Caitlin Weaver and I made a twitter bot called AynRandom.

The bot tweets Randian phrases like “_____ is a parasite” with the blank filled in the nouns and noun phrases pulled from literary texts (right now, just Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist”).

Artist's condition is a parasite.

— Ayn Random (@AynRandomized) April 10, 2014

We set up our python script on Dreamhost, and have a cron job posting to twitter every 30 minutes. To get things working on Dreamhost, we have the cron job call a simple shell script that activates a virtualenv environment. We’re using the twython library to post to twitter, and TextBlob to extract nouns and noun phrases for the tweets.

You can see our parasitical, moocher code on github.

I reject the harsh rose of altruism.

— Ayn Random (@AynRandomized) April 9, 2014