PSU

It has been a while since I’ve posted anything on this blog. Lets catch everyone up!

I returned to school! (See Platial on the right.) I’ve been attending Portland State University to refine my writing skills and to learn about film! I’m also taking piano lessons – to refresh my childhood memories from when I used to play the piano. Originally, I wanted to take violin lessons, but piano will do.

It’s been over a month since I started school and so far so good. I had been a little overwhelmed and burnt out from reading; I am also realizing (as a film minor) that I should watch more movies, but it is becoming slightly difficult to do this. Mostly because when I get home I want to relax and play video games! Yikes. I almost refrain from watching any movies, because it’ll cause me to dissect each scene.

I’ve also discovered something terrifying about myself! When I become stressed I eat! I eat and eat and eat. Basically, my resolution to this is to control my appetite, workout once a week (because that is all I can muster), and refrain from dessert (that is what gets to me the most). I think I’ve gained 10 pounds in the span of one month – no kidding!

On the pro side of eating (yes, not eating), I’ve decided that I should explore some of the little eateries near my school (once a week, perhaps).

Other stuff I’ve been doing.

• I’ve set up a Writer’s network! Check it out! Read! Write! Join! It’s called www.WritersUnite.com
• I’m Tweeting! See sidebar on the right!
• I’m still Plurking! PLURK FOREVER! www.plurk.com/MissCaughtUp
• And yes, I am on Facebook playing the likes of Restaurant City, YoVille (still), and Hell’s Kitchen. I even bought a snazzy Wireless Mighty Mouse for my Mac for such games like Hell’s Kitchen! It is truely sad… However, the Mouse is pretty damn sweet!

Well, until next time, you know where to catch me!

Filed under: Food, Portland State University, Video Games, YoVille, Blogging, Food, Hell's Kitchen, Portland State University, Restaurant City, Writers Unite, YoVille

Oh, How I Love Thee…New Things In YoVille!

Yesterday afternoon when I logged onto YoVille, I noticed one of my crewmembers “raced” me. Well, I couldn’t figure this one out, because I was too busy trying to get money instead of exploring the small town of YoVille. Until… A buddy told me about YoVille’s Speedway!

At YoVille Speedway you can race your friends, practice, or bet on your friends! It’s another fun way to gamble your money if you prefer not to dump it all at the casino.

How cute…

There are also new items up for sale! I love new items! I think some of it can nice little fillers in people’s YoVille homes. However, first I need to show the new Fashion items, as it looks like YoVille is gearing up for St. Paddy’s day. P.S. I already about the St. Paddy’s outfit – and as a bonus, some lucky female player will receive my extra St. Paddy’s outfit.

How bad do you want the outfit? Leave a comment to let me know and I’ll choose the person with the best desperation (LOL)

And at the Furniture Store there are many new items.

On the contest front: Thanks for all the submissions! You will receive an email from me soon!

Filed under: YoVille, YoVille Contests

YoVille Interior Design Contest

Items Needed or Provided -
* One room (i.e. Living Room, Kitchen, Bedroom, etc.)
* One gift that I assign to you.
* Your Creative Brain

TERMS & CONDITIONS
1. Have fun!

2. You must email me at mcu.yoville@gmail.com with the subject: “YoVille Interior Design Contest” (otherwise, your email will be discarded) and download the “Official YoVille I.D. Contest Form“, complete it and sent to me by March 12, 2009 23:59 PST to qualify. One entry per person.

3. Contest will officially start March 15, 2009 (when I wake up in the morning PST *LOL*), in which you will receive your YoVille gift. You will have to send a Thank You note to me to confirm that you have received your gift. If you state that you did not receive your gift, your entry will be disqualified, unless proven otherwise.

4. Design a room based on the gift that I assign to you – this is your only inspiration.

5. YOU MUST use the assigned gift IN the room of where you plan to redecorate for this contest.

6. You can reuse any items that you already own or purchase new items to redecorate.

7. You MUST use your own creativity.

8. You cannot duplicate – plagerize – other YoVille player’s design concept, regardless if you use a different floor pattern or wallpaper. The design has to come organically, from your own creative aesthetic. I cannot stress enough – the item that is assigned to you is the only item that is supposed to inspire you.

9. You cannot use illegal resources to meet your means: i.e. Any version of WPE software or any illegal hacker’s software. The use of this will disqualify the contestant(s).

10. The use of duplicate/multiple YoVille accounts will also disqualify the contestant(s).

11. Contest ends: March 20, 2009, 18:59 PST. At this time I will go and take screen shots of your room and send them to a panel of non-YoVille judges.

