Maru's Mun Journal

It seems I needed another Web 2.0 site to have an account on. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, Pinterest seems actually useful for me.

Anybody here who's got a Pinterest account as well so I can follow them? I'm yakalskovich there as well.


And special thanks again to a_is_for_amy for the invite!

What makes me uneasy about FarmVille is not that it's eaten the Nazgul's brain at the moment; worse brain-eatages have occurred, for example when I first discovered the old Discworld RPG back in 2004. The crack that is RPing (in contrast to the more sedate and ponderous nose-powder that is fanfic) so totally took me in for a while, I even did set alarms for it, and that seems to be an alarm sign.

It's not that Zynga, the company that makes it, is probably quite evil, and Facebook definitely is.

It's that there are no seasons!

You can plant whatever whenever you want to. There is no lambing season, no sowing in spring, no asparagus that stops on June 24th latest, no cabbage for winter, no St. Martin's geese, no blackberries belonging to the devil after October 31st...

Okay, making people wait for a result for a year would be counter-productive. But why not set random shorter season? Why not allow sheep tupping only on a Friday, and the sowing of certain crops only during the first week of the month, and so on? What makes real farming in real life what it is is seasons, and FarmVille totally eliminated that.

We first world people are used to having strawberries and tomatoes in the supermarket all the time, to mushrooms all year round, to green beans flown in from Egypt in winter, and to fresh flowers from Nigeria at Christmas. The globalised world is ignoring the seasons, so why should FarmVille reintroduce them? FarmVille farmers don't really want to keep up all night in the lambing shed at the dead of winter; they don't want to harvest a surfeit of cherries that they don't know what to do with, or do nothing between waking and sleeping but pluck apples and make cider in autumn. They don't want to race a thunderstorm for the wheat harvest, or pull a calf out by the feet. It's sanitised agriculture with purple cows.

There would be nothing wrong with it -- it is a game! -- except that it suggests to million of city dwellers that farming is a sanitary, fun business that brings forth bounty without season, without dirt, without suffering.

And that's demeaning to everything mankind did since the neolithic revolution.-

Okay, so Sphinx was being Audrey at me in a mail, not on purpose at first, I think (unless she meant to startle me out of something, which is quite possible, knowing Sphinx), so I was Andras back at her.

Audrey's not quite a pup, she's more like an honest-to-god hoax, and it's not really Sphinx who's Audrey; Sphinx is mostly Heinz, and her husband is Audrey. It's a bit complicated. We tend to be like that; I always say Sphinx is worse than me, don't I?

The third incarnation of Lajos had lived on her hoaxy web site (MM!Lajos is the fourth), so I didn't think Andras would be too-far fetched a pup to be back at her. Unlike Sooty or one of the lesser Milli!pups, Andras already had a mail address because, SN => mail address @aim.com

So far, so funny.

OK, so Audrey and Andras converse for a bit by mail between aim.com and gmx.de last night. Now I was just checking my email by webmail interface from work as I am wont to do in moments of lull, and for the first time tried to include Andras's address because there might be a reply from Audrey, right?

Only to find that I can't log into mail with that SN from work. AOL sees me coming in with a German-language IE6 from a .de domain, and decides I'm German (which I normally am, but Andras definitely isn't) and sends me to their German language version where a Screen Name is a 'Webname' and so on.

And the mail interface declares, in German, that it's never heard of anybody called 'pickshurperfect'.

Course they haven't, because Andras's address is @aim.com, not @aim.de or @aol.de or whichever domain the German localised version uses for the mail addresses. And because AOL is being so fucking clever, they automatically and irrevocably redirect me to the German language site they think I should be wanting to use, complete with wrong top level domain.

So if Audrey replied to Andras, I can only see that at home, where Firefox and Trillian prevent such AOL induced bullshit from happening. That, however, is not what one uses a web-based email address for.