The maker of @SEPTA_SURREAL cleaned up his act and launched a fiction platform

Twenty-five-year-old Ryan Epp used his programming chops in 2014 to set up a Twitter bot that perpetually trolled SEPTA using its own service notification tweets.

Norristown: maintenance filled cars with bacon. Refueling is creating 11 minute delays. #toElmSt

— SEPTA Surreal (@SEPTA_SURREAL) July 28, 2015

At least it tried to, until SEPTA blocked the account in August 2015.
But putting transit to shame was only a side gig for the Lancaster County-native, who had moved to Seattle to do his development thing at Amazon.
In January, Epp quit his job and moved to Media, Pa., to develop what is now Yarn, an interactive fiction platform for readers, writers and game developers released last Thursday for iOS.
“I think interactive fiction is a forgotten middle child that came way after books but just before video games,” Epp said. “It got steamrolled by titles with better graphics like Doom, but there’s some interesting stuff in this genre.”
There are 12 stories available for a free download, most of which were previously games built in other formats which were converted to Yarn. In these videogame/ebook hybrids, the reader can have an effect on the course of the narrative, making decisions for characters and creating alternative endings.
At the moment, only one part of the platform has been completed, but the founder says he’s working on a simple, drag-and-drop platform for developers to create their own stories, which will then be sold on the platform.
The whole package will be ready by end of the year, Epp says.
Here’s a short video on what Yarn is all about:
[vimeo 170232222 w=640 h=1137]