PUMPKINHEAD 5: THE FARMVILLE FRIGHTENING

Lots of people have been calling me up lately and asking, "Hey Choo why don't you do some Halloween stuff for the blog this year?"

So I'm like, "Didn't I do Halloween stuff last year?" 

And they're like, "No, you totally didn't do ANY Halloween stuff last year.  Don't you like Halloween?" 

And I'm like, "Yeah Halloween is OK, I'm just all out of ideas I guess."

So they're like, "Oh I have a great idea!  You should totally do a cartoon like with Carlos pecking your eyeballs out or something!  Everybody loves Carlos the turkey!  He is so funny!"

And I'm like, "That doesn't sound very funny."

And they're like, "It will be hilarious!  Trust me!"

And then I'm like, "Trust you?  I don't even know you!  Who the hell is this?"

And they're like "- CLICK -"

And then I'm like, "Hello?  Hello?  Anyone there?"

And then the operator's recording is all like, "If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try again."

So then I call the cops to report a crank caller, and so they trace the call, and then they're like, 

"THE CALL IS COMING

FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!" 

So then I'm all like...

So anyway, yeah, I don't really have any decent Halloween ideas at the moment so I'm probably just gonna recycle some old Halloween crap I did on Facebook last year.

Like that one time when Walter and Barbara were getting married and we had to help by making wedding sachets and inviting our friends over to trade them for RSVPs?  Remember that one?

Yeah, me neither.

Well one day Cathy Perry invited a bunch of her friends to her wedding table and some graphic glitch caused them all to fuse together into one big orange-headed blob.  So she posted a picture of that on Facebook:

I took a copy of her picture and cleverly added some eyes, a mouth with blood dripping and some text using a very crappy font that is difficult to read and which I will never use again.  

In case you can't tell, it is supposed to say PUMPKINHEAD 5: THE FARMVILLE FRIGHTENING. 

Pretty scary, right?

I guess it was supposed to be like a movie poster or something.  I actually have a vague recollection of looking up Pumpkinhead at Wikipedia to learn there had been four movies in the series, so this is how I knew to call my sequel Pumpkinhead 5.  This is the level of dedication to authenticity that I put into all of my dumb little throwaway FV2 pictures, people!  Crazy, I know.

So then Cathy can't leave well enough alone and just enjoy my little movie poster thingy for what it is, and she posts some weird reply.  I forget what she said since it was a long time ago and apparently I didn't save copies of the original Facebook posts.  But for some reason I then posted a picture of Pumpkinhead trying to entice her by offering her a crop packet.  I have no idea why.

I'm sure it's all irrelevant to the story anyway, since there really is no story.  Just some weird Halloween pics I made last June that I'm sharing with you now because it's October and you want Halloween stuff but this garbage is all I have to offer.

Oh yeah, I remember now.  It's because I wanted Pumpkinhead to kill her.  She was supposed to say "Oooh a crop packet, just what I wanted!  Thank you Pumpkinhead!"  Or something to that effect, at which point I would modify the graphic to depict Pumpkinhead violently murdering her; which although I haven't seen any of the movies, is what I assume that Pumpkinheads do to people.  Especially people like Cathy.

At any rate, it would have been a largely gratifying ending for all, but of course Cathy being Cathy took an unexpected path in this little "Choo's your own adventure game" of mine, and I think she must have started addressing Pumpkinhead directly.

It seems that she must have asked Pumpkinhead where I was or something, even though I was right there posting these pictures on her Facebook wall.  But that must be what happened because in the next picture that I made, Pumpkinhead is holding my severed head and saying, "Choo is right here..."

So in the picture my severed head is saying "this freak took my body," but I don't quite understand or recall why my severed head would be saying that, since clearly he didn't take my body - he took my head.  Some things I do don't make sense even to me.

Oh yeah, I remember now, it's because that was actually my body there in the picture with the pumpkin head on it.  OK, so I guess that makes sense now.

