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Audio, Game Boy Advance
6:53
2023

This recording was started after the news that on February 9th, Twitter was going to remove the free API for Twitter users, no longer allowing the average person to create and run a Twitter bot account without paying at least $100 per month for the feature. I created my own Twitter bot around two years ago, at the account @DecamarkDex. It would post images of a selection of a few Decamarks, a variety of glitch Pokemon from the Pokemon games. These “Decamarks” often have nonsensical names, pulled from other text located in the game, being named stuff like “based moves.” “MOONLIGHT” “foe contact w”, etc. It’s the game trying to make a being out of data that’s not suited to create a being.

Since I feared my bot would stop working, I wanted to make a eulogy for it, another art piece it could live on through. It’s silly to say, but this bot I built with someone else’s tools meant a lot to me, despite doing the bare minimum to keep it running. It helped introduce me to some people who have the same odd interests as me, and it’s been a blast to see people’s reactions to learning about this relatively obscure phenomenon.

In my room, I recorded myself reading through the bot’s posts, naming the different variations. Some of them aren’t named, so I left silence in their place.

With Gren’s help, I was able to get samples of various Gameboy Advance crashing noises, which play this disgruntled ear-searing noises on a 2-3 second loop.

Using Audacity’s envelope tool, I made it so that, over the length of the five-minute recording, my voice-over goes lower, and the crashing noises get louder until I’m drowned out completely by the static.


Direct download here.