Parody

[verachell]

This year for my NaNoGenMo project I'm going to attempt a parody of social media. I will use YeetWords to generate this. Maybe there will be some social commentary there! Who knows?!

It strikes me that NaNoGenMo is in theory particularly well suited to parody, since the writing can be generated by the program instead of having to be tediously written by hand.

I have a general idea how I want to approach this, but I'm open to input and ideas.

How this idea came about
This was originally an idea I had for creating a website of (human-written) parody posts. I eventually decided against implementing such a website because it would take too much writing by hand of social media posts, even with a CMS handling things like the actual scheduling of posts etc.

Yesterday it occurred to me that the abandoned idea could be implemented as a NaNoGenMo project (without a CMS) instead of a navigable website. So I dug out my notes and dusted them off.

I'd like the social media bits of my NaNoGenMo project to appear somewhat styled even if they're not clickable/navigable, so I'm looking to make the output in html with custom styles. I also think this would be an interesting use case of YeetWords. I just hope I can complete it in time!

[verachell]

I have finished this project.

• The code is here: https://github.com/verachell/Social-Media-Parody-NaNoGenMo-2022
• You can view example output as a web page here: https://verachell.github.io/Social-Media-Parody-NaNoGenMo-2022/ (60,930 words)

This parody consists of social media posts, real life activities, and newspaper reports (all ficticious). The parody has a defined beginning, middle and end.

This is not a case where the story's very plot comes seemingly out of nowhere, but rather where the rhetoric and repetition necessary for the parody is filled in by the algorithm according to the "bones" of a template. So templating was necessary. This template is written in YeetWords.

I've gone into more detail in the repository's README, such as sources of images used, and more. A few things I didn't talk about there, which I'll mention here briefly in bullet points are:

• Tooltips – elements that would normally be clickable on a real social media site instead have tooltips on them if the user hovers over them on the output html page. The tooltips indicate that that this is a fictional work.
• Sometimes, an image is randomly included in the newspaper. In that instance, to give a newsprint look, I simply use the w3-grayscale-max class that is built in to the w3css stylesheet; no additional image processing or custom styles were needed in that situation.
• For the sake of simplicity I don’t have nested comments in social media posts beyond just the first level, nor do I have an expandable comment list for multiple comments.
• I used web-safe fonts throughout to keep it straightforward. To help UX, the real-life story of the characters is in serif, the print newspapers in monospace with serif headlines, and the social media posts are in sans-serif.
• The ability of YeetWords to handle nested double quotes turned out to be unexpectedly helpful for this html project since I could do things like this without the double quotes posing a problem: ASSIGNLIST h3open = "<h3 style="font-family:serif;text-align:center">"

Conceptual diagram of the template outline

Screenshots of example output

At the beginning, the hammock is trending:

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As you can see below, at this point advertisers have aspirational names such as "Mauve Fides" and are trying to associate themselves with the trending item:

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Then a rocking chair becomes the trending item:

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Subsequently, a conspiracy theory is trending. It involves the trending item (rocking chair in this case), an occupation which happens to be the same as the main character's (architect), and an evil goal (release bubonic plague at a major event):

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As we get toward the end, several things have gradually gotten worse compared to the beginning: ad brands have gone downhill from aspirational (e.g. names such as Tempestas Uxor) to snitty, i.e. spammy - I use the word snit for spam to avoid confusion with SPAM brand (advertiser names such as Blackjack Forum and Pharma Center), and finally to misinformation advertisers (e.g. Annihilate Rocking chair Group, Eradicate Naysayers Forum). Language on the site has turned into expressions of harm against that particular occupation (architects in this iteration of the algorigthm):

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Finally, the ending:

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[greg-kennedy]

this is so good lmao