Photobucket Screws Over Its Users

Yeah, I'm sure this is old news by now but a month or so ago Photobucket decided that they would end their free third party image hosting and charge $400 a year for it.  Needless to say, a LOT of people and their websites were affected by this.  For me, it was just the loss of two web counters, fortunately.  For a whole lot more, the loss was their entire site(s).

So here I am looking for third party hosting sites for my two meager little counters, and you'll never guess where I finally landed.  First, I tried Imgur, and that just didn't feel right.  I looked into it and it seemed wrong.  Then I tried a dubious little site called VGY.ME.  Interesting, very simple, yet the url it gave me for my first image didn't work in the Boingdragon counter hosting site.  By the way, that's what I use for counters.  Boingdragon has been around for years, is very easy to use, and is free although they like a small donation.  So after trying the url from the other site and having it not show up in Boingdragon, I thought "Hmmm... let me try Blogger."  So I pasted the url of one of the pictures from one of my posts here, and what do you know, it works!  So now I have to try to actually create and replace my two counters.  One I use right here.  The other is on my art and framing website.  Now to upload my images and see if I can get this thing done and over with.

The Flying Car/Driving Plane

There is certainly a percentage of our society who can

handle evolution on this scale, but not nearly enough.

It sure will be interesting, though.

          There must be something very comforting about going crazy. I imagine that there are far too few of us who haven't spent an exhausting amount of time keeping a straight face when the world just seems to want so very desperately for us to lose it.

           After all, life begins as a comedy of errors. When we crawl, we don't know why, we just do it. As if lying on one's back staring at the ceiling wasn't good enough. Then we walk, and through countless faceplants into the living room rug (or hardwood floor) we continue until we can make it through a day without the vertical suddenly becoming horizontal. These juxtapositions in life are inevitable, we've been taught that since the beginning. Which is what brings me to this offering from our friends at Terrafugia. In what's sure to change the way we look at technological innovation, they've completely scrapped the concept of making a "flying car". Instead, they're concentrating on developing a plane that can drive. 

           There's nothing wrong with this, after all, moving forward is what we do. I'm just concerned that we as a species will not embrace this and other concepts like it with the proper attitude, in the right frame of mind. This is where going crazy comes in. It's not about the people who design such contraptions, or the poor not-quite-earthbound geeks who will strap themselves in, grin like Cheshire cats and fling themselves skyward. It's about all those who will hear a loud noise in the back yard, rushing out to find half of one of these things tangled in their kids' swingset and the lower branches of that oak tree your Granddad planted, and the other half dangling from the power lines in the next neighborhood over.  Various limbs and visceral remnants assorted and strewn.  A small number of these novelties scattered about the planet is inconsequential, but we all know that isn't going to last much longer. It's at this point when going crazy is going to come in very handy, and those of us who are able to get a jump on it are going to be the ones who will handle it best. I think I'm going to go lay on my back and stare at the ceiling for a while.

Mike Ehrmantraut from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul

Season three is getting really great, isn't it?  I love the story arc of Mike, Hector and Gus.  Can't wait for every week's episode!  When I watched Breaking Bad, I was able to binge watch it.  Having to watch once a week is killing me!  Wondering how Vince is going to handle the fact that Kim and Chuck aren't in BB.  Well, just have to wait I guess.  More soon, I have a lot to sort through.

Negan Is Ruining The Walking Dead

Maybe it's just the producers sticking with the basic plot in the graphic novels, but Negan is likely to be the downfall of this series.  The people calling the shots have demonstrated a shocking lack of intuition as to how the audience will respond to their choices that it's really surprising.  First, after an entire season (6) anticipating the arrival of Negan, basically turning the whole season into one big cliffhanger, they imposed yet another huge cliffhanger upon the viewers by leaving his choice of victim(s) unresolved.  This really killed a large part of my interest in the show, and I guess my opinion of myself as fairly average demographically speaking proved to be true in the reactions I've seen in the time since then.

