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Miami Herald
01-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
How Tinybeans Saved My Relationship with My In-Laws
My husband and I had our first baby 6 months ago, meaning our transformation into lovestruck zombies is nearly complete. We're obsessed with our little squish — otherwise known as Nathan — and I have officially become that parent who won't stop sniffing her kid. (I'm sorry, but where does that sweet baby smell come from and why has no one found a way to bottle it up?!) Of course, we're not the only ones who can't get enough of N. As first-time grandparents, my mother and father-in-law, who live a few hours away, don't want to miss one minute of the 'action.' That word is in quotes because, at this point, there is minimal movement to report. And yet! What happened today? Where are the pics? Send more videos! The ping! ping! ping! of text messages was relentless. 'Sleep when your baby sleeps,' they say. But these people clearly did not have a Nana who demanded CNN-style breaking news coverage of their grandchild. I love my in-laws — I really do. I'm beyond grateful for their enthusiasm, but also I need. some. space. I don't necessarily have the energy for endless back-and-forth while navigating the eat, play, sleep, repeat loop that is my current existence. The fewer asks of me at this point, the better (for all of us!). Thankfully, Tinybeans offered a brilliant solution: I set up the app to automatically send Nana emails with the latest baby photos her son and I take. She might not be tech-savvy, but she's a pro at checking her inbox. Now every time Nathan flashes a gummy grin or fakes us out like he's gonna crawl but nope — maybe next time, suckers! — Nana gets to witness it all going down. As for my father-in-law, he's a little more tech-savvy, but whatever it is has to be extremely user-friendly. Before Tinybeans, whenever he wanted to ask about N, it meant a loooonng phone call (or voicemail I didn't have time to listen to). Don't get me wrong; I enjoy our conversations. PopPop knows how to tell a good story. But that reminiscing sometimes crosses over into lengthy TED Talk territory. Tinybeans came to the rescue again by allowing him to comment on photos to his heart's content without always picking up the phone. Plus, it's fun for us to collapse on the couch and read his incredible notes. We love that Nathan will be able to look back on the comments left by his grandparents one day. Side note: There's also the fact that the app pulls double duty as a digital memory book. We've used it to document milestones like his weight after doctor's appointments, an Olympics-worthy front-to-back roll, and his first smile that was probably (maybe?) not gas. Not only has it been super easy to log these fun moments, but doing so helps us be more 'in the moment' wherever we are and whoever we're with — including grandparents IRL. It's cool looking back to see how far N has come, appreciating every step of his journey and not missing a beat. Honestly, Tinybeans didn't just save my sanity; it strengthened our family bonds. Our time with Nana and PopPop is spent making new memories instead of frantically providing updates. And my hubs and I can savor (almost) every sleep-deprived moment with our baby while sharing our joy with the people we love most. Want to give it a go yourself? Download the Tinybeans app here and watch all those 'ooohs' and 'ahhhhs' pour in.