Anyway my severed head is also asking Cathy for help, which is never a good idea.  In fact, if I recall correctly she replied something about giving me an aspirin.  Because everyone knows that aspirin is the best remedy for severed head syndrome, right?

But I guess I just went along with it, because then I made this crappy amazing animated GIF of Pumpkinhead feeding me Tylenols.

Y'all happy now?

Halloweeny enough for ya? 

Yeah I know, it sucked.  These recycled Facebook posts don't seem to translate over to the blog that well, do they?
 
Oh well, maybe the next one will be better.

But probably not.

Happy Halloween month.

Windoze

#15

This is the fifteenth installment of Friday Facebook Foto Fun, where almost every Friday we have fun with a new picture that one of my friends recently posted or shared on Facebook.  

Two Nuts

#4

This is the fourth installment of Friday Facebook Foto Fun, where every Friday* we have fun with a new picture that one of my friends or non-friends recently posted or shared on Facebook.

 * Note: "Friday Facebook Foto Fun" is unlikely to actually occur on a Friday, and much less likely to occur every Friday.

Farmer's Tan

#2

This is the second installment of Friday Facebook Foto Fun where every Friday* we have fun with a new picture that one of my friends recently posted or shared on Facebook.

* Note: "Friday Facebook Foto Fun" is unlikely to actually occur on a Friday, and much less likely to occur every Friday.

Snow Job

#1

This is the first installment of a new series of blog posts called "Friday Facebook Foto Fun" where every Friday* we will have fun with a new picture one of my friends posts on Facebook.

This little project came about when I found that a former Facebook/FV2 friend, Cathy Perry, was very fond of spamming sharing random pictures to  her Facebook page.  Her predilections would run toward pictures of cutesy animals, sunsets, serene nature scenes and the like; you know, the usual girly type stuff.  She would often introduce the shared picture to her audience with some enthusiastic commentary, fawning over how "Lovely," "Pretty" and/or "Gorgeous" it was, how she would love to "crawl inside the picture and live there," or how such-and-such "is my favorite <insert animal type here>."  Her Facebook friends would then regularly chime in to concur until it all became one big circle jerk of "oohs" and "aahs" punctuated by an unabashed overuse of emoticons.

Needless to say, this scenario wasn't really my cup of tea, so I often found myself choking on the schmaltz of it all while scrolling through my Facebook feed and finding these little gems of hers randomly popping up to taunt me.

One day I decided that I might try injecting some of her pictures with my own little bit of whimsy, in an attempt to at least make them more palatable to me, as well as preserve what shreds remained of my sanity.  I think part of it too is that Cathy was easily provoked into hilariously hostile reactions, and screwing with pictures she held dear seemed to facilitate same.

Typically I would just randomly paste a picture of my turkey Carlos into Cathy's pictures, partly because I am lazy and untalented, and partly because due to the great disdain she has often expressed for that bird, I knew that it would have a high probability of peeving her.  On some days I would endeavor to be slightly more creative than that, but not very, and not often.

On this particular day, Cathy posted a picture of some snowy Christmas town scene, and honestly, the thing that struck me most about it was how slippery and unsafe the roads looked.

Then this happened:

I was quite tickled by Cathy's earnest attempt to debunk the authenticity of my clearly doctored image by claiming the crashed automobile I had inserted was anachronistic to the scene.

Equally hilarious was Judy Brown Woodall's comment calling me silly because "no one was hurt."

Of course, it was that very comment which prompted me to explode the car and kill everyone in the scene.

So, who's the silly one now, Judy?   

Who's the silly one now?

Muhahahahahahaha!!!

* Note: "Friday Facebook Foto Fun" is unlikely to actually occur on a Friday, and much less likely to occur every Friday.

Farm Wars Canceled Due To Cheating!

