poetree

For my last post of the week, a bot account entirely on Twitter; pentametron. This account finds and retweets pairs of tweets that happen to form rhymed couplets of iambic pentameter. (At first, it just did single lines in iambic pentameter, but then it got access to more of the stream of tweets, and began doing couplets.) It also has its own website, pentametron.com, where you can see seven couplets at a time, formatted into sonnets.

The only direct control is that the bot's programmer has restricted certain phrases from popping up, if before they were getting rhymed over and over again. (Something like "I wanna watch the hunger games again!" was apparently very popular a year or so ago.) So, the bot will pair together two different messages from completely different users, with no expectation of sense. With literally zero expectations, any time it rises above that to create something surprisingly meaningful, it's entertaining! Sometimes a live event is going on (holiday, major sporting event, election night) that prompts a lot of people to tweet similar messages at the same time, so then the couplets will look coherent based on that.

Another touchdown! Ravens all the way!

No power for the Super Bowl? Okay.

Other times, we'll get random coincidences.

what is the definition of a friend?

We stand together till the very end.

(As an aside, ten syllables is not a lot, compared to the one-hundred-forty character maximum for Twitter! So the content comes across as relatively short.)

Another amusing note is that every once in a while, the "human" writing one of the tweets for the robot to come across...isn't human either. The bot @stupidcounter spells out numbers as words, increasing every two minutes--and once you get up into the hundreds of thousands, a lot of English numbers themselves are iambic pentameter. So, for the Yuletide fanfiction gift exchange, someone asked for a story "shipping" @pentametron and @stupidcounter ...and I obliged. (Everything centered in this is a verbatim couplet from pentametron. Everything off to the side is me, writing in imitation style.)