This is half changelog, half ramble.

Six games in the arcade now

There's a new light cycle game. You can play solo vs the computer, or create a lobby and send a link to a friend to play 1v1.

That makes six games total:

• Neon Cycles: four players, last bike standing
• Brawl-Out!!: a boxing game where you read the other player's tells, dodge, and counter
• Road Hopper: endless road crossing, one lane at a time
• Lunar Rover: an isometric roll down geometric slopes against the clock
• Ants vs Fungus: lane defense in the garden, holding off waves of ants
• Pixel Dash: a platformer where you collect coins and reach the flag

They all share a leaderboard and hook into the Callout system, so you can challenge anyone to any of them and play head to head.

Additions to finance tools

Added an Investment Advisor. It's an educational dashboard where you enter your current holdings and a watchlist, and it runs a set of pluggable strategy rules (swing trade and options setups) to surface ideas, each one with the reasoning written out. If you have an API key configured, it will also write a plain English narrative using Claude. If you don't, it falls back to the deterministic rules. This is intended to help the user find setups that look interesting.

The second is a Markets page with various technical analysis. It's a tracked ticker dashboard that caches daily price bars in the database and draws them with Chart.js. Overlay SMA, EMA, and Bollinger Bands on the price, then enable separate panels for Volume, RSI, and MACD.

The third is paper trader. It can handle options as well as shares. You can buy and sell calls and puts, with position effects tracked correctly. The advisor and the paper trading app are also linked. When the advisor suggests a move, a button is sometimes available to set up a paper trade that deep links into the trading screen with the order already filled in.

Free quote providers rate limit you, go down, and quietly throttle. I ended up building a fallback chain across providers (Finnhub first, then Yahoo, then a couple of backups) with negative caching, so one slow lookup doesn't stall the whole dashboard.

Little stuff

Animated avatars show up across the site: chat, the forum, blog comments, and the sidebar. The photo galleries got a slideshow mode and proper public and private settings.

Where this is headed

This site has quietly turned into my sandbox for trying things. A budgeting suite, a paper trading floor, a small arcade, a forum, real time chat. None of it is trying to be a product.

Next up is fleshing out the Financial Planner, which already has an interactive FIRE flowchart in it, and probably another game.

Thanks for reading. More soon.