Tiny Tower: What hath Man Wrought?

All I was looking for was a simple way to pass the time with my iPhone. Having neither money nor credit card, I was relegated to perusing the free apps, searching for something more than an alley cat who'll parrot your every word with a speech impediment that makes him sound like an emphysema patient. I'll admit, it's not easy when it comes to video games: most of the apps that I've downloaded are for social networking on the go (Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Goodreads, etc), news, or a dictionary. If someone were to steal my iPhone and hack through the security code, they would probably pity my mega-exciting life of memorising word definitions and keeping up with archæo-linguistic discoveries while listening to reruns of WGBH Jazz Decades, and think about returning it before laughing at their foolishness and formatting my auxilliary livelihood.

Like any other normal human being, when I first got wind of Tiny Tower, I found the concept silly: isn't this just a vertical Farmville? I refused to even consider deigning such an activity. Not so much because my time is valuable (it isn't), or because I was low on space (free apps and pictures of my dog don't take up that much room), but because the mere concept of the game seemed to offend my matured tastes in digital hobby.

Ennui quickly drowned any inkling of connoisseurship and enslaved me to the pastime I once found pedestrian. I noticed that my friend had downloaded the game via the Orwellian iPhone game centre; I started remembering playing Maxis's Sim Tower and how interesting I had found it for about the span of two days. It became clear to me that by downloading this aberration, I could relive some nostalgic jiffy of time and possibly cure my first-world tedium in between actual tasks. What I was treated to was an authoritarian horror that unleashed its avaricious claws into the fabric of my daily schedule.

Upon opening the game/app, I was immediately manhandled into a tutorial with loose instructions binding me into premature failure. Somehow, I made it through by building a pizza parlour and residential apartments where my pixellated tenants could live and work as I pleased. I quickly put my first three tenants to work tossing dough and exchanging workout stories at the parlour, while the other 2/5 of my residents were scoffed at for their laziness and lack of entrepreneurial chutzpah as I constructed a second suite in which to recruit more unemployed lackeys of apparent welfare state of Tiny Town. Soon enough I finally got the hang of the game, installing a few more businesses at which I could employ my tiny wards. Then the honeymoon ended.

What I didn't realise is that the game perpetuated play into all hours of the day, whether one actively pursued it or not. Like a Poean phantasy, the constant chiming of re-stocked floors called me back to the game, groping for my iPhone in the dead of night in order to answer its lonely whimper, checking in on my sleepless 8-bit avatars. I could never be safe from this clingy application: it followed me like an incompetent stalker, uncouthly bringing attention to its loneliness any chance that I had to myself or was engrossed in another activity. It wouldn't have been so bad, had there been some end goal, some destination to which I was nearing, but it seemed that instead I had thrust myself into a never-ending cycle of construction and commerce, dragging my digital building into the heavens like some twenty-first century Tower of Babel whilst concurrently optimising the centres at which I would accrue the funding to continue my perverse mission.

I had to break free. I had to find a way out of this obligated hell I so ignorantly enrolled myself into. I knew what had to come next: deletion. I had to delete the game from my phone! but the ding, the ding, the constant ding - it called me to it, dragging me forever back to its addictive shores... until the day came that I was able to purchase a priced game, at which point my free hours became the seat of rope cutting, apocalyptic gardening, and catapulting birds into sundry debris. Yet Tiny Tower remains, quietly biding its time, taunting me through its app updates, waiting for curiosity to kill the cat.

My Best Qualities: Sleeping with the Door Closed

I can never seem to fall asleep calmly with the door to my room open. Any time I try to shut my eyes, this looming shadow of worry seems to pounce on me like a ravenous lion, and envelops me until I can groggily slip out of my bed and walk over to the door to close it. It doesn't have to be locked, just firmly closed. I don't know if this could be traced back by a team of psychotherapists to some childhood trauma that I involuntarily suffered from, or some kind of Jungian instinct that was ingrained by the forefathers because of some kind of spiritual connexion that we unknowingly share. I'm pretty sure that neither of those can be true, because what this really boils down to is two primary fears: homicide and zombies.

The first, I suppose isn't so irrational, since anyone could really just slip into my house and start a Murder Party with all the unconscious bodies just laying about. I guess that it couldn't be that hard. At least, not to me. I can't really think of anything I could do if I woke up to some masqued mouth-breathing former mechanic stretched over my body with Thanksgiving Turkey on his mind. After all, he has the knife or ax or serrated screwdriver and is ready to check my organs for life; all I have at my disposal are two pillows and building incontinence. I suppose that the second might give me a small window of surprise, in which I could take my pillows and force him into a comfortable nap - though I can't see many serial killers suffering from narcolepsy. It would just take forever to finish a murder; not even worth it in the end. Now, a killer with sleep apnœa is a whole other story: at least you could hold off your rest until after you've finished desecrating the body; and then you can just lie down in whatever least-bloody part of the bed you can find and take a short nap. But I'd be dead either way, so it doesn't necessarily matter too much to me in the end.

The second fear is zombies. Yes, I know: I'm buying into the zeitgeist! Way to feed memes with cliché deep-seated fears! Don't worry, my inner hipster has already done enough scoffing at my reptillian brain, where you all should feel comfortable in your passive disgust for my general character. However, this doesn't change the fact that sometimes I fear that my casually-ill mother will at some point shuffle into my room, and I thinking her just having woken up in the middle of the night, will attempt to engage her in conversation, at which point I will die. Well, maybe not die outright, but she will probably lunge at me, lacerating some part of my exposed flesh, at which point I will lock myself in the bathroom and eventually attack and cannibalise some downtrodden, unsuspecting survivors holing up in my house for protection. I don't necessarily mean to single out my mother, as my father also has a penchant for roaming the corridor in the middle of the night, so he could as easily lumber into my room and ruin my already-dwindling track record with life. Sometimes I'll even replay the scene in my head indefinitely from the time I lie down to when I slip off into whatever bland dreams follow horrific panic-induced plotting. I can never get to the part where I'm eventually overpowered and consumed by the very people who gave me life - mostly because I already know it'll end that way, no matter how many laundry bins and office chairs cascade into them.

