Guess what?

I'm off to see Breaking Dawn!!! (Part 1, in November) :D Vue cinemas released tickets at midnight so I rushed to buy them! Well it wasn't quite that simple, they started adding them about 10 minutes after midnight ONE CINEMA AT A TIME. So sure enough Twitter was full of people saying "Where's my cinema?" and tons of people waiting up when they just want to sleep! Still, I've made some new friends from it and as mentioned already I was lucky enough to get mine! :D


When Eclipse came out we saw the previous two films before it and then moved to a different screen at midnight for Eclipse. They're doing something similar this time, but with all three of the previous films. I'm waiting to be able to buy tickets (the VUE website has been stuck with only two cinemas listed for about an hour now) although I don't think we'll go to all three films (mainly because that'll be *10 hours of Twilight and they being rather early at 4.30pm). The price is only £6 for standard seats though or £7.25 for VIP seats and that's for ALL THREE FILMS so realistically even if we just go to see Eclipse it's still cheaper any other single film!

I prefer seeing the midnight showings of big films simply because A) I want to see the film ASAP and B) It's been seen (at least once) so no worries about it suddenly vanishing from the big screen. However, I do think that VIP (or at least booked) seats are a MUST for big showings. I don't think the cinema experience is as much fun if you have to rush around like a mad fool to get the best seats although you probably all should ignore me saying that because I want you to buy the standard seats so I'll have more VIP ones to pick from! :) As it was though I was the first person at my cinema booking VIP seats:


I was actually counting out the seats to make sure they were as central as possible (there are 16 seats to the left of us and 15 on the right and middle row of the VIP seats so best location :) I'm such a film snob I know :)

Now do you want to hear the really amusing part? My Twilight friend that I see these films with might not even be able to actually go that evening so the tickets have been bought purely on the hope that she can! Worst case scenario though I figure it won't be too hard finding someone else who wants to go if needed :P

Last BBQ of the year

Last Friday I jumped in a car with Richard and Carrie and headed north to visit our friend Andy! Even though it was Friday evening the traffic wasn't too bad and we got there about 10pm and spent the rest of the evening chatting and eating pizza. The next day after we all got up we watched most of a rugby game, I say a rugby game because it's not something I really watch/know much about (I was anti-social and just chatted to people on Facebook and MSN LOL), but apparently England were in it and we won so that's got to be good :) After a while we started the mega BBQ and what a BBQ it was!! :D

Some of the masses of food!

I say mega BBQ because we had insane amounts of food to cook. Largely my fault for bringing too much (and things I wasn't expected to bring!), but although it threw Andy's food plans out slightly, I don't think anyone really minded, at least we had too much rather than too little! :D In fact we had so much food that when we lost a few, we didn't really care! :D

We had a few casualties fall through the bars!

Normally it'd be "OH NO WE'VE LOST SOME!", but this time we were more like "oh well, there's 300 more where they came from!" :D After everyone was completely full and we'd cooked everything (for consumption later) we moved back inside and spent the rest of the evening chatting and watching films!

On Sunday we watched the F1 and like the rugby it's not something I know much about so I probably annoyed everyone by my constant questions, but it's always good to learn new things. More amusingly I made some sort of comment about not really being interested in F1 since it's kinda of boring with cars just going round a track... and within 30 seconds on LITERALLY the 1st corner there was quite a bit crash! As far as I know noone was seriously injured which is obviously good, but it did bring much amusement to us all for the rest of the race everytime they referenced this initial crash and we saw the camera footage of one the cars literally sliding sideways into every other car! Around lap 30 it was rather quiet with not much happening so outloud I again repeated "Formula One is so boring...", but this time nothing happened. Boo :P But yeh I saw a rugby game AND the F1 this weekend, I feel all sporty and stuff! :D

By now it was early afternoon so sadly we had to start packing up and heading back home. We were lucky enough to have great weather all weekend and then on the drive back, about 1 hour from home, it started to pour down - perfect timing! :D Hope everyone else had a great weekend too!

All good things...

So this is going to be a FarmVille related entry and a bit of a rant at that, but also the last entry ever! I started playing way back in August 2009 and then stopped in December 2009, but started up again in February 2010 when they released the "Unwither Ring". It used to be a fun game, but for a while now it's just become more and more of a chore and if it's not fun, why play it? So because of all the work I'd put in I set myself a new goal before I could stop and today I reached it!

300!

Yeh I know, I need to get out more, although when you've got over 1500 "Belted Cows (which generate 3,000 coins per day EACH) getting money and levelling up isn't really much of a challenge. Over the last few months Zynga (who make the game), have just made it rediculous. First they introduced crop masteries, then tree masteries, then cooking masteries, then crafting masteries and finally animal masteries. But they never backdated any of them and whilst originally having the signs was something you felt impressed by, but over 300 signs later, it's just taking up loads of space on your farm and noone, even you, cares about them anymore.

All 243 regular crops, 4 of the super crops and 70 tree masteries

1 crafting mastery, 16 cooking masteries and 26 animal masteries

Then there was the constant requirement to spend real money. Originally it was just a few items here and there which were reasonably priced (as resasonably priced sa virtual items go!) and you didn't feel bad if you bought a few of them to make your farm look nicer. That's all changed now, they know that people were collecting every horse, every gnome or even every tree so they inflated the prices and started bringing out a new one of each of those... every 2-3 days! I did start collecting trees AND horses for a bit, but it just wasn't possible to keep doing that so had to stop collecting both.

My horses and horse-type animals

They've also started bringing out new quests every two weeks (and you have two weeks to do them in) and whilst you don't have to do them, you feel like you should at least try. If you don't have friends who actively play though, it's impossible to finish some of the quests... unless you spend real money to bypass it!

The lowest point to me is the constant price testing. For example with some special item they "release" it for cash, but everyone sees a different price. However if you go to buy it then you're told it's not yet available and it'll be coming soon. Then of course they analyse the prices of the buy clicks and release it at the highest possible price (that will still get people buying it!)

If you go on the Zynga forums there's nothing but upset people fed up with the constant popups, the out of sync errors, bugs that have been there for months and the constant attempt to make you spend real money and basically taking the fun away from the game. Zynga don't even bother to reply to any of them and you're probably asking "Why are they still playing then?" Because it was fun, we've spent a lot of time on it and we've still got goals we wanted to achieve. Although the forums are full of nothing but complaints, I'm sure there are still some people who are still enjoying the game and I envy them.

Here's some final pictures of my farms:

My original farm, anyone want a belted cow? :)

My English Countryside farm, mostly just for crops

I know my original farm has the England flags etc, but that's because that was BEFORE we could have an English Countryside farm :)

Okay so if you actually bothered reading this far, good for you! I stopped playing Restautant City again a few days ago too (because it's just boring and there aren't any levels higher than 90) and I've nearly finished Bejeweled Blitz (I'm 226/250 on the 450K star and that's the only one left) and after I finish that... no more Facebook games/obligations - Hurrah! :D