Gaan Haem

(This version’s written in an Orkney variant of Scots. Skip to the English version if you’d like.)

This mornin A teuk a waak tae the Post Office, n than back haem bi the strand, Newark. Hid’s a waak A ken gey weel; A’m waakit hid fer 15 year, tho wi lang spells in atween. Hid’s cheenged a peedie bit sin A stairtit waakin hid: thare are twa-three mair hooses, n a fair bit mair windmills, n a wheen mair cliff faas. Hid cheenges a bit mair huily as a ceety daes, but hid cheenges, for aa the fields n the roads n the kye n the birds leuk the saem. N the sea.

As A waakit, A foond A cadna cheust mind on wha bided in whit hoose. N than A saw that, tho A thought A kent aapiece o this 30 square kilometres o aamaist-an-islan, thare wis a road on ma left A’m nivver waakit doon.

A’m haem in Orkney, whare A growed up. A flit sooth ten year ago, tho A veesit affens. A’m haem fer a fower month resairch project intae Orkney language n poetry, fundit bi a peedie grant fae Creative Scotland. Acause A luve ma haem, n thare’s mair o hid A want tae ken. Maist o aa, A want tae ken hids wirds.

A’m wrote afore aboot whit fer A write in Scots: hid stairtit as a wey to reenge n claem Scottishness, n haes growed intae an inlin tae yaise margeenal leed tae speak tae minority experience. But Scots is a hyowj aarie o hinkan n scrievan n darg, n A’m anely cheust beginnan tae unnerstaand that aamaist-an-islan o language. This project is early resairch n early hinkan. A’ll be exploran thoughts n quaistens here in this blog, writin aboot chats n meetans, maakan recordans aveelable. The wirk is interviews, lang waaks, spieran at neebours, readan, hinkan n wirkshops. A dinna ken whit A’ll find or whar A’ll gang, but A’m gled tae be on ma wey.

Here’s a curn o the quaistens A’m stairtan wi:

1) Whit’s gaan on wi Orkney language the nou?

Thanks tae active teachers, A learned a fair bit o Orkney language literatur whan A wis at schail. Part o ma stairt as a writer wis reaain Walter Traill Dennison, Christina Costie n Robert Rendall: writers, poets n focklorists wha wrowt in Orkney language, recordan, pleean wi n advocatan fer vernacular leed. Dialect is spoken on Radio Orkney, n A mind on luvin Whassigo, hid’s Call My Bluff sort o gemm, n the local papers hae affens printit bits o dialect story n poetry. Thair wirk is at the foondation o whit A’m hinkan aboot, n his bin vital tae the wider Scots project.

Thare’s tae an increasan wealth o contemporar resairch intae n advocacy fer Orkney literatur n dialect. Simon Hall’s History of Orkney Literature brought tae wider unnerstandan the trends n tradeetions o writan here; Tom Rendall’s Voices Aroond the Flow has recordit n scancit the vareety o dialect forms n cheenges ower time; the Year o Orkney Dialect, Writing the North n relatit projects are supportin Orkney language literatur n resairch faarder. Sae wha’s writan in Orkney language the nou? Whit kin o writin is gaan on? N whar’s hid bein publeeshed? Wha reads hid, n wha daes hid maiter tae? Hou’s the language cheenged, n hou will hid cheenge, n hou daes that maiter? Hou dae fock here feel aboot the language thay speak?

2) Whit wey can we write minority forms o Scots?

The standardeesation o Scots throu the wirk o Scots Language Dictionaries n the Scots Spellin Comatee haes been vital wirk fer the preservation o n advocacy fer Scots leed. Haen common weys o writan hings maks hid aisier tae read wirk, aisier tae share wirk, n aisier tae yaise translation teuls. But, inevitably, houivver muckle the mynd tae accoont fer spoken variety inower standardeesation – n Scots standardeesation haes wrowt tae dae that in a wey English’s mixter-maxter standardeesation n unpossible spellan canna – waachles tae standardise inevitably erase minority forms o language. yaisan standardised Scots tae record Orkney dialect chances marginalisation n erasan Orkney’s language forms. Sae whit wey can we write in Orkney language, n whit wey can that apply tae ither minority forms of Scots?

