{"id":1662,"date":"2018-12-30T21:46:37","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T05:46:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.certainly-strange.com\/?p=1662"},"modified":"2018-12-30T21:55:03","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T05:55:03","slug":"cosmic-horror-restaurant-menus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.certainly-strange.com\/?p=1662","title":{"rendered":"Cosmic Horror Restaurant Menus"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Doc and I made a Twitter bot here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For months now, Doc has been obsessed with the idea of making a twitter bot that posts menu items with a mix of actual restaurant items and cosmic horror. The idea being to have something in a familiar format (menu item and description) mashed up with something so incongruous that the results would be hilarious or terrifying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had already written a Markov chain generator script for my Lessons of Vivec Generator<\/a> and Steeny Ipsum<\/a> jokes, so I said we should just use the script I had already written and modify the output a bit for Twitter. Just a tiny bit of tweaking, and using the Ruby gem t<\/a> and a cron job, we could have the bot up and running lickety split. Unfortunately, I kept putting it off forever, until I suppose we had the long holiday break which finally gave me the motivation (and free time) to make this thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so, I finally did it<\/a>! While I was tweaking the script for the bot, Doc went off in search of content to feed it (which mostly consists of endless online menus and a bunch of Lovecraft text). And I must say, some of the results were pretty spectacular. While I was still tweaking things and generating countless menu items in terminal, we were just cracking up at the weirdness that came out. Some of my all-time favorite food item names it came up with were:<\/p>\n\n\n\n