Rescued and Renewed Works: Taco Hell Menu, Tiny Protests, Jurakán Borinqueño, Protestitas and a Bonus

Poem over a map of the Caribbean.

The past few months I’ve been rescuing four works that I created using Tracery and published as Twitter bots using Cheap Bots Done Quick! (CBDQ). As you may know, Twitter’s recent changes have rendered CBDQ inoperable, and thousands of bots have gone silent as a result, a sad bot extinction event. Fortunately for my bots, my Chat GPT enhanced coding ability has allowed me to produce standalone Web versions of these, which has afforded me the opportunity to rethink and update the works. I will briefly list and describe them below:

Taco Hell Menu

Taco Hell Menu screenshootThis work is a critique of Taco Bell’s combinatorial approach to its Mexican-esque menu. It randomly generates a new menu item and a call to action every 30 seconds, or whenever you click on the Generate button.

This work is based on a Twitter Bot I launched on February 25, 2020 (@TacoHellMenu), which was inspired by this GIF and a conversation with Eugenio Tisselli. Its first iteration was built collaboratively in a bot-building workshop I gave at the US Naval Academy on February 25, 2020 for Perla Sasson Henry’s students.

Tiny Protests 2023

Screen capture of the work, picturing an emoji march in the middle of a cityI programmed this work on June 7, 2023 adapting the code from “Tiny Protests / Protestitas” published in Taper #2, and with help from Chat GPT while adding and updating the slogans from the Twitter version. I updated the code to focus on protest slogans that are relevant in 2023. To learn more about other iterations of this work, visit the versions published in the ELC4. Click anywhere on the work to trigger fullscreen mode.

Protestitas 2023

Captura de pantalla de marcha de protesta por una ciudad, todo hecho con emoji.Esta obra fue programada en Agosto de 2023 adaptando la programación de mi bot de protesta “@Protestitas,” un bot de Twitter que ya no funciona. Y aunque no replica distintas configuraciones de protesta, sí tiene todas las consignas de protestas en Puerto Rico comenzando en el 2017, cuando programé el bot original. Para conocer más acerca de las otras versiones de esta obra visite: https://collection.eliterature.org/4/tiny-protests-protestitas

Esta obra está dedicada al pueblo puertorriqueño que marcha por sus derechos.

Jurakán Borinqueño

Poem over a map of the Caribbean.Esta obra está basada en mi bot de Twitter (@Huracan_PR) creado en septiembre del 2018, conmemorando el primer aniversario del paso del huracán María por Puerto Rico.

Esta obra genera narrativas antes, durante y después del paso de un huracán por Puerto Rico. Aquellas que ocurren después se enfocan en el mal manejo de la recuperación por el gobernador Ricardo Roselló, el presidente Trump y sus equipos de trabajo. Las narrativas generadas por esta obra son aleatorias y especulativas, pero están basadas experiencias reales vividas en Puerto Rico.

Dedico esta obra a todas las personas que hemos sobrevivido el paso de un huracán por Puerto Rico y a aquellas que no tuvieron tan buena fortuna.

Bonus: Tracery2HTML Template

screen capture of the template, which reads "This is a generated text about your allergies."This template offers a rudimentary structure for users to either copy-paste their Tracery code or modify and add to the provided code. I created this as a way to port my CBDQ bots to HTML, and am sharing it with the community in the same generous spirit that Kate Compton and V. Buckenham had when creating and sharing Tracery and Cheap Bots Done Quick! The page is more or less responsive (it should look decent on a phone). It reloads automatically every 30 seconds and goes fullscreen with any click.

This is the first of several coding engines I will create (with major help from Chat GPT) to lower the access barrier to creative coding, digital writing, and electronic literature. To use it, you can save this file and open it with a text/code editor or download it here. And because it is licensed with the MIT license, you already have my permission to use it and modify it as you see fit.

I hope you find it useful!

By Leonardo Flores

Professor Leonardo Flores is Chair of the English Department at Appalachian State University. He taught at the English Department at University of Puerto Rico: Mayagüez Campus from 1994 to 2019. He is President of the Electronic Literature Organization. He was the 2012-2013 Fulbright Scholar in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. His research areas are electronic literature and its preservation via criticism, documentation, and digital archives. He is the creator of a scholarly blogging project titled I ♥ E-Poetry, co-editor of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3, and has a Spanish language e-lit column in 80 Grados. He is currently co-editing the first Anthology of Latin American Electronic Literature. For more information on his current work, visit leonardoflores.net.