There is a cursed steam somewhere in New York that holds Tamagotchi’s soul. Stop vaping and your digital pet dies. Only engineers who once worked for Andrill, a meta and weapons maker, were able to create extremely vicious machines.
And that’s exactly what they did at last month’s annual NYU Baka Hackathon. Stupid hackathons are a tradition of software engineers, hackers and maker spaces. Every year people from all over the country come together to use their skills to create something very stupid. Past inventions include machines that appear to have angered themselves when they want to get out of a small story, selfie sticks for cans of beer, and head mount racks that can be seen through the long intestines.
The NYU Baka Hackathon is organized by the Interactive Telecommunications Program at Tisch School of the Arts. It lasted for 12 hours and included works such as tables that didn’t stop shaking, and printers who drafted legally binding documents to track Pink’s promises. But the “steam or die” egg was a bell of a ball.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzqx2apc9dm
The machine was invented by former Meta employee Rebecca Xun and former Andrill employee Lucia Camacho. They originally thought of machines as a way to help Xun stop Vaping. “I originally wanted to stop vaping, so I was going to do this forever,” Xun told the Washington Square Times. “But if you use this power to exploit evil and make yourself more addicted, it’s more fun and stupid.”
Traditional eggs require different kinds of love. It needs to be watered, fed, played with and cared for. Users need to clean up their poop and balance the various health meters. Xun and Camacho digital pets have only one desire. That means you keep inhaling the vapor. Otherwise, his face fills the screen, and giant wet tears shoot in the side of his eyes.
In this video of NYU students at the Hackathon, you can see an early version of the machine in this video. “It’s very intense,” Camacho says in the video that an animation of Tanaka Drunk screaming is being played on screen. In the original version of the project, the duo vapeed and connected to a computer that ran the digital pet.
They have been repeating ever since, and now have a self-contained version, but there is a crying cartoon, which looks like a C4 brick. They tied up a small screen with steam from pink elf bar BC5000. The wire runs from the screen to some basic components on the back of the ELF bar.
Tamaoguchi, who dies if he stops Puff, was a stupid hackathon breakout star. Xunn and Camacho have attracted a lot of attention, but Xun told the Futurist that the experience was not all positive. Before the hackathon, she wanted to use her digital pet to help her stop vaping. “We tested it so much that we were both sick with vaping,” she said.
