I Put a Gold Box on the Table

Last Sunday I wrote that Oval Arcade was getting too serious.

Then I spent the week putting more things in the room.

The five-to-ten-hours plan is now two weeks old and 100% not being followed.

The room got denser.

There's a gold box on the coffee table. There's a desk phone you can actually dial. Grant talks. The Nobel medal does something. Most of the gold on the walls is clickable now. The arcade cabinet has five games instead of three.

I'll give away one: somewhere in the room is a hidden Tom Brady clip.

I'm not telling you where.

More Things to Click

Last week I was trying to make first clicks less predictable.

This week I was trying to make more of the room worth clicking.

The gold box is the big one. It looks like a joke. It turns into a walk through American wealth, who has it, and how this administration found a way to participate. Sourced.

Then it gets stupid again.

The desk phone is the opposite. You pick it up. You speed-dial somebody. Something happens.

It has no educational value whatsoever.

Grant is in between. Click the portrait.

The nuclear football somehow turned into WarGames. The Resolute Desk will still let you write an executive order.

I'm not walking you through the rest.

There's a Lobby Now

Small screens were a real problem. On a phone the Oval Office is basically a postage stamp with untappable hotspots. So phones now get a lobby with a short list of things that work well on small screens, plus a button to enter the room anyway.

The grandeur of the Oval Arcade is best enjoyed on a bigger screen.

I actually put that in the lobby.

The Cabinet Has Five Games

Last week it had three.

This week it has Gridlock and Strait Sweeper. One is a tiny light-cycle game. One is Minesweeper for a shipping lane.

They're still small and stupid. They still do a different job than the rest of the Oval. You can stop exploring and actually play.

That still feels like the right use of the name Oval Arcade.

The Photograph Was Thirty Megabytes

This is the unglamorous part.

The Oval Office image the whole site sits on was a 31-megabyte PNG. Every visit, including phones, was being asked to download a billboard.

So this week I finally dealt with it.

The site now ships smaller WebP versions at a few widths, and the browser picks one that matches the screen. The giant original stays on my machine. You get something more like a few hundred kilobytes.

We also stopped shipping a pile of leftover audio and images that nothing in the room was using anymore. Firefox was hitching on some of the movie clips, so those got fixed. Search listings were showing the nav chrome instead of a description, so that got fixed too.

It is why the room actually loads.

This Is Still the Same Thing

Last week I said Oval Arcade is a comedy environment that happens to contain serious, sourced information.

That is still the assignment.

The gold box is serious until it isn't. Grant has something to say. The desk phone has absolutely nothing to say.

The room should reward curiosity. It should reward clicking something twice. It should occasionally reward clicking something you have no business clicking.

Last week I was worried Oval Arcade was getting too serious.

This week I added Tom Brady talking about investing in crypto.

We're fine.