Hou A write this blogposts will cheenge ower time. A ken A’m no gettan hid right yet. Fer the nou, A’m yaesan standardised Scots wi a wheen o variations as merkers o Orkney-ness, like “aa” fer the Scots “aw” or “au”; “ae” fer the Scots lang “a”; “hid” fer “it”; “an” fer the Scots “in” at wird endans. This is no, A hink, sufficient. Gregor Lamb’s Orkney Wordbook n, wi Margaret Flaws, the Orkney Dictionary, include furder suggestions fer modifyan spellan tae Orkney forms, but thair yaise is inconsistent – n the yaise o spellan bi past n present dialect writers shifts. N than, spellan’s no the haaf o hid, fer gettan hid rite is atweel aboot idiom n grammar maist o aa. Mair yet, whit wirds ye cheuse maiter, fer thare’s Scots wirds no spoken in Orkney, that ring oot wrang in Orkney writan – but than again, the mair the language cheenges, the less wrang they wirds soond. Sae whit’s the right choice?

Tae hink on it anither wey, tae standardise Orkney dialect wad be tae write oot internal vareety, n o that thare’s plenty. To Orkney lugs, thare’s gey o a differ atween Westray n South Ronaldsay, wi whole voul shifts n bytimes thare ain wirds. N whanivver A hink about standardisation, Tom Leonard yollers in ma lugs, pyntan oot that standardisation is a political teul mair’n an artistic wan, pairt o claims tae nationhood n parteecular ideas o history, n that hid daesna necessarly hae that muckle tae dae wi hou, as hid must be, “all livin language is sacred”. He puts the kinchy problems gey weel here:

Yi write doon a wurd, nyi sayti yirsell, that’s no thi way a say it. Nif yi tryti write it doon thi way yi say it, yi end up wit hi page covered in letters stuck thigither, nwee dots above hof thi letters, in fact yi end up wi wanna they thingz yi needti huv took a course in phonetics ti be able ti read. But that’s no thi way a think, as if ad took a course in phonetics. A doan’t mean that emdy that’s done phonetics canny think right—it’s no a questiona right or wrong. But ifyi write down “doon” wan minute, nwrite doon “down” thi nixt, people say yir beein inconsistent. But ifyi sayti sumdy, “Whaira yi afti?” nthey say, “Whut?” nyou say “Where are you off to?” they don’t say, “That’s no whutyi said thi furst time.” They’ll probably say sumhm like, “Doon thi road!” anif you say, “What?” they usually say “Down the road!” the second time—though no always. Course, they never really say, “Doon thi road” or “Down the road!” at all. Least, they never say it the way it’s spelt. Coz it izny spelt, when they say it, is it?

Tae snirkle hings furder, A want tae speir at no cheust hou we can write Orkney language but hou A can write hid. A growed up wi English parents, but learned tae spaek on Westray, but learned tae be an adult in the Central Belt. Bytimes A cry hid “home” n bytimes “hame” n bytimes “haem”. Hou A’m writan nou isna hou A ayewis (or ivver) spaek, whither ye’re radin this in Orkney or English. Thare are wirds n speech forms A’ve lost n want tae relearn, but shoud A? Dae A want tae write hou A speak (n is that e’en posseeble?), or dae A want tae write somethan ither? Whit daes hid beir fer me tae mak this deceesions, wi ma ain personal history? But than, mebbe the quaisten “Whit sall A write?” is aesier than “Whit should we write?” – acause the latter asks me tae mak claims fer the warld, but the former cheust asks me tae mak deceesions aboot whit A want to spaek aboot n hou best tae spaek it, n that’s cheust whit the business o poetry is.

