FAQ
What is this blog?
This blog posts a new song prompt each week. You can then reblog the prompt with a link to a song that fits it (or do whatever else you want with it; I'm a pinned post, not a cop)
Who runs this blog?
@nullpointerintime, via an automated bot I've written.
What's the origin of this blog?
Back in March 2018, a friend of mine ran a daily song prompt challenge in the Slack for the course we were both teaching at the time. I then ran a similar challenge in March 2020 in a Facebook group for former TAs of that course and in March 2023 in an unrelated Discord server. These challenges were fun to complete, but the daily pace made them hard to keep up with and time-consuming to run. For 2024, we've decided to repeat the challenge in the Discord server on a weekly pace spread out through the whole year. I already had a Discord bot to post the prompts and I already posted my own responses to each prompt last year on my Tumblr, so I decided to hook up the bot to Tumblr as well to allow others to participate.
Where do the prompts come from? Will they ever repeat?
I believe the original prompts for 2018 came from an Instagram infographic whose source I no longer have. I came up with the sets of prompts for 2020 and 2023 through a mix of repeats and variations on previous prompts, new ideas of my own, and suggestions from others. Here are 2023's prompts.
Going forward, I'll add prompts in a similar way, though instead of me pre-selecting all of the prompts for a given period, the bot will randomly select each prompt from a bank (with a few exceptions where I might manually select a time-sensitive prompt to be used for a particular week). Prompts will not repeat within the same calendar year, but may return in future years.
If you have any prompt suggestions, feel free to send them in an ask and I'll consider adding them to the bank.
Will peoples responses for each prompt be collected into a playlist of some sort?
While I did this manually for past challenges I've run and I might continue to do so for Discord, doing so for responses to a public post won't really be feasible manually. I may eventually try to add an automated solution, though getting this to work across different streaming services is difficult. I personally use YouTube Music, so if I do decide to implement something like this in the future, responses that link to the song on YTM (the label-provided music track; not a video) would be the ones it would work best with (though I'd probably also support Spotify if I do end up implementing it)
This FAQ is a work in progress. I'll continue to update it as things change / people ask questions.