It’s a complicated question, especially I imagine for someone not familiar with US culture. Whether a person from Spain is “white” is itself a complicated and irrational topic. IMO it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to be confused about. I’m from the US and I find it confusing myself.

Goosebumps is high praise, thank you for saying so 🥰

Thanks! ❤️ I expanded it a bit, and put line breaks in so it’s like a poem:

With every breath I breathe the sky
and taste the breath of every tree
and bush, 
and creeping vine, and blade of grass.

And out I breathe the atoms I
no longer need, to feed the countless
growing things that live with me
on the seabed of the sky.

We live on the seabed of an ocean of sky. We breathe the sky with every breath.

Certainly. I think it’s kind of a truism that a high opinion of one’s own intelligence is comorbid with idiocy.

Anyone that lived ~through the pandemic~ knows that yes, most people are idiots.

I feel like this is a pretty universal belief.

LMAO thank you, I spent a while trying to figure out what title to give this post. I generally don’t like sorting games (or art in general) into “good” and “bad” buckets, but I didn’t really have a good handle on why people liked Flappy Bird, and I didn’t want to make assumptions about which parts of the game make it good or bad in people’s minds. “Is it good” is the most generic criterion I could come up with, so I went with that and hoped people would expand on their reasons in the comments. I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the comments (yours and others), it’s given me a lot to think about ❤️

That’s a good point, I too think it nailed one of the requirements of “simple” single-mechanic games, which is getting the player up to speed and into the fun part as quickly as possible.

That makes sense. I think with more complicated games (or any art) there’s some leeway where you can appreciate some things about the game enough that you endure the parts that don’t tickle your fancy. With games that really focus down on a single element, whether you are interested in the game at all hinges entirely on whether your tastes align with that one thing.

One of the reasons I asked is that, since precision timing games are not my thing, I can’t really tell if Flappy Bird is an exceptional example of the genre, or if it’s more of a Tiger King situation where it’s not that good, but it’s a fun thing that became a fad. Seems like the crowd is leaning closer to the latter.

IIRC the reasoning was that if the play store / app store synced, the app would be removed from the phone. I think for the vast majority of people, you may as well ask them to cast a spell as ask them to “sideload an APK”, so if they really really wanted to play Flappy Bird and felt that was beyond their capacity, this was the only alternative. Or maybe people thought phones with the “original” app would appreciate in value as collector’s items? The whole thing is mysterious to me.

I can see why people like games like Flappy Bird. I like a game that does one thing but does it really well. Precision button pressing has never been my forte so I have no sense of whether Flappy Bird was a “pretty good” precision button presser that just happened to get weirdly famous, or if it got famous because it really nailed the precision button presser genre.

It was extremely popular. For a while after it got pulled there was a small market for phones in airplane mode that still had a working version of the app. Some of the auctions went into the high five figures.

I remember this paper making a few headlines when it was published. It’s cool to start seeing generational trends in how emojis are used. I imagine they’ll flow in and out of the zeitgeist the same way clothing and other pop cultural trends do.

Also, my condolences to GenX. Authors didn’t even bother including them 💀

Please dish if you feel so inclined. I thought it felt very “blogger who has written a lot of blog posts” but I didn’t get any AI smell.

I’ve known for a while that one day the day would come when I wouldn’t be able to pick out the AI artifacts, and I’d join the throngs that chase the will o’ wisps through the dead internet. Maybe this is it for me.