Once again, here are three more levels that people keep emailing me about — level 33, 65, and 97 of Candy Crush. I really enjoyed going back and playing them again now that I’m farther away from them. Back when I played them the first time, I got stuck on each of them for a while.  So it’s either distance or skills picked up in later boards that made me see these boards differently this time.

For people who have already emailed me about these, I don’t think there is anything new in this post that I didn’t already tell you. For everyone else, the tips are here if you want them.

BUT WAIT, BEFORE YOU READ ON OR CLICK AWAY: Could you take about thirty seconds to fill out this questionnaire if you play Candy Crush to prove a point in my mind?  I’ll post the findings next week.  And pass along the link to the form to friends who play too.

Yes, I am this frivolous with my brain space.

Level 33

I don’t know why, but I actually liked this level. Maybe it was because there were so few moves, so you could play the board quickly. I liked knowing that it wasn’t going to work out without having dedicated multiple minutes to the round.  See, silver lining!

That said, the key here is cascade, cascade, cascade. Start with the bottom two squares because you may be able to pop some of the top ones inadvertently with a cascade. If you can get a horizontal or vertical stripe, use it, but the cascade will pop just as many jellies as the stripe.  So don’t be tempted to make a stripe when there are perfectly nice moves you can do on one of those bottom two levels to create a cascade.

The cascade is key!  Don’t get distracted by making stripes that may pop nothing in a row.

Level 65

This level sucks and there isn’t any nicer way to describe it.

Unlike level 33, where you should ignore making striped candies, you cannot win this level without making vertical and horizontal stripes.  There is just no possible way to break through the licorice, break through the chocolate, AND clear all the jelly without plenty of stripes (unless you’re purchasing boosters).  So above all else, make the special candies.  If you can get a striped and wrapped combo, excellent.  If not, make striped candies and explode them around the board.  It’s just a matter of making enough of them and using them before chocolate covers them.  So to that end, never leave a striped candy sitting there.  Use it!

In terms of the chocolate, treat it like clutter in your house.  You don’t want it to get out of control, but clutter isn’t the same thing as filth.  Don’t focus so much on cleaning up the chocolate in this level: focus more on keeping it at bay.

Good luck.  Really, it’s not you.  This level just sucks.

Level 97

Whoa, there is a lot going on here.  Bombs dropping (and they go off after 8 moves), weird cascading, and a minimum point collection quota.

So let’s look at it this way first: you will go far in reaching your quota just by taking care of the bombs.  You can’t only clear the bombs and make enough points to win, but you can collect at least half the points you need just by playing and making sure you always take care of the bombs before they go off.

You can luckily make a lot of striped candies on this board for whatever reason, so they will help you to collect points (though I found they rarely helped me take care of the bombs for whatever reason).  And when I re-played this level to remember how I did it, I got two speckled doughnuts during the round, one of which landed next to a green striped candy (when the board felt full of green candies).  I collected tens of thousands of points through both of those moves.

So focus on the bombs first and foremost.  Secondly on making and using special candies (striped, wrapped, and speckled doughnut).  And thirdly on just gritting your teeth and saying to yourself, “well, at least I don’t have to deal with chocolate on this level too!”

Currently: I’m on Level 201, and I’m happy to go backwards and explain how I did any board before that. Sometimes it was stupid luck but other times, there was actual thought involved. Let me know the level you’re struggling with.

I just learned about the 77 Days videos, which hint that something is going to happen on Monday.  It reminds me of when I was in elementary school, and the Book of Nostradamus had predicted something to happen on a certain day.  I wanted to stay home, certain that it meant the end of the world, but my parents packed me off to elementary school, promising to run and fetch me if the world ended.  I spent all of recess staring at the sky.  Nothing ever happened.

But viral Internet projects are very different from a dusty book of prophecies, hundreds of years old.  This creepy site has only been hinting about this date for 77 days.

September 24th.

As in this Monday. [Ha – I got the date wrong.  Thank you, Stacie.  The 24th is on Tuesday. So I get one extra day to feel uneasy!]

The site creepily states (did I mention this is creepy?  And unsettling?  And… creepy?)

Well, here you are. Somehow, you stumbled on the mystery of Pronunciation Book and its sudden, unsettling countdown to… something… on September 24th — 77 days from July 9th, 2013 (How To Pronounce 77).

