Category: /b/

Frolicking with the fairies

Let’s switch gears for a little while here, and steer the conversation away from you-know-which-game. Just for a while. Today I want to write about something completely different. Something called Glittermitten Grove.

This is a cute little resource management-type game where you help a colony of fairies to build themselves a foresty wonderland. The goal of the game is more or less to simply gather enough food to get your fairies through the winter. It’s pretty easy at first, as you only have like three fairies, and they consume roughly 2 food units a season.

Then things get a little more complicated, as more fairies move in. You’ll have to build more panties to hold more food. Since fairies also tire out over time, you’ll need to build houses for them to sleep in. And of course, you need materials from which to construct these buildings, which brings us to possibly the most interesting part of the game: wood.

As in many other video games, and also real life, wood is harvested from trees. Trees will grow on their own over time, and you can chop of bits and pieces of them to collect wood. Branch size and type of tree will dictate how much wood you actually earn. But you can’t just go cutting everything down all willy-nilly. Nope. Trees are also where all of your buildings are constructed, so you have to strike a careful balance between trimming the trees to gain wood, and keeping them large enough to support your fairy colony.

Light also plays a prominent role. Trees need to get sufficient sunlight to stay alive, and a tree that lives in the shadows for too long will wither and die. Your playfield is also dictated by a different light, which is provided by sight orbs. Everything out of the range of these orbs is covered in an impenetrable fog of war. Sight orbs are built using sparkles, which are collected by placing a prism in a tree and letting it absorb sunlight.

Sparkles also fuel magic, which comes in two varieties. There is the Fertilizer spell, which speeds up the growth of a tree. It’s nice that you can target specific parts of the tree, if you should need to add some weight to one side, or just want to grow out some extra branches to chop. There is also a fireworks spell, which is used to dig underground. There, you can find plenty of neat stuff, like crystals and treasure chests that are loaded with resources. I’ve heard there’s even a big secret under there somewhere…

Glittermitten Grove is a much more robust game than it seems at first glance. Having to balance light, trees, resources, and magic all at once is very engaging and a little challenges. I’ve made it through more than one winter with only two or three food bits left. It’s very nice to play a real-time resource management game after years and years of the stupid mobile and mobile-like games that run on a series of timers.

Also nice is that every fairy has a cute/dumb cliché fairy name, like Lavender Twinklebottom or Sprinkles Honeygrape. It’s fun just to look at them all and see which names make you groan the loudest.

I don’t know when or if the game ends, but I do intend to keep playing for a bit. While the gameplay that I’ve seen is robust enough to hold my interest for a while, it does seem like there should be something else to it. Or maybe you just play until you simply can’t keep up with the influx of fairies. I do have hope that something new will unlock eventually, because the game could certainly stand to offer a surprise or two.

So blog

Gosh, work sure has been workey lately. Doin’ all the work and business. Keeping the numbers up. Or down, maybe, depending on which way they ought to be.

Good lord, I wish there were something halfway interesting to say about my work. Alas!

There are other boring real-life developments to talk about, though! Hooray!

Like, for one, I am now officially the proud owner of an automocar. I don’t know how I keep managing to bumble into life improvements, but that’s just the way it goes for me. Law of averages, I suppose. When you don’t take action to make things happen, something’s bound to happen on its own eventually, right?

But yes, when my late grandfather passed, his car was given to my uncle, so that he could ferry my grandmother about. Once in a while, I would borrow it when necessary. Over the course of time, it began to stay in my possession longer and longer. My grandma would often talk about how she just wanted me to have it, but unfortunately I just didn’t have the means to support car ownership. Now that I’m living with mom and dad again, my cup overfloweth and I was finally able to complete the transaction and register the car under my name. The extra nice part is that my grandma was paying the insurance up until now. I’d like to pay her back, but there is no reality in which she would accept my money. I mean, she gave me a whole freaking car for free.

Have I mentioned lately how great my grandparents are? Even if I have, it can’t be said enough. And I mean all four of ’em. I really should make more time to spend with the three I have left.

Next up: Home renovations! Or, bedroom renovations, I guess. I think that at this point, I have put more work into improving my temporary bedroom than I ever did when I was a homeowner. The hook I hung on the door is almost too simple to mention, but I also installed a wall mount for my massive television. I had put it off for a month, but then realized that I could really use the extra surface space, so now my TV hovers in the air. Huzzah!

I also put up a small shelf over my bed to hold all my toys. I did a very thorough job of making sure it was level, but then completely forgot to center it properly between the wall and window. So now it’s mis-aligned with the photo frame that hangs directly above it, and it’s driving me bananas. I don’t feel like banging new holes into the wall and filling up the old ones though, so I’m just going to learn to live with it. It will forever be a reminder of my inability to do even the simplest tasks properly.

Also, yes, I know that frame is still empty. If I had a picture worth putting in there, I would.

Other things that happen

I’m fairly well-known as the kind of person who doesn’t like to do things that require effort and/or pants. But last weekend, I did a whole lot of things! New(ish) things! Including but not limited to:

  • Talked to the greeter and took the time to craft my own burger at McDonald’s
  • Ate at McDonald’s on Friday, Saturday and Sunday (I’m not proud of this one)
  • Went on a late-night Pokémon Go expedition to the zoo
  • Met and played with a new puppy
  • Checked out an annual craft show for the first time
  • Bought expensive artisanal mustards
  • Was disappointed that I didn’t find a candle that I liked
  • Performed an “Irish Goodbye”
  • Helped my grandparents move into an apartment
  • Went through a regular checkout lane instead of the express checkout at Safeway because I wanted a specific cashier

What an exciting life I lead!

A stray observation

You know how in some shows, a character will ramble to themselves very specifically about whatever situation they’re in, as a way to tell the audience about what’s going on? I think it’s a pretty common thing, at least in family-friendly cartoons, but I’ve never really thought about it before so I can’t say for sure how prevalent it is.

Lately though, I am finding that it drives me completely bonkers. The “Exposition Monologue” trope, where a character explains their situation to nobody but themselves (and the audience), is a terrible way to shoehorn in some information. It’s very annoying, and really takes me out of whatever I’m watching. Like, I get that you don’t have the time or money to always show everything, but at least throw a second character in there. It’s still obvious, but at least the exposition doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb when one character is explaining the thing to someone else.

Anyway, this little quibble comes up thanks to a notably bad episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003), where the first few minutes are made up of an incredibly annoying character that just keeps chattering to herself. This could have been taken care of in the cold open teaser, but no. And this episode is sandwiched in the middle of the otherwise stellar Season 3, which makes it seem even worse. Oh well. They can’t all be winners.

What is filler? We just don’t know.

Hey so September’s been a pretty quiet month vis-a-vis blogging.

Here’s an update: I moved over an old article from the Angelfire site. Which one? Stay tuned, as you’ll find out in three days!

Will I do any others? Ehh, maybe. I’d like to clean up the stragglers, but I don’t see myself being so motivated as to actually follow through.

(This is very much a 2003-style post.)

Don’t get your hopes up

Sometimes I like to pop random words into my search bar and then read whatever posts come up. That’s when I realized that I had not typed the word “penis” into any posts so far during 2016, and I felt like that needed to be remedied. So I wrote this post. A post what has the word “penis” in it. Twice, now.

I hope you have all enjoyed this attempt at humour.

And if you’re me, from the future, searching for posts with the word “penis” in them… Dude, you should probably get back to work. Oh, but read this one first. It made me laugh pretty hard today. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it, too.