Space Stories

September 1, 2015 6:52 AM

Space Stories
A Twitter bot that randomly generates tiny space stories.

A joint effort between myself and @thos_thom - he came up with the initial idea, we both provided source material, and I coded the formatting using Tracery/ CheapBotsDoneQuick.com.

Role: Co-creator, coder

posted by EndsOfInvention (13 comments total)

Prior to space_stories I also made @dungeon_junk (randomly generated junk you might find in a dungeon) and @future_junk (guess).
posted by EndsOfInvention at 9:29 AM on September 1, 2015

It won me over the first time I saw you use as a third sentence: "You're getting too old for this." Because Lethal Weapon in Space.
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:48 PM on September 1, 2015 [2 favorites]

Cool.
posted by Outlawyr at 3:18 AM on September 7, 2015

Thanks for this.
I checked out CheapBotsDoneQuick.com and have used it to write a rudimentary bot for my boat's twitter account.
It just does a Daily Bird Report for now, but it's inspired me to look into other possible bots.
And I might actually get round to expanding the Daily Bird Report to do other things.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 4:44 AM on September 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yay bots!
posted by EndsOfInvention at 1:27 PM on September 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Out of interest, how many lines of tracery is in Space Stories (or any of the others)?
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 5:19 PM on September 18, 2015

Well, "lines" is a bit weird because I formatted Space_stories' code with a word/phrase per line, because it has the most code of any of my bots and it was easiest to read that way. I did a quick word count and it has ~2,700 "words", but as most of the elements are multiple words, I think there are something like 700 different elements (words or phrases) it uses. I add more every now and then when inspiration strikes.

In related news, inspiration struck on Friday and I made @tasty_bargains.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 10:05 AM on September 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah, lines is probably not what I was aiming for, but a measure of complexity. It seems quite complex!

I keep adding bits to the Daily Bird Report, which should keep it interesting for quite a while. It's up to 1000 words, but that's probably not a great way to measure complexity.

I noticed quite a few tasty bargains retweets appearing in your timeline.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 10:28 AM on September 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ctrl-F hobo...damn!
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:52 AM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

"Hobo" added to the corpus.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 3:37 AM on November 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

and rum-soaked?

"You're skulking around in the killing dome. Your guide is a rum-soaked engineer. The motion-sensor's bleeping speeds up."

Totally works.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 5:27 AM on November 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yep, did that too! "Space" was already in there, surprisingly.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 5:48 AM on November 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

You bring rum-scented tears to an old hobo's goggles!
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 10:18 AM on November 18, 2015 [1 favorite]