Read My Lips: Two New Bots

I've been trying to finish as much of Situation Normal as possible before my job at the library starts (uh... I think this is the first time I've mentioned my NYPL job on NYCB, but I'll be writing about it later). But I have created two new autonomous agents to engage and confound you.

The first is Euphemism Bot, inspired by the fact that most of the output of Adam's Egress Methods sounds like weird euphemisms for masturbation. Euphemism Bot elevates the tone by putting out weird euphemisms for all sorts of dirty, shameful things. You'll never be understood again! It's been up for about a month, and it's already subverted its programming.

From the naughty to the nautical, there's also , which I "launched" today. It periodically sends out names that one, and only one, person decided to give their boat. The data comes from the Queneau-sounding , which I first learned of from the trivia podcast Good Job, Brain! (I'm linking to their Twitter page because their main webpage currently shows some base64-encoded text that isn't even a puzzle.) I had this idea kicking around in my head until yesterday's lunch with Andrea Phillips, when the topic turned to weird random datasets we'd collected. And now... a bot is born.

Boat Names also has an Egress Methods connection. I found the list of given names Adam uses for Egress Methods and used it to filter out boats that are named after people. This avoids the boredom of , which just proves that not many boat owners have wives named Eleanor.