Ghost (Owner)

About the Creator – Ghost

Who is Ghost?

Ghost is the creator of Super-Shiritori, a long-running word game project hosted on Discord. Known for obsessively building massive wordlists and crafting a mostly functional game system, Ghost has been maintaining and expanding the bot for several years. Originally from El Salvador, Ghost spent several years in South Korea (June 4, 2024 – May 2026) before a military Permanent Change of Station () relocation carried him through Japan, Alaska, and Los Angeles, California, before he finally settled in Hawaii, where he has resided since arriving on June 8, 2026. He is currently a senior in high school; which school is not publicly known. He has a deep passion for computers, language, and words, and has taken computer science courses, including (Computer Science Principles), with instruction in Java and Python. He primarily codes in Python and also uses HTML for web-related tasks. His main development tools include and GitHub, with past experience hosting projects on Glitch. Outside of Super-Shiritori, Ghost briefly experimented with Word Game Hub (hosted on Glitch), but no other public projects are currently known. The bot is supported by a team of dedicated Word curators, who contribute significantly to the community and the growth of the wordlists.

See Super-Shiritori's Development section for how this same relocation affected the bot itself, including its extended 2026 outage.

Military Connection

The branch is confirmed: Ghost's relocation is connected to the U.S. Army. What's less certain is his own personal status within it — Ghost has described himself as being "in" or "part of" the military, but given that he's a high school senior, this is most likely him referring to being a military dependent (a "military kid," relocating alongside a parent's Army posting) rather than being enlisted himself. That specific distinction has not been explicitly confirmed either way, so it's noted here as the likely reading rather than a settled fact.

A order is a permanent, government-directed relocation from one duty station to another, distinct from a temporary assignment — it resets where a service member (and typically their dependents) are officially stationed. It typically comes with a Dislocation Allowance (DLA), a lump-sum, non-repayable payment meant to offset relocation costs such as security deposits and utility hookups, usually paid about a month before the move, along with separate government arrangement and shipment of household goods. Overseas-to-overseas moves like this one (South Korea to Hawaii) are also commonly routed through established military transit hubs rather than flying directly, which is consistent with — though not specifically confirmed to explain — the Japan and Alaska legs of Ghost's own route. Housing at the new duty station is not always immediately available, particularly in high-cost, limited-inventory markets; Ghost's own account of waiting for government-provided housing in Hawaii, and the several-month delay that resulted, matches a widely reported real-world shortage of military family housing on the islands.

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Recent Events

In mid-August 2026, Hurricane Lala struck the Hawaiian Islands, prompting a state of emergency and tropical storm/hurricane warnings across the state, including Oʻahu — the island Ghost lives on, home to Honolulu. The storm knocked out power to well over 200,000 utility customers statewide at its peak, with Honolulu County among the hardest hit. Ghost lost internet access for about an hour during the storm but was otherwise unaffected and safe. Since Super-Shiritori runs on Ghost's own computer rather than any cloud host, the bot itself was offline for that same hour, going down and coming back up alongside his connection. Hawaii's power grid is prone to real, unannounced outages of several hours or more with no advance warning — a recurring risk for a bot hosted this way rather than a one-off from this particular storm — which is what later prompted the reconnect notice described on Super-Shiritori's Development section.

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How the Bot Was Made

• It all began with a love for the Roblox game Word Bomb, a game Ghost played constantly, even if he wasn't exactly great at it. What really stuck with him was how limited the word pool felt. Words like were excluded, and that didn't sit right with someone whose spelling was one of their strongest skills.

• Inspired by the idea of having a bot with a powerful dictionary in-hand, an idea that came from the OMG community, Ghost set out to build something better. The first version of his game was a very rough, Python-powered text-based experiment called Word Bomb Skuffed Edition, which eventually housed around 450,000 words.

• During the bot's development, Ghost also experimented with creating a website full of word games, called Word Game Hub, hosted on Glitch. The site was never finished and only featured one fully working game, but its dictionary reached a peak of roughly 574,900 words, sharing dictionary lineage with Super-Shiritori. The discouragement from the incomplete project caused a temporary loss of motivation. The original URL no longer exists, but the recovered source code — including a downloadable copy — is documented in full on the Word Game Hub page.

• With help from friends and external sources, the project evolved into a website called Ghost-Games, hosted on Glitch. That version eventually went offline, but it laid the foundation for what would become the current Discord bot.

• The bot was built using Visual Studio Code (VSCode) and runs with assistance from . Most of its core functionality was learned and developed through trial, error, and countless YouTube tutorials. Ghost doesn't really like the idea of using AI to write code, calling it "cheat-ish," but he did use the built-in AI assistant to help draft messages and responses for the bot's chat output.

• The biggest challenges? Frustration, technical hurdles, and being a broke high schooler with limited resources. Thankfully, a good friend named Kos now helps run the bot, keeping things online and stable.

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Design Philosophy

Ghost has described thinking about the relationship between Super-Shiritori's various word-chain game modes in loosely object-oriented terms, as a way of explaining how the modes relate to each other conceptually. It's worth noting upfront that this is a mental model rather than the bot's literal code structure — under the hood, each mode is a set of plain functions operating on dictionaries of game state, not actual Python classes with real inheritance. Mapped onto the real codebase as closely as the analogy allows:

• Multiplayer Shiritori and its Timed Shiritori variant work like two different instances of the same class, configured differently at creation — Timed Shiritori isn't separate code at all, just the same game state with one additional setting turned on.
• Protori fits the pattern of a subclass more than a sibling instance: it inherits the same core word-chain-matching rule (matching the previous word's ending) but overrides several of the base behaviors outright — a freeform turn order instead of a fixed rotation, a running score instead of simple survival, and a different way for a game to end.
• Solo Shiritori doesn't subclass anything in this framing; it composes with multiplayer Shiritori instead, reusing the exact same AI personality "brain" (the word-selection logic and spawn-probability table documented on AI Bots) as a shared component rather than duplicating or inheriting it.

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Partnerships & Collaborators

• Kos (kos256) – Bot Administrator
• GreenyMage (greenymage) – Graphic Designer
• Beyond that, the project thrives thanks to the small but loyal community that has formed around it. Whether you're actively contributing or just hanging out in the server, Ghost truly appreciates every one of you. This project wouldn't exist without that support.

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Fun Facts

• Has strong knowledge of geography.
• Some accent-based word translations happen automatically due to the global Normalize function; at first, people thought it was intentional.
• Many "false words" are created by Ghost as inside jokes; examples can be found in the Word Compendium under Shiritori originals.
• Admin Kos often calls Ghost by the nickname "Shiritori."
• Has developed a recent phobia of , after October 11th 2025.
• Favorite piece of digital media: the anime Clockwork Planet.

External Links

• Dislocation Allowance — Defense Travel Management Office
• Lala spins out to sea after storm hammered the Hawaiian Islands — ABC News
• Emergency responses to Tropical Storm Lala — Office of the Mayor, City and County of Honolulu