The Daily Sprout
One of the good things about being retired is that you have the capacity to indulge in completely pointless projects that no-one asked for, or wants (mind you, that may not be that different from being an active researcher). The other day I was on the treadmill listening to an old playlist when a Prefab Sprout track came on. Readers of this blog may know that I am a huge fan of Paddy McAloon’s songwriting. It struck me that a lot of his lyrics work well as stand alone snippets.
This is a common mistake (particularly of people going through a midlife crisis on Facebook), that lyrics which seem meaningful in context are trite, or even embarrassing when presented in plain text. Take a simple, obvious line such as “I miss you” – with the right singer, or chord change, or manic repetition, it can be very powerful in a song, but doesn’t mean much in isolation. But McAloon is a lyricist who often comes to his songs lyrics first, and many of them work perfectly as single lines or couplets of text.
I had the idea on the treadmill therefore to create a bot that would post a daily McAloon lyric to Bluesky. I haven’t created a bot before. I’ve set out how I did it in the end in a separate post. It was sort of assisted building with the aid of Claude. Anyway, it now works! I have to say I’m quite surprised that it does actually function as intended and seeing a random lyric every day prompts thought and a smile. I also created (well, vibe-coded really) a web page where you get as many lyrics as you want.
I’m sure the world doesn’t need another bot, but on the other hand Bluesky seems generally full of understandable fear, doom and outrage. Adding a little daily nugget of beauty into that isn’t a bad thing. If you’re on Bluesky, give the bot a follow!
