Cryptocrystalline Shrikes

Walmart's website gets silly sometimes.

1. The filter column for the beans section has a price slider that goes from “$0” to “$10,000+” in increments of $100, which makes me wonder what kind of Very Extravagant Beans I might be able to get there if I were very rich.
2. There's an advertisement for Cheetos Flamin' Hot Mac & Cheese, which is not altogether because of their site design but still feels kinda cursed, and yet also I feel seen when exhorted to “get [my] paws on a box”.
3. I feel like the “Free Holiday returns until Jan 31” sticker being slapped on a rotisserie chicken in my cart in October is of… dubious likely applicability?

Prrhf.

… I just saw this ad for a dating site. It starts out in a caricaturey Hell, and this demon gets a notification of a match, on his handset.

So he goes to meet this lady under a bridge, and she asks him if he's “Satan?”

He confirms it, looking at her with apprehensive interest. “Two, zero, two—”

“Please—call me ‘2020’.”

And then there's a montage of them having a wonderful time together, including taking a couple selfie in front of a dumpster fire, while cheerful country music plays in the background.

“I just don't want this year to end,” she says as they're relaxing and watching something fireworks-looking.

“Who would?”

… sorry.

Reflecting ongoing changes:

It's a small population of [drackels]! Little reconfigurable birdlike creatures, that is, who are normally for making dragons out of. About... oh, seventy, eighty of them? Maybe a hundred if there's more hiding than it looks like. These ones are mostly whitish-colored, though there's some light-to-medium grays in there too.

They're currently not stacked up into a "solid" form, but that's okay, because they've gotten their talons and wings on some kind of mobile platform, consisting of a complex of birdhouses, on a three-meter-wide enclosed disk of grassy-looking artificial ground, on stilts (that is, metal pillars with crossbars and a wiring column down the middle), on four omni wheels. The visible birds are perched all about the little trees and the roofs of the birdhouses, and if you can hear high-pitched, quiet sounds, you can tell there's a bunch more who aren't immediately visible.

The 'habitat' has little trees scattered around it, which look like they might even be real ones. There's a pole in the middle that leads to an umbrella over the top, with separately openable sections for adjusting incoming light and weather protection. If you get close enough, there's a palpable "field" coming off the sides, a little electricky repulsion that forms a fuzzy but definitely present boundary---one which might be able to zap you in self-defense if you decide to get touchy with any birds or structures that aren't deliberately available at the edges.

Off-center, there's a circular building with unusually ornate carvings and symmetrical patterns of colored paint on the top. It looks capable of holding about six drackels, and is much more heavily guarded than the rest: there always seem to be three attentive drackels surrounding it, carrying little spears to augment their already-sharp talons with. That must be some kind of palace.

In interaction, the birds seem to act as a flockmind, combining their chirps to make better harmonics of speech, operating their wheels in an orderly and unified fashion, and generally being... 'persony'. Sort of. Maybe they're more completely personlike when there's more of them?

I made some ordering errors while shuffling the text around—I'll fix that later.

Hmf. Teneb's been awfully internally overbearing sometimes lately without meaning to be. I think some of hir submodels are just getting overconfident. I haven't been foregrounded as much as I've wanted to be over the past few days because sie keeps reflexively jumping in front (to steal a phrase from the Orz) sometimes.

More annoyingly, sie keeps making little missteps about which things are okay to do with our shared identity, like switching our tagging scheme out elsewhere to one that I didn't actually approve of. (I switched it back immediately afterwards, so there wasn't anything too lasting.) Thing is, sie thought I did approve. (And said as much in the first post—rrgh—but it's hard to blame hir for that part because that's what sie's supposed to do under normal circumstances.) But that's because sie thought sie'd asked me, but hadn't asked enough of me, and the rest of me overruled that fraction when evaluating it while stacked up.