I am very sad to report that last week's Farm Wars turned out to be a total bust.  I was excited about this little contest, and it was really fun the first few days with some frenzied competition and good-natured ribbing between the competitors over at the Get ur Groove with FV 2 Facebook group.  We had a message thread there devoted to the contest where Cathy and I would squabble while our friends got in on the fun by making their own comments, instigating mock strife and cheering us on (most of them rooting for Cathy Perry).

But then it turned ugly.

Cathy was perplexed and upset that I was maintaining a lead of 1000+ points over her, so she started making reckless and baseless accusations that I was using a golden shovel; the purchase of which was prohibited by the rules we established for the contest.

This is what I said to Cathy when she accused me.

Of course, any notion that I was using a Golden Shovel is utterly preposterous and easily disproved by virtue of the way the golden shovel works.

Picture of Golden Shovel in action taken from Zynga's County Fair Guide

For those who don't know, when you buy a golden shovel, the points for every prized good you harvest for the following 24 hours is doubled.  Now, when you have a low medal like a bronze or silver, it is not uncommon to get 30+ points per prized good without a golden shovel.  But once you rise to the level of Platinum medal, such as Cathy and I both have, even your fully mastered crops and trees yield no more than 8-13 points or so.

My understanding of the reason behind this is that the game has a built-in handicap, supposedly designed to even the playing field for everyone (but more likely designed to persuade advanced players to buy golden shovels). Hence, the higher you rise through the County Fair ranks in medal levels, the lower the value of your prized harvests.  It"s counter-intuitive, I know.  But this is how Zynga apparently chose to do it.

Which brings me to the reason why Cathy's suggestion that I had purchased a golden shovel was ludicrous, as well as the evidence I uncovered that Cathy was the one who appeared to have actually purchased a golden shovel and cheated!  Here are screen-caps taken from the County Fair wagon showing my best prize good (left) and Cathy's (right), circled in red.

These screenshots were taken on the eve before the County Fair of Thursday, January 9, 2014.

Notice a minor disparity in point values there?  As you can see, my best prize good is a 13 point heirloom grapefruit, while Cathy's best prize good is a 36 point heirloom acorn!  Obviously, were I using a golden shovel I would be getting much more than 13 measly little points for my prize goods, and therefore Cathy's accusations were total nonsense.

But Cathy's little "best-defense-is-a-good-offense" approach to Farm Wars backfired on her, since by pointlessly calling me out, she caused me to look at her best prize goods; and lo and behold that's when I caught Cathy red-handed in possession of prize goods in the 36 point range -- 23 points more than my best ever!  Golden Shovel, indeed!

"How could this be?" I wondered.  We are both Platinum Medal XVII, so all things should be equal insofar as our ability to compete with each other on a level playing field for prize good points commensurate with our platinum medals.  After pondering it for a bit I reached the conclusion that there could be no other explanation - Cathy must be using a Golden Shovel!

So after this little discovery of mine, I was like,

And Cathy was like,

And so I asked her point blank,
 

She tried to deny it, feigning ignorance!  Which of course begged the follow-up question,

First she said "Oh, I have big trees, so they give me big acorns!"

Which was an asinine thing to say.  Obviously she was panicking, now just realizing that she had been caught in the act!  So, after pressing further, her excuse changed to, "Oh, I know, it must be due to mastery!"

So I told her that is BS, because my grapefruit trees are fully mastered and yet they only yield 13 point prized goods at best.  Mastery alone cannot explain a 36 point acorn!

A screenshot of my grapefruit tree ribbons. Blue=Fully mastered

So then her excuse changed to, "I know what happened now... It must be a Zynga glitch!"

Now, I will be the first to admit, this game is riddled with all manner of bugs, glitches and screw-ups.  But if Cathy's 36 point acorn is owing to such a thing, it would be the first time in the history of the world that any player has ever benefited from a "Zynga glitch."

As anyone who has played this game for any length of time knows, the usual Zynga glitch is the gaming experience equivalent of being repeatedly smacked across the face with a dirty rubber chicken. 

Which is to say, it is never what one would describe as a pleasant experience.

