Hey! I’ve got some unexpected news! My apology-generating bot is now a living chattering bot on Mastodon! [Note from future: it died] I’ve always wanted to make a twitterbot, but my bots tend to be too verbose for 140 characters. Mastodon is the perfect place for SorryBot to live! You can follow SorryBot on Mastodon at botsin.space/@sorry!!
This new version is written in a Tracery grammar and hosted by a friend’s app. At some point I want to learn node.js and use George Buckenham’s Tracery Node library to make Polly into a more robust bot that can respond to mentions with apologies specific to input text (like what happens on the version hosted here). Once I do that, I’ll also be able to port Valerie into a Mastodon bot as well. She’ll be more useful there and also will conveniently promote Sailing Rough Waters some more (remember that? Man, I sure wish I was still that cool).
In other news, I finished my onboarding modals for Mastodon. At some point I’m going to do a write-up on the pedagogy that went into their design. For now, if you join Mastodon you’ll be greeted my modals.
My horror chapbook is still chugging along. It has a name now! Jovian Flesh & Fauna. Hopefully now that my Mastodon modals are done, I can step back from Mastodon development and focus more on poetry.
Finally, I will be appearing as a guest on Mile Wide Club, a podcast about media discourse. I’ll be talking about Cardcaptor Sakura, masculine caretaking, and fatalistic queerness. Keep an eye out for when that episode goes up! I’ll make a post here and on my social media accounts when it happens. In the meantime, I highly recommend listening to the most recent episode where comic artist Grace Willey talks Moomins and displacement.
To-Dos:
Mastodon Onboarding Modals (and other mastodon stuff probably)- Onboarding modals design write-up
Make SorryBot into a Tracery-based Mastodon bot(totally something I was planning all along hush)- Learn Node.JS and upgrade SorryBot
- Make Valerie into a Tracery-based Mastodon bot
- Jovian Flesh & Fauna poetry chapbook
- Write “Intro to Boundaries for People Who Don’t Understand Boundaries” essay
- “Minimum Living” budget calculator
- Letters to your past self
That novel I said I’ve been working on.(I didn’t finish this I’m just canceling it because the horror chapbook fills the same hole in my heart)- Fix Feminiscience pages to not be awful.
- Mystery project (may or may not ever happen)