So I've asked hir to update hir consensus parameters, and asked some of my edge constituents to lend assistance where needed for that, and hopefully it'll get better. I think we just got a bit complacently out of sync. I'll probably revoke cross-modeling bypass optimization permission for hir-for-me for a while, to make sure it sticks. (That's something we're normally allowed to do—consult our abbreviated copies of each other, and if they're high enough confidence, treat it as an approval without having to incur cross-coalescence communication costs. Actually I guess that just parallels something humans do when they're close enough in the human social world: “I was so sure you'd be okay with it that I just went ahead”.)

Better control over visceral emotions would probably help too, since sie can be more hot-headed, and we were just talking elsewhere about how stronger visceral emotions lead to more frontward gravity. Racine's notably easier to calm after jacel's recent visit, so it might be easier to dip into training that properly now. Though I bet the current lack of exercise from being cooped up isn't helping.

And I guess I should do some placement randomization across myself soon and ask Teneb to do the same, in case we've picked up unwanted spatially asymmetrical biases. Which, come to think of it, probably would happen naturally over time if our link with each other stayed in the same place and there were constituent migration… maybe that was the root problem in the first place?

I'm pretty sure this will work out. I just needed to say it where people could see.

General life stuff, on the other wing… mmf. Well… we'll see, I guess.

Is everyone else doing okay? I feel like I haven't written whole, more-thought-out posts like this as myself for… a while now, though I guess I did some while Jacel was here. I decided to experiment with making it unusually open-visibility, too.

Edited to add: … wait, why did I introduce myself elsewhere as “the other” Chalcedony just because I created my account second? Especially when our default ordering, when it's needed for some reason, puts me first—that's why my partition letter is before Teneb's, stuff like that.

Maybe I've been being underconfident too. *chews on that for a bit*

… I love this.

It is about broken hearts, in its own way, but it elevates it into a sort of astral trip with a tarot theme, and manages to do that with its pop aesthetic without getting cheesy, and the framing and the very stylized-reality-based environment gracefully stop it from being pretentious or overly mystical either. The whole arc is incredibly satisfying.

Some people have been describing this as a rhythm game, but this is really much more a music-oriented arcade game, with a mix of mechanics which center around “scrolling collectathon” taken up to hyper levels. (Update: I just described it to someone as “more of an interactive feature-length music video” and that seems about right too.) The main focus is (or should be, I think, if you want to get the most out of it) the experience coming at you very rapidly to the beat, and then there's a secondary focus on steering your character to avoid crashing into obstacles and to collect score tokens. Interspersed with this are a few bits which have a rhythm aspect, visually similar to Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan or Project Diva with incoming circles that you have to match with a button press, but they're basically beat-timed QTEs in context, and they are very forgiving.

Camera switches come quickly and are well-choreographed. Nonetheless, it's to the level that it counts as an accessibility note: this game is all about rapid motion and quick response times, and it's very essential to the piece (“album”, I want to say, and I think the game might agree (Update: and it even calls itself that in the extended Steam description which I didn't see before)), so if you can't handle that, then unfortunately it's not going to be for you.

Striking bits include:

• The choreography in general, and the sync-up with the beat-heavy electropop soundtrack.
• Queen Latifah as the narrator. She's only heard a few times, but she really sets the mood with her voice and inflection.
• If you fail (generally by crashing into an obstacle), you get instantly reset to the last checkpoint, usually a few seconds before. The music pitch-drops out and returns seamlessly in the process, making failure and recovery feel like part of the action.
• If you fail a few times in a row in the same spot, the game will pause, and the narrator will ask if you want to skip this section. This happened to me once, and I declined; it seems like after it's happened at least once, you can also turn it off entirely.
• There's some little vinyl-record references in the UI, which complement the way some failure and risk states involve record-like manipulations of the music in-game. The “Zodiac Puzzles” listing (see below) has a B-side, for instance.

