Pet Society

For any of you folks looking for Pet Society news, the Stadium is now open.

I had hoped this would be where you could get pets to fight to the death for glory and money, but it isn’t.

Booger & The Dr Pepper

     I got my bottle of Dr Pepper this morning.  Checking the cap, I saw that it was a winner so I hurriedly plugged the code into the website.  I wondered if I were going to win another screen saver?  Maybe the same wallpaper I’ve already won?  Would it be a ringtone I couldn’t use?

     No!  None of those things.  I won a Dr Pepper keychain!  Now I have to wait ten to twelve weeks to get the thing.  Sheesh!  I want it now!

 

    For anyone interested, my Pet Society pet, Booger, has hit upon some sad financial times.  He sure could use your help, if you were so inclined.  Could you let this poor dog bear animal live on the street with nothing more than a tin can, a tire, and a rubber ducky?

     It looks like Playfish has a new game out now, too, called GeoChallenge.  I’ll have to take an in-depth look at that one, too, pretty soon.

Facebook Games Review III: Pathwords

     Pathwords is one of those games that’s great if you have a good vocabulary and a pretty good eye.  It also helps if you’re playing with friends that don’t have a good vocabulary or good eyes.

     When Pathwords starts up you’re greeted by a hexagonal grid that’s covered in letters.  The object is to start on a letter by clicking on it and then dragging your mouse over the other letters until you form a word.  The letters you have selected are also reflected on the bottom of the screen and are colored red, if you don’t have a valid word, or green if you do.  When you release the mouse then the tiles you used are destroyed and new blocks fall to take their places.  It’s a timed game, too, so you have five minutes to find as many words as possible. 

     Overall it’s a pretty good game.  There’s nothing spectacular about it.  Really, it’s quite utilitarian.  I

can’t recommend playing it on a laptop with a touchpad, though.  Sometimes the cursor can go all over the place and you end up trying to spell a word just to get gobbeldygook out of it.

     Like most Facebook games, Pathwords keeps track of your score and taunts your other playing friends with how great you are. 

     There is some strategy that comes into play.  If you see a big word coming up but you can’t quite get to it yet then you will need to settle on lesser words to let the other letters fall into place until you can get your big word complete.

     So, grab your dictionary and try it out for some interesting times.

Good News and Bad

Hello everyone,

I’m pleased to say that yesterday was a banner day here at GoE.  I finally broke one hundred visits in a day, for a total of 122 hits.  I don’t know what clock WordPress is working from, but it says today is a new day so I’ll go with that.

I’m saddened, though, that “orange kittens” and variations of that has been booted as the top search term that gets people here.  It was finally knocked down by “Yoville.”  If the stats so far are any indication, then tomorrow they may be beaten by people searching for cheats in “Pet Society.”

Orange kittens has been the biggest draw to this sight since the very first post, about genetically modified kittens.  To be fair, though, the picture has gotten more people here than the article.  And it’s not even my picture.

Anyway, I’m hoping a lot of people read some of the site and have decided it’s worthwhile to read on occassion.  I don’t get anything from this other than the satisfaction that it amuses somebody at some point for some reason.

Facebook Games Review II: Pet Society

     Pet Society is another SIMS kind of game.  Or maybe more like Little Computer People that’s more interactive.  It’s a side-view game where you make a “pet” and name it then let it loose in a house.

     And this is where a grown man should stop if he wasn’t totally

crazy.  I, of course, pressed on. 

     If Pet Society has a goal, that goal is to amass trophies.  You get trophies for visiting friends, playing ball, buying clothes and other things.  The secondary goal is to amass money so you can get the trophies for buying things.  Along the way I suppose you can also buy furniture and flooring and stuff to personalize your house.

     Essentially, Barbie with quasi-animals.

     Your pet isn’t just stuck in his house, though.  He can wander

around town.  Passing through trees can net you an occasional coin.  There are stores to visit, like a grocery store and furniture store.  There are also empty lots where, if you’ve got friends and invite them to play, a construction marker marks there spots.  If they actually join then the spot turns into another house.

     Walking into a friends house gives you a menu where you can engage in activities with your friend’s pet.  Dance, tell a joke, or whatever and you can earn points to level up (giving you money and different goodies) and money. 

     Also in town are two areas that aren’t active yet.  One is a coffee shop which, I guess, will be a place where you can interact with other players.  The other is a stadium.  I’m hoping this is where pets can battle to the death for fun and prizes.