You might’ve thought to yourself, “Why, this looks like fun!” And then you looked closer. Deeper. Now you do not know what to think.

Worry not, intrepid internaut, for help is at hand.

You are one of us now.

Creepier still (creepy!) is the spectrogram that forms from the silences in the pronunciation videos.  It’s a man with the word “Tomorrow” written over his eyes.  The image is in that link.

Theories abound about the meaning, from the freaky to the terrifying to the commercial.  It could be a viral campaign for a movie or it could be the release of a news story.

But whatever it is, it’s unsettling.  And I don’t like feeling unsettled.

Your thoughts?

Passing along two cool things I learned about this week that both were told to me because I blog.  Which means that if I didn’t blog, or if I had chosen to write about a different topic that day, I would not know of either of these things.  Isn’t that a strange idea; not just the roads not taken, but the information not known.  Anyway, mind blown and onward.

The first is Coursera.  Did you know that you can take classes online for free?  Another Dreamer told me about it in a comment.  You can go peruse the course listings, decide what you want to learn, and then take a class without ever leaving your home.  For someone who likes to learn for learning’s sake, this is the most brilliant, wonderful thing I’ve ever found.  And yes, I am probably going to sign up for one of the computer programming classes to complement what we’re learning from the book.

The second is The Room.  A friend mentioned it in a comment on GeekDad, and I decided to download it because he described it as similar to a text-based game (my favourite kind of game) upgraded with graphics.  And that is exactly how I would describe it too.  You feel as if you are in the room, actually touching each safe, picking up the various items you find and using them to solve the puzzles.  The Wolvog and I are working on it together (though I accidentally found one of the keys when I was trying to show the game to Josh, and I feel majorly guilty that I did it without him).  Would have paid a lot more for this game but was grateful that it was only 99 cents (and there is a free version for iPhone with in-app purchases).  Gorgeous graphics, sort of creepy music (but we keep the sound off).

Passing on the love since I was grateful to learn about both these things.

*******

Akismet saves me from a lot of spam — upward of 300 pieces on a regular day.  But it also sometimes yanks in perfectly normal comments that don’t discuss Viagra.  When it pulls them into the moderation folder, I see them and approve them immediately.  When it pulls them into the spam folder, well, I have to admit that lately I’ve gotten lazy and hit “delete all” without looking closely at the spam folder.  Looking closely means scrolling through 300 comments that are gibberish strings of random words, ads for sexual aids or… well… actually they’re pretty much all ads for sexual aids.

Bea noticed that her last few comments weren’t on the blog, so I dove into the spam folder and found two comments underneath one for “medieval fuck screens dragonball.”  So… while Akismet is catching the dragonballs, it’s also catching perfectly normal non-dragonball comments.

Please let me know if your comments are not going through.  I know Akismet sends a few to moderation each day, and I haven’t been able to get that to stop.  But I will dive into the dragonball-filled spam folder and pull out comments because I don’t want your words to go missing after you took the time to write them.

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Selling the Fantasy of Cancer Survival” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, A!
• “Outing the Single Hussy” (Knocked Up by a Test Tube)
• “Dear Writers: Success is Mattering to Somebody” (BlogHer)
• “The Bitch in My Head” (Where the Bleep is Our Stork?)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Project Sweet Pea has a post about BFPs in the ALI blogosphere (as opposed to the face-to-face world).  I loved this post because it tells the whole picture.  Sure there is envy, but there is also the fact that she writes, “I need to read about these BFPs. I need to know that this can work for people. That there is a possibility this might work out one day for me too.”  It’s a sweet post.

Persnickety Chickadee writes about how before she started trying to become pregnant, she had never had an overnight in a hospital.  Infertility has made her practically blase about surgery.  She writes, “Look, growth as a result of infertility. Not sure I wanted it in this way, but it is here.”  Sending her good thoughts for a quick recovery from the surgery this week.

Lastly, Two Adults, One Child has a gorgeous post about a run she took to quiet her mind.  You seriously need to read this post in full, but here is a taste: “Street lights overhead, casting a pattern of light, then dark, then light, then dark — not unlike the recurrent pattern of hope and despair with which I am so familiar.  Month after month.  Year after year.  I am comfortable here.  I know this place.”  The final line will break your heart.

