Originally I had two goals with the Team Venom twitter bot: learn something about python, and make inside jokes about one of my friends. This was accomplished and documented here – https://extremelylocalnews.com/2017/11/27/raspberry-pi-projects/ .

I wondered what else could you do with a bot on twitter. The answer: post pictures of video game screenshots. This project was a little more exciting than just posting comments from a text file since it allowed me to get a little more creative with what exactly is shared.

Using twitter API integration and a simple Python script (https://github.com/MisterLutz/Twitter-Image-Bot) Team Venom Bot now takes a random image from several screenshot folders, and posts it with a static message at certain parts of the day. For example, each day a cronjob runs “fatbot.py” at 10PM and posts a picture from the “fatguy” folder:

I’ve set up a few jobs, one for basic screenshots, one for fatguys, one for fighting games, and one specifically for “Dead or Alive 6” which is the game I’m playing most these days.

Now twitter can enjoy arbitrary images posted from a screenshot folder.  Every once in a while I get a few re-tweets which warms the cockles of my heart.

You can follow Team Venom Bot here – https://twitter.com/TeamVenom_Rules