Pulp Free

It’s that time of year again. Cooler weather, check. Fall leaves changing colors, check. Monopoly at McDonald’s, check! I’ve looked forward to this game for the last few years – not that I’m specifically a big fan of McDonald’s… I did grow up with Happy Meals and have admitted to having a short-term crush on their Chicken Selects a few years back. Come to think of it, I also get a craving for a McRib… But besides ALL that – it is what it is.

Now after getting all excited about gathering up all my game pieces and hoping this would be the year that Boardwalk would be mine, I came across a Web site that simply dashed all my hopes for being a winner. What? Not happy with free fries or Coke Points? Check this out:

Out of the millions of game pieces, the chances for finding the big ticket items are pretty slim. Only 3 Boardwalks. And that’s if none of the game pieces get thrown away! Not that I’m going to be eating 10 piece Chicken McNuggets just to grab a cool million… But it does seem like a long shot.

So if you’re still persistent in getting a few “1 in 4″ prizes, know that the packet of hash browns off the Dollar Menu are supposedly the cheapest way of getting game pieces. Suppose you could also send away for free game pieces – but then you don’t get to taste the goodness of fried potatoes! I’ve also heard that buying a medium water scores you some game pieces – but that’s just odd.

So if you’re reading this and happen to have found a Boardwalk game piece lying around, drop me a message below… I might have a match!

It’s been a long time coming, but I’m finally getting up enough courage to back away from FarmVille. Seriously, did somebody lace this Facebook game with crack? While I wasn’t one of the first to jump into this black hole of time & space, I would say I was early enough in to have laid waste to too many hours to count. At first it was fun – you know… All my friends were doing it. I had a buddy who had a pretty high level obtained and I just had to beat him!! (Truth be told, he’s no longer playing…) It was a great way to divert some time. Harmless fun, right?

Plow. Seed. Harvest.

Rinse. Repeat.

That started over a year ago – and now it’s hard to put it down. I get it – there’s no real value or point to it. Most of my friends have stopped playing, why can’t I? I haven’t bought any Farm Cash so at least I’m not out any real dollars…

I did think about quitting cold turkey. CafeWorld – gone. Even put FarmVille out of play for a bit and switched most of my time over to FrontierVille – it’s now gone as well. Both applications deleted and all that dead time gone for good. FarmVille – just a break. Then hopefully a delete as well. But how can I resist?

Oh little FarmVille Truck Seeder – I’ll miss you.

Now I do have two friends still at a higher level than I (I’m only level 72 with 465,232 XP). I know, let it go… Just let me get those pumpkins harvested first…

I grew up with Pac-Man. The Atari days – and oh yes… spending many a quarter or token in the arcades. I loved just walking around watching other people play… Spending a great deal of time with my all-time favorite Discs-of-Tron. So it was only fitting that for the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man, Google celebrated in style… Their very own playable version of Pac-Man on their home page:

While originally just available during the weekend of Pac-Man’s 30th anniversary, you can now play for as long as you want at google.com/pacman

Amazingly enough, the game on Google’s page is written entirely in Javascript, HTML, and CSS. Also from Google:

“To pay the homage that Pac-Man deserves as a ground-breaking innovation in the gaming world, Google equipped the doodle with many unique characteristics from the original Pac-Man game,” said a Google spokesman. “From preserving the distinct personalities of the ghosts Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde, to re-creating programming bugs from the original game, like a ‘kill screen’ on level 256, Marcin Wichary, a senior user experience designer at Google, and our resident Google doodler, Ryan Germick, remained as faithful to the spirit of Pac-Man as possible.”

I did chuckle to myself now that the weekend has past and most of the news stories about the beeps, noises and arcade music coming from coworkers computers have been posted… These gems from Derek Thompson:

• Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day)
• $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate).
• For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 Google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time. Imagine what you could build with that army of man power.
• $298,803,988 is the dollar tally if all of the Pac-Man players had an approximate cost of the average Google employee.

All this Pac-Man makes me want to go find that old cassette tape of Buckner & Garcia’s “Pac-Man Fever” – good times…

This post is almost as much for me as it is for the rest of my visitors (all three of you…). As I wandered of a wander across the Internet (as I do late at night) – I came across Chirag Mehta’s Web site. One thing lead to another and I started readying some of his older entries were he talked about the performance of his personal Web server being able to handle quite a bit of bandwidth (and some other similar type musings.) Essentially he hosted a java-based applet on his site called Falling Sands (which originally came from DOFI-Blog) and was getting quite a lot of hits. I’m all for traffic and I like the whole idea of performance on commodity hardware and cobbled together servers.

So this information about Falling Sands was out in December, 2005. Yeah – where was I? Can you image if I knew about this wonderful time waster two years ago – what my life would be like now? So here… You too can play now…

(This particular version I have here came from the Falling Sand Web site – there are a few varieties out there).

Over time I’m put a few of my favorite screen shots up (first one) as I lose even more sleep with this addiction. Need to know how to play? (This particular version doesn’t have the constant falling particles…)

"Falling Sand Game", also "World of Sand", (2005) is a Java applet first found on the Dofi Blog via Fark thread, later enlarged and rehosted by Chirag Mehta. The game has been popular on community link sites like Digg and Delicious and involves four main falling particles: sand, water, salt, and oil. Each of these particles have special properties that can be manipulated; among these include burning, desiccating, growing, eroding, and more. Along with these four, main particles are auxiliary environmental manipulators: Wall, Fire, Plant, Spout, Cera (or wax), ???, and Eraser. By putting these together, one can thoroughly enjoy the modeling and construction of very complex structures and systems. There is an additional special feature that can be turned on, off, or told to remain in place. This is called the namekuji. In Japanese, "namekuji" means slug, naturally for the properties of a slug when salt is poured onto it. Several different versions exist, varying from applets with zombies, or human bodies, that have their own unique properties to applets where auxiliary environmental manipulators have additional properties.