The roundup to the Roundup: Coursera and The Room.  Are your comments in my spam folder?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between September 13th and September 20th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

I said I would quit Candy Crush when I got to level 200.  That level was chosen because it was a nice round number, a fat number.  I felt as if Level 200 would say, “I got bored of this game; it didn’t get me.”  And I felt as if I had to quit because… you know… that thing called attention that I’m not paying when I’m playing out my 5 lives each night.

And then I got to level 200 and beat level 200.

And then I started to feel that gnawing emptiness that comes when you’re not quite ready to part with something, but you have to say goodbye anyway.  The end of a really good night out with friends.  Those last minutes before you have to leave for work.  The kiss at the end of a visit and then the drive backwards down the driveway where you can still see the person.

INSTEAD OF DELETING IT, I CONTINUED ON.

I yelled at myself once I crossed over to level 201, messing up my exit on a gorgeous, round number.  Now I’m stuck until level 225.  Or at least 250.  Maaaaaybe 300.

*******

On the other hand, I thought I would update to iOS7 the second it became available.  Not for myself but because the Wolvog can’t stop talking about it.  He could barely wait until the release date; expecting him to wait beyond the release date was asking too much.  He had already crooned about all of Jony Ive’s contributions while he followed me around the kitchen, insisting that his involvement meant it would be beautiful and functional.  He repeated the operating system like a mantra, “iOS7iOS7iOS7iOS7.”

I was going to download it while he was in school, but then I started seeing updates from people who upgraded and didn’t like it.  At all.  And I am such a creature of habit, so loyal to keeping things exactly the same.  A case in point: I spent the afternoon mending a jacket that is 17 years old rather than buy a new jacket.  I like this jacket.  I am familiar with this jacket.  So, if I am the type of person who keeps a jacket for 17 years, you can probably deduce that I am also the sort of person who likes her phone interface to look similar from update to update.

The Wolvog was beyond disappointed when I told him that we wouldn’t be upgrading on the first day.  Crushed.  Continuously repeating his iOS7 mantra until we banned the word from our house for the time being.  He got around it by calling it “the upgrade” or “you-kn0w-what.”

“I’m going to post about iOS7 and ask for people’s opinions,” I promised the Wolvog at bedtime.

“How come you can say it?  How come you can say you-know-what?”

“Uh… because I’m an adult?  Good night!”

So I’m asking you about it if you upgraded.  What do you think of iOS7?

The ChickieNob and Wolvog move through video games faster than Superman.

Allow me to be crotchety and old for a moment.  In my day, if you wanted a fancy new Intellivision game such as Pitfall or Utopia, you had to beg your parents for several weeks.  You had to make empty promises, such as the fact that you’d make your bed every single day before school.  Then you actually had to make your bed once or twice to give your parents a sample of the orderly world that would exist if you could have said game. (But just a taste, I mean, why buy the proverbial cow… or in this case, video game.)

You had to save up your allowance or babysit the kids up the street.  You had to do your homework very quickly so you could run over to your friend’s house and play their copy of the game a few more times to be certain that it’s a game you really really wanted to get.  And then, after writing an essay complete with a thesis paragraph, explaining how playing Utopia will help you to better understand the plight of farmers and fisherman in America or how Pitfall will make you a more adventurous, scorpion-jumping person, your parents would relent and purchase said game.  And you would play it, gratefully, for the next six months.  And not make your bed so you would have something to bargain with when it came time to beg for the next video game several months later.

And we liked it while we trudged uphill to school both ways.

Screenshot of Jetpack Joyride

Game obtaining is unsurprisingly very different for the twins.  If they want a new game, we don’t need to leave the house to get it.  Every game they want to play can be downloaded directly onto their iPods.  They don’t have to promise to make their bed to get it; not that I’d ever believe them but almost every game they want is either free with in-app purchases or the cost is minimal — less than a cup of coffee at the gas station.  Which means they ask for a new game pretty much on a weekly basis.  By the time I figure out what Hay Day even is, they’ve ditched their farms and are now Jetpack Joyriding around with Barry Steakfries on a grand adventure.

While games have gotten less expensive (depending on the gaming system) and easier to obtain along with graphics obviously leaps and bounds ahead of when Pitfall consisted of a brown blob retracting in three jerky steps to indicate a growing and receding mud pit, the speed in which kids obtain and release games has created a new crop of problems: vetting overload, flighty attention, and lessons missed.

