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Posting possums with a bot is no easy task. @Thunderysteak explained to me: “I’m not planning on creating any new ‘Every Hour’ or any other Twitter bot account. Even when the bot is fully automated, it can be incredibly stressful maintaining it. If you’re not careful, you can easily get overwhelmed by the number of submissions you receive. Even when I’m not planning on creating a new Twitter bot, I have rewritten the PossumEveryHour “engine” from scratch to not depend on any specific service and I’m planning on releasing it as a free and open-source project once I’m finished writing documentation for it.”
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The sad possum above reminded me that one of the best threads from the account was about helping people with mental health issues. Surprisingly, the possum bot had a lot of thoughts on the subject and helped other people with their own issues:
“I’m not going to lie, it was very surprising how it helps people’s mental health. I’ve made the pinned post when the lockdowns were starting and I was at my lowest of lows mentally wise, and I thought that creating that post would help people in some way because I was already in a personal lockdown for six months and knew how it is to be stuck in a very tiny room for ages, I just didn’t expect it to get this far with the lockdowns.”
“I was stuck in my room for six months because I used to work for a mega-corporation-that-should-not-be-named until my body completely gave out from the work stress and I landed in a hospital for a month. I still remember being told ‘Quitting will look way better than being fired’ and then being escorted out of the building. At the time I made that pinned post, I couldn’t find a new job for six months ‘from lack of experience’ and I was ready to sell everything I had and return back to my country.”
Thankfully, that didn’t have to happen. They didn’t even need to use the popular bot to help with a job search. The possum bot lives on.
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