Inspiration
When trying to come up with initial ideas, our team focused on issues that were common, but that also would be fairly easy to tackle. While the rapid advancement of technology has undoubtedly had many positive consequences on our society, there are some negative ones as well. Idleness and general contentment with wasting time doing relatively pointless things for hours on end are some of the negative consequences that come from the rise of technology. The digital world is certainly an interesting one, but many people don't truly utilize the awesome opportunities it presents. We are blessed with essentially every piece of knowledge known to mankind at our fingertips, yet we spend our days keeping up with celebrity gossip, watching videos of other people getting hurt, and sharing funny posts on social media. Wouldn't it be something to be able to inspire people to go out and actually do something for a change? Perhaps that's a lofty goal, but if we can even get one person to swap a Monday wasted looking at lame memes for something a little more worthwhile (like looking at good memes, or doing something productive), we consider that a victory.
What it does
The concept is simple. Click the stale memes and exterminate them. Once you succeed, a timer shows how much time you spent on this trivial game. Below the timer is a list of different ways you could have been more productive with that amount of time, to (hopefully) serve as an inspiration.
How we built it
The website was built on the exploitation of a single laborer who used nodeJS in the intellij IDE. The nodeJS application was uploaded to github and then connected to heroku, where it is currently ran on. We only used node because the main programmer wanted to practice and get better at javascript. We didn't really need too much backend for this project. We originally planned to create the game with random colored squares, but then it was changed to memes because we are THE MEME TEAM.
Challenges we ran into
- Had trouble using the canvas element for the grid, so we ended up just using a table (very deprecated, yes, but it works).
- Had trouble using POST to this node project for whatever reason... very annoying, currently insecurely passes the number of seconds to the winner's page.
- When the hackathon first started, the main programmer's git ssh key got screwed up for whatever reason. It took him a few hours to realize the problem and to fix it. After he fixed it, he was able to get the site available on herokuapp in a few minutes.
- The hardest part of the hackathon was trying to set up the domain name on domain.com. We have never seen such a terrible, super-commercialized website before. It was not very user-friendly. We spent a majority of the last day trying to get the custom domain name we bought, memetherapy.org, to connect to heroku. We didn't even finish this... What a terrible service man.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Surviving our first Hackathon!
- Actually finishing this project.
- Living off of only granola bars and chips for a solid day.
- Getting a mobile-friendly app without trying too hard.
What we learned
- We learned that "In The Air Tonight" by Phil Collins gets very annoying when played more than five times in the span of a day.
- The main programmer learned that he hates web programming and domain.com.
What's next for Meme Therapy
We are currently searching for our mannequin's stolen hand, but once we get to the bottom of that, we plan to make the program smoother than a baby's buttock and more ornate than a rich man's Christmas tree. Additionally, we hope to turn this project into a mobile app so it can reach a wider audience.
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