#magic beans

from The Beaverton, Canada's The Onion, on the latest AI hubub:

America’s magic bean market is in turmoil after a Chinese company unveiled a competing bean that’s less than one tenth the price but still just as useless.

'DeepBean’s new beans only require a third of the water that American beans need to not grow into anything of value,' an analyst said. 'Any serious investor or cow owner would do well to give DeepBean a look.'

American magic bean companies like Beanco, The Boston Bean Company, and Nvidia have already shed hundreds of billions of dollars in stock value as investors contemplate getting their magic beans from overseas.

'Society can’t advance without magic beans to grow into bizarre and ultimately worthless simulacrums of real beanstalks,' one investor said. 'If we’re only wasting moderate amounts of water on them instead of massive amounts, that’s a plus.'

awww, poor techbros sad that their trillion-dollar boondoggle is no better than the million-dollar Chinese boondoggle?

You are walking down the road when suddenly in front of you appears a mysterious stranger. The cloaked figure offers you a gift- a handful of magic beans. The moment the beans are in your possession, POOF! Where before there was only road, there is now a fair. Play carnival games, explore the fairgrounds, spend your beans on some nifty prizes!

The single greatest contributor to me getting a new exciting creative idea is when I’m feeling wholly unsatisfied with the 8 other creative projects that I’m currently working on. I have 3 entries for the SOGOTP game jam to go but the layout for all of them has been so frustratingly unsatisfying that my brain started spawning new ideas.

Magic Beans was a compromise. It isn’t the game that the adhd squirrels in my head are excited about, but it uses a simplified version of the choose-your-own-adventure structure that I can’t stop thinking about. Let’s call it hyper-fixation adjacent.