12. There will be 5 winners and 5 runner-ups. The winners will receive an email on March 25, 2009 by 22:59 PST.

13. Grand Prize winner will receive the fun and rare Gumball Machine (Value: $25YoCash)

14. Second Prize winner will receive 1000 YoCoins.

15. Three Third Prize winners will receive 500 YoCoins.

16. All winners, including the five runner-ups, will be featured in this blog.

GOOD LUCK!!

Filed under: YoVille Contests

Why YoVille? – And a new item.

Many of you who have logged in this morning have realized that there is a new item at the Gift and Flower shop.

At 5000 YoCoins a pop seems awfully steep for a lackluster item. I was able to play with it for 5 seconds, only to realize that it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, so far. It has potential to be a great item as soon as they add more “options” during editing. Alas, it could just be that I only had 5 seconds to play with it.

Moving on…

At first, playing YoVille was just a means to kill time, until it became a shopaholic-crazed addiction. Most of the point of YoVille is to make money, buy stuff, fill your house, add friends, climb up the working ladder, and make more money. That’s just the basics of YoVille.

There’s more to YoVille than meets the eye. Visiting people’s places, rating them, gifting, and other socially friendly activities – and depending on your objective, you make YoVille what you want.

The first night I came to YoVille, I met Scarlet. She showed me the ropes and taught me how to max. Throughout my newbie phase, Scarlet would visit my apartment and leave me messages and this was how we communicated for a short period of time, and then she sent me a gift. It was such a generous gesture from a stranger in YoVille land. Of course, gifting anymore is meaningless, since some of us are trying to obtain the highest YoVille badge (yes, this includes me. I now have the highest YoVille badge for gifting LOL).

At one point, I decided to visit Scarlet when she was online. From then on our relationship blossomed. We became two inseparables causing havoc in the little town of YoVille. Well, there are others in our YoVille girls-gone-bad group (Erika – fun a vivacious woman and Nurse Nikki – sarcastic, witty-to-boot, and Scarlet’s real life best friend), but it has been mostly Scarlet and me.

The more I got to know her, the more I discovered what an admirable woman she is. She’s caring, endearing, funny, giving, patient, and optimistic. Scarlet lightens my day when I’ve had a bad one.

Thus, I feel a little lost when she’s not in YoVille. I have no need to build up my house or make money at the moment. I have been experimenting with the whiteboards, but that isn’t enough for me to play on YoVille; so I’ll log off and work on something else.

And so she has become one of the major, major reasons why… I YoVille late into the evening.

Sometimes we find great people in the strangest of places.

Left to Right: Me, Kaj, and Scarlet in my hot tub. LOL

Filed under: YoVille

“Want to See My Rocket?” ;-)

It’s not what you think, but it certain is a good icebreaker – so long as the person you’re breaking ice with doesn’t decide to slap you.

The new items in YoVille consist of a Rocket and a Golden Piggy. See for yourself.

The Rocket gyrates whenever a person touches it or comes into the room. Needless to say, this collectable item opens up for a lot of… humorous conversations.

Next…

I’ve been playing with my newly purchased Wacom Intuos3.

I’ve never used a drawing tablet before, so it feels strange to draw or navigate with it. However, I did use it to create my first drawing on my YoVille Whiteboard.

(Yes, and to the left is a message I left to remind me and my friends that, “We are awesome.”)

(Here is the 1st attempt of Art on my YoVille Whiteboard.)

It’s not great, but it was my first time. I plan on improving my dexterity and creating more art soon.

And another thing…

To my Facebook crew friends on YoVille: Did you know that when leave your crew a message the first time you log in of the day that you’ll receive double the amount of coins than kissing, dancing, joking, or fighting?

There you have it…

Filed under: YoVille

Some Serious Glitch in The Matrix (YoTrix)

The past two evenings, YoVille has had its shares of major glitches. It felt like a haunted virtual town. People were seeing doubles; snowballs were at mid-stop and seemingly floating in the air; piles of money repeatedly spewed atop people’s heads; mysterious hoagies appearing in their own dialogue bubbles! And only the players who voiced out these anomalies saw them, no one else did, until it happened to you!

What do these anomalies mean? Nothing really, it’s just YoVille programmers restructuring the game. So here are what’s new…

New fugly Dutch and Pennsylvania furniture, the furniture is so hideous that I’m not going to post the pictures here.

Now on to the second update: Your energy status.