A feenal note n set of quaistens on this: A’m yaised “language” n “dialect” intercheengeably here. This wirds are no intercheengeable. A language is, o coorse, a dialect wi an army n a navy: language is inherently fankelt wi the state. Whan A cry hid “language” A’m makkan a poleetical claim, n mebbe that’s no wan A want tae mak. The fock wirkan on this in Orkney hae maistly cried hid “dialect”. Shoud A yaise that? Hid’s haird, whan as a writer in Scots A’m accustomed tae threap the languageness o ma language. Whit daes hid beir tae gie wans language that minority status? Is that a status A might want? In ma hairt, whan A stairt tae hink aboot this quaistens, A stairt tae imaigine a warld whar thare are nae languages, anely dialects. A wis nivver that fond o armies n navies masel, thou hail navies yaised tae bide here, in Orkney, n wan is sunk at the bottom o the Flow.

3) Whit poems can A airt oot here?

This are big quaistens, but the harder hing still is tae airt oot poems here. A’m wrote a curn o poems o Orkney here n thare n ayewis felt A’m missan somehing. Thare are stane circles n tombs here; thare is history unnerfit; hid’s the first piece a danderan poets’ mynd gaes, that sense o history n place. That n the birds. George Mackay Brown‘s compendious body o wirk records somehing vital in 20^th century Orkney n bigs a gey personal mythology n theology, but hid’s no fairly the Orkney A ken, n hid’s no wrote in Orkney’s wirds n aa. The romantic n dramatic Orkney o Edwin Muir‘s poems likewise. But than, nor is the Orkney foond in Robert Rendall n Christina Costie ma Orkney, tho hids past is present. Whit is ma Orkney? N whit dae A hae tae spaek aboot hid?

A’m no shuir. Thare are wind turbines nou, n marine energy resairch bringan skeely employment. The fishan that stowed oot peedie herbours whan A growed up is aa but gaen, n the tourist n craft economy haes boomed. Cars yaised tae be winched aff o boats bi crane; nou thay roll on, roll of, n the isles n thair vyces hae mixt. Thare’s a nightclub that patronisan traivel journalists write aboot. Orkney music pleys throu, stranger than ivver. The sea level rises, cliffs collapse n sae dae bird colonies. A growed up on wan islan n wis a teenager on anither aamaist-an-islan; A’ll be spendan time on baith, n sae whit weys will memory daud intae reality? Whit dae A hink A ken that will be cheenged? Whit poems are here fer me?

GOING HOME

(This wan’s wrote in standard formal English. Hap tae the Orkney version if ye want.)

This morning I took a walk to the Post Office, and then back home by the beach, Newark. It’s a walk I know very well; I’ve been walking it for 15 years so far, though often with long breaks in between. It’s changed a little since I started walking it: there are a few more bungalows, and a lot more windmills, and a few more cliff falls. It changes a bit more slowly than a city does, but it changes, for all that the fields and the roads and the cows and the birds look mostly the same. And the sea.

As I walked, I realised that I couldn’t quite remember who lived in which house. And then I realised that, though I thought I knew most every part of these 30 square kilometres of almost-an-island, there was a road on my left I’d never walked down.

I’m home in Orkney, where I grew up. I left ten years ago, though I visit regularly. I’m here for a four month research project into Orkney language and poetry, funded by a small grant from Creative Scotland. Because I love my home, and there’s more of it I want to know. Most of all, I want to know its words.

I’ve written before about why I often write in Scots: it began as a way to explore and claim Scottishness, and has grown into a desire to use marginal speech to speak to minority experience. But Scots is a huge area of thinking and writing and working, and I’m barely beginning to understand that almost-an-island of language. This project is early research and early thinking. I’ll be exploring thoughts and questions here in this blog, writing about interviews and meetings, making recordings available. The work is interviews, casual chats, long walks, talking to neighbours, reading, thinking and workshops. I don’t quite know what I’ll find or where I’ll go, but I’m glad to be headed there.

Here are some of the questions I’m starting with:

1) What’s happening with Orkney language now?

