A little while ago I comment on how I had yet to edit the photos I had taken before Christmas when visiting my father in Cornwall - Photos that I still haven’t edited.
Enjoying my first full day in Cornwall I have added about another 700 photos to the queue, but despite being at the back of the queue. I have already given them a quick edit down to about 100 photos which I will try and get put up on here shortly.
All the photos were taken down at Widemouth Bay whilst I helped my father take the dogs for a walk and whilst one of the dogs wasn’t particularly obliging, the other was a right poser as you can see above.
I’ll put a link up to the gallery just as soon as I can get the photos up - Due to the vagaries of the Internet at my Dad’s I can’t get access to my website and so I am having to type this up elsewhere and so can’t upload them all at the moment.
Over the past week I have learned that I seem to be reasonably good at warfare, but not so good at being tribal - Especially as at one point I got bored and decided to leave the tribe I was part of and wage war on them as well.
Allow me to explain how I came to this conclusion, about a week or so ago a friend introduced me to a game called Tribal Wars. The premise is simple, you start with a village and develop it and then join with other players in a tribe to wage war on other tribes. All of this happens in real time, so you can wake up and find that your village has been annexed by a nearby player - This hasn’t happened to me yet, but has happened to several players near me, most of whom have decided to go and try starting a village somewhere a little quieter.
My favourite moments so far have been coming home slightly inebriated at 4am and deciding that was the perfect time to attack nearby players. Sadly as the game is populated by a lot of male 16-25 year old maturity varies from player to player.
One player actually congratulated me on taking out his village as it was apparently carried out in a textbook manner with troops being used appropriately to weaken his village and not giving him a chance to recover at any point, despite the help he was getting from friends of his in defending his village. He didn’t believe that I was quite the n00b I was claiming to be only a couple of days beforehand.
Not all players are as pleasant though and here’s an exchange that started with the player after I scouted him out:
Mikusina: come and get some
Me: I will, but only when I am ready.
(Cue me doing the number crunching between his forces and mine, with me concluding that I could wipe him out without any real difficulty and launching an attack. He dodges his troops out of his village so when my attack hits he loses nothing except a few resources.)
Me: Sorry we called while you were out, however rest assured that we will call again at a more convenient time to catch you in. Would you care to suggest a time for me to visit you?
Mikusina: dude u scared shit out of me , i will cry to my mommy ohh
Me: So that’s where you were when I came knocking, it’ll be a few hours before I visit you again - Should give time for her apron to dry out nicely before you get it all wet again.
At this point realising I was probably arguing with a 16 year old American schoolkid, I decided that I’d teach him that someone who knows how to use punctuation and grammar, might also know how to kick some ass as well.
A few attacks at random intervals and now he has no troops left and is in line to be the second village I take over at some point in the next couple of days.
Further evidence I am doing something right is my place in the rankings, as out of over 45,000+ players I am in the top 400 and if all goes to plan I should be in the top 100 inside of 48 hours.
In terms of aggressive player however I do even better, as I am already in the top 200 for enemies slain. I might only have an army of about 2000, but I have killed over 13,000 troops and scared off 5 other players in the process.
I’ve argued repeatedly that Maths can be funny to little avail with most of my friends and now I’d like to argue that it can also be romantic. I admit that it’s more of a stretch to argue this particular case without some kind of obligatory multiplication gag.
A picture being worth a thousand words here’s a post from xkcd that I meant to post a couple of weeks back for Valentine’s Day:
I know technically it doesn’t work, but I have to admit if I got this as a Valentine I’d be well chuffed - That said seeing as how I haven’t had a Valentine for several years, I’d be chuffed just to get one so perhaps I should say I’d be especially chuffed if I received something like a Sierpinski Valentine.
For the uninitiated and curious the idea comes from a fascinating shape called a Sierpinski Triangle which is a surprisingly complex shape that is generated by a couple of very simple rule, for more on it have a look here at wikipedia on Sierpinski Triangles.