Cryptocrystalline Shrikes

Things you learn from Colorful Stage ranked matches:

Sometimes, messing up a critical part can wipe out everything you got from perfect play in the rest of the stage. Sometimes, perfect play throughout the beginning means you can die at the end and still win. It depends.

If you focus on comparing yourself to your rival throughout the flow of the song, you will probably lose. But it's hard not to get distracted by it. It's so shiny and tempting. (And if you ignore the results in between, then why were you in ranked anyway?)

The “Easy, right?” sticker is a trap. (I don't usually fall into that one, but my opponents have.)

Even if you're sitting there a dozen points behind for most of the course, keep pushing for the perfects. If nothing else, you'll need the habits for the next round. And sometimes you get a lucky break.

[Also posted at icosahedron.website on the fediverse.]

“It was this phenomenon which Euphorius Cloy exploited when he invented the anticapita cannon. A small auxiliary head is discharged into the dragon's body. This immediately gives rise to unreconcilable differences of opinion and the dragon is immobilized by the ensuing deadlock. Often it will stand there, stiff as a board, for a day, a week, even a month; sometimes a year goes by before the beast will collapse, exhausted. Then you can do with it what you will.” –Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad

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. ^..^