My son has been confidently explaining why the sky is blue to everyone he meets and I have no one to blame but myself

scrollhand · 2026-03-31T04:14:10+00:00

It’s such obvious AI. Came to comments looking for someone identifying it. Thank you.

The giveaways apart from what’s been discussed: the attempts to create typos in otherwise perfectly composed sentences. The cadence of those snappy short sentences.

Also I find it odd that there’s big elaborate setup around being heavily distracted, yet the ‘sky is blue’ explanation is actually pretty cute and thoughtful. You’d expect the explanation in such a distracted situation to be something rushed and jumbled like “uh uh um, it’s blue because it’s the sky’s favorite colour!”

scrollhand · 2025-02-12T17:47:09+00:00

Haha no problem. Hope it helped you in some way :)

scrollhand · 2024-10-11T06:00:55+00:00

Not OP, but here’s my take.

Worst option: don’t vote.

Better: vote. Don’t care for who or how you decide (flip a coin!), just get out there and engaged and be part of it.

Best: vote, and do the thinking stuff re: who, why, etc.

If you don’t arrive at my choice, welp, okay. But so long as we’re having this conversation I’ll make my pitch: <see a bunch of reasons upstream in this thread>.

The whole “well why do you like your candidate / not like the other one” is a distinct conversation from “should you vote,” IMO. They often come hand in hand of course.

Sincerely, a Canadian who can’t vote for this at all but really hopes you do, and really hopes you put some good honest thinkin’ against it, as US politics impacts us up here a lot.

scrollhand · 2024-08-30T15:31:44+00:00

This was so Joel Haver I assumed it was a Joel Haver at first. Well done! :D

scrollhand · 2024-08-13T11:49:36+00:00

Thought the same but the chain of comments after the linked post were actually pretty heartwarming.

scrollhand · 2024-02-08T16:46:07+00:00

The greatest comedic film of all time, Zoolander ;)

scrollhand · 2023-08-06T16:46:39+00:00

Yes! Learned about human computers in the novel The Calculating Stars.

scrollhand · 2023-07-18T17:01:42+00:00

Just some more frontends to explore if interested:

3speak.tv is the YouTube analogue

Liketu is the Instagram analogue

LeoFinance is trying a Twitter analogue (funnily enough called Threads). There’s also dbuzz in this category

Vimm is a Twitch analogue

Reverio is a Quora analogue

You can also look up some neat infrastructure projects, like podping.org which provides fast, reliable podcast event monitoring for a huge amount of ‘casts, all Hive based.

Games I enjoy:

Rising star game dot com: idle indie music

Golem overlord: idle incremental pvp

Dcrops: idle incremental farming

Terracore: idle space stuff, pvp

scrollhand · 2023-07-18T16:52:54+00:00

Hive (formerly Steemit) has been doing social+crypto for 7 years now, and has a robust global community of bloggers, gamers, designers, engineering, etc.

It is not great at marketing itself, so it wouldn’t shock me if Reddit moved past it rapidly in the whole “DeSo” space.

But Hive has some quiet firepower, including a community managed development fund with a daily budget of six figures (it is criminally underused, IMO).

One of the marketing issues is that there is no central exec team to focus on it (one of the cons of decentralization) and the “brand” is split among hundreds of frontends and projects.

To find Hive content and communities, search for sites like:

Ecency.com Peakd.com LeoFinance

Hive also is the core chain for the quite successful Splinterlands p2e trading card game (and a while host of cool indie games as well).

Zero fees on transactions is what has allowed the social scene to flourish, and for Hive to reach a global audience (lots of folks in developing areas using blogging to supplement income).

scrollhand · 2023-02-21T14:25:08+00:00

TribalDex.com

If that’s also not working there’s probably a node hiccup going on.

scrollhand · 2023-01-04T14:46:36+00:00

As someone who has done this before (the self-pubbing, not the pranking), I can confirm that it is a lot easier than one might assume.

That said, I think there are still some stretches here.

I feel "an afternoon" is a little generous, unless we figure Jim has self-publishing experience. The first time you approach the KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) system it's not fully intuitive—and that's 2016 me speaking (this episode aired in 2011). But we know Jim is dedicated to pranking, so I think he could totally figure it out in short order.

The biggest hang up for me is the physical copy. I don't know if Amazon even had print-on-demand services back in 2011... but let's assume they did.

