Ask the ball

What a ball is actually for

Nobody believes the ball. What it does is end a stall. Two people have been going back and forth about the same small decision for ten minutes, the ball says outlook good, and everybody is relieved to have an excuse to stop. The answer is not information; it is permission to move on.

Which is also why it should only ever be pointed at small decisions. For a real choice between named options a wheel is honest about what it is doing, and for a straight fifty-fifty the coin is faster and carries none of the mystique.

Writing your own answers

A ball with your own answers stops being a toy and starts being a prompt. A class can fill it with study advice, so a shake gives back "read it out loud" or "try the second one first". A team can fill it with the four places they ever go for lunch. A party can fill it with the forfeits.

Keep them short. The window is small on purpose, and an answer longer than about six words stops reading like a verdict and starts reading like a paragraph. Write more of them rather than longer ones: twenty four fit, and the ball avoids repeating the last one it gave.

The question box, and why it is empty when you come back

Typing the question out loud is half the ritual, so the box is there. What is not there is any record of it. The question is held in the page while it is open and discarded when you leave, because a list of the questions people ask a magic ball is exactly the sort of thing that should not exist on anybody's server, including ours.

The answer set you choose is kept, because that is a setting rather than a confession, and it is kept in this browser rather than anywhere else.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

The tool runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, nothing you make is uploaded, and nothing you type is sent anywhere or put into a link.

The page itself is not silent, though: it carries advertising code and a visit counter that sets no cookie, and the cookie page says exactly what each of those does.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.eightball.bank, pph.eightball.custom, pph.eightball.motion and pph.eightball.muted, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.