Added a Chrome Dino-style game to my research tool's pipeline wait screen driven by real SSE events [P]

Slightly unhinged engineering decision but it works.

My tool (ScholarScout) has a 2-3 minute pipeline: fetch papers from 8 databases → analyze trends → generate ideas. During that time, the user sees a pixel art owl running through a parallax forest.

The fun part: it's not fake animation. Each paper dot that spawns in the game corresponds to a real paper_found SSE event from the backend. Papers drip-feed at 600ms intervals from a queue (even if the fetch returned 30 papers at once). Colors = source (white=arXiv, green=PubMed, purple=Crossref). When pipeline finishes, owl celebrates.

Tech: vanilla JS canvas, 32x32 sprite sheet (12 frames), requestAnimationFrame loop, image-rendering: pixelated. No dependencies.

Here's the demo vid

ScholarScout v1.5.3 - Demo

Actual useful changes in the same release:

• Review Mode: paper clustering (k-means on embeddings, Jaccard fallback) + per-cluster synthesis + cross-cutting analysis
• Paper freshness: _used_count per paper in cache, least-used prioritized, auto-widen date range on exhaustion
• All thresholds externalized to config.yaml

github.com/neej4/ScholarScout

or

ScholarScout — Papers in. Ideas out.