This is a fun little timewaster

[conuly]

I've made it as far as 90 points.

Also, FYI, signups are open at holly_poly.

*************

The Insect Portraits of Levon Biss

Keep your home's temperature up and the heating bill down

The Fight to Integrate New York City’s Specialized Schools Is Misguided

The Sunburnt Country

Blue And Red Companies: How CEO Activism Is Reshaping Workforce Politics

A New Surge at the Border Is Forcing Migrant Families Into Motel Rooms

A $21,634 bill? How a homeless woman fought her way out of tow-company hell

#HimToo Should Be a Conversation About Male Victims of Sexual Assault

Comments

[calimac]

Every time I start playing it, it almost instantly tells me "You dead." Not very interesting.

[conuly]

Well, we can't all be great at it.

[calimac]

Sure, but there's a vast middle ground between being great and consistently striking out within half a second.

[marahmarie]

Same here, except I figured out what the problem is (at least on my end) - every time I click Play the page takes my mouse cursor and literally shoves it right off the webpage. By the time it allows the cursor to be moved back onto the page, game over. :(

Sucks sucks sucks I really wanted to play this, wondering if it's just a joke or something...

[conuly]

It legitimately works for me! I would not have posted it if it didn't. I'm sorry it doesn't work for you at all.

[marahmarie]

It's not your fault, so you don't have to apologize (though I do thank you). Maybe it's just a Firefox thing - I'm using a Beta. But I could still try it in Chromium, Edge or IE, I just haven't gotten around to doing so yet (but will let you know if that fixes things once I do).

[moem]

It may just be me, but I don't click on links if I can't see where they're going. Since this is your journal, feel free to ignore!

[sonia]

Seconded. I really appreciate your links and I assume there's a reason you're using bitly.

At the same time, I've been wanting to request that you leave the original links visible, or at least say what site they're going to, so I don't use up my NY Times or Washington Post articles on things I'm only vaguely curious about.

[conuly]

When a link is from the Washington Post or the NY Times, the bitly link typically will read wa.po/whatever or nyti.ms/whatever. The LA Times is lat.ms/whatever.

Although when it comes to that, I find the Post paywall to be utterly laughable - you can delete cookies and bypass it or, if you don't want to, stop a page from loading halfway through and bypass it that way. And I think you can still bypass the NY Times paywall by just googling the article title and clicking through that way.

(Though right now I've just downloaded an extension that bypasses most paywalls for me, so I don't even have to do that.)

[sonia]

Huh, useful to know about that extension, thanks! I wondered if you had a LOT of subscriptions.

[conuly]

Lol, no.

There's also the old standby of opening up paywalled articles in a different browser.

[marahmarie]

Let me point you in the right direction (for Firefox but you can check for Chrome store equivalents): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypasspaywalls/

Some websites also have annoying "sign up for our newsletter" or "disable adblocker" interstitials; to zap them there's this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-javascript/

For reading on the phone: Firefox works on Android and supports all the same add-ons as the desktop version.

And the MSN News app lets you read as many WaPo or NYT links as they publish without hitting paywalls, unlike Google News and some others. The SmartNews app lets you read as many as they publish using their SmartView feature, which downloads all the articles for offline viewing once you open the app.

[sonia]

Thanks for the info! I had found that extension for Firefox once I knew it existed, and look forward to enjoying it.

[marahmarie]

Cool, you're welcome. :)

[conuly]

And the MSN News app lets you read as many WaPo or NYT links as they publish without hitting paywalls, unlike Google News and some others. The SmartNews app lets you read as many as they publish using their SmartView feature, which downloads all the articles for offline viewing once you open the app.

Nifty!

[marahmarie]

Oh yeah. It's the only way I can read material that's kind of, how do you say, above my pay grade, I guess. :)

[conuly]

It's easier for me to keep the links short for other reasons, and I like being able to see that 500 people (or whatever) clicked on my links on any given day.

I typically take the text directly from the title or, sometimes, from the first paragraph, so you can google the title if it's really interesting, or you can ask me if you want. Then I diabolically can laugh at getting more comments too.

[marahmarie]

Whatever it takes, right? LOL :/)

[conuly]

Well... I do like getting comments. I'm not sure how sarcastic you're being.

[marahmarie]

Not at all sarcastic! You just had the nerve to say what I'm always thinking, at least in regards to my own blog. *tips hat to you*