It seems the “energy status bar” is a combination of energy and speed. I’m not sure if dizzy subtracts or adds to this, but they have eliminated the “dizzy status bar.”

Not only have they decided to change it up on us YoVillians, but they have also added a new menu, so players can fill up on energy.

What’s the plot here? To make you use more coins!! The menu items are expensive! And the least expensive item on the menu with the most energy for your buck (coin?) is the Strawberry Short Cake.

You’re asking, do I really need to buy menu items? The answer is: Ich weiss nicht. I don’t know! Your avatar will tell you that it is hungry, i.e. the mysterious hoagie that appears in your dialogue bubble. I don’t know if your avatar will die from starvation if you don’t purchase food items, or if illnesses are provoked from avatar starvation. I guess we’ll have to find out.

Along with this expensive menu and avatar hunger is the inflation of the avatar’s “actions”. The dancing moves, when back in the day (um, YESTERDAY) only cost players 1 energy point to do the “Arm Shuffle” and 15 points to do “You Da Bomb!”. See what it costs you now.

The new changes are definitely exciting, yet I’m not too thrill that I will need to shell out more money to feed my avatar.

Filed under: YoVille

How to Be a Rich YoVillian Part II

You have YoCoins, but you are absolutely against purchasing or earning YoCash – and the previously mentioned suggestions cannot satisfy your greedy little grubby YoVillers? There is another way. However, you really have to work for it.

Whiteboards.

What are whiteboards? Well, they are exactly what it is: A whiteboard. These little babies allow YoVillians to create artwork or insert Photo Art to enhance the interior design of YoVillians’ apartment or house. Some players use whiteboards to their advantage by creating artwork and selling them to YoVillian art collectors. However, it will take a lot of patience and a lot of time to work on a piece.

Whiteboards can be purchased at the Gift store for 3000 coins. Sometimes you can find these whiteboards for less at YoVillians “garage” sales. But once you have one, what do you do?

You can draw some really cool art (like the art below from www.yovillian.com), or figure out how to do Photo Art. Only a small handful of YoVillians know how to do this and they use a program to insert real pictures into these whiteboards, which makes Photo Art on whiteboards a hot commodity. If you can obtain this mysterious program (*cough* WPE Pro) and use it to insert a Photo Art, then you’ll be one rich Wichser.

So how much can you sell these artworks for? Name your price and YoVillians will determine if it is worth it. I have seen whiteboard art go from 4000 coins to 10k. It really depends on what the artist is asking for and what buyers are willing to pay.

Filed under: YoVille

How To Be A Rich YoVillian Part I

Working at YoVille Factory really doesn’t pay. Especially when you’re only allowed to work every six hours, I guess Zynga Inc doesn’t believe in overtime. So here are a few tips to gain more YoCoins, without obtaining YoCash or scamming, are:

• Add more “crew” – requesting people from your Facebook friends to join YoVille. This will raise your salary – ever so slowly.

• “Kiss”, message, gift, or commit other acts of playfulness on your crew’s “bot”. However, you’re only limited to perform these acts of promiscuous kissing or gifting 20 times a day.

• Max another fellow YoViller – Basically you play Tic-Tac-Toe or Rock, Paper, Scissors with the person you are trying to “max”. The short cut to maxing out is to exit the game as soon as the screen says, “GO”. The limit of maxing capability is 200 coins every 24 hours.

If you must have YoCash:

• BREAK DOWN and sign up for one of the many “offers” in the “Earn YoCash” tab.

• BREAK DOWN and PAY for YoCash or YoCoins – however, you’ll get a better deal purchasing YoCash than YoCoins.

• Become a seller – Basically, if you have YoCash in your account, you’re already one-upping another YoVillian. Why? Because you have access to purchase “rare collectables” or furniture and clothing that charges YoCash only. Here’s a breakdown:

• • Most recently, there has been this huge demand for Gumball machines. These cool little Gumball machines (that actually work when activated by certain functions) cost 25 YoCash, which is equivalent to 2500 coins. Now, some YoVillians cannot purchase these lovely Gumball machines, because they don’t have YoCash. In this case, the ball is in your park. You can turn around and markup these machines from 6000 coins to 10,000 coins. However, I don’t advise selling the Gumballs for 10,000 coins if you don’t have the patience to wait for some rich YoVillian – but do so if you can. I normally sell mine for 8000 coins, unless there is a saturation of other Gumball sellers then I will lower my price.

• • You can earn more YoCoins with any items that requires you to pay with YoCash, and depending on the mark-up value of other competitors, you’re sure to make a nice profit.

Any questions?

Filed under: YoVille