Robot Shaming Museum.
Did that grab your attention?
It's not three words pulled out of a hat, it's my next project.
Let me explain:
The exodus
When creating skullivan.com, I wanted to learn how to secure a website through Cloudflare. I set up simple logging tools and watched the logs roll in. One by one, bots began to visit, and I couldn't help but think of them as little guys parsing my website.
"He's looking for robots.txt? That's so polite of him."
"Oh, what's our boy doing? Searching for wp-login? He's a little sneaky, better keep my eye on him."
"Hey, why is this fellow clicking all my links? What's he looking for?"
I carried on this way through much of the night until it was time to sleep.
The project
That night in bed, ten seconds before I should've drifted off, my brain quietly tapped me on the shoulder.
Ben... make all the little bot guys into randomly generated characters...
I pulled the covers over my head. It tapped again.
Ben... draw a bunch of heads and wheels and antennae and faces... make procedurally generated character images for the bots...
I said, "Brain stop thinking of this idea because then I'm going to have to do it."
Ben... make a Markov chain that generates random names for the little bot guys...
Ben... use AI to give the bots D&D alignments based on their activity...
Ben... put it on your portfolio as a "deployable educational cybersecurity tool..."
Next thing I knew I was at my desk, logging into my server and scribbling notes at 3AM. Looks like my first portfolio project is going to be a weird one.
Let the bot-shaming begin!