These are fortune files for the program fortune (usually this is BSD fortune,
though other ones exist).
I made them because I have my own things I'd like to include, and also because while I like some of the default fortunes the massive number of them makes it harder to choose (and there is a lot of stuff in there that is bad, to say the least).
You can use these by building data file versions with strfile and then copying
both files to the fortunes directiory of your fortunes install. For instance, on
OSX with a homebrew installation:
strfile curiosity curiosity.dat
cp curiosity curiosity.dat /usr/local/Cellar/fortune/9708/share/games/fortunes/You can also run make.sh to do this automatically, but note that it's not
portable; it's written to run in zsh on my laptop.
This won't override the default fortunes that are preinstalled; clear out the directory first if you want to fully replace those fortunes.
Note: If you then try to run fortune from this directory, it won't work
right; fortune seems to prefer trying to read a file with that name in the
current working directory (if one exists) but doesn't know how to read it
without the dat file adjacent to it.
I've split the fortunes into three categories to make it slightly easier to sort which ones you want:
- curiosity contains interesting fun facts. The idea of them is to spark the kind of curiosity that leads to deep dives on Wikipedia or reading through source code to understand how something works. They can be about anything, though a lot of them are technical. This is the best one, IMHO.
- mantras is a collection of personal platitudes; they're essentially things from past me to future me. I recommend going in there and removing ones you don't like and adding your own—I can't guarentee my platitudes will mean anything to you.
- quotes is quotes from things I like, generally reminiscent of the more "traditional" fortune files, and ultimately pretty empty because I prefer the other two categories.
I very much welcome pull requests if you have things to add!