Random Shopper

nybots:

Bots are contraptions that humans have set into motion across the Internet.

Bots are engines of whimsy and chaos, who will sometimes try and convince you they can make penises bigger.

Bots are scavengers who bend and glue our cast-off word-garbage into scrapbooks, hoping we’ll be impressed.

Bots are rarely perfect, and that is what makes them human.

Do you like randomness? (If you follow this tumblr you probably do.)

Do you like 80s freestyle battle rapping? (If you follow my other tumblr you probably do.)

If you answered yes to either of those questions, you might like RapBot, a program I wrote that generates 80s freestyle battle raps.

February’s order has arrived! This time around, it consists of three books.

The first is David Ferry’s Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (Phoenix Poets), a collection of poems and translations by renowned poet David Ferry (who, weirdly, lives about four miles away from me). “Poems and translations” means the book contains a mix of both original poems as well as translations of other, mostly ancient, verse. The book won the National Book Award. It looks like it was pretty well received, so I look forward to reading it!

Meanwhile, Palmistry for All (Illustrated Edition) is yet another automatically generated book from the Project Gutenberg archive of public domain works. It was published in 1916 by the mysterious “Cheiro”, who notes in the text that he is retired and anyone claiming to be him should be taken as an impostor! Cheiro’s real name was William John Warner, and he was a well-known occultist of the kind you’d find hanging out in aristocratic circles in the early 1900s.

Couple of amusing things: Amazon reviews of this book complain that there are no illustrations, which makes a book on palm reading kind of useless! In my edition there are illustrations, so it must have been updated due to complaints. The other funny this is this page in the front of the book, listing Kissinger Legacy Reprints’ other “scarce and hard-to-find reprints”:

Um, oops.

Last up, we have Abilities, by Marc Quaranta. This is exactly the kind of book that I don’t want to read: someone’s first stab at what appears to be young adult fiction. We’re almost immediately introduced to three characters who are all 24-year-old men, which caused me to guess that the author is a 24-year-old man. Turns out I was right! Anyway, I’m going to read this simply to spite myself. Maybe I’ll read it out loud to my spouse. I am not expecting to like it, but then, what’s a random shopper that doesn’t buy you something you’re sure you’ll dislike?

Just kicked off the February order. The total ordered was $48.16, and this month’s order was made possible by generous donations from Hunter Willis (@bhunterwillis) and “Claus from Denmark”. Many thanks to both of you!!!

Amazon has lots of algorithms that try to determine what kind of a consumer you are. I’ve always maintained that if a computer program ever attains sentience, it’s likely to be Amazon’s recommendation engine.

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to keep track of what kind of person Amazon thinks Random Shopper is. For the first two months, it didn’t offer any recommendations because it didn’t have enough data. But it’s finally started recommending things for Random Shopper to buy. I’ve pasted the list below.

Probably the weirdest thing about it is that it’s almost what an alternate-universe version of myself would buy: a version of me that was slightly more interested in sci fi and film studies. Still, the fact that it’s got plenty of political philosophy and Philip K. Dick stuff makes it not too far off from my own tastes. (Granted, the companion book on Covenant Discipleship is… not really my thing.)

(Note: AdBlock will block these images. They’re affiliate links. Gotta fund this project somehow!)

For this month’s shipment, I got two books: Machiavellian Democracy, by John P. McCormick; and Canadian Notabilities Volume I, by John Charles Dent.

First, let’s talk about Canadian Notabilities. First of all, it is a work in the public domain that you can read online for free. I’m excited because I knew from my test runs that sooner rather than later I would receive a public domain book. There are tons of these on Amazon—in fact there appear to be nine separate editions of this book alone, available for purchase anywhere from $0 (free ebook) to $88.99 (unadorned paperback)!

I’m not sure what the original publication date was for this book, but the author only lived from 1841-1888, so I assume it was published in the mid-19th century. It’s a collection of short biographies of notable people from then-recent Canadian history.

I just got it tonight so haven’t read it yet, but the first page is pretty interesting! It’s setting up the story of Thayendanegea, AKA Joseph Brant, a Mohawk leader from the late 18th century. I was ready to read some pretty racist stuff, but at least the first paragraph is strikingly modern in its treatment of First Nations:

Most of us have grown up with very erroneous notions respecting the Indian character […] We have been accustomed to regard the aboriginal red man as an incarnation of treachery and remorseless ferocity, whose favourite recreation is to butcher defenceless women and children in cold blood. A few of us, led away by the stock anecdotes in worthless missionary and Sunday School books, have gone far into the opposite extreme, and have been wont to regard the Indian as the Noble Savage who never forgets a kindness, who is ever ready to return good for evil, and who is so absurdly credulous as to look upon the pale-faces as the natural friends and benefactors of his species. […] The fact is that the Indian is very much what his white brother has made him. The red man was the original possessor of this continent, the settlement, of which by Europeans sounded the death-knell of his sovereignty. The aboriginal could hardly be expected to receive the intruder with open arms […] It would have argued a spirit of contemptible abjectness and faintness of heart if the Indian had submitted without a murmur to the gradual encroachments of the foreigner […] The first and most hideous butcheries were committed by the whites. And if the Indians did not tamely submit to the yoke sought to be imposed upon their necks, they only acted as human beings, civilized and uncivilized, have always acted upon like provocation.

The other thing I want to note about this book is how weird its page layout is:

The margins are very thin, and the text is big — but the end result is that while it’s easy to read the big letters, it’s actually tiring to move your eyes left and right over the page.

Machiavellian Democracy is a book that foregrounds the democratic leaning in Machiavelli’s political writings (while his name is synonymous with self-interest, his actual philosophy is far more diverse than popular imagination gives him credit for). From the description of the book:

Inspired by Machiavelli’s thoughts on economic class, political accountability and popular empowerment, McCormick proposes a citizen body that excludes socioeconomic and political elites and grants randomly selected common people significant veto, legislative, and censure authority within government and over public officials.

A randomly selected legislative body? In what will be a surprise to no one reading this tumblr: THAT is something that I can get behind.

(Also, from the amount that was spent and the prices of these books, I’m pretty sure there should be another shipment coming to me, but it might be on back order or something. I have no way of really knowing without spoiling the surprise. Hmmm.)

beaglejeans:

I wonder what you’ll do if you get a DVD from the wrong ‘region code’ or maybe even in ‘PAL’ format?    In looking at this, I did it manually with the Wordnik ‘word of the day’ … “attacca”, and an Amazon search, scrolled down to the first physical item, which is this (admittedly awesome) 1966 Italian Sci-Fi DVD.

That’s all part of the fun!

Thanks to some donations from “Jannes” and “Andreas from Germany” I was able to place an order this month that came out to $72.90.

Well… we’ll see what shows up!

…I made something tonight. It’s not quite Random Shopper, but you might like it, especially if you have ever used Twitter.