The show has been nothing but one big snore since season 7 began, and with the mid season break coming up, it's looking like the show could be headed for its demise sooner than a lot of us expected.  My own reasons for believing this are probably the same as a lot of people, considering that I'm in complete agreement with most of the criticism I'm seeing these days. 

When I first met Negan in the graphic novels, I thought "Okay, this villain just isn't believable."  I didn't really think much at that point about how this would translate into the tv show... maybe it was a defense mechanism, my subconscious wouldn't let me go there.  Now that it's actually out there, on the screen, it's really hitting me how unbelievable this character is.  Forget the major gaffe with the season 6 cliffhanger, the man just doesn't work.  I realize that in order to watch a show like this, the viewer must accept certain things which strain credulity, but this goes way beyond what's acceptable.  At least for me.  Yeah, we accept the concept of the re-animated dead.  I get that this, compared to a charismatic, murderous megalomaniac, should be the tougher sell, but it's not.  The tough sell is where the hell did Negan come from in the first place?  For the life of me, I can't come up with any scenario which explains where Negan came from and what he did in the pre-apocalypse world.  This guy could not possibly have held any sane position in the real world.  The only places a person with his qualities could have been are prison or a mental institution.  I suppose he could have already been a cult leader before the world went to hell, but come on, how likely is that?  Plus, the murderous quality couldn't have just developed overnight, or even in a year or two.  There's also nothing in what they've shown us that makes me believe that someone, somewhere along the way, wouldn't have taken him out by now.  He's a psychopath with a bat.  There's no CSI, no forensics, one of his own people could take him out at any time.  In my opinion there's no way this guy just created this persona as an adaptive response to an apocalypse situation, and no way he's ruled his people for this long without being taken out.  Believing in the dead walking is easy compared to believing Negan could even exist.  Even more frightening, if the producers make the poor decision to stick to the graphic novels, they're seriously going to lose nearly their entire audience.

Season 7 has been completely boring due to the fragmentation of the whole composition of the show.  It's all over the place with no discernible point, no element that ties it all together except, of course, for Negan himself.  They're spreading the show way too thin and it's only resulting in apathy and disinterest.  In seasons 4, 5, and 6, we spent so much time going down every stinking back road in existence and NEVER stop anywhere it would actually make sense to hole up for a while, until they met the Alexandrians.  I've been tired of the "dumbass" approach they've been taking for three years now.  The theme that the dead take a back seat to surviving humans is wearing so thin that it's like someone's "lucky underwear" which is held together by a few threads and would blow away like dandelion spores in a stiff enough wind.  The show has become nothing more than a soap opera with an occasional run-in with the dead just for color.  And seriously, they really need to stop having dozens of walkers just showing up in absolutely every section of woods they pass through.  The population density just doesn't cover it.  After two or three years, the walkers would either be so spread out that it would be totally rare to run into one, or they would gather into herds which would be equally rare. 

I really think it's time to give the audience some REALITY for a change.  I know this wouldn't last long term, but I think the viewers need a break from the soap opera and relentless barrage of villains making life difficult.  In season 2, I had my doubts about the wisdom they were exhibiting by not looking for a smart, safe, easily defensible location.  I went on Google Earth, found the quarry they were at in season 1, and in only about a minute I found the perfect location about thirty miles north-northeast.  It's called Lake Sidney Lanier, it has a large island in the middle served by one road.  This would be perfect, just blow the main bridge in and pass out the fishing gear.  Plus, all they'd need to do is use boats to reach the marina, then use trucks to go scavenging.  The island sports a large resort which would house everyone comfortably, and two golf courses which would make beautiful farmland.  I think that though this may seem laid back and even a little boring, I really believe they need to give the viewers something that actually makes sense before they lose all of us.  Spend some time at the lake, then maybe they have a problem where they have to leave.  Maybe then they could use their heads again and head for the Florida Keys.  Another beautiful and easily cleared out and defensible place to put down roots for a while.  Get creative from there, but I think that people watching really want things to make sense.  This involves two things:  First, get rid of Negan asap, and get these poor fools on a lake full of fish, or the ocean.  A completely unlimited source of food.  Give the whole "humanity is the big problem" thing a season off.  The viewers need a break.  Any more endless back roads and the series is done.

