Joe Brainard’s 1975 book “I Remember” is an incredible work of poetry. The New Yorker called it “his miniaturist memoir-poem,” and Paul Auster’s blurb for the 2001 edition gives a good sense of it: I Remember is a masterpiece. One by one, the so-called important books of our time will be forgotten, but Joe Brainard’s […]
Tag Archives: bots
Choochoobot in Source’s #botweek
I wrote about some of the things I learned from @choochoobot’s development (and popularity) for Source for its annual #botweek. It’s a little strange writing about programming projects, because I still feel very inexperienced, but I think there are some easy lessons to pull out here. People do not behave rationally around emoji. A large […]
Making ethical bots, over at Motherboard
To my tremendous honor, Sarah’s Motherboard article about instilling ethics in Twitter bots quotes me in a few places. In particular, it recounts a story I hadn’t told publicly about a bot I didn’t make. Recently, Higgins hoped to make an iterator bot out of turn-of-the-century popular music that had been digitized by the New […]
New bot: @choochoobot
It’s a goofy idea: After a few happy-hour drinks on Thursday, I decided to write a little Python script to make emoji “trains” of random length, combining the steam engine with the two styles of rail cars. Once I got that running, I remembered reading about Emma Winston’s “Tiny Gallery” bot, which tweets little scenes […]