Monkey News

Just chiming in with a few minor updates!

• Server performance should be pretty solid now! Upgraded to a much bigger machine to handle all the traffic and all the monkeys and all the bananas.
• You can now sort monkey words by "Top" or "Discovered" or "Contributes" (they all have some amount of overlap)
• You can now see how other monkeys achieved their items by tapping on them in the gear screen
• Check out the community at /r/MonkeysZip!

Stay tuned for more updates! Now that the server issues have calmed down I can focus on highlighting some of our more interesting primates!

First, a round of applause for all the monkeys working very hard to make sure this service becomes as difficult as possible to run! 👏👏👏

Today was spent putting out various database fires, not always succesfully. But it's understandable, considering that 3000 monkeys have written over 17 million words in the last day or so. But have no fear, we'll be back up and running in a moment, currently expanding disk capacity, which is the limiting factor right now.

In the meantime, there's been a few updates as well! You'll notice (when back up) that you can now set the color of your monkey's background! A small feature so you and your monkey neighbors can collaborate on themes! There's also been a handful of new items added!

• A stack of books
• Rare space helmet
• Rocking chair
• Others????

I hope you've been enjoying this experiment so far! Later tonight I'll have a followup post to meet some more of our interesting monkeys! Thanks for your patience!

Hey there, quick update! We now have /r/MonkeysZip if you want to share feedback, a particularly funny monkey, or yell at me that a Discord would be more appropriate! Come hang out!

On April 1st, 2025, around 11:00am EST, the first monkeys began typing. The very first word that the very first monkey typed... was "v". Just, "v".

You might argue that the letter V is not a word. That it shouldn't count, and that the monkeys I provide are clearly useless. I might not disagree with you. But you know who would?

SHAKESPEARE.

You see, a standalone "v" appears 518 times within the works of Shakespeare. Sure, nearly all of them refer to Henry V - but that's who Skirissa Shmulpy was referring to as well.

Well, in the subsequent hours, the rest of our monkey cohort really couldn't help themselves but continue to type "v" thousands upon thousands of times. More times than Shakespeare could've ever dreamed of. Once a word is written as many times as it appears within his works, consider this word completed. Monkeys who continue to type it will no longer receive the bonus points for contributing it.

Completed words

So what other words have the monkeys completed? A whopping 2170 words! Of course all the letters, words like "the", "of", "are". But also some impressive one-hit-wonders such as:

• nemesis (claimed by Bozzy Karro)
• heareth (Cranky Gaster)
• spades (Flanny Lisworth)

and - the most highly esteemed,

• esteemest (Lezzle Twirro)

Which is a stunning nine letters long. "Banananas" is also nine letters but no monkey has yet claimed it.

Long words

While we're on the topic of nine-letter words, let's also take a peek at what we have on that side of things, Shakespearean or otherwise.

We've got two hearty eight letter words:

• anisette (Nelfo Frigel)
• faltered (Izzle Scratt)

And a digestible portion of 7 letter words:

 riveted  deceits  laertes  seibels  vintage 
 caterer  uraemia  nemesis  cringed  thither 
 othello  daisies  tibetan  bearlet  parapet 
 marians  shitted  teeside  throats  pretext 
 settled  gloated  setters  notthat  tissues 
 retouch  sesames  gravels  married  tanners 

BUT! The longest word, is, indeed "esteemest" at nine imposing letters. Lezzle absolutely knocked it out of the park on that one.

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I hope you enjoyed this update, I have lots more updates in the pipeline, both on the monkey-field and here, so stay tuned. Thanks for joining and enjoying this project with me.