One of the sillier things I do with my computer is print a horse fortune every time I open a new shell, printed by the even sillier CLI tool ponysay. A long time ago, I downloaded a fortune database from horsefortun.es (RIP), a website full of posts by the Twitter (RIP) account @horseebooks (RIP). More recently, I added a fortune file of posts from “weird twitter”, which added a lot of excellent variety. Most recently, I added one more, of posts by the excellent @utilitylimb. Most famous for “I can control any kind of gem with any kind of snake”, she is not only an all-time poster, she has returned to the internet after a decade long hiatus and can be found at @utilitylimb.bsky.social. Go and follow.
Anyway, please enjoy these Homebrew formulas for fortune files filled with good weird posts.
brew install indirect/tap/horse_fortunes indirect/tap/weird_fortunes indirect/tap/utilitylimb_fortunes
I use them by putting this at the top of my .zshrc:
fortune /opt/homebrew/share/games/fortunes/weird | ponysay -b unicode