
Show HN: Twitter bot which tweets Magic cards with appropriate GIFs superimposed - minimaxir
https://github.com/minimaxir/magic-the-gifening
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cvsh
This is awesome.

Side note: I absolutely despite how Twitter bakes all GIFs into videos and
prevents you from saving them as GIFs.

~~~
Pxtl
When there's a gif in a discussion, it's like 3 taps on mobile to play it
despite having a play icon on it. First time you touch it, it just expands the
tweet. Then it expands the video. Then it actually plays the video.

Hilariously bad ui.

~~~
wlesieutre
You say "bad UI," twitter says "increased engagement!"

Potato, potahto.

~~~
dmix
I know you're joking but that's still a bullshit metric and a risky one to
make if they are looking at only taps + total time. It's not increasing ad
revenue, extending meaningful engagement time, or user happiness.

Having worked in analytics for a long time I've seen countless examples of
metrics like these being needlessly optimized so I find it harder to laugh at.

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stephengillie
That's pretty amazing. Too bad we can't print GIFs. Will this lead to a
resurgence of "MTGIF" or "Magic: The GIFering"?

(And all this time, I've been doing it manually with Imgur images and
MTGCardMaker.com. Tangentially, here is an album of MTG cards I made to try
and "port" common Powershell functions to MTG:
[https://imgur.com/a/4sa6v](https://imgur.com/a/4sa6v))

~~~
lightedman
"Too bad we can't print GIFs."

Gonna call it now - physical digital trading cards, animated.

~~~
bradmwalker
[https://cardamajigs.com/collections/lenticular-
tokens](https://cardamajigs.com/collections/lenticular-tokens)

~~~
lightedman
No, no. Not even close.

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jcolella
Very interesting project, integrating all these different libraries. One
thing, I noticed that you are using a hardcoded path to the json. Created an
issue for you [https://github.com/minimaxir/magic-the-
gifening/issues/2](https://github.com/minimaxir/magic-the-gifening/issues/2).
Thanks for sharing your work.

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Fragoel2
Another slightly related cool twitter bot is @RoboRosewater, that uses machine
learning to generate new cards.

[https://twitter.com/RoboRosewater](https://twitter.com/RoboRosewater)

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Sniffnoy
I don't understand... where is it pulling the GIFs from? How does it determine
what GIF to use for a given card?

~~~
lambda
The code is pretty short and easy to read:

It parses the card names and IDs from a CSV file here:

[https://github.com/minimaxir/magic-the-
gifening/blob/master/...](https://github.com/minimaxir/magic-the-
gifening/blob/master/mtgifening.py)

And calls create_mtg_gif, which calls get_giphy_gif, which requests GIFs from
the giphy API by searching for the card name, and then finds one that has an
appropriate aspect ratio.

[https://github.com/minimaxir/magic-the-
gifening/blob/master/...](https://github.com/minimaxir/magic-the-
gifening/blob/master/utils.py)

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cutcss
I can't believe it's 2017 and Twitter still doesn't have a "Top Tweets" link
in every profile to sort tweets by popularity (RT+likes count)

~~~
batiudrami
Twitter is a complete mess, UX-wise. I don't know what they're doing over
there.

~~~
spiderfarmer
Probably a continuous fight between progessive and conservative UX designers.
Just like the US basically.

~~~
jessaustin
Haha does that mean that "prog" and "cons" designers actually have basically
identical tastes, and fixate on tiny insignificant differences while ignoring
a whole universe of design possibility? That would explain how fast Twitter
gets new things out the door...

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justhackedme
Too bad it barely works.

I like the idea though.