For instance, Kathy Jones and I have been suffering a glitch where every time we achieve a mastery ribbon, as well as each time we attempt to store an elder tree in inventory, our game crashes.  In poor Kathy's case, this has been going on for weeks.  According to Zynga, "We are completely aware of this matter and rest assured this will be corrected soon."  Which in Zynga-speak translates to, "Yeah, yeah we know, we know.  Now stop bugging us about it.  We'll get to it eventually.  Maybe."  But I digress.

It is worthy to note that Cathy's best prize crop this week is a 12 point cherry.  So not only would Cathy have us believe that this was the first time in the history of the world that any player has ever benefited from a Zynga glitch, but it was also the fastest glitch ever fixed by Zynga in history!

Fastest glitch-fix in history, or she just hasn't bought a golden shovel yet this week? You make the call!

Even though I felt that I knew the truth, I thought I'd give Cathy enough rope to hang herself the benefit of the doubt, so I came up with the brilliant stupid idea of  suggesting we each take screenshots of our respective game dashboards to prove once and for all that no Golden Shovel had been purchased by either of us.  I posted mine first, as a gesture of good faith.

I knew almost as soon as I proposed this ill-conceived idea of mine that Cathy would simply claim to be incapable of figuring out how to post a screenshot, even though it was a 10 second/3 keystroke procedure that any small child could accomplish, and even after it was fully elucidated, illustrated and demonstrated for her via detailed tutorials, diagrams, YouTube videos, etc.

This way she could stall me while the timer on her shovel ticked away and expired!

I predicted that once the shovel disappeared from her dashboard hours later, she would magically proclaim, "Eureka!  I have just this very second mastered the elusive screenshot ability!" while posting a worthless belated screenshot of her suddenly clean dashboard, devoid of the Golden Shovel which was undoubtedly evident there just moments prior to expiring.

Lynn Hubbard's valiant efforts to help were in vain.

Sure enough just as I predicted, about four hours later and after much hemming and hawing about how she needed to wait for Kathy Jones to come home from work in order to provide her with a series of hand-drawn step-by-step diagrams indicating how to accomplish the monumental task at hand, Cathy posted her triumphant screenshot.

At this point Cathy's friends all rallied around her to applaud her new-found screenshot ability, completely oblivious to the fact that it no longer mattered one iota, due to the time which had elapsed since I posted mine.  Clearly, the timer on the shovel had run out, and the shovel icon had disappeared from her dashboard by this point.  This fact seemed to be lost on everyone, and it all became a singular celebration of Cathy's miraculous screenshot accomplishment.

It was like watching a party being thrown for an infant who had just successfully made their first bowel movement inside a potty training apparatus.

For the record, I like Cathy and consider her a friend.  I haven't known her for too long, but thus far she has proven herself to be a good FV2 neighbor, a fun person to interact with online and a genuinely good person deep down inside (when she's not molesting my buffalo or threatening to murder my turkey, Carlos).

So the last thing I ever wanted to believe is that she would try to cheat me or lie to me and completely ruin our fun little contest.  But I also know that she is very competitive and quite fond of purchasing Golden Shovels in the past.

Perhaps it may appear that I take this game too seriously, but I really don't.  It's just that I abhor cheating and lying on general principle, and also I am a man of logic, so things need to make sense to me - especially when my BS detector has been set off by blatant chicanery.  Given this, how could I ignore the inexplicable incongruity in our respective prize good values and the inane explanations for same that my competitor provided?  Unless someone has a better explanation, the only viable one I can come up with is that Cathy used a Golden Shovel.

There is little doubt in my mind if I hadn't opened my big mouth that day, the 1,000 point gap would have mysteriously closed by the following day, and Cathy would be in the lead, courtesy of her Golden Shovel.  But I guess we'll never know for certain.  Only one person knows for sure, and she's sticking to her story of denial; however implausible it may be.

My blog is very popular!

