Last week, we saw Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho, give an interview in which he claimed that millennials have no culture and don’t read books; this is, of course, false. He then proceeded to spend his time crowing about how “triggered” millennials are; presumably because they, uh, corrected his facts.

Ellis has spent years on twitter attempting to get “generation wuss” to stick as an anti-millennial epithet, with little success. He’s done podcasts about “social justice warriors” getting “offended”. More recently, he has complained about:

• MeToo
• Emotional support animals
• “Hysteria” about Donald Trump
• Cancel culture
• Millennials overreacting in…

Did a popular news site and/or right-wing dipshit share your tweet with a bunch of rando dipshits? Here are two ways to get them to yell at a robot instead.

the easy way

Just tag one of my honeybots into the conversation. The ones that are working right now are @good_opinions and @meka_activated for general argument purposes and @christianmom18 and @LUVTHATSAVIOR for arguing specifically with atheists. You can also use Sarah Nyberg’s @arguetron if you want something more sophisticated. All you have to do is reply to the individual assholes and include the bot’s handle. Since assholes on the internet never untag people…

Today at the Albuquerque Families Belong Together rally, one of the speakers encouraged the crowd to post selfies, tweet with the event hashtags, and check into the event at Facebook. That’s a terrible thing to tell a crowd. Here’s why.

From the beginning of Facebook, police have been using it against citizens — from campus police using it to bust parties to monitoring activists involved with protests in Ferguson and Baltimore. …

If you’re wondering where I went, terfs put me in Twitter jail — you know how they term search the word “terf” and report everything they find? Well:

Anyway, I figured I’d let y’all know so no one worries I died or anything. See you in a week!

After a couple years of making bots, I’ve made a fair few wordlists that I thought other people might be able to make use of, so I decided to release them. These are provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License; if you want to use them commercially, please contact me and we can work something out.

I’m just providing these as lists in txt files; I use delim.co to turn them into Tracery code.

• body parts
• goo
• buildings that are full of secrets
• unsettling gerunds
• unsettling adjectives
• cooking tools
• ingredients
• cooking styles
• dishes (compiled from multiple cookbooks, mainly the Joy of Cooking, as well as suggestions from Twitter followers)

Originally published at barrl.net on June 25, 2017.

I’ve been talking about how easy it is to get started making bots for a while now, but I haven’t done a long-form writeup of all of the tools that I use that you might find useful. So here we go: a list of resources that I use for making Twitter bots.

Tracery Basics

• Cheap Bots Done Quick This is the software that most of my Twitter bots run on. It handles the regularly scheduled posting as well as the replies
• Tracery The language my bots are written in
• Tracery Visual Editor
• Another Tracery Editor
• Tracery Interactive Tutorial

Non-Tracery Tools

• Auto-fave/Retweet bots I use…

This talk will be livestreamed through Periscope on the Politics of Twitter account; this is just some links to the bots and tools I mention in the talk.

Bots mentioned in the talk:

• hydratebot
• ThinkpieceBot
• infinite_scream
• tinycarebot
• InauguralDonors
• man_products
• arguetron
• hail_the_orb
• everyorb

Making your own bot

• use yourregulargmailname+somethinghere@gmail.com to create a “different” email address when signing up for Twitter (more info)
• Tracery visual editor
• Cheap Bots, Done Quick!
• More info on Tracery

More tools

• Comma delimiter
• Case converter
• Aspell word list maker
• The Great Noun List

More info:

• Shooter sent Facebook message to Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos before gunfire at UW protest, police say
• How the shooting at the UW protest of Milo Yiannopoulos unfolded
• Man shot before Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos’ speaking event is in critical condition

Breitbart, the “alt-right” fake news site that Yiannopoulos writes for, has been publishing various falsehoods about the shooting, including claiming that the victim was one of his fans, when in fact the shooter was. Verify these claims with a real, credible news source before you believe them.