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Worst Page on the Internet
The worst page on the internet begins innocently enough. A small button beckons the user to 'Click me.' When they do, the game commences. The player's score, or 'stimulation,' appears in the middle of the screen, and goes up with every subsequent click. These points can then be used to buy new features for the page—a CNN-style news ticker with questionable headlines ('CHILD STAR STEALS HEARTS, FACES PRISON'), a Gmail inbox, a true-crime podcast that plays in the background, a day-trading platform, and more. Engaging with these items—checking your email, answering a Duolingo trivia question, buying and selling stocks—earns the player more points to unlock even more features. So far, so fun. But fast-forward 20 minutes and somehow what began with a few curious clicks has turned into a frenetic effort to juggle ever more absurd online tasks. You must continuously empty your inbox, open treasure chests to collect loot, crush pastries with a hydraulic press, purchase cryptocurrency, and even take care of a digital pet, all while YouTube influencers doing exercise routines and eating giant sandwiches vie for your attention elsewhere on-screen. By the end, you have forgotten why you started playing but feel compelled to continue. A chat box pops up in the corner, in which virtual viewers comment on your performance. 'How is this your job?' one asks, sounding suspiciously like my wife. The name of this monstrosity, which was released earlier this month, is Stimulation Clicker, and it is more than a game. It is a reenactment of the evolution of the internet, a loving parody of its contents, and a pointed commentary on how our online life went wrong. In bringing each element of the web to life and layering them on top of one another, the game ingeniously re-creates the paradox of the modern internet: Individually, the components are enjoyable. But collectively, they are unbearable. When everything on the internet demands attention, paying attention to anything becomes impossible. [Read: Beyond doomscrolling] The game is the bizarre brainchild of Neal Agarwal, a 26-year-old programmer who has spent years designing online apps that comment on and satirize digital conventions. The Password Game asks players to input a strong password that follows an initially familiar set of rules: letters, a number, a special character. But soon users are instructed to add steadily more preposterous elements, such as 'the current phase of the moon as an emoji,' corporate sponsors, and 'today's Wordle answer.' Earth Reviews parodies the star-based evaluations that have overrun the internet by allowing visitors to rate dozens of common items and experiences, including 'acne' (1.3 stars, 217,181 ratings) and 'grandmothers' (4.6 stars, 160,847 ratings). Other projects have educational components. Space Elevator lets the reader scroll upward from the Earth into the stratosphere, learning about the history of flight, space travel, and astronomy along the way. The Deep Sea does the same, but for the ocean. Taken together, Agarwal's creations have racked up hundreds of millions of views, enough for him to make expanding his menagerie of online oddities his full-time job. And for Stimulation Clicker, he pulled out all the stops. He hired voice actors to produce a 45-minute true-crime podcast about a woman who worked as a mermaid. He got real-world streamers and influencers to record themselves for inclusion. He even roped in the announcer from the best-selling Halo video-game franchise to reprise his role here. The result is a remarkable rendering of how digital life has gone off the rails. With every new feature that is introduced, Stimulation Clicker takes players on the all-too-familiar journey from 'this is neat' to 'this is ruining my life.' What was once novel becomes oppressive, because when every online experience is optimized to monopolize our attention, the feeling that is ultimately evoked is not elation but exhaustion. [Chris Hayes: You're being alienated from your own attention] The idea for the game first occurred to Agarwal during the coronavirus-pandemic lockdown, when life moved online and 'there were definitely days that felt like Stimulation Clicker,' he told me. 'You have a million different social-media feeds and everything's pulling you in every different direction at once, and it's almost like a feeling of vertigo,' he recalled. 'I wanted to capture that experience of just endless bombardment, which I feel like is kind of the defining feature of the internet at the moment.' In this, Stimulation Clicker succeeds. But although the game might seem like a dark commentary on the corruption of the internet, it's also a hopeful demonstration of how to recover the internet's promise. After all, what Stimulation Clicker does is use the experiential quality of an online game to help users understand what the web is doing to them. The game explains something that many people feel when using the internet, but can't quite express. 'I'm very much a believer that the web is a creative medium,' Agarwal told me. 'We have amazing movies that get you to reflect on life, and I don't see why a website can't also be like that. But right now it feels like the web is very underutilized in that way.' He doesn't come to condemn the internet, but to rescue it from algorithms and mass marketers. 'I'm not saying the web is terrible and kids should never use technology,' he said. 'It's more of a feeling of, like, I know the web can be better than it currently is.' In that sense, Stimulation Clicker doesn't just epitomize what ails the internet; it is also an antidote. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Unhinged Browser Game That Explains How the Internet Went Wrong