Set of ten NCIS portraits

Three so far, another three next weekend.

Who Does Negan Kill On The Walking Dead?

Who cares any more?  Seriously, this could have been a masterful season which built to a roaring crescendo, but instead the producers saw fit to let the end fizzle away in the name of the age old "cliffhanger."  I agree that the concept of the "cliffhanger" is many times necessary to the telling of a good story, but let's remember that this entire season has been pretty much one big, long cliffhanger.  If you push a cliffhanger too far, you risk losing the audience to impatience and apathy.  The solid foundation upon which a good cliffhanger is constructed is the genuine concern of the viewer for the subjects.  If you push the viewer's patience too far you lose them.  This is the mistake the producers made in this situation, in my opinion.

We spent 16 episodes in anticipation of the appearance of Negan, and even those who haven't read the graphic novels knew what was coming at the end of the season.  The viewers should have been given an epic climax to the season, allowed to have the off season to contemplate, to grieve, to mourn.  The threat of Negan and his potential for the future would have been more than enough of a cliffhanger on which to end the season.  We all know that the producers stray from the graphic novels, so nobody really knew what was going to happen EXACTLY.  We all knew that someone had to be sacrificed for Negan and Lucille to fulfill their anticipated threat, but we didn't know who.  This was the cliffhanger we've all dealt with all season long.  This ending was cheap and predictable.  I called it days before, and I was dreading my prediction to come true... but it did.  I really had hoped that the producers would break from the obvious and the predictable, but I was sadly disappointed.  The instant the episode ended I ceased caring which would die.  I'm not going to be one of those who will spend the next five or six months wondering and worrying which will die.  Negan can beat all of them to death for all I care at this point.  I'm calling this "Schrodinger's Negan."  He kills someone for sure, maybe more than one.  However, since the producers have chosen to stretch this out so far and for so long, they've worn thin the patience of much of their fan base.  I'm a pretty average guy, and I know that I represent a decent percentage of the shows demographics.  They pushed it too far with me, and so I know that they pushed it too far with a whole lot of people.  You may not be one of them, and if so, enjoy the next five or six months of nail-biting and anticipation.  As for me, I'll forget this until it comes back and when it does, I'll watch to see who dies and not care at all who it is.




The Walking Dead
Negan season finale
Who did Negan kill?
The Walking Dead spoilers

Official Warning From The Neopets Team Neopets Will Probably Be Shut Down

Jumpstart, the company that bought Neopets a while back, has been doing such an abysmal job at running the game site that it's very likely it won't last much longer.  Yes, Nepets may actually be shutting down, closing forever.  Neopets has been mishandled in the past, but never so badly as it's being run right now.  In fact, it seems like all they know how to do is lose players.  Where there were once hundreds of thousands of players, last time I saw their counter showing the number of players it was in the 4 digits.  They've since removed the counter, presumably to avoid embarrassment.  There hasn't been an "event" in almost a year, where there used to be something happening almost non-stop.  Since the first thing they did after buying the site was to fire almost the entire creative staff, this isn't surprising. 

One thing they're still very good at, however, is throwing around warnings and threatening to freeze accounts over the smallest, and sometimes even no infraction.  People in glass houses, Jumpstart.  You really want to piss off the handful of players you have left?  If you're new to the game and got one of these warnings and are reading this, take my advice and leave now.  You're not going to be missing much except more lame warnings for having done nothing, and there's nothing they're going to change about the game to make it worth your while.

The only thing I've seen Jumpstart do is make this site worse.  I started playing a VERY long time ago, and I do very little there now.  There are a few tricks I've learned over the years for making neopoints, and all I ever do is stop by once in a while to do them, and every 28 days put my pets back in the lodge so I don't have to waste time feeding them.  The games get old, fast, and Jumpstart doesn't seem to see the very simple fact that they need new content to bring in and hold onto new players, and to keep the older players from doing what I'm doing right now. 