     There are a couple of things I don’t like about Pet Society.  One

is that it’s harder than Hell to make money unless you have a lot of friends or cheat somehow.  The easiest way to get serious coinage is to buy it with your PayPal account.  Even in Yoville, you can “work” for $200 or so every six hours. 

     The other thing kind of disturbs me.  If you hold down the mouse button and rub the cursor over your pet, they make some weird purring noises.  If you keep rubbing then a coin pops out of their head.  Ummm…  Kind of phallic, you know?

Facebook Games Review I — Yoville

     In the past week I’ve decided that it’s time to become a bit more Internet savvy.  Sure, I’ve got the blog thing that I’ve been doing for years, but I’m woefully behind the times when it comes to social networking sites, life stream sites, and whatever other goofball things happen to be out there.

     I do have a Facebook account, so I figured that would be a good place to start.  For a long time I was getting all these invitation for these weird things.  Zombie wars, Pirate wars, Werewolf wars, Mob wars, and so on.  I never really knew what they were for.  It also doesn’t help that I don’t have a bazillion friends. 

     Anyway, I started looking at some of the applications that were available.  As near as I can figure, 90% of the applications on Facebook are for teenage girls.  The other 10% are kind of playable, although a lot of them remind me of graphical versions of BBS games from long ago.

Yoville

     Right now I’m playing “Yoville,” which looks like a scaled down

“Sims.”  Essentially the idea is to make money and buy furniture and clothes.  You have an apartment, which is where you can put your furniture and home decorations.  You can also wander around town and talk to people.  It’s kind of interesting, except the town is full of people who “tlk 2 u like dis.”  It’s kind of like Brooklyn or Bayonne.

     To make money, you go to the Widget factory and sign into the computer.  You can also make money by playing games with other people in town, like “tic-tac-toe” or “rock-paper-scissors.”

     Buying food at the diner allows you to get energy that you can

use for actions.  Like, doing the “robot dance” or waving your arms around.  You can buy alcohol which fuzzes up your screen.  You can also buy coffee so you can move around faster.  I haven’t seen anything for simulated sex, which I’m pretty sure is at the top of most people’s wish list.

     Despite the fact that I think everyone that’s on “Yoville” is a teenage girl, everyone seems to be quite nice. 

Friday Nonsense

     Last night I made King Ranch Chicken for dinner.  I got the recipe here and followed the simple version, which uses canned soup.  It turned out pretty good, although I think my chicken was too tough.  Brennon, though, started eating and only stopped long enough to say, “Holy crap, this is good!”  I take that as a good sign.

     I wanted to get “Spore” when it came out, but I wasn’t able to.  I keep reading and hearing about what a disappointment it is, so maybe it’s best I didn’t get it.  I also wanted to get “Force Unleashed” but wasn’t able.  Ars Technica is saying that the game is crap.  Maybe I’m just not meant to get anything.  Although I don’t usually count a review as the word of God anyway.  I’d still like to play it, reviews be damned.

     Fallout 3 is the next in my line of things I want but I won’t get.  I hope it’s good, though.

Random Crap

     I’m using the new Windows Live Writer Beta now.  I’m not seeing much of a difference and I still can’t figure out how to change the default font.  And the ‘tab’ key still puts it into block quote mode instead of giving me a damn indent. 

     It’s actually sometimes raining today!  I haven’t seen rain in forever.  I’ll have to write it in my journal so that future archeologists will know what the weather was like today.  Yeah.

---

     Despite the fact that I’ve been using computers forever, sometimes I just never get around to figuring out what stuff is on the internet.  I’m still not totally sure what a “podcast” is supposed to be.  I’ve only recently gotten around to using Twitter.  You know, stuff like that.  My photo albums on every site that use is an absolute mess.  I’m afraid to see what my Picasa site looks like.  It all makes me feel so behind the times.  But at least I have a Facebook and MySpace account. 

---

     Tomorrow is Talk Like A Pirate Day.  I don’t think I’ll be able to participate on account of me not being good at talking like a pirate.  It would probably be a good day to release future “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, though.

A Daily Dairy Diary

     Are you one of those people that keeps a journal?  An adult version of the diary?  If you do, do you ever write in it while thinking that someone in the future, like a thousand years in the future, might read it one day?  Does that affect what you write, like make things clearer and document stuff better or do you sanitize it just in case some futuristic academic decides to judge your life?

