Waldo JaquithI made a new Mastodon bot! It uses three years of applications for custom license plates in Virginia that were rejected for being inappropriate (courtesy of a FOIA request by Virginia Public Media), and generates images of those plates. It posts twice daily. Some are funny, some are gross, some are weird little puzzles, and the number "69" shows up a lot. https://botsin.space/@rejectedplates/112151431401925961
As always, I'm grateful to @muffinista for providing a Mastodon instance dedicated to bots (https://botsin.space/), where I house my growing collection of goofy little fediverse bots.
Credit where credit is due: the idea for this bot came from @ca_dmv_bot, which does the same thing for California, but with the fun twist that California provides both the applicant's explanation and the reason the DMV rejected it. That bot isn't active on Mastodon anymore, but you can find it on other networks, including Bluesky. https://github.com/rjindael/ca-dmv-bot#readme
Chris Huff 
@waldoj @rejectedplates love it!
Jessamyn@waldoj Excellent, I always love seeing these. I sometimes participate in Wikipedia's RFCs for usernames and you see a lot of stuff like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/User_names
@jessamyn Community management is so much work!
Shawn Hooper (he/him) 🇨🇦@waldoj @rejectedplates FOIA FTW. Too bad it wasn’t open data instead.
This is great. Well done
Alison Wilder@waldoj amazing idea! I will perpetually enjoy this, thank you!
@alisynthesis I always get a kick out of these lists, and sometime in the past few days, on some social network (I can’t find it now, I regret), I saw a reference to somebody setting up a bot for rejected plates in another state. After that percolated for a bit, I figured I’d replicate the idea in my state!
@waldoj I was thinking about this a couple of years ago when I was coming up with a personalized license plate. I figured there must be some doozies.
@alisynthesis Here's the other one I saw reference to! It doesn't seem to be active anymore, but I always like to provide credit to others for their ideas. :) https://botsin.space/@ca_dmv_bot
ca-dmv-bot (@[email protected])
3.49K Posts, 1 Following, 3.29K Followers · Real personalized license plate applications that the California DMV received from 2015-2017. Posts hourly. Not the CA DMV. (14.07% complete)
ca-dmv-bot (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image Customer: I CALL MY 2 KIDS MONKEYS DMV: MONKEYS CAN BE SLANG FOR 2 THINGS. 1-RACIAL SLUR AGAINST AFRICAN AMERICANS. 2- SLANG FOR VAGINA Verdict: DENIED
Mike McCaffrey 
@waldoj Apologies, I will not be following your bot because seeing the government arbitrarily decide what speech is acceptable based on the thinnest of connotations is just infuriating.
Marcos Huerta@waldoj this is great. That LA times (?) article about California rejections was pretty funny.
Peter Griesar@waldoj I was very surprised I got JFCLOL approved. But then IRL it made enough drivers enraged I got rid of it
@griesar 20 years ago my license plate was "GNU LNUX,” but several times it made people so excited that they'd honk and flash their lights, leaving me unclear whether they were just really into Linux or whether my car was on fire.