Unix Fortunes by Nietzsche
fortune is a venerable Unix utility with a simple purpose. You call it and it returns a random quotation picked from a set of files. You can set this up to run when a terminal is opened, and this way you get a nice quote-of-the-day thing. fortune ships with virtually all Linux distributions. There’s just one problem: the default quote databases that ship with fortune, well, they stink.
Unix fortune is an intriguing window into the earlier days of the Internet, when neckbeards were still the dominant social group and BBS was still the dominant mode of communication. It is, unfortunately, also a reminder that casual sexism on the Internet didn’t start with Twitter. The quotes in the fortune databases are largely unchanged since the days when the Internet was a bunch of pasty white guys snickering over dirty jokes in chat rooms. It’s not just that much of the content is sexist (or racist) enough to be offensive; it’s that it’s not even funny-offensive. It’s the kind of content that derives all its value from being transgressive, and stripped of that, becomes banal.
Of course, you can avoid the databases of raunchy humor in fortune. Then what you’re left with is an endless stream of barely-amusing Larry Wall quotes, and a tiresome flood of atheist dogma that truly rivals /r/atheism in obnoxiousness1.
What I’m saying is fortune needs some new content.
Where to get some? Sure, I could troll Wikiquote or one of the many other quote-on-demand services, but I find that people who go looking for quotes to compile almost always have what I find to be terrible taste2. Instead, what if I were to find some content written by one of the most iconoclastic philosophers in history? One who produced several collections of aphorisms, a format perfectly suited to fortune? One with a glorious mustache?
Yes, I very much want to be greeted by a Friedrich Nietzsche aphorism every day when I open my terminal. That is what I want.
Implementation
Luckily, fortune can be pointed at new database files from which to select a quote. The format of these files is quite simple: they are plain text, usually normalized to 80 columns wide, and each entry is followed by a % character alone on a line. And each of these files must be accompanied by a second file with a .dat extension. This second file is a binary blob created with the strfile utility, used to help with random access.
I found a number of Nietzsche’s works available electronically and under the public domain3, which was perfect for my purposes. I had hoped to build a workflow to automatically parse these files into a suitable format, but the variability of the formatting meant it was far easier for me to tweak each book manually with regular expressions and Vim.
Usage
I now have glorious Nietzsche fortunes on my command line, but what good would all this work be if I didn’t share it with the world? Thus I have created a GitHub repository with everything you need to get your own Nietzsche fortunes.
- Either clone the repository with Git or download the zip file here.
You can now point
fortuneat the data in this project:fortune -s -n 600 this_project/fortuneAnd of course, it wouldn’t be quite the same if you didn’t have your fortune delivered to you by a talking ASCII cow (or in my case, a dinosaur):
cowsay -W 70 -f stegosaurus $(fortune -s -n 600 this_project/fortune)
Enjoy. I know I will.
Internet atheists are an impressive group. Who else could take a subculture formed in opposition to orthodoxy, and turn it into a community rife with leader-worship and an irrepresible need to force your personal opinions on everyone else? N.B. I am more-or-less an atheist, and yet I absolutely cannot stand these people.↩
Yes yes, I realize that I am now one of those people, and I fully appreciate the irony. Thanks for checking.↩
Most of the books came from the wonderful and important Project Gutenberg, with one additional work from Nietzsche’s Features.↩