The worst page on the internet begins innocently enough. A small button beckons the user to 'Click me.' When they do, the game commences. The player's score, or 'stimulation,' appears in the middle of the screen, and goes up with every subsequent click. These points can then be used to buy new features for the page—a CNN-style news ticker with questionable headlines ('CHILD STAR STEALS HEARTS, FACES PRISON'), a Gmail inbox, a true-crime podcast that plays in the background, a day-trading platform, and more. Engaging with these items—checking your email, answering a Duolingo trivia question, buying and selling stocks—earns the player more points to unlock even more features. So far, so fun. But fast-forward 20 minutes and somehow what began with a few curious clicks has turned into a frenetic effort to juggle ever more absurd online tasks. You must continuously empty your inbox, open treasure chests to collect loot, crush pastries with a hydraulic press, purchase cryptocurrency, and even take care of a digital pet, all while YouTube influencers doing exercise routines and eating giant sandwiches vie for your attention elsewhere on-screen. By the end, you have forgotten why you started playing but feel compelled to continue. A chat box pops up in the corner, in which virtual viewers comment on your performance. 'How is this your job?' one asks, sounding suspiciously like my wife. The name of this monstrosity, which was released earlier this month, is Stimulation Clicker, and it is more than a game. It is a reenactment of the evolution of the internet, a loving parody of its contents, and a pointed commentary on how our online life went wrong. In bringing each element of the web to life and layering them on top of one another, the game ingeniously re-creates the paradox of the modern internet: Individually, the components are enjoyable. But collectively, they are unbearable. When everything on the internet demands attention, paying attention to anything becomes impossible. The game is the bizarre brainchild of Neal Agarwal, a 26-year-old programmer who has spent years designing online apps that comment on and satirize digital conventions. The Password Game asks players to input a strong password that follows an initially familiar set of rules: letters, a number, a special character. But soon users are instructed to add steadily more preposterous elements, such as 'the current phase of the moon as an emoji,' corporate sponsors, and 'today's Wordle answer.' Earth Reviews parodies the star-based evaluations that have overrun the internet by allowing visitors to rate dozens of common items and experiences, including ' acne ' (1.3 stars, 217,181 ratings) and ' grandmothers ' (4.6 stars, 160,847 ratings). Other projects have educational components. Space Elevator lets the reader scroll upward from the Earth into the stratosphere, learning about the history of flight, space travel, and astronomy along the way. The Deep Sea does the same, but for the ocean. Taken together, Agarwal's creations have racked up hundreds of millions of views, enough for him to make expanding his menagerie of online oddities his full-time job. And for Stimulation Clicker, he pulled out all the stops. He hired voice actors to produce a 45-minute true-crime podcast about a woman who worked as a mermaid. He got real-world streamers and influencers to record themselves for inclusion. He even roped in the announcer from the best-selling Halo video-game franchise to reprise his role here. The result is a remarkable rendering of how digital life has gone off the rails. With every new feature that is introduced, Stimulation Clicker takes players on the all-too-familiar journey from 'this is neat' to 'this is ruining my life.' What was once novel becomes oppressive, because when every online experience is optimized to monopolize our attention, the feeling that is ultimately evoked is not elation but exhaustion. Chris Hayes: You're being alienated from your own attention The idea for the game first occurred to Agarwal during the coronavirus-pandemic lockdown, when life moved online and 'there were definitely days that felt like Stimulation Clicker,' he told me. 'You have a million different social-media feeds and everything's pulling you in every different direction at once, and it's almost like a feeling of vertigo,' he recalled. 'I wanted to capture that experience of just endless bombardment, which I feel like is kind of the defining feature of the internet at the moment.' In this, Stimulation Clicker succeeds. But although the game might seem like a dark commentary on the corruption of the internet, it's also a hopeful demonstration of how to recover the internet's promise. After all, what Stimulation Clicker does is use the experiential quality of an online game to help users understand what the web is doing to them. The game explains something that many people feel when using the internet, but can't quite express. 'I'm very much a believer that the web is a creative medium,' Agarwal told me. 'We have amazing movies that get you to reflect on life, and I don't see why a website can't also be like that. But right now it feels like the web is very underutilized in that way.' He doesn't come to condemn the internet, but to rescue it from algorithms and mass marketers. 'I'm not saying the web is terrible and kids should never use technology,' he said. 'It's more of a feeling of, like, I know the web can be better than it currently is.' In that sense, Stimulation Clicker doesn't just epitomize what ails the internet; it is also an antidote.