It should come as no surprise, then, that as of today I have still not finished Max Brooks's Zombie Survival Guide, because every time I begin reading it, I starting getting nervous only a few pages in. I get similarly nervous watching or reading anything else zombie-related, but can otherwise finish the movie/show/book without problem, only realising as I lie down in my bed that the virus can hit at any time. Obviously, I realise that it's pure fantasy, that as of yet there is no such thing as that kind of infection; and even if there were, I should be able to take comfort in the fact that my slovenly person would not make it more than a few steps outside of my home in case of such an epidemic without being surely and quickly ended.

Adventures of the Human Water Closet, Episode 1: The Party

Book Review #2

Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness by Bryan Lee O'Malley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What 'Preciously Little Life' had in novelty, and where 'vs. the World' seemed to drag with trying to move the plot and establishing background, 'Infinite Sadness' craftily combines. The story effortlessly moves between drama and comedy, with ingenuity and nerdiness peppered along the way.


View all my reviews

Book Review #1

Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives:  The Life and Teachings of Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica by Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of the most, if not the most, spiritually beneficial books I have ever read. Elder Thaddeus approaches the indulgence of sin from a seemingly unique and yet patristic angle, giving advice that is burning with love and exemplary of the meekness and kindness espoused by Our Lord.


The only negative aspect of this book was that it was virtually just a  collexion of quotes (though some were quite long), and this sometimes made it hard to read the book straight through. On the other hand, this configuration could in fact be spiritually beneficial, as it forces the reader (and gives them the ability) to stop and consider each individual quote.


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Hello, BLOGOSPHERE

I feel like I should begin actually blogging again, but to be honest, I don't know if I have much of anything to actually write about. Ah, crisis of the twenty-first century! I suppose that all of my time on Twitter has somehow destroyed my capability to communicate in anything past 140 characters, but maybe it's about time that I try.  Then again, though, I probably have nothing interesting to add to the world, and my weblog becomes part of the milliard of bytes in digital clutter that are clogging up the tubes of the Internet.

Oh well, I suppose. Here's to effort!

New Phone, New Problems

For whatever reason, it seems that the last phone I had decided to crap out on me and stop allowing the receiver to work. Basically, this meant that the few people who called me would hear me explaining this problem to them while they yelled 'CAN YOU HEAR ME? NOW? NO? HELLO? NOW?' as I dejectedly told them that I had no idea what they were saying, because I couldn't hear them.

After visiting the Verizon store, I was told that something inside the charge terminal (or whatever spacetalk term they used) broke off and now made my phone thing that I was using a Bluetooth. They also asked if I had tried using the Speakerphone option. Of course, being the infinite hub of wisdom that I am, I replied to them that no, I had not; nor had I even thought of it.

Needless to say, it worked; and for the next week, while my (free!) replacement was being shipped to me, fellow SUNY Buffalo students rejoiced in hearing my family, friends, and I shouting at each other through my confused little phone. Finally the new phone came, however, and oh how excited I was! It could make calls, receive calls, send texts, receive texts, all like my older phone, but newer and shinier (honestly, it is shinier)!

Around Tuesday evening, I decided that it would be a good idea to celebrate having an 8pk of Guinness by drinking one, so I pull out my travel mug (you know, in case I had to drink on the go), and fill it up. My ex-girlfriend had travelled home on train for the weekend for a family emergency, so I decided to text her to see how everything was and when I would be picking her up. It's about this time when my new phone supposed that it was parched.

Not even Michael Phelps could have pulled off so beautiful a dive (probably because he swims and doesn't dive); I was flabberghasted, unsure of what to do next. Some of the Guinness splashed out and soaked everything on my desk: newspapers, homework assignments, my laptop, and probably something else. After long deliberation (probably like a minute), I realised that I should be trying to save the phone.

Off I ran to the bathroom, Guinness in hand, yelling 'awshit awshit awshit awshit', pouring out all of it caramel creamy goodness down the sink to see my poor new phone convulsing in a show of lights that either signified Morse Code or a mini-rave. As anyone familiar with electronics would do, my first instinct was to pull out the battery, so it wouldn't short-circuit. The battery, however, was fiercely locked into the phone and refused to come out. Some finagling finally freed it, after a minute or two of struggle. It was somewhere during this that I yelled 'damn it!' about as loud as I could.

Returning to my room with the damaged replacement, and going to my Clorox wipes to clean off the desk, my roommate, who was this whole time reading a magazine, looks up and says, 'huh? did something happen or something?'

Today, after letting it dry, I've realised that somehow the keypad no longer recognises the B, H, or Y keys properly: B gets me a return with nmb, H a backspace followed by lkj, and Y now equals poiu. The frontscreen works on and off, with a white foam rising over it like a cararact; and the key colour went from bright white to a dull brown. Now that I think of it, some of my punctuations don't work, either. I am in no denial over the fact that the inside of my phone is probably covered by a syruppy residue that will haunt me for the next year or so.

All in all, it could be worse, but it's going to be hard texting. Tis is not a good waj to talk to people for a wole jear; trust me after a daie its gotten annojing.