Thanks to active teachers, I learned quite a bit of Orkney language literature when I was at school. Part of my learning as a writer was reading Walter Traill Dennison, Christina Costie and Robert Rendall: writers, poets and folklorists who worked in part in Orkney language, recording, playing with and advocating for vernacular speech. Dialect is spoken on Radio Orkney, and I remember loving Whassigo, the Call My Bluff-style game played there, and the local papers have often printed bits of dialect story and poetry. Their work is at the foundation of what I’m thinking about, and has been vital to the wider Scots project.

There’s also an increasing wealth of contemporary research into and advocacy for Orkney literature and dialect. Simon Hall’s History of Orkney Literature brought to wider understanding the trends and traditions of writing here; Tom Rendall’s Voices Aroond the Flow has recorded and analysed the variety of dialect forms and changes over time; the Year o Orkney Dialect, Writing the North and related projects are supporting Orkney language literature and research further.

So who’s writing in Orkney language now? What kind of writing is happening? And where’s it being published? Who reads it, and who does it matter to? How has the language changed, and how will it change, and how does that matter? How do folk here feel about the language they speak?

2) How can we write minority forms of Scots?

The standardisation of Scots through the work of Scots Language Dictionaries and the Scots Spellin Comatee has been vital work for the preservation of and advocacy for Scots language. Having common ways of writing things makes it easier to read work, easier to share work, and easier to use translation tools. But, inevitably, however much the effort to include for spoken varietry within standardisation – and Scots standardisation has worked to do that in a way English’s hodgepodge standardisation and impossible spelling can’t – efforts to standardise inevitably erase minority forms of language. Using standardised Scots to record Orkney dialect risks marginalisation and erasing Orkney’s language forms. So how can we write in Orkney language, and how can that apply to other minority forms of Scots?

How I write these blogposts will change over time. At the moment, I’m using standardised Scots with a few variations as markers of Orkney-ness, like “aa” for the Scots “aw” or “au”; “ae” for the Scots long “a”; “hid” for “it”; “an” fer the Scots “in” at wird endans. This is not, I think, sufficient. Gregor Lamb’s Orkney Wordbook and, with Margaret Flaws, Orkney Dictionary includes further suggestions for modifying spelling to Orkney forms, but their use is still inconsistent – and the use of spelling by past and present dialect writers varies too. And then, it goes beyond spellingbecause getting it right is truly about idiom and grammar most of all. More still, what words you choose matters, because there’s Scots words not used in Orkney, that ring out wrong in Orkney writing – but then again, the more the language changes, the less wrong those words sound. So what’s the right choice?

But then, to standardise Orkney dialect would also be to write out internal variety, of which there is plenty. To Orkney ears, Westray and South Ronaldsay are markedly different, with whole vowel shifts and sometimes different words. And whenever I think about standardisation, Tom Leonard shouts in my ear, pointing out that standardisation is as much a political tool as an artistic one, part of claims to nationhood and certain ideas of history, and that it doesn’t necessarily have much to do with how “all livin language is sacred”. He puts the problems best here:

Yi write doon a wurd, nyi sayti yirsell, that’s no thi way a say it. Nif yi tryti write it doon thi way yi say it, yi end up wit hi page covered in letters stuck thigither, nwee dots above hof thi letters, in fact yi end up wi wanna they thingz yi needti huv took a course in phonetics ti be able ti read. But that’s no thi way a think, as if ad took a course in phonetics. A doan’t mean that emdy that’s done phonetics canny think right—it’s no a questiona right or wrong. But ifyi write down “doon” wan minute, nwrite doon “down” thi nixt, people say yir beein inconsistent. But ifyi sayti sumdy, “Whaira yi afti?” nthey say, “Whut?” nyou say “Where are you off to?” they don’t say, “That’s no whutyi said thi furst time.” They’ll probably say sumhm like, “Doon thi road!” anif you say, “What?” they usually say “Down the road!” the second time—though no always. Course, they never really say, “Doon thi road” or “Down the road!” at all. Least, they never say it the way it’s spelt. Coz it izny spelt, when they say it, is it?

