

Response by poster: Thanks! If I'm allowed to ask another question on the same topic, I'm having an issue with the correct formatting of a nest of choices. For example, I'd like to have the bot select different adjectives based on a randomly generated time of day.

For example: "I walked out into the moonlit night."

I've been trying to follow the tutorial at Crystal Code Palace and have come up with the following:

"setTimeOfDay: [“[TimeOfDay: day] [TimeAdjective: hot, bright, sunny, hazy, cloudy, rainy, cold, warm, suffocating]”
, ["[TimeofDay: sunset][TimeAdjective: brilliant, blazing, fading, scarlet, red-gold, beatific, lingering]”
,["[TimeofDay: twilight][TimeAdjective: deepening, darkening, purple]”
,[“[TimeofDay: night][TimeAdjective: dark, velvet, enfolding, mysterious, star-drenched, moonlit, starlit, silent]”

But for some reason it doesn't work, even though I imitated Kate's code as closely as I could. Is there a way to do this better?
posted by all the light we cannot see at 4:48 AM on February 12, 2020

Best answer: I think you had a some extra [s in there. This works:

{
	"setTimeOfDay": ["[TimeOfDay:day] [TimeAdjective: hot, bright, sunny, hazy, cloudy, rainy, cold, warm, suffocating]",
"[TimeOfDay: sunset][TimeAdjective: brilliant, blazing, fading, scarlet, red-gold, beatific, lingering]",
"[TimeOfDay: twilight][TimeAdjective: deepening, darkening, purple]",
"[TimeOfDay: night][TimeAdjective: dark, velvet, enfolding, mysterious, star-drenched, moonlit, starlit, silent]"],
	"origin": ["#[#setTimeOfDay#]story#"],
	"story": ["It's #TimeOfDay# and the adjectives are: #TimeAdjective#,#TimeAdjective#,#TimeAdjective#,#TimeAdjective#"]
}

posted by EndsOfInvention at 5:06 AM on February 12, 2020

Response by poster: Thank you so much! This is really helpful.
posted by all the light we cannot see at 5:35 AM on February 12, 2020 [1 favorite]