Addicted to FarmTown

Almost a year ago, I wrote a blog post about being addicted to the Facebook game Knighthood. I haven't played that much lately. Nowadays, I am into fake farming.

For those of you who have played Sims, I imagine FarmTown may be a bit familiar. You get a plot of land and then you start planting things. You can plow fields, buy trees, harvest crops and make some money to buy more things for your farm like flowers or a barn.

This, too, is a Facebook game. I got addicted thanks to a friend who visited me after the surgery and told me all about it.
"Sounds fun!" I said. "Invite me!"

As most of these games go, they are based on inviting as many of your Facebook friends as possible. The more of your friends who play, the more benefits you get. In FarmTown, for example, your friends are called neighbors, and once you have more than five neighbors you get access to faster plowing tools. If you have 10 neighbors, you can hire someone else to plow for you.

For now, I stick around the Marketplace and wait to get hired. If someone else lets me harvest their raspberries, tomatoes or pumpkins, I will make lots of money and may eventually be able to my myself a pond.

Meanwhile, Albie is busy downstairs playing his new Wii Zelda game that came in the mail yesterday. Ah, the joys of having a day off!

To tweet or not to tweet

A fellow Quinnipiac University alumnus recently blogged about Twitter, and how easy and convenient this social networking site is. "It has really changed my life," he wrote.

Fine, I said to myself. I've never understood what this is, so let's try it.

Friends have described it to me as "Facebook status updates on steroids" or "people constantly writing updates and nothing else." (for those of you not familiar with Facebook, a status update is where people can write, as often as they wish to in any given day, what they are doing. The site gives you "Viktoria is..." and you fill in the blank. It can be anything from "am sick of work" to "is petting a kittycat.")

So I signed up. I logged in. I found out that some of my friends were already on it. Then I wrote my first phrase - "is now on Twitter" - and I waited. What's next? Apparently, nothing.

After a while I realized that since I had no "followers" - people who read my site - I was writing for nobody. And the people I was "following" hadn't written anything in days.

When posting desperate message on Facebook about how I hate Twitter and how pointless it is, I got all sorts of advice. One friend wrote "you have to join a group, like writers, and then they can help you out with advice." Another friend at work said "You have to follow some celebrities you like - the actual celebrities on there - that's the only fun about Twitter. They actually write what they are doing and you get to read it."

I had no interest in following celebrities. I couldn't even think of anyone I wanted to search for. Finally, one name came to mind: Bryan Adams. He was there - I found him. Today, I added Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Bynes and Cesar Millan - the Dog Whisperer.

Twitter policy seems to dedicate that if someone signs up to follow you, you should sign up to follow them, but I have no idea why anyone would want to read about my day with the cats. Oh, and you are also limited to a certain number of characters.

I guess that's about it. Well, I'm giving it a week. If I'm still not into it - yeah, I was already sick of it after a day - then I'll just shut it off and never look at it again. For now, you can find me here (although I've protected my updates so you have to ask permission first to become a "follower.")

My Facebook status

So there's this thing on Facebook, the social networking site, where you can set your status as often as you wish (most readers are now rolling their eyes at me, but I do know people who have never been on Facebook, so bear with me...)

Anyway, it says "Viktoria is..." and then you fill in the rest. Whatever you write will be seen by everyone who is your friend on Facebook - in fact, they get a little news alert about it as soon as you update your status.

Today, I was daring and erased the "is..." so I could write "Viktoria never wants to go back to work again."

My boss, of course - one of my 127 Facebook friends - got slightly alarmed.
"You can write whatever you'd like on Facebook, of course," he said as I got to the office. "I don't mind."

But his eyes and his body language told me he was upset. And then he also said "If you don't want to be here, you should just leave."

Claiming my attitude towards work is not the same since I got back from vacation, my boss then put me in a really bad mood before he left the office.
"I don't care!" I believe was one of the last things I told him before I stormed out of his office. "Nothing is going to make me change how I feel about this place!"

A few hours later, we were back to normal. My boss even gave me permission to "unfriend" him on Facebook for more "privacy" from work people, but I'm not so sure I will.

This is just how things are, I guess, when you live your life both in cyberspace and in the real world.

I'm a Knighthood nerd

A few friends invited me to the social networking site Facebook last summer. In the fall, I recieved several invitations a day. I resisted 'til the end.

When I finally joined, I was amazed at how many of my friends were actually there. I could message with friends I hadn't seen since high school, and I could look up information and see pictures of their pets and boyfriends.

Then I started adding different applications, after friends invited me and encouraged me to join them. It's all a ploy by advertisers, I know, but some of the apps are actually useful. The Pokey dog you have to feed every 24 hours became a nuisance, forcing me to check in frequently and wasting my time. I quickly uninstalled the yellow labrador retriever I had called Moose.

People kept sending me Green Patch requests - and when I finally added that application I found out you can save the rainforest. Still a little cautious, I googled it and found out that it seems to be legit. Sponsors of the program supposedly donate a certain amount of money to save the endangered trees, based on how much the users use the program. Now I send at least 20 fake plants each day to my friends - ranging from pansies and daffodils to Holy Shiitakis and Rolly Pollies. I've supposedly saved 31 square feet of rainforest.

But the application that really got me going was Knighthood.

It started with a request from a co-worker, as so many of these usually do. "I've made you a noble in my kingdom," it said. "Come join me!" I joined.

At first, I wasn't quite sure why I built a castle, a marketplace and a watchtower. But then I realized that I could move my friends around between the buildings and I started expanding my kingdom and upgrading their levels of usefulness. I invited a bunch of my friends, who all became my squires, and then I built as much as I could.

Then I hit a road block. The program didn't ask me to do anything else, and I was stuck. I googled it, and people were talking about attacks and conques and raiding for gold.

"I want to do that!" I thought. But how?

I finally read an Extensive Guide to Knighthood, and by following instructions, managed to add a Garrison and go into Attack Mode. Now I'm at war.

Of course, I realized there were still things I wasn't sure about. What do the little numbers next to the shields actually mean? And how come it says you make people weaker when you attack them over and over again, but at the same time you increase their defenses? And how come I get all my gold and my vassals stolen even though I keep everyone on their defense posts?

Turns out, this really is a strategy game. What I needed was a mentor. One day last week, this mentor fell out of the sky.

"Hi, I'm Jill. If you come join my liege, I can help you get stronger," this girl wrote on my wall - a sort of personal message board for nerds like me. Jill is an advanced player of the game. Originally from England, she now lives in California and (apparently) spends a lot of time on the internet - and on Facebook.

Having broken free from my previous lord - the co-worker who invited me - I was now sovereign and could sign up with Jill's as my liege. She's my new best friend.

I've spent hours in the past week expanding my kingdom according to Jill's instructions, which at first included releasing all my friends who never signed up for the game. They are apparently not very useful anyway, and they disappear after 15 days.

By me being stronger, I automatically make Jill stronger - that's her ulterior motive. But I'm OK with that. She has powerful friends in the game, and today they are helping me rescue one of my trapped knights.

The only problem? Jill is going on vacation for 2 weeks. How will my kingdom survive without her?