Unauthoritative Pronouncements

I felt like being annoying (what’s new), and I decided to take advantage of an ASCII twitter meme from last… uh, summer? Matt Alexander had harnessed this meme for the patented “Super Fave” already, but I needed to make it even more ridiculous. Easy to do with a simple text substitution. Just replace all the same characters with a different character. Simple find and replace stuff. You can do this on your iPhone or iPad so easily. If you don’t have Pythonista, you should, because: PYTHON WORKFLOWS. It seems so intimidating to “program” something if you don’t do it often, but the function is literally called replace and you give it the text to replace, and the text to replace it with. 'this string'.replace([original],[new]) That’s not fucking Scheme, it’s not Objective-C, there are no End Tells. That means you can bug the shit out of people without breaking a sweat!

Start with whatever ASCII meme you want to butcher, like a “Super Fave” if it’s on multiple lines, use three quotation marks in front of, and behind it. This lets Python know it should respect all the lines of text.

superf = u"""
☆。 ★。 ☆  ★
 。☆ 。☆。☆ 
★。＼｜／。★   
  SUPERFAVE
★。／｜＼。★ 
 。 ☆。☆。☆ 
☆。 ★。 ☆  ★
"""

Easy, right? The “u” at the start of the quote lets it know you’re using fancy, unicode characters. No big deal really, you just put a “u”.

Now that you’ve assigned the text to a variable, it’s super easy to manipulate it. Assign some other variables for the text you want to replace. like

a = u'💩'
b = u'🌹'

Boring, I know. Now let’s do the replacement:

r = superf.replace(u'★',a).replace(u'☆',b)
print(r)

Notice that I assigned it to a variable again so I could reuse this. I’m also chaining the two replace functions to each other. You could put every one of these things together without defining any variables, but it’ll just look like a train-wreck, so skip it.

If you want to make this an interactive application, there’s a feature in Python called raw_input() where you can let the user enter text at run time. Inside the parentheses, you can specify text to put at the prompt line to give people some kind of instruction. Like so:

a = raw_input(u'★  = ')
b = raw_input(u'☆  = ')

There are also some fluffy things I added to the script that are Pythonista niceties, and not things that work on the desktop. Pythonista helpfully includes a console module to control the way text is printed out when the script runs. I want to set it to look like Helvetica Neue so it’ll match closely to watch iOS Twitter clients will display. Naturally, these are not monospaced fonts, so you’re going to get variable-widths to the characters that will deform the overall shape of the text, to some degree. The clipboard module just helps to copy the text output right to the clipboard when it runs. No need to do it yourself. We live in The Future. You can run without any of those extra things just fine on your desktop.

I initially sent this to two, very responsible people on Twitter. I admonished them not to use it for evil. Then I used it for evil, like, uh, 20 times since then.

Go forth, my minions, and annoy the shit out of everyone!