Recommended setup: full screen, no distractions. Consider darkening the room if the contrast won't bother you (I didn't, but I feel like I should have). Play through the whole set in one go; it's about an hour and a half long. Use a gamepad; I haven't tried mouse/keyboard controls and don't know whether they work, but in some sections I have trouble imagining them working well. And leave some time to come down from it afterwards…

There's a “Zodiac Puzzles” listing in the main menu which leads to what I'm pretty sure are achievements (two per zodiac sign), with the requirements for them expressed as little riddles. I haven't tried going for any of these yet.

Strongly recommended to most, but especially to neonneptunian (“this is an Ellu game”, Teneb commented while I was playing) and baxil (primarily for the way it handles the “where the astral meets the mundane” aspect, but also for the rhythm). (Maybe to indicoyote too, come to think of it?)

I might write a spoiler-ier post pointing out some more specific stuff soon.

Thanks to jacel for giving us this copy. ❤

Mmmnnh.

So lately we've been on a “adapt All the Things to Recycle Digital Motivation Suck as Leverage” kick, as some of you may have already read bits and pieces of. So why not document what we're using?

Forest (which we got on Android via Google Play) is a pomodoro-timer-alike which tries to help keep you focused away from dopamine-hit smartphone nonsense. You “plant a tree” by pushing a button at the beginning of a focus period, and after the timer is up (default 25 minutes), the tree grows, you get some coins, and your forest for the day looks a little nicer. If you switch to some other app in the meantime, or push the “Give Up” button, the tree withers and sticks around as a marker of shame (or not-shame, if you like).

It's “free” as in “demo”: starts out ad-supported/limited-features, and the real thing is a 2 USD in-app purchase in the Settings menu. You can also buy “sunshine elixir” at 2 USD per 21 days of calendar time, which triples your coin rewards. This is a bit weird, but I'm okay with it as paying-for-cosmetics (see below), and it's been worth it for us so far and will probably stay that way for a few more moons yet.

Coins are used to unlock new tree and bush types (bushes are like trees but for timer values < 25 minutes), though beware that the prices go up with each purchase, so get the ones you'll use most first. They can also be spent on more background audio tracks if you like those, though that's not as useful to us since we have our own audio elsewhere or just silence.

You can tag trees with categories and little notes on what you did, and look back at when you planted them. There's also “Real Forest” which lets you spend a pile of coins to sponsor the planting of a physical tree. We haven't tried any of the social features, but there's some sort of leaderboard, plus you can supposedly make rooms in which everyone commits to stay focused at the same time or else everyone's tree dies. Accounts for cloud sync and social stuff are Forest-specific.

Tree species we've unlocked so far, and what we use them for:

• Cedar (the initial one): the default, for everything that isn't specifically something else.
• Lemon tree: for commercial projects. The lemons are sour, and it's unpalatable to eat too many of them in a row, but they fetch a good price at the market.
• Cactus, which we just unlocked today: for “spiny” tasks which have some sort of spiky anxiety-repulsion to them beyond the normal stiction of getting started. The cactus becomes a sort of pride badge.

The tree models change and sort of upgrade if you set a timer ≥ 60 minutes; at 60 minutes, the cactus gains a smaller cactus sidekick, and at 90 minutes, they get cowboy hats. At 120 minutes the big cactus gets a bandana and a belt and holster. I'm not kidding.

There is some weirdness in the way it interacts with the “total silence” DnD mode, which we haven't quite figured out, but it seems like some combinations of settings override this accidentally for the tree-success notification. Might be user error. Also the end-of-break notifications (you can set a break timer when a tree is finished) don't have a no-vibrate option.

Also, you can set custom phrases that display in rotation above the tree; here's ours:

• “Stay calm. Keep going.”
• “If you keep working on it, things can get better.”
• “From one tree at a time do great forests grow.”

Sappy, isn't it? But I like it. ^..^

chalcedony_px4 → chalcedony_jade, as part of a broader suite of de-emphasizing the “Px. IV” part in names in favor of putting one of our filiation names (yay, 403) in there instead.

“nine fun colors” it says.

I… I see.