SnakeAndBacon

Ssssss

I'm real bacon

Description

Snake'n'Bacon are the creations of Michael Kupperman, and are featured in his aptly-titled Snake'n'Bacon's Cartoon Cabaret. Within its absurdist confines, this book accounts "The True Story of the Famous & Beloved Team", wherein the hissing an' sizzling duo are introduced as the timeless film stars that they are. A brief excerpt of their work can be found at the Royal Bacon Society blog. And mr. Kupperman himself tags his own tweets and posts about them.

The entirety of their character interactions can be summed up as follows:

  1. A Secondary Character makes a statement, asks a question, or attempts to move along the plot of the story
  2. Snake hisses
  3. Bacon says something brief and self-descriptive

These are the governing principles behind @cr_snake_bacon .

Technical Concept

The personality engine was primed with dialogue derived from the limited material at our disposal. MadderLib was built to describe the sentence generation patterns. Additional content has been added to round out the dramatic range of the much-beloved Bacon. Inspirations came from:

On a scheduled basis, @cr_snake_bacon will search for recent uses of the word 'bacon', and will reply to the 'Secondary Character' who addressed him. Bacon speaks first, followed by Snake -- which is a departure from the comic book source material, in which Snake always gets the first line. For our purposes it'd make less sense that way, and this personality engine is already scraping the bottom of the make-sense barrel to begin with.

Bacon will avoid saying the same type of thing (sentence pattern) for roughly 10 iterations. Snake has little choice about repetition, as you'll see from his half of the @cr_snake_bacon status messages.

In an attempt to placate the Twitter Gods -- as poor beloved @wheeeunicorn apparently did not -- @cr_snake_bacon only wakes up and speaks about once every couple of hours. This minimizes the annoyance so that their scaly & meaty hijinks may continue. However, this does make the personality engine somewhat chirpy; if we get enough requests to do so, we could crank that periodicity down.

In select cases, @cr_snake_bacon will link to the source of its inspiration.

Twitter Bots

Ssssss

I'm a crisp delicious bot

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Page last modified on September 19, 2009, at 07:27 AM