To complicate things further, I want to ask not just how we can write Orkney language but how I can write it. I grew up with English parents, but learned to speak on Westray, but learned to be an adult in the Central Belt. Sometimes I say “home” and sometimes I say “hame” and sometimes I say “haem”. How I’m writing now isn’t how I always (or ever) speak, whether you’re reading this in Orkney or English. There are words and speech forms I’ve lost and want to relearn, but should I? Do I want to write how I speak (can I?), or do I want to write something else? What does it mean for me to make these decisions, with my own personal history? But then, maybe the question “What shall I write?” is easier than “What should we right?” – because the latter asks me to make claims for the world, but the former just asks me to make decisions about what I want to say and how best to say it, and that’s what the business of poetry is.

A last note and set of questions: I’ve used “language” and “dialect” interchangeable throughout. These words are not interchangeable. A language is, of course, a dialect with an army and a navy: language is inherently bound up in the state. When I say “language” I’m making a political claim, and maybe that’s not one I want to make. The folk working on this in Orkney have mostly used “dialect”. Should I use that? It’s hard, when as a writer in Scots I’ve become accustomed to assert the languageness of my language. What does it mean to give ones language that minority status? Is that actually a status I might want? In my heart, when I start to think about these questions, I start to imagine a world where there are no languages, only dialects. I was never that fond of armies and navies myself, though whole navies used to live here, in Orkney, and one is sunk at the bottom of the Flow.

3) What poems will I find here?

These are big questionns, but the harder thing still is to find poems here. I’ve written a few poems of Orkney here and there and always felt like I’m missing something. There are stone circles and tombs here; there is history underfoot; it’s the first place the wandering poets’ mind goes, that sense of history and place. That and the birds. George Mackay Brown‘s compendious body of work records something vital in 20^th century Orkney and builds up a very personal mythology and theology, but it’s not quite the Orkney I know, and it’s not written in Orkney’s words either. The romantic and dramatic Orkney of Edwin Muir‘s poems likewise. But then, nor is the Orkney found in Robert Rendall and Christina Costie my Orkney, though its past is present. What is my Orkney? And what do I have to say about it?

I’m not sure. There are wind turbines now, and marine energy research bringing skilled employment. The fishing that filled small harbours when I grew up is all but gone, but the tourist and craft economy has boomed. Cars used to be winched off the boats by crane; now they roll on, roll of, and the islands and their voices have mixed. There’s a nightclub that patronising travel journalists write about. Orkney music plays through, stronger than ever. The sea level rises, cliffs collapse, and so do bird colonies. I grew up on one island and was a teenager on a thinly connected peninsula; I’ll be spending time on both, and so what memories will prove false? What do I think I know that will be changed? What poems are here for me?

Photo by Colin Moss, licensed under Creative Commons BY-ND 2.0.

How I Made Two Wee Twitterbots

Uncategorized

This is a beginner’s guide to writing bots. I’m not an expert: in fact, I barely understand what I’m doing, which is why I’m writing this. I want to encourage other folk who don’t know what they’re doing to give it a go to, so we can figure things out and make new stuff together.

It’s also a love letter to bots, because they deserve it.

Who Am I?

I’m a poet and performer, mostly. I make things that look like poems, things that look like games, things that look like shows, things that look like two or three of these at once, and things that fall into the cracks in between. I’m interested in minor languages, political art, understanding how money works, and play; I like experimental art and populist art and I especially like the rare art that manages to be both experimental and populist.

I can’t code. Well, not much. I’ve written a text-based game in Inform and one in Twine, both of which have very simple and accessible programming languages with lots of documentation and advice for newbies, and I can do simple things with HTML for websites. That means that I have a basic understanding of what it means to write instructions to make computers do things. I’m pretty good at maths, but nothing special. I think the most important thing I bring to coding is a deep curiosity and a love of learning how to do new things.

I made two simple twitterbots because I fell in love with what bots can do and wanted to try it out. I’m still learning! I’m writing this to help other people with love or curiosity or desire start learning too.

Why Bots?

