The Bots of 2014

I took an oath of non-bot-making for most of December, but now I'm back in the game. At the end of January I'm a guest of honor at Seattle's Foolscap convention, and I've got a couple site-specific installation projects that will hopefully entertain congoers to the exclusion of all other activities.

But for now, I have two new bots to entertain you, the general public. The Hapax Hegemon (@HapaxHegemon) posts words that occur only once in the Project Gutenberg corpus I've been getting so much mileage out of. So far it's emitted such gems as "zoy", "stupidlike", and "beer-swipers". And like so many of my recent bots, it won't stop until we're all dead.

My second new bot is the Serial Enterpreneur (@ItCantFail), which posts inventions. It's basically playing Snake Oil (spoiler: Crummy.com 2013 Board Game of the Year) with a much larger corpus, derived from the Corpus of Historical American English and the Scribblenauts word list.

So far my favorite @ItCantFail inventions are the delicious Fox Syrup, the liberal-friendly Left Drone, and the self-explanatory Riot College. Write in with your own wacky inventions! I won't use them, because that's not how this bot works, but it seems like a fun way to kill some time.

More bots are on the way! But not for a while, because I gotta do novel work and get the Foolscap-exclusive bots in shape.