151–160 of 198 posts
Doing this felt odd, it was like it wore out something in my brain. After a while I could picture the animals I wanted to enter but I struggled to remember the word for them. Only now, a minute or so after stopping, could I remember 'Dragonfly'
I was also amused by the reaction to "crab":
> (Carcinization makes it hard to define “crab”, so I'm going to pretend you said “brown crab”.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah there are lots of inaccuracies. I added bobcat, then lynx, and it would not accept lynx because bobcat was there. Oh, and, 77, just woke up. No coffee.
114, here, because it allows extinct animals (sabre tooth, Mammoth, stegasaurus, etc) Also, things we normally don't consider animals - tapeworm, aphid, etc. Also accepted blue whale, sperm whale and orca :-/
267, I was going pretty strong and had about 2 minutes racked up, until I hit a wall, and couldn't think of anything else. Thinking in groups helped the most, e.g. reptiles, flightless birds, african animals, etc. Extinct animals also work, including the dinosaurs!
I added Jellyfish and then Portuguese Man-o-war. It took the man o war, but crossed out Jellyfish and said "added a vaguer term", but a jellyfish and a man-o-war are discrete animals. The man-o-war is a colonial siphonophore composed of zooids, while a jellyfish is a singular marine organism. They're both in the phylum Cnidaria, and that would have been a more vague term had I entered it.
Instead of trying to think of just any animal, I found it easier to add a constraint… 1. Animal that starts with A 2. Animal that starts with B 3. Animal that starts with C … (I also appreciated the easter eggs: “Are you Australian?” and “You listed both dingos and dogs, so I gave you the benefit of the doubt, but there's disagreement on whether the dingo is its own species of canid, a subspecies of grey wolf, or sim…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apples are not fruit in the strict botanical sense. > Apples are considered "accessory fruits" (or sometimes termed "false fruits") rather than true botanical fruits because the fleshy, edible part develops primarily from the flower's hypanthium or receptacle, not just the ovary. The actual, true fruit is the core containing the seeds, making it a pome.
These discussions are really fun to me. The opportunities to be absurdly pedantic are almost endless. Common words for things gloss over so many details. Most of the time those details aren't important but they still exist and there's someone on the internet that cares deeply about them.
I just made a variant of this that uses the browser speech recognition API. It's simplified, with none of the flair of the original, but should be fun to play in person. It's fun to shout animal names at computer with friends. https://t.moveything.com/animalscream/ (works best on desktop chrome. it's too slow on safari in my testing.)