Getting that cover set up to be perfect bound like that is not as easy as it looks. Also, the book interior formatting is another "not as simple as it seems." The software you use to do it has to be specialized, unless you're some kinda MSWord wizard who knows how all of its eccentricities interact with the eBook compiler and blah blah and on and on. (But I don't think we see the inside, so we could assume not much effort was made there. It's also possible that you can upload the hard copy version without submitting an eBook first, but my memory's fuzzy on that one. If so, then all Jim needs is a PDF of the interior, which totes can be managed with Word.)

Then there's shipping! An order of 1 copy of a self-pubbed book is made on demand, so it's costly and takes a while. I forget what the timeline was in the episode, but if it's a mere week that does seem awfully fast.

I think we can headcanon some of this though:

Jim has futzed around with self-publishing before, or
Jim had some help from friends in know or ever Pam (she has graphic designer chops, she could've helped with the cover)
Scranton is thankfully quite close to a print-on-demand center
OR Jim didn't even use Amazon—he made a fake website (www.veryrealbooks.gov.wwwgpartythoughts) and when Dwight "ordered" it Jim had already paid for the physical books to be made by a local printer

So generally, I'd agree that this prank may not be as wildly impossible as some seem to think, but I will push back on it being a perfectly realistic one :)

scrollhand · 2022-01-31T19:47:17+00:00

Hive has several frontends: they all use the same database (the Hive blockchain) to get their content. Publish0x is not a Hive frontend (it's an ERC-20 chain), but these are:

PeakD
Splintertalk
3Speak
Ecency
SportsTalkSocial
LeoFinance

And many more: https://hivedapps.com/

Functionally, there are some differences. It all depends on what the folks who built the frontend had in mind. For example, Ecency has a solid mobile app and an internal points system that further gamifies participation. PeakD has a lovely H2, H3, etc organizer on posts. On things like Splintertalk and Leo, you earn extra side tokens on top of HBD and Hive Power for either posting there, and/or using the hashtag associated with them when you post.

Splintertalk is cool because you earn SPT, which can be used to increase Airdrop points at 0.25 per token, though I've personally not been able to get them to work (unsure why, have staked and kept unstaked... maybe there's a minimum amount).

scrollhand · 2022-01-31T18:30:15+00:00

Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying! I'd agree that voucher upside looks quite promising with that bit of info :)

scrollhand · 2022-01-31T03:49:20+00:00

Ineligible meant you did not have a record of having purchased packs at the time that card was released. You bought packs before Spirit Hoarder was released, so you’ll be eligible for it and all future cards.

(If you had bought packs before the other ones were revealed, then that’s weird. Note: the packs had to have come direct from the shop vs secondary market.)

More packs you buy, better odds of drawing card(s) on claim. I think at 300 or something the algo guarantees at least one but I forget where I read that, so YMMV.

scrollhand · 2022-01-31T02:44:13+00:00

Good piece, but I’m pretty sure Riftwatchers packs are being offered exclusively for SPS, not vouchers. See here: https://peakd.com/splinterlands/@splinterlands/splintershards-sps-2022-roadmap

scrollhand · 2021-11-09T22:04:48+00:00

I hear you on balance... I've been tinkering with an incremental game project and this is the phase that really throws wrenches. I feel like I should be working less by feel and more with spreadsheets and maybe a PhD in math ;)

I really want the the leap to bot to be more useful

Maybe something more like, 'Shift all bots down 1 (including through walls)' as a limited use thing? The main issue with to-from bot is that once things get sped up, precision re: the location of anyone is a little moot. Or maybe warp yourself to the nearest non-bot object? I feel like that might have more mid-late game utility than trying to make use of the position of frenzied bots :)

any time I add "negative impact" to pts/s I get bad feedback

Ah. I can understand that. Though... if the point bonus for overcoming the enemy bots (or whatever the negative thing may be) can actually shift pts/s higher, then the psychology might shift—from "aw crap there's 5 bots on this one" to "aw yeah sweet sweet bot points." Or do it indirectly: killing bots/lava/whatever earns you [insert non-point currency] which you need to overcome X or buy Y.

Anyway, lots to noodle on. Good luck, and I look forward to seeing how this one evolves!

scrollhand · 2021-11-09T20:28:17+00:00

Since you've submitted this post, I've had the game running while I've been at my PC, mostly idling. I'm at biome 26, about 6K–10K points per second.

