Ruby Is The Animal Crossing Of Programming Languages

Ben:
That's the goal. That's the point, right? And I was like, "Yah, I'll check this out. Maybe it'll help me relax." And I'm like, "Now what do I do? Now what do I do? Now what do I do?" This is not helping me relax.

Starr:
Oh yeah. It is kind of a bunch of tasks.

Josh:
That's maybe not for everyone.

Starr:
But you do get to a point where you can kind of just goof around. I got it and then I played 20 minutes every three days or something for a couple of weeks just because I was like, "I don't know if I want to go gather this wood right now." But then you get over a hump and then it's more of an open world and you can kind of just sort of make it your own.

Ben:
I think part of my problem was my son's been playing it for a while now and he's got this nice house with all this cool stuff in it and I show up and I got a tent. I'm like, "Oh. I want a nice house."

Josh:
You've got to put the work in. Got to put the time in. He plays Minecraft too, doesn't he? Or did?

Ben:
He used to. Yeah.

Josh:
Okay. Do you ever play that with him?

Ben:
Yep. Yep. Yeah. And they totally eclipsed me. It was no contest. I had, "Hey, I got two blocks together", and they've got the Taj Mahal. I'm like, "Oh, all right."

Starr:
Yeah. Everybody's gives Tom Nook such a hard time for being such a capitalist, but you know, I'm just saying, I want, I want a house loan with no interest and no payback schedule and I can pay it off reasonably with, with a couple hours work gathering nuts and berries.

Ben:
So I started playing this morning because I read an article in the Atlantic about the game and I really enjoyed one of the angles. The article was like, "Maybe this is an indication of where we can take our society, where people are doing things they want to do but not under the pressure of having to pay back a serious mortgage", and all this kind of stuff.

Ben:
And I was like, "Hmm."

Josh:
Everyone has their own island where they live with a bunch of artificially intelligent NPCs and we can occasionally visit but it's rare.

Starr:
There you go. And if you save up your Nook Miles, you can buy a ticket to an island that's covered in spiders.

Ben:
Ooh.

Ben:
Well yeah I read that those spiders are actually, that's the way you make the real bucks. You collect those tarantulas, right?

Starr:
Well I mean there's the real spider island. So I looked into this. There's the real spider island, which is just a thing in the game and then for a while there was a bug in the game. Where you could force tarantulas to spawn infinitely. But they kind of did a patch that didn't get rid of it entirely, but it kind of made it less game-breaking.

Josh:
That's cool.

Ben:
Fun.

Josh:
So.

Ben:
So maybe I'll report back in a week or so and be like, "I love this game", and I won't be able to work for a month cause I'll be playing Animal Crossing. We'll see.

Starr:
Well I hope you. We all need some relaxation these days.

Josh:
Maybe Animal Crossing is really a metaphor for reality.

Ben:
It's the world they wish we lived in.

Starr:
Yeah, definitely.

Josh:
I wish I could spawn tarantulas at will. That would be a pretty cool defense mechanism.

Ben:
That would be pretty cool.

Starr:
Yeah. If that one doesn't work for you, I'm telling you Stardew Valley might be more your jam too.

Josh:
I've heard that one's really good. Yeah,

Ben:
I heard that I'm supposed to avoid Factorio at all costs.

Starr:
I don't even know what that is.

Ben:
Apparently it's a really addictive game. I don't know much about it because I've avoided it.

Josh:
My problem with these games is just...

Starr:
It's the one where you take one number and you multiply it by itself minus one and then you just keep doing that?

Ben:
The game goes really quickly.

Josh:
It's a pen and paper. Yeah. I don't have the attention span for, for these games anymore. That's why I just play first person shooters, just mayhem for 30 minutes to an hour and then I'm done.

Ben:
You want to get your Twitch on and then get back to real life?

Josh:
Yeah. It's rare that I get immersed in, in a game like that. Occasionally I guess one will come along, but it hasn't happened for awhile. Except for Ruby programming. I think that's really what ruined. Developing kind of ruined everything for me because that's...

Starr:
You know what? When you said that, I just realized Ruby is the Animal Crossing of the programming world.

Josh:
Is it?

Starr:
Yeah. Yeah. If Ruby was a game it would be Animal Crossing, which is kind of nice. So what are we talking about today?

Ben:
Talking about Animal Crossing.

Ben:
You know, since you talked about Heya in our last episode, but we didn't get around and talking about the backend of how we're actually doing Heya, I thought that'd be kind of fun to talk about because it's kind of fun to build.

Starr:
Wait, what do you mean how we're doing the back end? I thought it was an open source project that you installed in your own app and everything. So what sort of back end would that be?

Ben:
Well, we have to have a website to tell people about it and then we have to have a way to take people's money because we're actually selling licenses.

Starr:
I mean, technically they give us their money. We don't take it. They give it to us.

Ben:
You know it's kind of like Tom Nook. Yeah.

Starr:
We make them an offer they can't refuse.

Ben:
We're not going to force you to pay us, but...

Josh:
Full transparency, we haven't taken anyone's money yet.

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