"Official Warning" my ass.  FUCK YOU, Jumpstart.  Here's what your "Official Warning" got you.  I'll be happy to post something that says you're the lamest thing the game of Neopets has seen in its entire history any time you feel like fucking with me for no reason.  Have a nice fucking day.

Monster Legends Team Zeppelin Cheated out of Battle by Page Load Error

I swear I should have titled this blog "why Social Point and Monster Legends SUCK ASS."  Those shit brained, fuck faced, ball breakin' duck fuckin' pains in the ass have struck again.  If I were you, I'd quit the game now.  Luckily I am me so I'm quitting as soon as I hand off leader of my team to someone else. 

So have YOU been playing Monster Legends, Team Zeppelin and lost a battle you didn't even get the chance to play because it didn't even load then gave you the "ERROR" message?  Maybe they just don't care to make a game run right.  I have solid wifi connections where I play, and ever since they started with this war nonsense it seems like the game crashes every ten or fifteen minutes.  Every time I try to post something to my team chat room I have to type it out three or four times because there's a "connection error."  I just lost a battle today to an enemy with less than half my strength, and it was their number three player!  I had beaten their #1 and #2 easily, all 3 of my monsters barely a scratch.  Can you imagine how infuriating that is, especially when we're losing due to lack of effort by my team?  This is a team we should have beaten, easily.

Another thing that makes no sense to me is that I see weak members of my team being attacked many more that the five times you would think is fair.  The most I've seen so far (in three wars) is someone who's had 9 defenses.  What the FUCK sense does this make?  The reason I attack the top five enemies is because, as the strongest on my team, it's my obligation to do that.  I understood that I'd be taking attacks away from weaker players if I attacked below my level of enemy peers.  Guess I was wrong about that too, and lost when I could have won.

The next thing that makes me wonder what is broken in some people's heads is WHY THE FUCK JOIN A TEAM IF YOU'RE NOT GOING TO PARTICIPATE?  Seriously a THIRD of my team or more doesn't attack at all, and another third doesn't understand they get FIVE battles. 

So there you have it, the three strikes.  The chat feature causes a lag that fucks up page loading.  The war game itself has issues that cause lags and fucks up page loading which rips you off of battle credits, and is absolutely unfair in allowing weaker members to be attacked many more than 5 times.  And the jackoffs who just don't participate. 

Social Point has some good ideas with their games, they just don't seem to know or care when they're unfair, annoying, or simply too glitchy for people to enjoy.  This is why you're better off with a gun to your head than playing anything put out by Social Point.

Social Point,  FUCK YOU.

Monster Legends Team Zeppelin Wars Help, Problems, Tips

I absolutely cannot believe that I'm here again so soon with yet ANOTHER issue with the cement heads at Social Point.

Is anybody else baffled at how this works?  I mean, I did research the rules when I started a team... they went like this:  First, rebuild the zeppelin.  Next, either start your own team or join one.  Once your team has at least ten members, you can initiate a war with another team.  Then all team members get 24 hours as "preparation day,"  to feed their monsters and add runes if they want.  I think they must have written the in-game rules section in an intentionally confusing way or actually changed the rules a few days in because it seemed like there would be two days of battling with up to five battles per day.  Turns out it's five total... and somehow I "misread" that two days of battle was really only one.  I wonder how that could have happened.  I played my five battles yesterday, won them all.  Got the full 15 points for all three of my monsters surviving in each battle.  My team's "second day" was scheduled to begin around 3:00 this afternoon.  I was really looking forward to getting home from work and finishing my next five battles.  Guess what, I get home and for some reason I still can't figure out, our first war was over and we lost.  And to add to all this retardation, even though a new war was started by our co-leader, I was forced into using monsters I had barely developed.  Social Point just has NO CLUE when it comes to creating events that don't completely piss people off.  I have a number of maxed out monsters which I can use for fighting, with several runes level six, several level five, and several level four.  It's fairly obvious that they set it up this way so people spend gems to move their runes around and I'm not doing that.  I doubt that very many people will.

