Five mini-posts

2025-08-20

A collection of thoughts too short to be their own post so I compiled them together

Derivative Clicker's unsatisfying ending

Something I like to do from time to time is play idle / incremental / clicker games. You're probably familiar with cookie clicker, well as it turns out there are a whole lot more games in that genre. Here is a database of them, although my taste differs significantly from the users of that site. I prefer games which last a week to a few weeks, and are strongly in the "idle" category, and I really do not want story. I play these games to have something to do in the background of my life just to occupy my hands from time to time. Something to habitually check in on every hour or so to watch the number go up. I don't want to have to read story, I don't want to have any execution challenge, I don't want strategy, puzzle, or survival mechanics. Oh, and of course, I don't want any sort of microtansactions. Thankfully there are lots of games like this. Most recently I have been playing Derivative Clicker.

This particular idle game is relatively old, and so it's somewhat outdated in certain design aspects. It's a lot more idle than a lot of modern incremental games, which require more frequent interaction, but I see this as a feature. It's also lacking a lot of depth which is not so much a feature. Also, it actually expects you to click the "click to gain money" button in order to play efficiently, which should not be a mechanic outside of the very beginning of these kinds of games. Spam clicking or installing an autoclicker is not what I'm here for. But anyway my real gripe is with the ending.

In these kinds of games, you win by completing the achievements. The final two achievements I have left in Derivative Clicker are quite simply stupid. First is an achievement, "you're probably using an autoclicker", which requires clicking 10 million times. Yeah, I'm not doing that. Second is "centillionaire", which requires earning a centillion dollars. The problem is, as far as I've read on reddit, the game starts to actually break when the numbers get that big. There's a mechanic where at a certain point you have so much money the game just draws a line and calls it "infinity", and forces a reset. But a centillion is really close to this threshold, so it's possible (according to reddit), to just end up skipping past centillion without ever actually landing on it and getting infinity reset. And that's if you're lucky. Again, because the game starts to break, if you're unlucky, you can just straight up lose your save. So because I don't want to deal with either of those options, I am just going to end the game here, after unlocking all the unlocks and getting all the achievements except those two, because those two are dumb and shouldn't be in the game.

The normals are cooked.

I know I know, calling people "normals" is cringe. Anyway wasn't I supposed to say "Normans" here instead as part of a joke. Whatever.

It has come to my attention that long time internet youtube personality Hank Green has released some sort of "app". This app, Focus Friend, is at time of writing, the number one app in the US app store apparently. What is this app? It is a virtual bean character attached to a timer. You set a timer, and while the timer is going, the bean character does some sort of activity on your screen. If you pick up your phone and exit the app to do something else while the timer is still going, the bean character is unable to complete it's activity and looks sad. This is supposed to motivate people not to be distracted by their phones. I have nothing against this, it's good not to be distracted by your phone, whatever helps with that by all means, go ahead. I learned about this because of this video by the creator of this app. Well, I'm going to say I'm not sure I'm comfortable calling Hank Green "the creator" of this app, because I doubt he wrote a single line of code or drew a single art asset. I'm sure he just paid other people to make it for him. I'm not sure what that makes him. Anyway, in this video, in which he discusses the app and it's unexpected meteoric success, he confesses to just how distracted by his phone he is.

"I will use it to watch a movie. I'll be like, ok, I'll turn Focus Friend on, and I'll be able to not pick up my phone during this movie. Otherwise I can't, I like can't watch a movie! Or I use it to have dinner with my family."

I'm not judging. Ok I'm judging a little. You can't get through a movie? Really? You, 45 year old man Hank Green can't sit through a movie without checking your phone? The normals are not OK! What's on your phone that's so interesting?! I didn't realise how bad it was for people. I thought I was bad because I scroll youtube shorts while I take a shit instead of reading manga or something. Not even able to watch a movie? I'm not ragging on anyone. It's not anyone's fault they are like this, it's obviously the fault of tech companies who have designed machines which rob us of our attention to drive profits and blah blah capitalism is le bad. All I'm saying is, and maybe this is a selfish viewpoint, I felt a little better about my ability for self control after seeing that I might be significantly better than other people. Given that this is the number one app in america, it seems like I may be better at self control than a lot of other people. At least with regards to technology. Put a chocolate bar anywhere in my vicinity and you'll see how quickly my self control falls apart. I really am helpless in the face of chocolate. It's so tasty! Anyway, I wish anyone using this app good luck, I suppose.

Updated my about page

I have updated the about page on this website to be a bit more descriptive and detailed. You can read it for yourself, it's linked at the bottom of this page.

The algorithm is fickle

I've recently seen three high effort, long form youtube videos drastically underperform in views what I assume their creators intended. These are videos which I know for a fact would have taken months to produce, and which I'm fairly certain did not earn enough revenue to pay for themselves due to their underperformance. In all cases, the viewcount was significantly lower than the channel's sub count. What's more, all three of these videos were genuinely good, and completely up to par with the rest of that channel's output if not surpassing it in quality. No, youtube's algorithm, in it's wisdom, just decided to but these people into assured financial trouble for no reason at all.

I believe this will only continue to happen more frequently, to higher and higher profile channels, and the "meta" will shift. I think that the "youtuber who only uploads one 8 hour video a year", will not last as a concept.

gopherholes and gemcaps and pubnixes

I love pubnixes conceptually. If I had known about them when I created this site, I would have hosted it on one of those (probably sdf), rather than here on neocities. Not that I hate neocities or anything. I just think pubnixes are really cool. Anyway the problem is, what do I do on a pubnix? I join one (i've joined a few), and then what. I don't have anything else to say. Sure I can host a website or gemcap or gopherhole, but what would I put on there? I already have this blog. I don't have anything else to say! So unfortunately my pages sit useless.