Eulogy for @imgonverbyou

recently, a twitter bot that i coded stopped serving. back in 2017, rebeccalynn told me about an idea she had: a website that would take metro boomins producer tag—a rapper lilting if young metro dont trust you im gon shoot you—and swap the word shoot with another random word. i suggested we make it a twitter bot, and thus was @imgonverbyou born.

ey tweeted once an hour for several years, producing such bangers as:

as well as:

and not to forget:

the core code only took me a couple of days to write. eir brain is written in python, and thus leverages a couple of libraries to connect to both twitter and a dictionary api called wordnik within a short script:

# Import packages for handling the APIs
import tweepy
from wordnik import *

# Define some constants for the Wordnik API
API_URL = 'http://api.wordnik.com/v4'
API_KEY = # REDACTED

# Access keys for Twitter
ACCESS_TOKEN = # REDACTED
ACCESS_SECRET = # REDACTED
CONSUMER_KEY = # REDACTED
CONSUMER_SECRET = # REDACTED

# Initialize the Wordnik API client
client = swagger.ApiClient(API_KEY, API_URL)
wordsApi = WordsApi.WordsApi(client)

# Get a random transitive verb to substitute in
word = wordsApi.getRandomWord(
    includePartOfSpeech='verb-transitive', minLength=2)
verb = word.word

# Create twitter API client
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET)
auth.set_access_token(ACCESS_TOKEN, ACCESS_SECRET)
api = tweepy.API(auth)

# Swap in the verb and post to Twitter!
api.update_status(
    'IF YOUNG METRO DONT TRUST YOU IM GON %s YOU' % verb.upper())

# RL suggested the bot fav tweets that say 'Young Metro'
# to boost engagement
results = api.search(q='Young Metro', rpp=10)
for result in results:
  try:
    api.create_favorite(result.id)
  except tweepy.TweepError:
    continue

originally the script was hosted on appengine, but as that platform started getting large and unwieldy i ported em to a django app so i could self-host. but my last webhost was gobbled up by a larger corporation and i dont have time to port em again.

especially toward the end of eir lifespan, the bot tweeted some words that didnt seem to me (or others) to be transitive verbs.

ey also once used a slur that i had to manually delete. but sometimes the incongruity worked:

a long running process, one of my most prolific bot progeny. thank you @imgonverbyou for your service.