     Or are you one of the people that does keep a journal but doesn’t give a hoot who reads it or when?  Or maybe you don’t keep a journal at all.

     During those times in my life when I do keep a journal (which I never keep up on and abandon at some point) I can’t help but think that someone is going to read it in the future.  Like, some archeologist in a few hundred years is going to dig up my notebooks and read through them.  I wonder if the language will still be the same, or if it will change significantly that my writing is unreadable (which it would be anyway because I’ve got sloppy penmanship penpersonship). 

     So, I think should I put in a bunch of details about the weather is stuff, just in case the future would find it interesting?  Should I explain any idioms or let them try and figure it out?  Will my diary journal be a Rosetta Stone for future generations?

     In reality, though, they’ll probably all end up in the dump.  Or, more scary, be recycled.  Why would recycling be scary?  Think of it this way, if the ancient Egyptians or Greeks were keen on recycling, what would we know about them today?

hulu-stuff

     I had to drive to Louisiana and back the other day.  We made it in just over 24 hours.  Luckily, hurricane Ike hadn’t touched down yet.  While I saw a little bit of flooding on the way back it was nothing like what it would be a few hours later. 
     The trip there was worse in some ways.  I had the two oldest boys with me and they napped until we got to Houston.  Then they got hungry, but I wanted to get past Houston first because of the way I10 works there.  It wasn’t anything to be worried about, though, because there was no traffic at all.  Driving through Houston on I10 at 6:00pm and not seeing any traffic is kind of spooky.
     Then they started getting hungrier.  So once we past through downtown I started looking for something, like McDonalds or whatever.  Everything was closed.  Every once in a while there’d be an open gas station, where we’d get a couple of snacks, but otherwise everything was shut down.  We didn’t find a place to eat until we got to Jennings, La. and that town was packed with people.
     But we got there okay.  And we left the next morning and got back fairly quickly.  The highways were getting kind of backed up once we left I10.  Police were everywhere, even though it didn’t stop people from driving like asses.  People in black Dodge Chargers, in particular.
     Zoey was ecstatic when we got back.  She’d been left alone for that time so she went nuts when we got back.  She still had plenty of food and water.  Tooka was just about out, though, and I left three bowls of food in his cage.  I did have a backup plan in case something went wrong and we weren’t able to get back in time.

     Hulu.com rocks.  I’ve watched two seasons of The Pretender, and the first seasons of Tremors and Journeyman. 
     I’d never seen any of these before.  I like The Pretender a lot.  I think it’s up to four seasons, so I have two more to go.  I think.  I’ll have to look and see if they’re on DVD.
     I like the Tremors movies a lot.  I think they’re funny, smart, and goofy.  I’m sure other people didn’t watch any others after the first because it didn’t have Kevin Bacon in it.  And there’s probably people that didn’t watch after the second one because Fred Ward wasn’t in it.  But I think Michael Gross as Burt Gummer totally rocks.  I didn’t know he was in the TV show until I started watching it.  Overall, I think it’s pretty good for a TV show.  They don’t turn down the gore that much from the movies, and it’s still funny.  Also, several episodes had Christopher Lloyd (Back to the Future, Taxi) as an eccentric scientist.  Some of the special effects are kind of cheesy, but not too bad considering it’s television.
     Journeyman surprised me.  I thought it was going to be a lot like Quantum Leap, and it is, but it has its own twists and charms.  It’s about a newspaper reporter that (seemingly) randomally gets chucked back and forth in time tracking someone that they’re supposed to help.  It works pretty well.  Unfortunately, I hear that series has been cancelled after the first season as well.
     Hulu is also good for catching shows you may have missed, if you don’t have a DVR or something.  I was able to watch Kitchen Nightmares and Burn Notice last night.

     I’m writing this now using Notes by Thinkfree.com.  It looks pretty interesting and allows you to post to a Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress or Movable Type blog.  I guess.  I’m about to try that now. 
     My only real problems are:

• Tab doesn’t work
• Fonts keep changing with different paragraphs
• Can’t insert a horizontal rule

     Other than that, it may be a decent alternative.  Unfortunately, it still doesn’t match Live Writer because I can’t post to my Live blogs.  The upside is that I can use it in Windows and Linux.  I guess I’ll never have a blogging tool in Linux that will match Live Writer.