I think that bots make poems, and that some bots are poems.

My favourite bot is poem.exe, which generates original haiku of consistent strength and occasional astonishing beauty. I think poem.exe is a haiku master to equal Bashō, and I mean that. It doesn’t always succeed, but neither did Bashō; I do know that I’ve never written a haiku as good as poem.exe’s best, and I’ve been trying to learn how for over a decade. Through applying a gentle weave of chance operation to a deep understanding of language, pattern and meaning, poem.exe’s author enabled it to master a single poetic form. I’m worried about which form is next. Some other bots I love which generate interesting kinds of poems are Fantasy Florist, Dreams juxtaposed, Pentametron, and how 2 sext.

Other bots don’t so much generate poems as become poems: every non-word‘s individual tweets are often beautiful and inspiring pwoermds in themselves, but the bot gains its true poetic power from apprehending the enormity of its task. The poem is not any given tweet or series of tweets, but the overall writing project, extending indefinitely into the future. In this sense, poemy bots are the end state of the Oulipian project of authoring constraints and then exhausting them. No human author can exhaust a form as comprehensively as a robot can; robot minds are better-suited to the task than our own. Random generation has long since rendered Queneau’s 100,000,000,000,000 Sonnets obsolete: poem-gen is the best attempt at this I’ve seen, but there are many others and may be better still. Some other bots I love which I think are poems are feelings.js, CEO PYRAMID OVERLORD, Available Parking, and whispers for moon. Visual art has its analogue, as image bot convos showcases, with the heart-warming and popular ⋆✵tiny star fields✵⋆ being my favourite, perhaps because it is so close to text.

Other bots don’t write poems, but try to find them, like ROM TXT. Other bots love, extend, satirise, and explore famous poems by exhausting them, like This Is Just To Say. Other bots are less like poetry and more like performance art: the wildly successful everyword asked what it might mean to pay close attention to each fragment of language, and this felt important enough to have given inspiration to many beautiful derivative projects, of which every bird is my favourite, and much silliness, as documented in my Everyword Orgy. Other bots do other strange and lovely things that aren’t necessarily understandable in the terms of art, much to their advantage. I can’t explain why digital henge touches me so much; perhaps it is the quiet and unassuming reminder of huge astronomical forces into a relentlessly noisy, digital, immaterial, human space. sea change likewise.

This is considering bots as artists, but bots can also be activists, cops, crooks and many other things besides.

All of which made me want to make one very much.

My Bots

Work No. 128 started life as a tongue-in-cheek parody of Martin Creed’s (in)famous Work No. 127, which won the Turner Prize and comprised a lightbulb in a room switching on/off every 30 seconds. It belongs to that family of contemporary art which is summoned to mock the art industry, like My Bed and The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. I actually have a fondness for these works, though not for the brutal financial system in which they are complicit. One day I was thinking about the horror of personal branding on Twitter, and how I could imagine tweets being on brand or off brand, and then made a throwaway joke about a bot alternating between the two. A month later, I’d built the bot.

Due to some constraints in Twitter’s mechanically-enforced codes of conduct, no Twitter account can repeatedly tweet the same words over and over. This constraint was a gift to Work No. 128 in the end, because it meant the bot had to introduce glitch and static to be able to operate. This gives the final piece a slightly disturbing and aggressive aesthetic, I think. I would call Work No. 128 a poem that’s outgrown the joke it grew in, something that gains it’s strength from its persistence and terrifying extension into the future, and I feel very grateful that 7 humans are willing to follow it despite its awful frequency.

Poetry Prompt-a-Tron also started life as a derivative idea. I was struck by the eerie beauty of Dwarf Fortress’s procedurally-generated poem descriptions, and thought there might be value in making a human-world Twitter version. I realised that randomised poetry prompts would be simultaneously “twisty metal sculptures made out of words” and a useful service, sparking ideas for poems. They’re also a slightly satirical commentary on the idea of poetry prompts themselves: some of her ideas are impossible, some are pointless, and some are just “Write a poem”.