Okay, so people quit, and I don't blame them because I was leaving as well and disbanding my team.  Maybe if the chicken fuckers at Social Point can pull their collective heads out of their collective asses and make an event that's actually fun to play, sticks to its own rules, and isn't set up to manipulate people into wasting gems, I MIGHT play it again.  For now I'm going to finish whatever days I have left on the current "loyalty reward" then I'm walking away for a few months.  Maybe they'll get it eventually.

This is directly to the team of shitheads at Social Point:  You started by creating a decent game.  You all must have suffered some sort of mass brain damage since then because you've been poisoning the game as I've sat by and watched for the past year.  Check your offices for a gas leak.  You've really lost it.  You suck.  Goodbye, you mother fucking assholes.

Anybody wand to give feedback directly to Social Point, here's the link... http://support.socialpoint.es/games/monster-legends/

OR you could start a blog like this one and give the whole internet a chance to see how you feel.  Look to the top of this page to start one of your own.

Monster Legends Ancient Egypt Island Help, Problems And Tips

The first thing you should know about these events is that if you're expecting the opening of boxes to find the monster to be fair to the odds, be prepared for disappointment.  Social Point is once again tricking its users into thinking something is fair when it's actually complete bullshit.  Case in point... okay, so you've saved up some tokens and are ready to start choosing boxes.  You open a monster's page and there are your 18 boxes.  You think the monster is in one of those boxes, right?  Wrong.  It's not in ANY box until you've opened TEN boxes.  ONLY THEN do you have the chance of getting the monster.  And the number increases for higher monsters.  A couple of them, you have zero chance at getting the monster until you've opened FOURTEEN boxes.  What makes this even more unfair and deceptive is that when you open a box and fail to get the monster, they actually highlight a box telling you that was where it was "theoretically" hidden... giving the player the impression that there actually WAS a chance of getting it on that turn, which there wasn't.

Okay, I know in the headline I said that I have tips.  There isn't much, considering that Social Point is tricky and deceptive and can't be trusted to be consistent with anything, but a few things you can do are breed very basic monsters using simple elements like earth, fire, and nature.  You should be able to breed monsters that usually only take a few minutes to breed and hatch.  You can also add gold runes to some high level  monsters for boosted gold production. 

Two monsters you can use for quick breeding are firesaur and treezard, which seem to have only two results: greenasaur (which sells for 200) and pandaken (which sells for 2500).  Both take 30 seconds to breed and another 30 to hatch.  You don't get a token every time, it seems to average (at least for me) about one in every 3 tries.  I did it for about 25 minutes and had to stop because the normally docile leeches living in my cerebral cortex were becoming agitated.  So, if you have no life whatsoever, are stuck somewhere with absolutely nothing else to do, or watch a lot of t.v., you can do this to accumulate tokens while your brain slowly leaks out of your ears.

I wouldn't waste time with PVP, they only give one or two and the more trophies you have the more likely you are to be attacked and raided for your gold and food.  Even though I have three level 100 legendaries with runes from 4 to 6, I try to get my trophy numbers as low as possible by intentionally quitting battles and losing trophies.  This is the only solution I've found in lieu of Social Point offering an "opt-out" for the pvp battle section.  I suppose "opting out" wouldn't be recommended even if they offered it because sometimes PVP is necessary to one of their "events."  It's still a good idea to reduce your trophy number unless you've either got the very best monsters in the game or aren't bothered being raided for your supplies.

In conclusion, I just want to say that I've posted this to help inform as many people as possible of the trickery involved in these events.  I only found this out at the very end of the last event, the alien island.  My strategy was to save up all my tokens and wait for the final monster, which I would have really liked to get.  It turned out that I didn't have enough tokens to open all the boxes, but I felt confident in the odds.  Turns out that I didn't have enough tokens to even have any chance at all of getting the monster.  So, in that event, I got no monster at all.  Needless to say, this really pissed me off when I saw the charts on the wiki page.  Here's a link to the wiki page for the Ancient Egypt Island.  Take a close look at all the charts, and you'll likely come to the same conclusion that I did.  The game designers at Social Point are a pack of ass licking douche suckers.

http://monster-wiki.com/egypt-island/

Also, here's a link to the page where you can contact Social Point to give them your opinion or any complaints and suggestions on how they've structured their game.

http://support.socialpoint.es/games/monster-legends/

Lost Gems in Ancient World in Dragon City?

