twitter

A thing I made: 2edStatBot, for all your Twitter old-school RPG needs.

I’ve been toying with the idea of, and over the weekend finally got around to finishing, a silly little Twitter bot, 2edStatBot, which generates a set of AD&D 2nd Edition stats — old school, 3d6 in order — picks a class recommendation based on a not-very-sophisticated algorithm (re-rolling if it can’t find a recommendation, which in practice means if every stat came out below 9), and tweets the result, every ten minutes:

[tweet https://twitter.com/2edStatBot/status/295908019101917184]

The code is basically just Darius Kazemi’s Metaphor-a-Minute, except with all the metaphor-related guts replaced by random-number-related guts, and like Darius’s bots, it’s running on Nodejitsu (in fact, since Nodejitsu requires apps to respond to HTTP requests, I figured that endpoint might as well do the same thing as the Twitter bot, so if you want, you can go get a D&D character there, too).

I’ll upload the source code here shortly; it’s rather hacky but it works. I should probably put it on some public source control repository or something, but I never did figure out git. At some point I plan to make it respond to mentions, so you could tweet “@2edStatBot roll me a ranger” and it would respond with an appropriate set of stats.

Update 2013-12-25: Well, I finally got around to figuring out github and uploading the 2edStatBot source, nearly eleven full months after the bot went live. Whoops! Here it is, if you’d like to take a look: https://github.com/smadin/2EdStatBot

Quick Note: Egypt

I would like to comment on what’s going on in Egypt right now, but I don’t feel remotely qualified to do so. It’s probably much too early to know what this is going to mean, but it’s hard to imagine that it won’t at least mean the end of Mubarak’s three-decade rule. I’m following @bencnn, @ioerror, @AJEnglish and @sharifkouddos on Twitter, and @RamyRaoof‘s Flickr set, currently. It’s not from Raoof, and I don’t know the original source, but I think that the picture of a protester kissing a member of the riot police will be one of the enduring images from this uprising.

My hopes are with the people of Egypt.