Fiber Monday

 

Still No Thread
Hat Instead

As you may guess by the above caption, I still have not had a chance to scoot down to the ol Wally and grab some red crochet thread for the Mystery Project, which will have to be on hold until such a time as appropriate thread is procured. However, I have managed to make a Size Large Seed Stitch Beanie from Kirsten Holloway Designs, and let me tell you, that was fun!

I had completely forgotten how fun it can be to make a hat!

I used my clear orange plastic I hook (5.5mm) and about 2/3 of a skein of Red Heart Unforgettable in Polo, and I ended up with a very very cute hat!

A very cute hat indeed!

I don't think I've ever done front post single crochet or back post single crochet before, but I really do like the rib effect it gives, and my oh my do I love me a good half-double crochet in the 3rd loop (those fun ridges)! Seed stitch, or lemon peel stitch, is still really fun, and I look forward to continuing to work with it!

I do, however have to get my act together on picking up that thread, though. I can't abandon the poor Mystery Project forever.

And I have some Mother's Day gifts to work on, too.

The hat, by the way, is lovely and soft and stretchy, and while my noggin does not at all qualify as "large-to-xl", the hat still stays put, and the stretchiness tells me that I could absolutely get away with a smaller version!

As for the bit of yarn I have left over... I maaaaay make something... critterlike from it. Unforgettable is such a smooth, shiny yarn that it'd absolutely make a cute little art doll or amigurumi for someone who doesn't play rough...

And I do have that whole box of eyes...

Let us see what we can do with a little yarn and a lot of practice!

And Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Fiber Monday(ish)

 

In Which I Am Always Late, It Seems...

I was supposed to start working on this blog over 12 hours ago, but I just can't seem to get going right now. How annoying. I will say this, though, my dreams last night were bizarre. I woke up right after having the equivalent of a political style cartoon imprinted on my dreamscape with a guy holding a large mason jar filled with orange tornadoes and bragging that he'd "collected the world's most valuable tornadoes".

What the heck, brain?

So it's been that kind of day - off-kilter and weird.

Also painful because my dumb butt walked 3.2mi (5.15km) in the pouring rain because I love books and there's a new bookstore in town...

It's a really nice bookstore.

I'll be going there a lot.

Unfortunately for me, about 3/4 of the way there, the backs of my ankles got blistered and now we're in the stiff-and-painful stage, so I couldn't take the 3 mile (4.8km) walk to the boardwalk I wanted to take. Today would've been a pretty good day for it - no rain.

Unlike the rest of the week.

But this is not the whining about things blog, that's tomorrow. Er... technically today.

This entry is specifically for my crochet work!

And I FINISHED SOMETING!

A cropped tanktop!

This garment has been in the works for quite a while, and... I'm not 100% pleased with it, but it's a great early effort, if I do say so myself. Which I do. Say so. Myself. uh... moving on.

Closeup on the construction

I feel terrible because I cannot for the life of me find the pattern I used for the yoke on this piece to recommend it to you. I want to say it may have been in another language because I couldn't understand the rest of the pattern and just freestyled the rest after the twisted-stitch yoke... which may have been less of a good idea than I'd hoped...

If you recommend this yoke pattern, please let me know lol

I used a simple V-stitch for most of the garment, though I did interrupt it every 14 rows with another round of the twisted stitch for cohesion. I wish I'd been more diligent about fit-testing as I went, though, because... boy is this revealing.

Like, I understand that croptops are short and meant to be a bit revealing but...

I made it too wide and the armholes WAY too deep.

I cannot wear this in public is what I'm saying.

Makes a wonderful sleep shirt, though, and now that I understand (partly) how I went wrong, I can probably make more tops in a similar vein!

So there you have it: my very belated Fiber Monday :P

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Saturday Casual Gaming - Two Eyes Nonogram

 

Hey Haven't Done One of These In A While!

Once upon a time, I had a new game on her every week. I'd play the game and then review it and I'd let you all know what I thought. Mobile games, PC games, even the occasional console game... I'd cover what I loved (or didn't) about a game every week.

Except I'd never finish the games. Well... except one or two.

