Gatorbox
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Now with over 1,000 action phrases!!
🕑 Added 2018-06-21 22:59:59 +0000 UTC One of the earliest side projects we ever worked on here at Gatorbox was putting together an amusing Twitter bot. This process actually goes all the way back to the days when the "Gatorbox" name was originally concocted in 2013 and even predates it by a few more years as something that I was once working on just for the hell of it with Monkeymafia, a website coder who would eventually be involved with the Gatorbox project in 2012-2013.It all began with @MysteryKon, a Twitter handle that I registered quite some time ago (2011?) with the intent of utilizing a "hacked" version of this dumb novelty thing for pets called "Puppy Tweets"... which was this little medallion that you put on your dog's collar and it had things like a microphone and accelerometer inside of it. The device would wirelessly send signals to a USB dongle plugged into your computer that interfaced with some software that you'd have provided Twitter credentials to. Basically, whenever your dog did stuff it would supposedly tweet automatically.
Except this piece of junk didn't actually work. Or do anything. If you check out the Amazon reviews on the product you'll see lots of people complaining that the device itself doesn't really seem to affect what gets tweeted. It might not even be sending signals at all because even with it unplugged customers were still getting tweets posted.
So it was a failure. We wanted to do dumb crap with it like mess with the sensitivity, wear it like a keychain, hang it from the ceiling fan, etc. Have it tweet out dumb stuff which we would have customized ahead of time.
We still wanted to have some kind of "official" gimmick bot on Twitter for Gatorbox just for the novelty aspect of it, and that's when we drew inspiration from @horse_ebooks and its rhythmic non sequitur posts about... everything. I had the bright idea that we could just have a similar bot that spit out Gatorbox-related things, like quotes from the stream and our videos. We got back to work years later and repurposed @MysteryKon into a test version of "@Gatorbox_ebooks" and launched the project in 2016.
With the help of our fans, viewers, and followers, we've gradually added quotes and content to the bot's script and now I'm pleased to announce that @Gatorbox_ebooks is running with over one thousand different possible phrases. That number is only going to continue to grow, but it was a milestone that I wanted to share with you all -- everyone's support and pitching in has brought this dumb bot's vocabulary into the four digits.
@Gatorbox_ebooks tweets once every 6 hours. It used to be every 2 hours but that was too much for most people and borderlined on spam, so we dialed it back a little bit. Feel free to give it a follow and get some random out of context quotes posted on your Twitter feed throughout the day, everyday!
