An interview with a poet who made a Pokémon Twitter bot

You may have seen a lot of Pokémon on Twitter recently. Todd Anderson has, too, and he loves it and he wants more of it.
Anderson is a poet, primarily, but his work crosses borders with technology. Yesterday he created Pokemon Go Bot, a Twitter bot that places a random Pokémon in a random street in the world and takes a screenshot, which it posts to Twitter. We caught up with Anderson, who is running the Wordhack Biennial at Babycastles this month (featuring a lot of people who’ve been written about in Technical.ly Brooklyn) about the bot.

A wild Electrode appeared in Dubai, Dubai #PokemonGo pic.twitter.com/HzREAjicO9

— Pokemon Go Bot (@PokemonGo_Bot) July 12, 2016

Technical.ly Brooklyn: OK, so why did you make this?
Todd Anderson: Since it was released, I’ve been seeing a lot of Pokemon Go screenshots on social media, either of pokemon appearing in funny places or jokes of x pokemon appeared in y place and one thing bots are really good at is generating a certain kind of joke or media that is popular at the moment in a series of endless variations.
Also, “for fun” was a big reason. It was a way of scratching the pokemon go itch while still doing a coding project. People are forced to be at their desks when they want to be exploring the world and discovering new pokemon and this bot is the least I can do for them.

A wild Starmie appeared in Sofia, Bulgaria #PokemonGo pic.twitter.com/ToXDdvVIjR

— Pokemon Go Bot (@PokemonGo_Bot) July 12, 2016

TB: How does it work?
TA: I have a big list of 275 or so major international cities and their GPS coordinates. It picks a city from the list then picks a random GPS point in that city, then looks on Google Streetview for an image using the streetview static image api (it keeps trying points until it finds a street view image) then it picks a random pokemon image from a folder and centers it and overlays it on the streetview image with python image processing (the pokemon images all have transparent backgrounds) then it uploads the image to Twitter and tweets out “A wild **pokemon name** appeared in **city name** #PokemonGo.
I don’t know if you play or not, but there is this little neurochemical rush you get from seeing a sweet pokemon on top of real life even if you know it’s not real.

A wild Nidoran (male) appeared in Izhevsk, Russia #PokemonGo pic.twitter.com/kAFpjxls7U

— Pokemon Go Bot (@PokemonGo_Bot) July 12, 2016