{"id":12314,"date":"2019-05-27T13:06:08","date_gmt":"2019-05-27T12:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/?p=12314"},"modified":"2019-05-27T13:06:12","modified_gmt":"2019-05-27T12:06:12","slug":"you-are-awful-but-i-like-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/?p=12314","title":{"rendered":"You are awful, but I like you"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Regular readers may remember that I&#8217;m in a sort of work crunch period at the moment, in real life I work for one of the UK&#8217;s top universities (it&#8217;s Cambridge) and during the exam period, as it is, we&#8217;re open a bit later so I go full throttle on overtime (because I live in a flat, in Cambridge) so I don&#8217;t really have much time to explore gameshow stuff. The good news is that there&#8217;s only three weeks left and I get my life back, and so I&#8217;ll have a bit more time to dedicate to The Bar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the things we do to pass the time is app based quizzing in between the moments when we have customers to serve. The <strong>Tenable<\/strong> app is pretty much perfect for this &#8211; no time pressure so we can put it down if we have to deal with something, well pitched questions, and a reveal that&#8217;s still quite exciting even without the real stakes. We&#8217;ve also got some mileage out of the <strong>Millionaire<\/strong> app from all the way back in 2013, even if it suffers from very dated questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you know of any more apps that fit the bill then do let me know in the comments. We might see if <strong>Pointless<\/strong> works under the circumstances playing against AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" data-attachment-id=\"12315\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/?attachment_id=12315\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/mill.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"360,640\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"mill\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/mill.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/mill-169x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12315\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/mill-169x300.jpg 169w, https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/mill.jpg 360w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 169px) 100vw, 169px\" \/><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>However there&#8217;s a more recent <strong>Who Wants to be a Millionaire?<\/strong> app come out, based loosely on the US version. And I hate it. But I also can&#8217;t stop playing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It is very much the epitome of money grabbing, but in a way yet manages to be insidious but aggressive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In each game you play against an &#8220;opponent&#8221; (i.e. it&#8217;s someone&#8217;s picture and probably an AI). You answer questions and go up the money ladder but, and here&#8217;s the exciting twist, you can&#8217;t cash out until your opponent makes a mistake. At that point you&#8217;re free to cash out whenever. The actual &#8220;dollar&#8221; value of the questions is largely irrelevant, but to make your coins back, which is the payment of entry, you&#8217;ve got to make it to at least question ten. Whatsmore, beating your opponent nets you a bonus box, filled with lifelines and experts and suchlike, but go a few questions further and you can upgrade that to a better box, with more lifelines and experts and suchlike. It very much encourages you to play on &#8211; bonuses are yours to keep regardless but coins are always on the line (you can only &#8220;drop&#8221; as far as your opponent got).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pretty good. The questions are fair, they rarely get more than \u00a316k\/\u00a332k level really. You have a limited selection of lifelines, you earn more by opening boxes. Mildly addictive stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>How do you open a box? You start a timer with various amounts of hours on it depending on how good the box is. Oh you can&#8217;t be bothered to wait? Well there&#8217;s a speedy-option! Use jewels to unlock the box early. Want to use a lifeline but don&#8217;t have any in stock? Jewels! Want to ask an expert, but you haven&#8217;t waited the requisite eight hours? Jewels! Got an answer wrong and would like another go? Lots of jewels! Want to upgrade a box? A stupid amount of jewels! How stingy is it in giving jewels out? Incredibly! So far, so standard pay-to-play. But it really is <em>very<\/em> stingy in terms of what it gives out compared to what you need to do anything worthwhile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Viewers, I&#8217;ve spent money. Not much, \u00a34 total, and it doesn&#8217;t go far. And if you want to play but run out of coins, every four hours you get a FREE MYSTERY BOX with <em>not-quite-enough<\/em> coins to play a game at the top level you&#8217;re at and a lifeline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You get a question wrong on the <strong>Jeopardy<\/strong> app, say, you still get to play out the rest of the game. You get one of the early questions wrong here, you&#8217;ve blown four hours effectively. It&#8217;s effectively virtual jeopardy, but it&#8217;s jeopardy all the same, you&#8217;re begging for your opponent to go wrong when you get into the big money, and even when you &#8220;win&#8221; it&#8217;s surprisingly nervewracking pushing onwards. In the last week I&#8217;ve found myself deliberately working out the best times to play for maximum advantage later on. It&#8217;s ingenious and horrible, be careful before downloading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Regular readers may remember that I&#8217;m in a sort of work crunch period at the moment, in real life I work for one of the UK&#8217;s top universities (it&#8217;s Cambridge) and during the exam period, as it is, we&#8217;re open a bit later so I go full throttle on overtime (because I live in a\u2026 <span class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/?p=12314\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pLcmt-3cC","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}