There isn’t enough time to research games thoroughly before download.  I work a full time job, and I can’t keep up with the game request research.  We have fairly strict rules about violence in games since I know the twins will end up in our bedroom with their nightmares.  Of course every child is different, and what rolls off one child’s vinegary brain like a blob of oil will emulsify in another child’s imagination.  So we can’t always go with popularity or another parent’s vetting of a game since every child is different.  There are plenty of times when I have to say no not because there is anything wrong with the game, but because I don’t have the time to explore the reviews and look at screenshots.  By the time I can get around to looking at the game, that game is already on its way out with the elementary school set.  If you want to keep up with the video game talk, you need to pretty much download and start playing instantly.

Rapidly downloading and discarding games means that kids — at least the ChickieNob and Wolvog — aren’t deeply exploring a single world, immersing themselves so deeply into a game that they start imagining themselves an actual owner of a farm or a jetpack.  Back when my sister and I played epic games of Utopia, I would feel actual joy when the rain clouds watered my crops, imagining my villagers excited by the bounty of invisible food.  I cared about Pitfall Harry, constructing a backstory for him that explained why he would brave quicksand and rattlesnakes to collect diamond rings.  We stayed so long with one game that we ended up knowing every single screen.

The twins don’t even remember some games when I bring them up months later, trying to figure out if it’s okay to delete them from my iTunes account.  With the exception of a few games that have sticking power, most games are barely explored and quickly forgotten.  I can still remember every single game we owned on both of our gaming systems as well as any computer game my parents purchased for us during a twenty-year span.  Will my kids be able to recall video games when they’re older to annoy their kids with how life used to be back when graphics were merely three-dimensional or allowed the gamer to place themselves squarely into the action (which was back when we all lived above ground before the zombie apocalypse)?

And lastly, there are the lessons missed that video game playing afforded us in my youth.  We stuck with a game until we solved it (and then we photographed the television screen with a Polaroid camera to prove it to friends at school the next day).  We stuck with it no matter how frustrated we got because it was our only game option.  We couldn’t cajole our parents into buying us two games in quick succession, so we stayed with a single game of Super Mario Brothers until we found every single portal and collected every single coin.  Playing games that way made me feel as if I accomplished something after all those hours in front of the screen.  I felt as if I had used my brain, solved a problem, seen a story unfold in front of my eyes.

Right now, with games so plentiful and easily (and cheaply) obtainable, they don’t stick with a game very long once it gets frustrating.  If they can’t figure it out after a few tries, they delete it and move onto the next game.  I realized that I was starting to do it too; download dozens of hidden object games, play them for a few minutes, and then delete them when they ask me to make a purchase or connect to Facebook.  Maybe this new tendency of game creators to push us into playing socially in order to build their word-of-mouth non-organically is what makes me turn away from games in a hurry, but certainly my twins aren’t thinking about how annoying it is to be manipulated into giving game makers access to your friend’s eyes in exchange for a few minutes of entertainment.  The ChickieNob and Wolvog are deleting because easy come, easy go.  They got the game easily, the game turned out to be a challenge, and they deleted it in favour of the next set of shiny graphics coupled with catchy song.

This problem isn’t solved by forcing my kids to buy their own games; after all, when a game is free or 99 cents, what I need them to learn can’t be learned without a foot coming down to make a few rules.

New games need to be played for a few weeks before they can be rotated off the device, so choose wisely, kids, since you won’t be able to download another one this month.  Before a game can be replaced with a new game, they need to explain why they’re removing it.  Too many “it’s too hard”s on games that I know are playable will result in me meanly telling them to keep at it until they’ve figured out three more boards.  Games that only allow them to progress if they make in-app purchases or connect to a social media account may be deleted immediately considering in-app purchases are blocked on every device in this house and my children aren’t old enough for social media accounts.  And lastly, they also need to choose a game and play it with me, slowly solving it together and talking about it incessantly to build their imagination.  Infocom games are particularly good for this torture.

Hopefully this will ensure that we stop having conversations such as the one that occurred a few weeks ago.  The Wolvog’s iPod was recharging and I offered him use of my phone since he had just started his screen time for the day.  He turned down the offer, informing me that my phone was boring:

It always has the same games.