So I put it to you, my many many loyal followers, tell us in the comments below, what do you think happened?  Did Cathy buy a Golden Shovel and try to cheat?  If not, where do you think the 36 point acorn come from?  The giant acorn fairy?

OK, how about this. If you agree with me, just say nothing.  Don't even leave a comment.  Your many many numerous silences will speak volumes, thereby proving my theory correct!

Also, earlier this week, this happened:

"Grammar Nazis? On my FV2?"  It's more likely than you think.

Farm Hard, Farm Strong

In hopes of winning the F A R M   W A R S contest against Cathy Perry, I was farming pretty hard the other day.  I hadn't felt much like playing fv2 over the holidays, but Zynga's recent announcement of new levels, coupled with Cathy's challenging challenge got my farmer blood flowing again!  So back to the farm was I, raking and hoeing, planting and watering, fertilizing and harvesting away like a madman on a mission.

My half-hearted hiatus over the holidays had left me with a huge backlog of neighbor visits.  Friendly and helpful neighbors were lined up for miles and miles just hankering to do all my dirty work; everything from slopping the hogs, to pointlessly wasting visit energy by clicking on random items of decoration, to watering the trees and raiding my wells.  There were so many of these well-intentioned and benevolent souls in fact that it took me until 3am to get through them all.

Fully exhausted after such a long day on the farm manipulating others to do my bidding, I finally lay my head down to rest and thought to myself, "Choo-dog, (I call myself that sometimes) you farmed HARD today!  Hard and STRONG!"  "This is what farming is all about," I thought.  "A hard day's work of making other people toil in my fields."

Then I started thinking about, "What if Hollywood made a movie about my life?  What would it look like?"  Not so much the movie itself, but the movie poster, that is.  And this is what my fertile mind conjured:

 

It's a pretty good likeness, I think.  I wanted to change the gun to a fertilizer rake, but I got lazy and just put a strawberry on top. "Everything's better with strawberries on top," I figured.  Plus I had more farming to do, so no time for fancy graphics.  

The original poster can be seen here, in the event you are too young to remember when this movie originally came out, in which case I hate you, you young whipper-snapper.  Get off my lawn!

So back I went to my farm the next day to farm harder, and I thought to myself, "Wow I sure could use some more fertilizer, how can I get monies for this?" 

Then I remembered Lance Armstrong's nonprofit organization, Livestrong, and those silicone wristbands that were everywhere for awhile.  I thought, "What if I make a Farm Strong wristband of my own that I could sell to generate fertilizer revenues?"

So I went online and found a site where I could design and purchase my own custom silicone wristbands!  Here is what I came up with:

The site was pretty neat, as it let me choose a motto for front (Farm Strong), and back (Team Choo), along with clip art to add to my wristband.  I chose a cow, a horse, a strawberry and a pear, because to me, these are symbols of farming.  The cow represents milk and yogurt, the horse gives me fertilizer, the strawberries give me prized crops and the pears give me prized tree fruits.  My Farm Strong silicone wristbands would perfectly symbolize the full circle of farm life!

I was so excited as I placed the order and input my credit card numbers.  It cost me around $310 for an order of 1,000 of these babies.  "A solid investment," I thought, while calculating my ROI in the four-to-five-figure range, depending on how much I ended up deciding to charge for them.  

Here I am thinking, "I'm f'in ta get paid in mad stacks of fertilizers, yo!"

What I didn't anticipate is that no one would be interested in buying any.

As it turns out, no one cares about Team Choo or farming strong, or wristbands, cows, horses, strawberries or pears, for that matter.  In fact, one person who shall remain nameless even accused me of cheating by attempting to use the proceeds of my wristband sales to gain an unfair advantage over my competitor!

So now, since I cannot in good conscience sell these things in the wake of accusations of malfeasance, and since even if I could, nobody wants to buy them, I am stuck with 1,000 worthless Farm Strong/Team Choo silicone wristbands.

But I'm still farming strong, and farming hard.