New Twitter bot - @IFinspiration

Hi all,

I created a Twitter bot named IFinspiration, who tweets twice a day new ideas for your next IF :slight_smile:
It does this by combining randomly tags from the IFDB, and I like the result so far: “A mud game set during world war ii, dealing with philosophy and non-human protagonist.”, “Idea for a roguelike game: make it about mild cruelty to animals and/or sword and sorcery.” or “Create a game set during the 1940s about profanity.”.
The output is a little rough sometimes (articles are the biggest problem), but I didn’t have the courage to go through 1700 tags from the IFDB to correct all that; plus, a little ambiguity is good for the creative juices too :wink:

It took me literally 2 hours, using the awesome tool Cheap Bots Done Quick, which is dead easy to use: the ‘code’ is like:

{   "origin" = ["This is a tweet for my friend #friend#, who is so #nicething# !"],
    "friend" = ["Albert","Betty","Charlie"],
    "nicething" = ["nice","funny","beautiful"],
}

You can look at my source if you want. I have categories for locations, times and adjectives, as well as the general topics; this took me most of the 2 hours I spent on this, but it was still easy because times and locations often started with a capital letter. (And I used mild regular expressions to clean up the tag list.)

I don’t think I’ll be spending that much more time improving it in the future, since I like the output already, but feel free to comment and suggest things!

And I’ll plug other IF-related bots in case you’re interested: YouAreCarrying, who tweets random inventories from Infocom games, and IFDB Sommelier, created by emshort (and I wouldn’t have done mine if she hadn’t tweeted about CheapBotsDoneQuick and her bot in the first place, so thanks!!), who generates original IFDB searches combining several criteria, and usually leads to a small and interesting slice of the IFDB. And I do want to stress once more how easy to use CheapBotsDoneQuick is, so check it out!

I’d play a roguelike game about mild cruelty to animals. :slight_smile:

And/or sword and sorcery. Can’t get too creative with these things.

Yay, cool! CheapBotsDoneQuick is really satisfyingly fun – I’m glad you liked it too.