Remembering the Anagramatron (1 of 5)
This clever little bot found unusual connections in our words.
Twitter machine…
Interact with me.
Can you see what’s special about the bolded lines? They’re mutual anagrams, using exactly the same letters as each other.
She want me to fight her.
The Taming of the Shrew.
Each line bolded here was penned separately by Twitter users, back when it was called Twitter. It took a bot to pair them.
Overslept again.
I love great naps!
A few updates ago, I aired some of my mixed feelings about the decline/demise of X/Twitter. The service is a shadow of what it used to be, and even less of what we hoped it might be. But in its early days, it was a godsend to those who wanted to study language: how we used it, how it used us. And some of those studies, bless them, didn’t have to be all that serious.
Man, only two episodes left.
I feel so lost and empty now…
Bots were unleashed upon the Twittersphere to find haikus and palindromes, but my favorite was the Anagramatron, which found seemingly random tweets and paired them together based on whether they contained exactly the same letters in a different order. These pairings were further filtered by the bot’s creator, Colin Rothfels, and the best 4-7% of them were put on display on Tumblr. The code of the bot itself is on GitHub.
This world is a nasty place.
Distraction always helps.
I had some contact with Colin as I was putting together my own book, Or The Other!: The 799 Awesomest Anagrams. He gave me gracious permission to use any of the Anagramatron’s “discoveries” in my work. But as I got the book ready for publication, I found the Anagramatron’s own production had dried up.
I wanted to help, but how?
What would be the point?
Colin and I talked about this a bit, and he expressed a desire to restart the feature, but other work kept pulling him away. He’d stopped before Twitter doubled its character limit, which probably wouldn’t make the job any easier. Checking his account now, I find one of his most recent tweets goes, “So anyway ten+ years later Twitter is now an app I open when I want to find out why some other part of the internet isn’t working.” #relatable.
There is a cat in my lap. Lap cat!
At least I can reach my laptop.
That’s probably all the explanation I need for the Anagramatron’s continued retirement. I can’t hold disinterest in what Twitter has become against anybody else! But I do miss it, and I figured I’d do what I could to preserve its legacy over this next set of updates.
It’s hard to change, but I’m trying.
Debating cutting my hair short.
What you’ll see over the next week or so, with a quick interruption for the Ubercross Y, isn’t close to all the Anagramatron material I put in my book (let alone everything it found in its active years). So if the spirit moves you…feel free to check out the rest of it!
New roads to discover.
So scared to drive now.
I hate doing awkward things.
Dear God, what was I thinking?
Gunshots in my backyard.
My birthday’s gonna suck.
(I love the picture the last one paints. Here’s hoping you don’t find it too #relatable.)