I Finished Two Eyes - Nonogram.

This game is lovely and a perfect time-sink. Free to play from start to finish with an option to pay for zero ads (which, admittedly, could improve your experience), and with gorgeous art and lovely music, this game was well worth a download - especially since I love nonogram-style gameplay!

For those not in the know, a Nonogram game involves you filling in squares of a grid to make an image, guided only by some numbers. The games usually have a tutorial (sometimes unskippable) which teaches you how to use those numbers to figure out what you're drawing. They're also often story-based, where the pictures you're filling in are the illustrations. These tend towards the fairytale side of fiction, so if that's not your cup of tea, you may find yourself simply in it for the gameplay, which is still quite rewarding!

Two Eyes, which is published by GAMEFOX (I've played other games of theirs!) and is available on ios and android, tells the story of a wolf and a deer slowly coming to terms with the fact that they are reincarnations of a deeply loving couple. It's very Greek Tragedy and well-told, though you can kind of tell it's a translation (sometimes the sentence structures are a bit rigid and unnatural, for instance), but in the end, it's a sweet little story, and I was, as the kids say, there for it.

The art, as you can tell, is spectacular, but I will not spoil you for the pixel art aspect - that would be cheating, since the pixel art is the gameplay!

I will, however, tell you that the story is broken into which character you're following (Wolf puzzles or Deer puzzles), and every story is broken down further into chapters. There are story-advancing puzzles and non-story-advancing puzzles, and both are fun! The story-advancing puzzles are arranged in a large 36 puzzle grid and range from 10x10 to 30x30. After you complete one character's story, you can finish the other character's story to see it from their perspective (the titular Two Eyes), or you can skip to the bittersweet finale.

The finale is the hardest part to get through with a triad of brutal 6x6 grids of 30x30 puzzles to get through. Your reward, however, is seeing the end of this lovely little story of enduring love.

Now, I mentioned the ad-free purchase option earlier. In my opinion, having an ad after ever two or three puzzles is a very fair tradeoff. For me, these ads were always easy to exit out of after about five or ten seconds, and I only accidentally fatfingered them once or twice. It was not economical or necessary for me to pay the oh-so-steep (sarcasm there, friend) price of two whole American dollars for the luxury of not seeing ads for a local guy who fixes basements for a decent price. Definitely pay for the ad-free version if you find the ads obnoxious, though, because the money goes towards making a bunch of beautifully drawn nonogram games like this one!

I can strongly recommend Two Eyes Nonogram to anyone who loves casual, untimed puzzle games.

That's all from me today!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 230: Merge City

Sphere Games Studios made this merging game!

So, you might have noticed that I'm really getting into these merging games - you take two of the same item, you drag one on top of the other, bam, new item. Do this until you win. Or get bored. Or both. I like the monotony, believe it or not. Monotony is my jam.

So are neon colors and building things, so this Sphere Game Studios offering on Android is absolutely tailor-made for me.

You start off with a limited amount of space.

In the early game, you have just the nine spaces in the center, but as you level up (by merging more and more buildings together) you don't just gain new styles of building, you also earn more spaces in your city! There looks like there's a lot going on here, but don't worry, it's not as complex as you might think.

The double arrow button is just a cash shop where you can spend real money to gain some in-game bonuses. I'm not a cash-shop person, but if you feel a burning desire to support Sphere Games Studio, that's certainly a fast way to do so!

The medal button leads to your Achievements - these will earn you more coins as you go along, so keep an eye out and tap it when it throws up a little red bubble with a white exclamation point - that means you have a new Achievement to check!

The last button on the left is the x2 button. This is... pretty self-explanatory - it's a way of doubling income from your houses by watching an ad.

On the upper left are your gear button - a way to check out in-game options like volume (though I haven't heard any music?) notifications, language, etc - and your bar-graph button - which is the leaderboard. I'm in more than 4000th place...

On the upper right, there's a game pad button. This enables a mini-game where you try to stack blocks all the way to the top of the screen without them collapsing. I suck at this game, and it was impossible for me to play it and take a screenshot, so... sorry about that.

