I jumped into the "ebooks"1 Twitter bot trend very late, starting in September 2017 and going until August 2018. I was very active on Twitter during that time and my friend @astral had created their own similar bot which I found very funny, so I decided to try my hand at doing my own. What quickly came to life was my horrible horrible robot daughter, Dark Kiwi 
1. ohhhh wait, am I going to have to explain what "ebooks" accounts were?
So horse_ebooks was a Twitter account made in 2010 that tweeted out spam links to ebook websites but also tweeted random fragments of sentences copied from other sources in order to not look entirely like a spam account. It was mostly junk, but sometimes it was funny junk, and it was interesting enough to watch as a point of fascination and occasional comedy.As the Wikipedia page tells it, the account was automated but was sold in 2011 to a Buzzfeed employee who saw an opportunity to turn virality into bigger fame, stripping the spam links and increasing the "random" funny sentences, which led to follower growth. Horse_ebooks had over 200,000 followers at its peak in September 2013, which is when Buzzfeed Boy brought his plans to fruition and revealed an ARG2no called "Bear Stearns Bravo" and some phone number to call and fuckin... stupid is what it was. You had a low-res JPEG avatar of a horse, I'm not calling your phone. Nobody called this phone.
The secret was out, and a flame of small virality was snuffed out with it. Thankfully, the comedic premise of horse_ebooks was easy to replicate: turn a corpus of information (in my case, my own tweets) into a model of things I would likely say, and then make a tweet factory. I'll get into the specifics a bit later, but hopefully you get the idea now. Let's go ahead and step out of here--
Oh, my favorite horse_ebooks tweet? Everything happens so much. Definitely built for retweeting, but the sentiment has held true. Anyway,
DK's core was, if my searching is correct, this library on GitHub for creating a Markov-chain-model-thing that was written in Ruby!! When I was digging out old files for this, I expected them to be in Python, but then I saw the .rb extension and started to recall some Wild Shit I did to get all of this working on my old PC. I tried at first to install Ruby for Windows, but was unable to get the gemfile stuff figured out because all of the documentation was Linux commands. So, fuck it, I installed a VM and Ubuntu and quickly got things figured out to the point where I could pull my tweets and build a model.
"Dark Kiwi" was a name I'd used in cases where I was very drunk (a good number of DK's tweets are about drinking, which in hindsight.... yikes) so I figured it made sense for a robot that spewed incoherent shit. I picked Hifumi from New Game! as the avatar because I'd recently watched the first season, and I related hard to a girl who is shy, prefers to chat on the computer and has a secret interest in cosplay.3
The Ruby script was hosted on a free Heroku instance4 and started chugging away, creating that occasional moment of comedy and a massive stream of garbage. Primarily, the bot made tweets on its account at scheduled times; I was kind of surprised to see this clear intent in the comments, especially since the project was just for me. At least it helps me look back and say girl, what the fuck? A tweet every two hours????
I was working full-time at a job that didn't allow cell phones on the floor, so I can recall the feeling of "I would like funny things to come back to" but maybe mixed with "I need to fill this void I'm leaving behind." DK had existing routines for liking/RTing/talking to people who interacted with her, so I had a fair number of friends and mutuals who followed her and talked with her, and sometimes she would see something that caught her interest from those folks and jump into the replies of other tweets to share her thoughts. I was very dumb about tweaking the encounter percentages and I remember getting pinged one day because I set the reply rate too high and she was annoying people.
It was a nice year, though. I updated her language model a lot, because I was also tweeting when I could, both at her and in general. I needed to boot up the Linux VM to run my Ruby commands whenever I did that, so the feeling became like a ritual: cutting out a section of time to do very specific tasks for something I'd personified; suddenly the attachment makes a little more sense lol.
Probably one of my favorite moments in that time frame was streaming Celeste when it came out in early 2018. I'd picked Kiwi for the save file name (natch), and one of my friends referred to Badeline as "Dark Kiwi" which just added a nice extra texture to all of that story. Theo also called Dark Kiwi "an adorable goth Kiwi" which made me pop off hard enough to save 13 identical screenshots in my Steam folder. It was nice.
By Summer 2018 I'd heard that coming Twitter API changes were probably going to break Dark Kiwi's functionality, specifically the reply stuff. I could have let her go on as tweet-only, but it didn't feel right if she couldn't talk to others. Comparing the human fingerprints on horse_ebooks and on Dark Kiwi, I'm very happy that I left her there. I'm proud of her and I love her very much.
I think this is probably as close to a eulogy as I'll make for my own Twitter, which I have abandoned but not yet deactivated. Maybe I never will.
3. There was a time where Dark Kiwi talked about Mario so much (because I was enjoying Super Mario Odyssey very much) that I edited a Mario hat + mustache onto the avatar. I wish I still had that file.
4. I still don't know what Heroku is, but their promotional emails continue to end up in my inbox. They are nice little reminders of DK, to me.
