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#Cohost Global Feed
also: ##The Cohost Global Feed, #The Cohost Global Feed, ###The Cohost Global Feed, #Global Cohost Feed, #The Global Cohost Feed, #global feed
Some time ago, a wonderful Twitter bot called Boyd ebooks existed. This bot, run by someone who's identity remains unknown to this day1, would periodically (every hour or so) post randomly constructed Boyd Cooper rants.
Boyd uses an algorithm to generate his rants procedurally out of various pieces ingame and this bot, created some time in October 2013, replicated that. Some concessions were made. For example, in the game every one of Boyd's rants ends with a non-sequitur before going on to the next rant. ebooks seems to instead just occasionally post a lone non-sequitur instead of an entire rant. Additionally, Boyd's occasionally muttering was removed presumably to make the rants fit better into Twitter's character limit. But other than that it seems to be a very faithful reproduction of the algorithm.
Unfortunately, in April, Boyd ebooks shut down. It posted one final message - Boyd's final line from the game - then stopped. It's pretty sad but it had a very good and long run.
I realised though, soon after creating the System Shock 2 Logs bot (content warning for System Shock 2 spoilers and other potentially upsetting themes within said logs) that Cohost, could provide a much, much better platform for Boyd ramblings. With how lenient the limits are, Boyd's insanely long rants could finally be allowed to run unchecked for as long as they wanted and didn't need to to omit the mutters.2
So, I wasted no time in porting my milkman library3 to JS and now Boyd Cooper is on Cohost, better than ever!.
Enjoy!
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It's been speculated that it might've been a developer or other friend of Double Fine. They'd probably have needed access to the original Lua code to reimplement the algorithm faithfully. AFAIK Anna Kipnis hadn't yet done talks or explanations on the algorithm at the time the bot was made. (The author could've also done some very good guesswork or been the only person on the planet with a functional Psychonauts Lua decompiler, I suppose)
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My new version keeps the mutters but still differs from the original algorithm in that much like Boyd ebooks, it'll randomly decide to just post a non-sequitur sometimes.
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I made this soon after the original Psychonauts Lua sources were found - it's an open source reimplementation of the original algorithm that can be customised.