

Happy third birthday, Horse_ebooks - wallflower
https://medium.com/language-lingustics/7e3b7130f131

======
eshvk
She uses the phrase "spam robot". Is that semantically equivalent to
automated? If so, for the love of god, can someone tell me how I can build
something that auto-generates beautiful existential poetry like that? (I am
only half joking here)

~~~
simonw
Have you played around with markov chains? They're really easy to build and
produce very entertaining results - a few years ago I tried feeding all of the
SXSW Interactive session titles in to one and got results like "Participatory
budgeting crowdsourcing for real time marketing growing a digital culture".

~~~
d23
Can you suggest some good resources for newbies/laymen on the topic?

Edit - For anyone else who might be looking, this page gives a nice pythonic
example:

[http://agiliq.com/blog/2009/06/generating-pseudo-random-
text...](http://agiliq.com/blog/2009/06/generating-pseudo-random-text-with-
markov-chains-u/)

~~~
Groxx
Well, as a very rough overview, all they are is:

    
    
        * read in words
        * keep track of the frequency of "wordA wordB", "wordB wordC", etc.
        * use that frequency, e.g.:
          { "wordA" : {"wordB" : 0.5,
                       "wordC" : 0.25, ...},
            "wordB" : {"wordC" : 0.75, ...} }
          combined with a word, say "wordA", and pick a
          random word from the frequencies, weighted by frequency.
        * your word is now the word you just picked.  repeat that
          last step until you get bored.
    

You can go 'up' and 'down' in how many layers of frequency you want to
collect, like the frequency of individual word pairs, vs word triples {"wordA
wordB" : {"wordC" : 0.25}, etc}, vs sentences, anything.

The more you collect, the more 'real' your generation will tend to be, but it
takes more data to train it effectively since you want lots of possibilities
for each 'key' so it doesn't repeat itself. Otherwise it might think that the
only thing that comes after 'key' so it doesn't repeat itself. Otherwise it
might think that the only thing that comes after 'key' so it doesn't repeat
itself. Otherwise it might think that the only thing that comes after 'key' is
a single phrase, so it keeps selecting it and it doesn't sound like something
anyone would actually say.

------
bcjordan
horse-ebooks.com now goes to quotestatusjoke.com.

What does this iframe on quotestatusjoke.com do?
[http://quotestatusjoke.com/twitter/tw.php](http://quotestatusjoke.com/twitter/tw.php)

The contents say:

> Now 07:27 - we work from 14:00

And a cached version says:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:M0v3DQU...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:M0v3DQUrCXsJ:quotestatusjoke.com/twitter/tw.php+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

"1000_quotes|2441|2049|13240 1 - that matter, of National Review - there is
not much reason to pay it attention. OK 0 - If a church offers no truth that
is not available in the general culture - in, for instance, the editorials of
the New York Times or, for OK

Search by tweets: fun & follow: 1559500496 158361802 375521629 391547065

Unfollowing... ok 56349379 ok 113315835

delete in messages:

delete out messages: 352898710100922368, 352898708427382785,
352898707064225792,

exit check new followers

Send thank you message to: 50860829, 414537821, 479947786,"

Is this a site visitor-triggered cron job?

------
octo_t
Because everything happens so much, have a look at the most popular
horse_ebooks tweets
[http://favstar.fm/users/horse_ebooks](http://favstar.fm/users/horse_ebooks)

------
bentoner
Here is some code to create your own _ebooks twitter account:
[https://github.com/mispy/twitter_ebooks](https://github.com/mispy/twitter_ebooks)

------
Groxx
The day I found Horse_ebooks is the day I "got" Twitter.

Thank you, Horse_ebooks, and happy birthday.

------
longears
Here's more code for running your own: [https://github.com/longears/horsey-
books](https://github.com/longears/horsey-books) It's running the (NSFW) bots
@fetlife_ebooks, @obscuregenres, and @snes_games.

Lately I've been tweaking and curating the output before posting it. It makes
it a bit less magical but much funnier. It turns out that seeding your brain
with random starting points like this is a potent creativity-boosting
technique.

I tried using Bayesian spam filtering to classify the results as Funny or Not
Funny, but it was unable to detect funniness just from which words were
present in the message.

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shadowed
Another phenomenon inspired by @Horse_ebooks is the proliferation of non-spam
"Horse" accounts. As examples, @Horse_JS, @Horse_Recruiter, and @Horse_iOS
each have their own flavour of topical absurdity.

~~~
Cyclosa
Thanks. The @Horse_ebooks account is spammy and the bizarro tweets are far too
rare IMO. I'll check out the other ones.

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Slackwise
Hmm, nobody's mentioned Horse_eComics, the web comic that takes Horse_eBooks
tweets and turns them into comics:

[http://horseecomics.tumblr.com](http://horseecomics.tumblr.com)

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BitMastro
It reminds me of the Cornell boxes created by Neuromancer and Wintermute