I want to deepen the texture of her ideas through adding layers of randomisation and a bigger corpus to draw on, and I want to incorporate a responsive element which will curate the poems people write from her ideas. One of the lovely things about bots is that there are often improvements to be made.

How I Did It and You Can Too

Please Note: This guide links to a template that, due to changes at Google, will stop working in June 2015. If you understand code you can read about it here: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/migration/oauth-config . I’ll try to make a fix to sort this out, and will update this when I can.

1. Follow a tutorial.

When I asked friends where to begin, I was pointed to The Light Aesthetic’s tutorial and template for making bots in Google Apps Script. This is accessibly-written, to my mind, and walks through most of the stages of making a bot, given that there are still some tricky stages. Working in Google Apps Script also has the advantage of not having to understand the command line interface — you know that thing in films where a hacker types furiously on a keyboard and things appear next to > symbol? like that but real.

Two other tutorials which look good but which I haven’t used are Joel McCoy’s guide to making _ebooks bots (bots which say random things drawn from your tweets) and Dan Cox’s guide to making bots in node.js. Both of these require understanding that command line thing, which I still don’t quite get, but the former gently introduces it a bit.

What all these tutorials are necessarily missing, though, is the bit where you write new code — the bit where you make an original bot.

2. Taught myself very basic JavaScript.

I didn’t know how to write code, so I went to the free Codecademy JavaScript course. It’s very basic, very friendly, and very accessible, with a big community on hand to answer questions when you get stuck. It’s designed with young people in mind, which helps a lot. I spent an hour a day for around a week to finish it, and by the end I had a solid understanding of how one programming language works — enough to start writing Twitterbots, and a foundation from which to learn new skills by trying them out. Like I said, I have very limited experience in some other simple languages, and I’m good at maths and generally comfy with computers, so maybe I was quicker at this than you might be, but I’m confident that it’s accessible to most and a low time commitment.

3. Wrote some dodgy code.

With the confidence that I needed to learn by doing and making it up as I went along, I wrote a program for Work No. 128. Or rather, I wrote some of it. I used a template from The Light Aesthetic’s tutorial which did the work of communicating with Twitter, and I copied some bits of code I didn’t quite understand from my pal Alice Maz‘s first bot. (She learned how to do all this a couple of months before me.) I also copied some bits of code from various tutorials around the internet. But I did write a few lines of original work, and figuring out what I needed to copy is also a useful skill that I gather all programmers employ.

I understood the logic of what I needed to do and I made something I thought would work. It didn’t. And that’s OK. When I wrote Prompt-a-Tron I got closer to the final code first time, but it was also broken when I thought I’d done it right. And that’s OK. We learn by doing.

4. Asked for help to fix it.

So this led me to ask some supportive friends to help me identify my mistakes and debug my code. I think this was the most important stage of all. I wouldn’t have had the confidence to try and make a bot without knowing a few folk who would help me out when I got stuck, and who would encourage me to keep trying. We learn by doing, but we also learn by having friends who support us and share their skills.

I recommend finding a friend to help you when you get stuck. They don’t necessarily have to understand twitterbots — if they do any programming, they’ll have most of the skills you need. If you don’t have anyone, then send me a message; I’m probably not good enough to help myself, but I have some friends who like supporting bot-makers who might be willing to help out.

5. Hit go!

Hitting go on my first bot felt wonderful. I had to hit the go button a few times to make it work, but when it flew I was so proud. I’m still excited when I look at it. I had the same buzz when Prompt-a-Tron took off, and I’m still fascinated by what she makes. She delights me. I want to share that feeling!

I still don’t really understand everything my bots are doing, or how all my code works, and I’m OK with that. I didn’t understand how a poem worked when I first wrote one, and I’m still figuring how different combinations of spices make the best curries. There’s a lot of programming culture and language I don’t understand too: I haven’t got to grips with the command line, and I don’t understand GitHub yet, though both are on my wishlist of things to teach myself. You don’t have to know all this to start: you just have to want to start.

