rockiscope

README

⚾ Rockiscope

A Bluesky bot that posts daily horoscopes and win/loss predictions for the Colorado Rockies — a team that has given its fans almost nothing but pain since 2018, yet here we are, building software for them.

Born on July 5, 1991, the Rockies are a Cancer. Every game day, Rockiscope scrapes the daily Cancer horoscope, pulls live stats from the MLB API, runs everything through a prediction engine where the stars get the final say, and posts the result to Bluesky — one hour before first pitch.

On off-days, it posts the horoscope with a season stats summary because even when they're not playing, you're still thinking about them. 🔮

🧠 The Prediction Engine

Real stats provide the foundation, but the horoscope tips the scales. The engine weighs multiple factors and learns from its mistakes over time:

Factor	Starting Weight	What it uses
Team win rate	30%	Season record from MLB standings
Pitcher matchup	30%	ERA + WHIP: our starter vs theirs
Head-to-head	15%	Season series record vs today's opponent
Home/away split	10%	How we play at home vs on the road
Streak momentum	5%	Current W/L streak
🔮 Horoscope	10%	The stars speak via SHA-256 hash of the daily reading

🎯 Dynamic Weights

The prediction engine learns from its mistakes. After each game:

1. Records the prediction + actual result to prediction_history.json
2. Calculates which factors "pointed" the right direction over the last 10 games
3. Adjusts factor weights ±3% toward better-performing factors
4. Clamps weights to prevent any single factor from dominating (>45%) or disappearing (<2%)

Weights start at the values above but shift over time based on what's actually predicting correctly. On first run, the bot starts fresh — weights adjust as the season progresses. After 10+ games, the model begins dynamically optimizing.

🔄 Follow-up Posts

After each game, Rockiscope posts a follow-up reply with the result:

• Correct prediction:

🌙 Planets aligned. Opponent declined.
📊 Rockies W | 4-3 | Season: 7/10 correct

• Wrong:

🔮 Retrograde strikes again. So did the opponent.
📊 Rockies L | 7-3 | Season: 6/10 correct

🗓️ The Other Six Months

The Rockies' season ends in September. Rockiscope's doesn't. The bot reads MLB's season calendar and changes modes on its own:

Phase	What it posts
⚾ Regular season	Everything above. Unchanged.
🍼 Postseason	A report card thread for the season (accuracy, which signals worked, what the model learned, best call, worst miss). Then the bot adopts a playoff team, picking the roster whose players' birth charts are most compatible with a Cancer. It predicts the adopted team's games and replies with results. When they're eliminated, it re-adopts. When someone wins the World Series, it takes credit if it can.
🔥 Hot stove	Only posts when something happens. Rockies trades, signings, waiver claims, DFAs and releases are checked at 10 AM and 5 PM, each with the player's zodiac sign and Rockies compatibility. Minor-league deals are ignored, and busy days roll up into a digest. Every Sunday there's an Opening Day countdown.
🌵 Spring training	Predictions for spring games. It doesn't count. Neither does this. These picks are stored separately and never touch the real season's weights. The countdown goes daily for the final week.

Season rollover. When spring training starts, the finished season's predictions, final weights and a stats summary are archived to archive/<season>/. The live history then resets with default weights and the bot announces the fresh start. If the bot was offline all spring, the rollover happens on Opening Day instead.

🛟 Built to survive a Raspberry Pi

• Crash-safe state. Every file is written atomically with a .bak fallback, so a power cut mid-write can't corrupt the season.
• No double posts. Every seasonal post has an idempotency key that's saved the moment it posts. A reboot mid-day, or mid-thread, picks up exactly where it left off.
• No late predictions. If the Pi was down through a pregame window, that game is skipped. Predicting after first pitch would be cheating.
• Graceful degradation. Failed API calls retry with backoff, then the bot tries again in 15 minutes. If MLB's calendar is unreachable it falls back to a cached copy, then to a month-based guess. If a horoscope or stat is missing, the post goes out without it.
• Polite. MLB requests are spaced out, the bot posts nothing between 10 PM and 8 AM except game results, and a daily post cap catches runaway bugs.
• Clock-aware. The bot waits for NTP before acting, since a Pi has no hardware clock, and timezone data is embedded in the binary.