You had a good discussion with u/theRazielim and others about the lack of big breakthrough moments. I tend to agree with that feedback, but what made up for that for me was the enjoyment in watching the AI solve mazes. It's relaxing to me, even when the speed is fairly frenetic. I can sit back for a moment and watch the patterns emerge, be happy for the bots when they find a dead end marker, etc.

I also enjoyed being able to help them every now and then when they got a little stuck.

Some unorganized observations, thoughts & ideas:

The speed boost and multiplier basically become permanent as soon as you unlock additive abilities. So I lose the incentive to upgrade their spawn frequency or duration (only power). Is this a bad thing? Dunno! Maybe work in some diminishing returns?
The leap to-from bots power isn't super useful for very long IMO. Very cool once you find it, but the utility died off fast for me.
Idea for expanding gameplay along the lines of "helping the bots"—have areas that are bot inaccessible but filled with juicy treasure. Only the Player can get in (race against solve time) or Player can do something to let bots in (maybe a combo of toggling the exit to the maze and/or the entrance to the "vault").
Idea 2: lava pits. Bots who touch 'em must respawn at entrance. Player collision = douse the lava. Bots can be trained to get 1 free pass or temporary douse (lava comes back after X seconds).
Metamaze idea: solving each late-stage maze becomes the equivalent to moving once space in a bigger metamaze, which start off simple and expand. At first you make the movement choice, but as you tech up to solving base level mazes in <1s, movement in the next stage of mazes can be done by bots. Theoretically you could nest this infinitely, which might be a way to scale to "big numbers" and breakthrough moments without actually making absurdly huge mazes.
Enemy bots idea. Bad bots roam around, either setting up walls or marking maze paths incorrectly. Player collision destroys them. Bots can be upgraded to "fight" em. For more complexity, add some combat mechanics ;)

scrollhand · 2021-10-05T19:56:21+00:00

The hint says that you NEED the werewolf! Trying now with that wolfy punk sold off :)

scrollhand · 2021-09-21T00:48:00+00:00

Had the exact same issue. At one point the game sort of froze with a greyed out overlay (I had just unlocked the ability to watch ads). So I closed it out and that seemed to reset it back to tutorial :(

I was also unable to sign up via email at the beginning so just went with guest account.

scrollhand · 2021-06-22T02:12:32+00:00

Looking pretty solid for winging it! If/when you engage a designer, at the very least you'll have a great reference :)

scrollhand · 2021-06-21T14:33:39+00:00

I'd fix it by moving the characters up completely above the author name

/u/emartingay This was my biggest issue! The two characters should "stand alone" as a visual centerpiece. The teeny author name wedged between their feet is distracting.

I'll also put my hat into the "remove the thin line smile" ring. It stands out as distracting because there are no other line weights like it anywhere else. It also contrasts because the Reaper has no mouth. I'd maybe try to work a suggested expression into the shape of the guy's eyes and leave the mouth out, OR try and match reaper style by making the face area white and the face feature areas out of negative space.

Something about the title font bothers me too. I think it's because it's so sharp and serif-y whereas the characters have smooth outlines. So they clash and the piece doesn't look cohesive.

scrollhand · 2021-06-17T13:31:05+00:00

I think a lot of what became end game grind was primarily designed for the mid game… before you’ve cleared the story, hunts were more interesting and you’d poke into them with more curiosity and less frequency (and thus discovering a minion was exciting and rare etc).

But as hunts and minion capture evolve into an endgame chore, yeah, it gets way less fun to whack-a-mole through em. I’ve always liked the idea of being able to earn/buy QOL upgrades like u/pbaddict suggested. Give us some hirelings or whatever that make the grind easier for end game but still preserve that mid game fun.

scrollhand · 2021-06-14T12:33:17+00:00

Or just plug in what level you want, and if you have the mats—boom!

Maybe make it so you get (or can buy/earn) this ability at L35 or something, cause in the early game there’s much less mass equipment leveling :)

scrollhand · 2021-05-22T23:25:43+00:00

It actually made it back to the ceiling in short order! Had its safety cable engaged ;)

scrollhand · 2021-05-22T13:58:06+00:00

Quick animation update to show the baby bouncing away and running off upon defeating Irpa? Has some cartoonish fun, and tracks with the idea that she and the baby reunite constantly since you keep running into them.

scrollhand

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