I made a bot a while ago called Song Rememberer, which asks if you remember a song. It’s continually remembering songs but can’t quite name them – really just an extension of the sound system in my own head. It asks questions like:
I am one of the only people who follows it, but every day I get to remember an imagined song or two. Occasionally someone replies with an attempt to name the song. You can follow it too at @songrememberer.
The code was made with Kate Compton’s amazing Tracery, and hosted via Cheap Bots Done Quick!. The source code is available here, if you want to make something similar.
Selected excerpts from my work Hawaiian Wisdom have been published in the book No, Robot, No!. The introduction to the work is a merging of narrative – describing the project in a speculative project – but also functioning Python code which can be used to generate your own “Hawaiian Wisdom”:
There are great authors and poets included in the book – it’s nice to share company with Rowyda Amin, Andre Bagoo, Clive Birnie, Theodoros Chiotis, Angela Cleland, Iris Colomb, Joey Connolly, Ria Dastidar, Rishi Dastidar, Sarah Dawson, Harry Giles, Matthew Haigh, Cliff Hammett, Tom Humberstone, Yvonne Litschel, James Midgley, Gabrielle Nolan, Astra Papachristodoulou, Abigail Parry, Flo Reynolds, Adam Samson, Ruth Stacey, Alex Stevens, Becky Varley-Winter, Katy Wareham Morris, Rebecca Wigmore, Chrissy Williams, and Cat Woodward!
I started working with this corpus in 2016, with the project Scriptych. Part of the project involved building vector embeddings for words from Hollywood movies; as a side part of the project I started to play with alphabetising movie lines from the films in the Cornell Movie Dialog Corpus. Some of the outcomes were oddly poetic, for example this section beginning with “Oh dear”:
Oh dear God. Its all right...a bad dream, just a nasty old dream.
Oh dear God...
Oh dear God...
Oh dear girl, your extracurricular activities are of no consequence to me. I don't give a damn who you sleep with. I'm concerned about David.
Oh dear! But then where did the motorcyclists come from?
Oh dear! George, this is gonna kill Tony. He's waited his whole life for this break.
Oh dear, I didn't really mean to...
Oh dear, I feel like doing a bit of work.
Oh dear, are you actually laughing?
Oh dear, why is life so complicated? Sometimes I really wish I could be someone else.
Oh dear, yes. You were an excellent student, before all that clarinet nonsense. You loved Chopin. You used to call it "heaven music." "Teach me some heaven music," you used to say.
Oh dear- -you're geting that downtrodden look again-
Oh dear.
Oh dear.
Oh dear.
Oh dear.
Oh dear.
Oh dear. Have I made a blunder?
Oh dear. He wasn't friendly during the filming?
Oh dear. I have made you nervous.
Oh dear. I'll never work in this town again?
Oh dear. If one must have a clinical name.
Oh dear....easy honey...
Or this list of things that people forgot:
You forget what I went through to give ya the best.
You forget where I work?
You forget yourself!
You forget yourself, Homer. This here's my daughter! You got your own mess to deal with--ain't that right?
You forget, I dislike YOU at least as much as him.
You forgetting the gag line, Killaine. The police don't take anything for granted.
You forgetting who sat next to you for a thousand missions. I know how you drive.
You forgot "sexy".
You forgot her degree in literature. She's a writer. She published a novel last year under a pen name. Do you want to know what it's about?
You forgot something.
You forgot something...
You forgot the "Now I'm going to tell you what the hell is going on" step. See usually that comes before the, "It's over" Step. And it always, always comes before the "You can go" Step. What is over?
You forgot the Hula!
You forgot the mangoes, didn't you?
You forgot the milk.
You forgot the tent?
You forgot this.
You forgot to be there.
You forgot to say 'Simon says."
You forgot to tell me what a City Sealer has to do.
You forgot to wash my purple shirt. I told you a hundred times it was Purple Day at school today.
You forgot your keys!
I liked some of the outcomes so much that I took the section which begins with the word ‘Love’ and used it as poem at my own wedding (romantically titled 48 Lines about Love, alphabetically ordered), which was read out loud in inimitable style by my good friend Craig Nunes:
48 Lines about Love, alphabetically ordered
Love a cup of tea. With lemon. Love and happiness for ever. Love at first sight? Love demands it. Love doesn't have to be right. It just has to be love. Love gives you wings. It makes you fly. I don't even call it love. I call it Geronimo. Love him… Yes, it is true. That's the hard part for me… I knew him better than anyone … I knew him best. Love holds you to me. And we are in danger, not you. Love is different for different people. Love is funny. Love is just another name for sex. Love is sexy and sex is lovely -- I don't care what you call it, an android can't have it. Love is… love is… love is… Love it! Love it. Love it. Which way? Love me oodles and oodles? Love me. Love me… keep me safe… Love me? Love that name. Love this car! Is it new? Love to, sir, but no can do. No spare room. Period. Love to-- Love to. Love to. Love was never our problem. Love ya, Margie. Love ya. Love you too. Love you too.. Love you! …Well, why don't we turn in? Love you, Dil. Love you, man. Love you, too. Love! You don't love anybody! Me or anybody else! You want to be loved - that's all you want! Love! I'm made of love! Love! What do you know about love? Love's a killer, isn't it? Love's the same as it always was. It's people who change. Love, Sire! Love, secret, and uh, sex. But not in that order, necessarily, right? Love, you can still write to each other. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Passion. Obsession, all those things you told me to wait for. Well, they've arrived.
Anyway, Movielinesbot is quite simple – it takes the 304446 lines of alphabetised movie lines and tweets them one at a time. At the time of writing, it’s currently up to the “His name is…” section.
This week, I made a silly Twitter bot. It was mostly an attempt to make a tutorial about making Twitter bots using Dreamhost servers, but ended up being a bot who periodically tweets lines from Des’ree’s 1998 hit Life.
The bot itself is inspired by the africa by totobot, which simply tweets a random line from the song every few minutes. It is actually so irritating that I’ve stopped following it myself, as I found my days permeated by twee earworms about preferring toast to ghosts, or the desire to fly around the world in a beautiful balloon.
The codebase is on Github – you can use it to build bots yourself if you use Dreamhost, or adapt the code slightly if you use another host (or have your own server).
You can also follow the bot at @life_by_desree, if you dare.
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