Tracery Bots¶
Tracery, CBDQ and The Bots I Made¶
Tracery¶
I first heard of Tracery from Kate Compton’s twitter, or something like that. Memory fades, and I am sure that when I first encountered it, I filed it away under “interesting” and forgot all about it for a while. I must have seen the tutorials and trials in the lovely, and very pink, Crystal Code Palace site.
I have to be honest, when I first encountered the wall of pinkness that is the Crystal Code Palace, I was tossing between “Wow!” and “Are you serious?!” But I was soon caught up in playing with the editor and having fun. It was also a little humbling to realise that, even though I was a designer who was supposed to be questioning rules and assumptions, I had a bias that said “I am not sure it’s supposed to look like THAT.” Thankfully, I got over that fast !
CBDQ and The Trippy Gourmet¶
In early 2020 (It’s five years and some months since then at the point of writing this, so I am getting my timeline only from my file creation dates !) I discovered Cheap Bots, Done Quick (CBDQ) by V Buckenham. CBDQ was a great way to take a Tracery based generator and launch it as a Twitter Bot. I launched @TrippyGourmet then, just for kicks, and refined it a couple of times until I was satisfied enough.
Also in early 2020, I first took up teaching Creative Coding - mainly using p5.js to create Generative Art. But my TrippyGourmet bot became part of the examples of how code could be used for fun, “creative” outcomes, and not just staid software development.
The Trippy Technologist¶
By 2021, I had also taught an IOT course twice and was coming up to doing it for the third year in a row. So I created another bot, TrippyTechnologist, which was meant to poke some fun at finding IOT/Tech based service problem statements to design for.
Bötterdämmerung¶
On April 6, 2023, post Elon Musk’s hostile takeover and associated shenanigans, Twitter shutdown (or rather, priced up) all API access, resulting in services like CBDQ having to shut down. While the bot accounts and pages continue to exist, with all the weird and wonderful content they have generated over the years, they are no longer active.
Bots in the Cabinet of Curiosities¶
This set of pages is my attempt at re-homing my bots and linking to their existing Twitter pages so they have a new home and are available for people to play with. A blog page isn’t the most public and popular medium, and I don’t think I’ve ever had an audience of more than 4-5 people, so no one’s clamouring for the Trippy Gourmet to make a comeback.
But, for one, this is atleast mostly immune to third-party whims, and two, this is in some ways me screaming into the void that I did this, I was here.
I also would love to keep playing with Tracery itself, and so this will provide a continuing home for any other explorations I do with it. Beyond playing with Tracery, I am also exploring setting up whimsical webpages to stretch my skills as well as to break with the morass that the mainstream internet has become. I hope these pages bring some whimsy and joy to the people of the internet.
Tracery in the age of GenAI¶
GenAI has taken off in the five years since I started playing with Tracery and ChatGPT can write entire essays and theses. I myself use it for a whole range of things, not the least is using ChatGPT to help me setup these webpages through my very basic web development skills. But I still believe, and hope to show, that there is a lot of charm, mental exercise, and other forms of value to using Tracery to create stories, poems, shapes, ASCII landscapes, and so much more.