The English countryside, spring daffodils, snowdrops, bluebell glens, pine forests, robins, foxes, red squirrels, the sound of bees, summer roses, early morning dew on spiders webs, blackberry bramble flowers, wild bunnies, hedgerows, hedgehogs, oak trees, endless fields of rippling grains, streams you can wade in, fishing for minnows, meadow larks singing, kite flying, wood smoke coiling in cold air, chestnuts roasting, bobbing for apples, cinder toffee, hoar frost in winter, hand-knitted gloves tied on a string.
Okay, so the title of this post is a little misleading in that I’m not really what you would call a Gaming Person. Not like most of you Yung’Uns who seem to play the latest games on teeny tiny handheld screens. Something I envy by the way. Great eyesight and hand-eye coordination only youth can give you.
Me?
I play games. Board games mostly. You name it I’ve probably played it.
Though I have played video games (do they still call them that?) with and against the OH on their PSP 2/3/4/5 — I lose count which iteration they have right now. I particularly like the Lego games, they’re silly, fun, irreverent and not to be taken seriously, meaning, a little less violence than the usual kind of game the OH plays.
But there is one online game I do play and, checks notes, have played since it first came on the market way back when, in 2012. And that’s a farm game called Hay Day.
Hay Day is a free-to-play mobile farming simulation game developed and published by Supercell. Hay Day was released for iOS on 21 June 2012 and Android on 20 November 2013.
That’s nearly 14 years!
It’s not that it’s addictive. Far from it, what it is, is easy to play, fun, silly, and a whole lot of cute. The simplicity of play leaves it up to you, the player, on how you play, what tasks you tackle, and the speed at which you want to play and or advance levels. If, in fact, they have levels.
Everything is so smooth. And the ease of play makes this my go to game above and beyond online Scrabble, Words With Friends, or any other game I’ve come across. And believe me, I’ve tried loads. They never stick, or is that, I never stick with them?
Whatever, Hay Day suits me right on down to the ground, or is that, to the Farm? Anyway, this is definitely my kind of game.
So come on and join me, a new life awaits you down on the farm. Oh, and don’t forget to bring your wellies, it get’s a bit muddy here.
This post is happily stolen from Keenan who lovingly stole it from Katherine who probably stole it from someone else. And so it goes … steal this one if you want to take part!
Having decided to move full time to Pika I was thinking about aborting micro blog altogether but hesitated because there’s one thing it does that most other indie places don’t. And that’s offer a cross feed to our socials.
Enter all the clever kids over on Mastodon who pointed me towards Rob Knight’s wonderful app, Echo Feed. What’s more, both Maique and Davey offered up step by step guides to help me set up an account. Wonderful!
These guys rock when it comes to helping a Princess in distress.
So there I am, I found the website, created an account. All very straightforward and, once in, I was given a simple enough set of parameters to fill out. I mean, how hard is it to fill in a URL and hit Create New Feed?
Not as difficult or as complicated as I thought it was going to be. Now, we’ll see how well it does posting this post to Mastodon for me.
Okay, here goes nothing, pushing the Publish Post button …
Those wonderful folks at Good Enough who created Pika have pulled out all the stops on their latest update. And, lucky for us, have revamped the already easy to use post editor by adding a few bells & whistles.
Specifically, we can not just do bold or italics, but can colour text to highlight it, while making life so much easier for us to to add a horizontal line, strikethrough text, or add footnotes1 and even, if we want it, smaller text.
Yes, I am being childish writing a silly post just to luxuriate in having all these tools at my ink-stained fingertips.
Colour me happy!
Whee, will you look at this, I can now have automated footnotes without trying to figure out what fecking key combo I need to engage. Brilliant.