📊 Dashboard

rockiscope run also serves an analytics dashboard on port 8086 (ROCKISCOPE_PORT to change it).

• Every season, every phase. Pick a season, then switch between ⚾ Regular Season, 🍼 Postseason, 🌵 Spring Training and 🔥 Hot Stove. Each prediction phase gets the same set:
  • Cosmic highlights: biggest upset, worst whiff, called shots, streaks.
  • A game-by-game season calendar.
  • The Bot vs. the Pessimist: would "always pick L" have beaten us? (In 2026 it did, by 5.) Postseason and spring race a coin flip instead.
  • Stars vs. Science: who was right when the horoscope disagreed with the stats.
  • Confidence Is Decorative: accuracy by the confidence phrase the posts used.
  • Record by opponent, and an expandable game log. Click a game to see where it was played, both starting pitchers, the call in the post's own words, what each factor said, and links to the Bluesky post and MLB Gameday.
• Regular season adds Trust in the Stars, the weights rebuilt game by game by replaying the engine's updates, plus the factor-weights pie.
• Postseason adds the Adoption Agency (who we adopted, when they let us down) and the playoff birth-chart audit.
• Hot Stove shows every roster move posted, with signs and Rockies compatibility.
• Finished seasons get their report card. 📚 All-time compares seasons side by side.
• A phase banner shows what the bot is doing right now: the adopted team, the Opening Day countdown, or spring picks.

It's read-only: the dashboard reads the same crash-safe files the bot writes, including archive/. The JSON is available at /api/status, /api/seasons and /api/season/{year}.

📡 CLI

rockiscope <command>

  run          Start the daemon (default)
  post         Force a post now, skip the schedule
  preview      Print what would be posted, don't touch Bluesky or any files
  phase        Show the current mode (regular season, postseason, offseason, spring)
  test-auth    Verify Bluesky credentials
  test-mlb     Hit the MLB API and show today's game
  test-horo    Scrape today's horoscope
  version      Print version

🚀 Install

One command on a Raspberry Pi (or any Linux box):

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tlugger/rockiscope/main/install.sh | sudo bash

This will:

• 📦 Download the latest release binary (or clone + build from source if no release exists)
• 📄 Create a .env file with placeholder Bluesky credentials
• ⚙️ Install and enable a systemd service

After the install, edit your credentials and start the service:

sudo nano /home/pi/rockiscope/.env    # add your Bluesky app password
sudo systemctl start rockiscope

Create an app password at bsky.app/settings/app-passwords.

To update, re-run the same install command. It:

1. backs up your data (prediction_history.json, season_state.json, archive/) to backups/
2. downloads and checksum-verifies the new binary before touching the running bot
3. swaps it in, keeping the old one as rockiscope.prev
4. restarts and health-checks the service, rolling back automatically if the new version won't stay up

Managing the service

sudo systemctl status rockiscope      # check status
sudo systemctl restart rockiscope     # restart
tail -f /home/pi/rockiscope/rockiscope.log  # logs

📊 Data Sources

• MLB Stats API — free, no auth, real-time game data + stats
• Horoscope.com — daily Cancer horoscope
• Bluesky AT Protocol — posting via XRPC API

✨ Sample Posts

Each post includes the game info and prediction as text, with the full horoscope rendered as an attached image card — crescent moon, constellation, and all.

Game Day (1 hour before first pitch):

⚾ Rockies vs Houston Astros
🕐 1:10 PM MDT at Coors Field
🪖 Michael Lorenzen (9.00 ERA, 0-1)
📊 5-6 | vs HOU: 2-1 | W2

🔮 A slight celestial nudge toward a Rockies defeat (55%)

📎 Attached: horoscope image card

Off Day (10 AM MST):

⚾ No Rockies game today.
📊 5-6 (.455) | Run Diff: -3 | L1

📎 Attached: horoscope image card

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Built with mass amounts of misplaced loyalty and a mass amount of Coors Banquet. 🏔️