The real hidden gem here is the hilarious 40 minute mermaid-themed true crime podcast parody that you'll only hear a portion of if you progress quickly. As far as I can tell, it's fully custom-made for this game? Can't find any references to the characters online.
https://stimulation-clicker.neal.fun/ sounds/true-crime.mp3 - it's hosted on Cloudflare, but even so I don't want to cost OP significant bandwidth, so join the two strings above for the direct link.
"Aww, he was all cat 'n tonic when he first saw her." An absolute classic. I would do anything to know more about how this came to exist.
Speed-ran the game using this (well, I injected jquery first to select the element using $() because I'm an absolute Baboon) in about 45 seconds, spam clicking all the upgrades, and clicks stopped going up after hitting "342,044,125,797,992,850,000,000,000,000 stimulation" with 10k clicks per second.
What a ride. Love the implied commentary on our over-stimulated lives!
Fun fact: browsers' devtools consoles have de-facto standardized convenience aliases for querying the DOM, similar to jQuery [0][1][2][3][4]. This means you could do something as simple as:
to create the simplest dependency-free cheat speed runner. (And, as mentioned earlier, shrinking -- or logically also zooming in -- the page results in more DVD bounces.)
Ah, thanks for the heads-up, apparently there is something borked in Chromium wrt $ / $$ encapsulation, as it seems they are nor reachable from the (global) context setInterval so doing `window.$ = $; window.$$ = $$;` fixes that in Chrome. Not sure why. (Yet again embarrassed myself by trying a snippet that "simply must work ® according all documentations ™" in single a browser only before posting. Sigh.)
I bet it's working as intended. The $ symbol is probably a special feature of the console and is not intended to be a property of window. Inside setInterval, the function is no longer being executed in the special console environment, which has access to that symbol.
Yes, I guess there could be some intention behind that, presumably some security precautions, but still: the fact that you can see $ in the globalThis (as a non-enumerable prop), and that globalThis you see from inside the timeout-ed function is strictly equal to globalThis seen directly from the console, that makes it somewhat spooky.
And it (`setTimeout(()=>{console.log(typeof $==="function")},0)`) works in Firefox. (Interestingly, you cannot get $'s descriptor in there, but you have it always available in timeout.)
131,903,042,042,866,960,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stimulation per second
I envy your rig - mine glitched a lot to get it in <3min. Might not be doing myself a service by actually answering the Duolingo questions via LLM... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-J0ppP-H9s
The podcast makes a couple of winking references to other bits of the game, including a mention of "that time that poor boy was pushed into that hydraulic press".
Absolutely. Reminded me of all the effort GTA spent on radio, to much fanfare.
The entire production value is fantastic. Glad to see Neal expanding. This is only a half step away from something less jokey, and more marketable.
If that's the path he chooses, of course. But judging by his smiling face in the center of it all wearing a poor fitting crown, I think he's just in it for the lulz. And I may respect that even more.
This great packaging has a critical social media tone for me. Absolutely amazing fun and addictive showing almost dark patterns. For a deep dive:
"Ethics of the attention economy: The problem of social media addiction", [1]
I say this as someone who's tried all the state-of-the-art voice generation systems: so far, nobody has trained an AI to "chew the scenery" nearly as effectively and effusively as these voice actors having the time of their lives playing southern belles and bean company owners who are blisteringly envious that a dead mermaid is stealing their spotlight by dying from a megalodon attack.
Haha, the problem is: we still haven't gotten AI to generate voices! "State of the art" just uses regular TTS engines and then adds extra inflection as "special sauce" or stretches it out, etc. At least, that is how it works for these AI generators that need to do it "at scale." When you can spend more on classic speech models, you can go well beyond that (see Siri, Google, Alexa, etc).
https://stimulation-clicker.neal.fun/ sounds/true-crime.mp3 - it's hosted on Cloudflare, but even so I don't want to cost OP significant bandwidth, so join the two strings above for the direct link.
"Aww, he was all cat 'n tonic when he first saw her." An absolute classic. I would do anything to know more about how this came to exist.