You Odyssey This!

I made yet another Twitter bot: @YouOdysseyThis. It does the same thing that @SheikahMemories does for Breath of the Wild, but for Super Mario Odyssey.

All I had to do was modify a few strings and create the account, so I was able to do it all on my phone from a thousand miles away. My laptop isn't working, so my phone is all I have right now.

As of right now it's having trouble keeping up with real time , since there are so many people playing the game and posting their screenshots and videos. Hopefully this will settle down soon.

Enjoy!

Update: I've scaled it back so it only retweets a certain percentage of qualifying tweets, and that seems to be working.

twooshbot is dead. Long live twoosh_bot!

My twooshbot account got permanently suspended from Twitter for "violent threats". Yes, seriously.

So, I created a new, kinder, gentler Twitter account.

Here's why I think it was suspended:
Sometimes, twooshbot would respond with movie quotes.  Some of those quotes were of the Emperor Palpatine trying to get Luke to come to the Dark Side of the Force.  In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke doesn't respond in violence. Instead, he realizes what's happening, lets go of his anger, and refuses to fight except to defend himself (and his sister).  That's how I wanted these responses to be perceived.  A gentle, humorous reminder to keep it cool.

Of course, if you have no idea what this twooshbot thing is, and some random bot account jumps into your heated conversation telling someone to give in to their anger and strike you down with it, you report it to Twitter, and they respond with the perma-banhammer.

I tried appealing to Twitter Support, hoping that if I removed the offending content, they would restore the account, but they refused to budge.  They even froze the phone number I used to activate the twooshbot account, so I had to use a different phone number to create an app to connect to the new account.

Here are the responses that twoosh_bot will no longer say (a few of them are from Firefly):

• The hate is swelling in you [reply user name] is unarmed.🌌Give in to your anger!⚔
• Your hate has made you powerful! Use it! Strike [reply user name] down with it. 🌌🌑⚔
• Use your aggressive feelings, [user name]. Let the hate flow through you! 🌌🌑
• Wonderful girl! 🔫👨 Either I'm going to kill her or I'm beginning to like her. 👸🌑🌌
• Maybe you would like it back in your cell, your highness? 👸🔫👨🌑🗑🌌
• Also? I can kill you with my brain. 🌌👧🧠
• Ah, curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal! 🦖 Har har har! Mine is an evil laugh! 🦕 Now die! 🌌
• You don't know me, son, so let me explain this to you once🌌If I ever kill you you'll be awake, you'll be facing me & you'll be armed

These were a very small fraction of the hundreds of responses that twooshbot would post.

So, that's how I got banned.  It sucked.  I'll try not to do that again.

SheikahMemories: A New Twitter Bot

@SheikahMemories

When I first started playing Breath of the Wild on the Nintendo Switch, there was an account that would (intermittently) retweet all of the pictures posted by players.  Actually it was simpler than that.  It would retweet everything with media and the #BreathoftheWild hashtag.  It caught a bunch of re-posts and other junk, but it also captured people's cosplay pictures and fan art.

I used to have a column dedicated to this account on my Fenix Twitter app, and I would scroll through the screenshots and other content, and enjoy the community of like-minded fans.

Recently, that account has gone away, or rather it has been renamed and repurposed to retweet Nintendo Switch posts, regardless of the game.  These days, that means almost exclusively Splatoon 2, which is fine, but that's not what I'm in to right now.

So, after contacting the developer to see if they would reinstate the functionality (and receiving a negative reply), I thought, "Well, I already have a Twitter bot, this should be easy."

I haven't written the bot yet, but I've created the @SheikahMemories account.

• UPDATE 2017-09-02: I have now written the bot!  It took about four hours to strip down and adapt the existing twooshbot framework to the new behavior.

Note: I've since replaced the Twitter list following the account with a saved search for the #BreathoftheWild hashtag, but not everyone uses an app that can do that, and once I had the idea, It got legs of its own and I'm kind of excited to implement it, whether or not it's strictly necessary.