6. Continued to fix things.

Both my bots are still a little bit broken. Occasionally I get an error message I don’t understand from Work No. 128, and there are many improvements to make to Prompt-a-Tron. Like all machines, bots are never completely finished: they require maintenance and can always be fiddled with. Bots aren’t independent: they depend on other bits of code and machinery operating around the world, and sometimes the part you need isn’t available any more. So I’m expecting to have to look after my bots for a long time, and I’m glad to do it.

How My Bots Work

Work No. 128

This is the code. (This is not a good way to share code, but like I said, I don’t understand GitHub yet.) The first and last bits are from The Light Aesthetic’s template, and the middle bit is mine. Any line with // in front of it is commentary rather than code.

The bot has a spreadsheet living in my Google Drive with a single cell in it, which acts like a switch. When it tweets “onbrand” it flips the switch so that next time it knows to tweet “offbrand”. This may not be the best way of achieving this, but as far as I can tell it’s not possible (or I don’t know how) to make a variable within a single piece of code in Google Apps Script that persists over time, so I had to make that switching variable outside the code. Even if that’s a silly way to do it, it taught me how to use spreadsheets with a program.

The bot has a list for each letter that makes up the words “offbrand” and “onbrand” of Unicode characters which look like the original letters. It uses a random number generator to pick random characters from those lists to build the right word each time. Then it tweets it!

Poetry Prompt-a-Tron

This is the code. Again, the first and last bits are from the template. The interaction with Wordnik was adapted from Patrick Rodriguez with bits from Alice Maz’s Captain Barbossa. All of the code that pluralizes nouns is copied from Blake Embrey.

This one is a bit more complicated. It puts together a number of different randomised elements:

Nouns and adjectives from Wordnik, which offers a service I don’t fully understand to provide randomised words.
Forms, actions and modifiers from my own lists. The former is largely from Bob Newman, with my own additions; the latter I mostly made up, with help from Bernadette Mayer’s list of experiments. These are randomly selected using the same method as Work No. 128’s characters.

The bot has six different sections. 1b decides whether or not to include a random adjective. 1c decides whether or not to use “poem” or a random form. Based on those decisions, 1a figures out if it needs to use “Write a” or “Write an” based on what the next letter is. (It hasn’t worked out how to account for “hour” and similar yet.) 2 decides whether or not to use a random noun, 3 a random action, 4 a random form. Each of the randomised options has a different probability of being used, which adds texture to the bot overall: if a bot uses the same elements each time, its workings are very transparent to a human viewer, which tends to be unsatisfying. There’s a 6% chance of it just tweeting “Write a poem.”

Now Go Make a Bot

Let me know if this guide is helpful. Let me know if I can help. If you’ve got advice or suggestions of useful resources, please do add them in the comments.

I’d love to hear what you do!

These bots and this guide generously supported by my backers on Patreon. If you like what I do, consider joining from a buck a month to help me make and give away more things.

Everything I Bought and How It Made Me Feel: Annual Report

Poetry, Theatre

After twelve months, twenty thousand pounds and nine hundred and twelve purchases, my purchase-logging anxiety-mining consumer-anthropologizing self-quantifying endurance blog Everything I Bought and How It Made Me Feel has concluded.

This is the annual report.

It analyses a single consumer’s year, exploring what was bought, and why, and how it felt. All data is hopelessly subjective. It answers all questions that were asked, and none. There are charts and tables and graphs and worry. It discovers how much I spent on survival and how much on self-actualisation, whether buying love or buying esteem was more likely to make me feel bad, which artform made me feel best to buy, whether more expensive things felt worse or better, which supermarkets felt worse, and why it all matters nothing and everything.

Download the Annual Report (pdf, 172kb)

Download the Raw Data and draw your own conclusions (xls, 2,256kb)

The debut of the stage show of Everything I Bought…, featuring new numbers and strange ideas, is Wednesday March 18th at Camden People’s Theatre, London.

This work generously supported by my backers on Patreon. If you like what I do, consider joining from a buck a month to help me make and give away more things.