Magic Realism Bot
November 10, 2015 8:41 PM   Subscribe

Magic Realism Bot
Magic Realism Bot is a Twitter bot that writes tiny magic realist stories. Think Jorge Luis Borges, with a dash of Calvino, Eco, García Márquez and Allende. There's a little bit of Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis, Philip Pullman and (a childhood favourite of mine) Richard Hughes in there too.

The code is by my sister, MeFi lurker lexie yodel, and the words are by me. More background here.

Some of my favourite tweets so far:

A depressed archduke build a swimming pool that is filled with optimism.

An 18th century Chinese empress obsessively writes love letters to gravity.

A Brazilian viceroy passes a law against silence.

A famous librarian discovers a painting that depicts every single owl in the world.

A bookshop owner reads of a method of having sexual intercourse that would cause the laws of thermodynamics to be destroyed.

A schoolteacher invents a new kind of astrology based on the movements of swans.

A Hercule Poirot mystery in which the murderer is revealed to be income inequality.

A Palestinian king builds a lighthouse made of forgetting.
Role: Co-creator
posted by dontjumplarry (9 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
This project was posted to MetaFilter by wintersweet on November 11, 2015: an azure & emerald tome describing a world made only of plates of beans

LOVE. I've written a FPP about this, but I'm waiting to hear if joseph conrad is fully awesome already has one ready to go.
posted by wintersweet at 10:53 PM on November 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


"A 16th century mathematical treatise describes a universe made of the past."

I think that's just real realism.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 6:11 AM on November 11, 2015 [7 favorites]


This is lovely, intriguing, enlivening. Awesome!
posted by Oyéah at 9:35 AM on November 11, 2015 [1 favorite]


I would really like to see a tarot deck where the cards were based on these. I know that's not really how tarot works.
posted by a halcyon day at 12:51 PM on November 11, 2015 [2 favorites]


a halcyon day: Not quite what you described, but you might be into the Crossed Destinies bot, if you didn't know of it.
posted by Su at 2:35 PM on November 11, 2015 [2 favorites]


This is fantastic! I made my first bot last night and I am really getting excited by the possibilities.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 3:20 PM on November 15, 2015 [1 favorite]


187 followers in a day, that's impressive.
My only real for public consumption bot has been far less popular...
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 2:25 AM on November 16, 2015


Just to say I love this - it's a super kickstart for thinking about your own stories. Can you say or post reference links for how you accomplished the technical part of this?
posted by newdaddy at 4:51 AM on November 22, 2015


Just to say I love this - it's a super kickstart for thinking about your own stories. Can you say or post reference links for how you accomplished the technical part of this?
posted by newdaddy at 12:51 PM on November 22 [+] [!]


Thanks!! The code (which is written in Python) specifies a series of formulas which provide basic syntaxes, and those formulas draw on a corpus of thousands of words tagged by part of speech and other characteristics. So "a (nationality) (type of person) (transitive verb) (things or concept)" could be the formula, and the result is "A Belgian empress makes love to prime numbers". The syntaxes can be more complex and can also vary quite a lot, but that's the general idea. We plan to put the code up onto GitHub in the next few months -- still tweaking it (and expanding it) at this stage.
posted by dontjumplarry at 10:49 PM on November 24, 2015


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