Reflective Blog Post on What is Aleatory Poetry?

This week we learned about “aleatory poetry,” which is the process of using chance to generate text. We learned its definition, the randomness of it, and how to use tracery to create. This has been a really fun week for me because when doing the reading this week, I actually understood everything and the html didn’t look like a total mess. I think that is because I am starting to finally understand everything we’ve learned and that is so exciting for me.

For our hands on activity this week we were tasked with writing a short story but using tracery in it so that it will re-generate everytime giving us a new story or new details in the story. I had a lot of fun getting to be creative and write a little short story. I also really liked the Another Tracery Visualizer website, even though it isn’t Dr. Pilsh’s favorite it might be mine. I think I liked this site so much is because it is very simple and you are able to input a lot of details and it really does all the work for you. I had a few hiccups in my way while trying to do the tracery grammar myself with a website, but thankfully Dr. Pilsh was able to help me via microsoft teams!

I think something we talked about briefly that was really intriguing to me was using tracery and twitter bots. I personally haven’t had a twitter since I was in high school, which seems like forever ago now, but I do love to see what is going on in the twitter world every now and then. Anyways, I think that it is SO cool that you can make a bot to run a twitter account virtually on its own. For example, the infinite desert twitter bot just uses symbols to create a new desert scape every few hours a couple times a day. Then you have soft landscapes which uses images, which I’m not sure how this is done but i’m sure its using tracery in some way. I also liked the every sheriff bot, because I just thought it was so fun and funny and care free. Overall, I really like the idea of a twitter bot and think I might have to try it out on my own sometime, maybe that will be what brings me back to the twittersphere.

To enhance my experience this week, I took to the web to see if I could find anything to help with my understanding of tracery. However, I didn’t find anything, or to be clearer I didn’t find anything helpful. I found lots of articles, but nothing was as clear as our reading and there was nothing that helped enhance my understanding they just made me more confused. So, s/o Dr. Pilsh cause you truly make everything so clear for us to understand! While going through things I could find on the internet I did run across a great blog post from Dr. Pilsh called Making Twitter Bots w/ Cheap Bots Done Quick and it was so interesting and so good. Actually reading that article is what kind of grew my last paragraph and the interest I have in twitter bots now! Overall, this was a really fun week and I loved what we learned about. Cannot wait to take a look at everyone elses blogs. And as always, see ya next week!

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