The only feeling that is truly free is finding a cool shoe.
After some misadventures with cat names, I figured I should try something that is a bit more ambitious. Luckily enough a friend of mine complained about the quality of shower thoughts on Reddit and I had my next project already set out for me! Specifically, I aimed to use the same model from the last project, but train it with the top posts from Reddit to create new shower thoughts.
The challenge of this project would be to get the data to train the model. Well, that would have been a challenge if BigQuery didn’t exist and did not already have a system in place to pull posts off of Reddit. Max Woolf was again the hero here and outlined how to do this. Using his code as a start, I pulled all posts with a score above 10,000 from 2018 to now and used the resultant spreadsheet to train the model.
After running the training a few times and tinkering with the steps and temperature to get original ideas rather than repeats, I was able to get some fantastic absurdist thoughts like:
- If you have a bachelor’s degree in English, you’ve either achieved mediocrity, or been amazingly successful despite it.
- Tesla owners have long wondered how their investment would turn into a cancer that kills off of humans and other intelligent lifeforms.
- From a certain point of view, The Lion King song is literally about how cheap timber he can cut from diseased trees.
- Francis Ford Coppola’s Animal House is a movie about family but mostly ignores the fact that it’s a family film.
- The only skill that a baby should be taught is that of a babysitter.
- The super-rich have quick cars, luxury SUVs, big houses, and golf courses. Everyone else has slow cars, luxury SUVs, small houses, and little golf courses.
- Having your favorite band member’s mom on your birthday cake is a sacrifice you can only make once every four years.
- Rich people eat a lot of stale bread in the winter to keep warm, poor people eat a lot of stale bread in the summer to keep the poor from being cold.
- Bones from mummies are much stronger than those from the dead so even if you amputate their right leg, it won’t affect them too much.
- The younger you get when you’re infected by a virus, the more nihilistic you become.
- Baking bread basically involves creating a rich, warm atmosphere for a crowd of people to enjoy delicious, organic food for hours.
- The seductive aria mime that grad students pretend they can’t can’t see is really the effective result of weeks of failed attempts at eye contact.
Are they good shower thoughts? No. Do they make sense? Only a little bit at best. But was this entertaining? Yes. You can see the (heavily cleaned up) full list of results if you are into bizarre humor.