it's always weird when you meet someone who says "oh, i watched your talk!" or "i read your blog!" and not just because of the uneven footing—meeting someone who now has an idea of you in their head, and not being able to reciprocate.
for me, it's weird because i haven't really written software that people use or know, and yet i've managed to be known as someone who knows things about software. i feel like someone three chords short of a punk band who gets mislabeled as a musician.
i'm not known for my coding ability: i've just been very funny when i complain about things.
the one good talk isn't really about problems with software, it's about the problems with people. the good blog post isn't about programming, it's about the contradictory nature of advice. plus, both of these things are roughly a decade old. in other words: i'm not known for being good at programming, or even being funny, i'm known for telling one good joke in my thirties.
i peaked. i was pretty sure that was my sum total of niche micro-celebrity experiences, too.
well, then the crow thing happened, like the punchline of a joke "you feed 150 crows one time..." and suddenly it dwarfed pretty much everything else i've put out on the internet. the nice bit? i didn't feel like a cheater. i wasn't making funny jokes, i was taking good photos of funny birds.
it's given me some hope that as I steadily march forward to death, there'll be some other stupid shit that gets me into trouble. i've also learned that other stuff from my past can come back to haunt me, too.
i guess i was lying about "not writing software people use." technically speaking, i did write one useful program — buttbot — an irc bot that replaces random syllables with butt. i never expected it to be so popular.
it started as a joke. an irc channel full of nerds, all writing bots, and i said "hey i can write one too!" and heard "make a bot that says butt". so i did. fast forward a little bit, through the knuth-liang hyphenation algorithm, a google code project, and some fancier statistical methods, and i had accidentally created a mascot for maybe twenty people.
i'd all but forgotten about it until a year or so ago, up until i saw a very familiar name in a random twitch stream. there was a "buttesbot", and it said "butt" in chat, down to using the same weird text replacement algorithms i'd half-assed all those years ago
turns out it wasn't my exact bot, someone else decided to rewrite it in java, and someone else was also credited for making it, too. one link to a github repo containing the perl code i'd long abandoned.
but i can't blame people for that.
i used to say "i won't appear in the pages of history but i'll probably appear in a footnote." now? i think it's more likely i'll appear as the punchline to an hour long youtube video as someone hunts down the origin of a meme.
it probably won't be about buttbot.
it'll probably be the "i don't have tourette's, you're just a cunt" tshirt. that's probably my greatest contribution to history.