On the bottom right, there are three buttons (eventually). On the top, you'll have a globe button, which will take you to a new city or "world" when you reach a high enough level. Below that is a standard shop button, which you can access to buy buildings from with your coins!

Below that is a little house with a number - this is a quick-buy for a house. I haven't had much use for it, but it's cool to see the box color be yellow instead of the red, blue, or purple boxes I'm used to.

Speaking of boxes...

As usually happens in games like this, you have boxes which your buildings come in. The red boxes are your normal buildings - the lowest level ones you can get, usually. The blue boxes are higher-level buildings that appear randomly as a bonus as you play. Purple boxes are bonus coins! All of these boxes are free and can either be tapped into existence on the center bottom box button, or they'll time into being on their own, slowly filling your board!

Eventually, you'll get enough levels to gain another city/world.

One of the chief complaints I've seen on this game is that it's just what it says - a merging game. I don't really see how that's a bad thing. Yes, these games can get tedious. Yes, they can be hard to manage over time. No, I don't mind - that's half the fun!

So if the only real complaint I've seen is that the game is honest about its nature, that's not so bad, eh?

One last note: on occasion, you'll see a paper airplane gliding over the city. This is another ad opportunity where you can get bonuses by clicking on it. Otherwise, I haven't been bombarded by ads at all!

Overall, I'd say that Merge City is a really pleasant, simple game with some stunning visuals. I love the eternal sunset background on these floating cities, and the gameplay is fun while not being too taxing. It's a perfect bus-ride game!

That'll do it for me today, guys!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 229: Miner Dash

It's so freaking hot it feels like the Earth's core is squeezing up into my soul...

I know, I know, it's way warmer and muggier than 88℉ (~31℃) with 51% humidity elsewhere in the world on a more consistent basis, but...

I'm a fall person. I prefer the cool, crisp weather of a proper New England autumn, and this gross oilslick weather just will not stand!

I will confess that I was originally going to do something like a "Christmas in July" schtick where I would list a bunch of Kongregate titles that feature snow and ice, but then I found a totally unrelated game and fell down the rabbithole of playing it. Before I knew it, it was lunch time and I hadn't written anything in this blog!!! Oops.

The game, as you may have guessed from the title, is Miner Dash, and it's an offering from Kongregate user "dabontv", who has made 26 games on Kongregate alone, all of which are absolutely bonkers. They have what appears to be an Angry Birds-style slingshot game about mummies, an idle clicker starring poop (with a sequel!) and a game where you set people on fire.

Miner Dash is a relatively simple and straighforward game by comparison, but even here we find some small hint of crazy.

When you click on the Guide, it helpfully informs you of the goal of this game.

Your goal, as this tiny red-bearded miner, is to dig to the center of the Earth. No, seriously, that's the goal. You want to dig down to the Earth's core (and they're very specific that it's Earth, and not some random fantasy world) within 30 in-game days, which are measured in mining time.

See the thermometer at the top of the screen? That's your time.
You have until the whole thing fills up with red to get to the core or as close as possible.

You can use the left and right arrows to move either direction while digging,
but you have to hold and not just tap, because he needs some nudging.

Once you fill your gauge all the way red, your pick explodes, which means you have to go to the crafting screen and make a new one or multiple replacements.

That's why you want to get a bunch of the ore and even trees!

Whenever you breach a new layer of soil, you find a "recipe", though perhaps "blueprints" are a better term. This "recipe" will allow you to make something new. You start out only being able to make wooden pickaxes and cheapo bombs, but so far, after a few hours of fiddling around, I've gotten special items, golden pickaxes, and red bombs that explode way bigger.

And while some experimentation is possible, it's just easier to just wait for the recipe
to show up, and then just click on what you want to craft from your Recipe bar.

Provided you have the materials, crafting is as simple as "click item, click CRAFT"

I love the red bombs, since they can really take you deeper when you're running out of pickaxe power or when you're trying to get large swaths of materials but you don't want to change direction!

Overall, this is a fun, silly little game with great graphics. I think I'll probably be sinking more time into this mining simulator (especially since it's so hot out and I kinda want to stay near fans and AC).

Go Enjoy Something!
FC