See that?  That's Social Point and one of its users.  (By the way, "Social Point" is the company that runs Dragon City and Monster Legends among other things.)  Well, here I am again with another gripe about these assholes.

The first thing you should know, if you're a new player to either Dragon City or Monster Legends, is that the people at Social Point are unscrupulous bastards who spend most of their time trying to think of ways to trick their players out of money and/or the (gems/game currency) they've acquired by playing.  Did this happen to you?  Did you accidentally spend gems you hadn't meant to?  Then you fell right into their trap.  It just happened to me for the second time while I was crafting special gems in the "ancient world."  The first time I lost over a hundred currency gems I didn't know how, but I knew it was while I was playing the "ancient world" section.  After that, I stopped playing that part of the game for almost a year.  I just went back yesterday, started breeding, summoning and crafting again.  As I was crafting the special gems used to summon new dragons, I accidentally spent about 145 currency gems and it was because of the way these shitheads have set the button.  They know exactly what they're doing, people have complained about it, it's all over the forum, and they haven't changed anything.  It's pure greed, and that's what seems to drive these assholes.

So, without going on and on about changes, just know that if this happened to you, A) you're not alone, it's happening to a LOT of people and B) there IS something you can do about it.  First, write to them and tell them that you will NEVER spend one cent ever again on their game, tell them why, but don't expect any response or any changes to be made.  Here's their help page http://support.socialpoint.es/games/dragon-city/  Also tell them that you'll tell every one of your friends what happened and that they also should think twice before giving these greedheads any money at all.  Post it on your Facebook page.  They seem to thrive on all the attention they can get by bothering their players there, they might as well reap the fruits of their greed there as well.  Tell as many people as you can that these games are set up to trick you into spending game currency.  I'm slightly comforted by knowing that I gave them under 20 bucks about two years ago, but once I saw the greed and trickery I said "Hell no, no more."  The 145 gems I just lost though, that takes a LONG time to save up.  It's safe to say I'm pretty goddamn pissed off right now.

Well, that's it for me and the "ancient world."  It's really sad and pathetic that they feel the need to abuse their players in this way, but that's corporate greed for you.  The only way to have any effect is to hit them in the bank account.  If enough people get angry over this, then maybe they'll listen.  I doubt it, though.  So, until the next thing these morons do to piss me off comes along, I'm out for now.  I hope the 145 currency gems they tricked me out of was worth a blog post like this being prominent on the web.  I hope it's helped anyone else out there who feels ripped off by scumbags.  Hey, want to voice your problems?  Start one of these blogs.  Look near the top of the page.  I joined the Social Point forum before so I could post, but I couldn't find where to post a new message.  Admittedly I'm still seeing red and not thinking clearly so I just came here to post yet another complaint about their greed.  Thanks for reading and good luck with your gem use in the future. 

Lose gems ancient world
Lose gems Dragon City
Lost Gems
Stolen Gems
Dragon City greed
Ancient World gems
Ancient World ripoff
Dragon City ripoff
Dragon City sucks
Quit playing Dragon City

Masterchef Season 6 Sucks

At least for me it does.  I'm not a chef but I do alright in the kitchen, and I've been a fan of this show since the start.  But that came to an end less than fifteen minutes into the second episode.  First, I think the loss of Joe Bastianich was potentially terminal for the series.  If not, it sure has a deep wound that needs to heal.  He was the edge, the fear factor.  Damnit, he was scarier than Gordon.  He was also incredibly fair, balanced, and well educated in his judgments.  The loss of his experience and character is disastrous.  I don't know right now what caused him to leave, but it's cost the show my viewership and since I'm a pretty average guy, the demographics say that I'm not alone. 

They chose to replace Joe with a woman named Christina Tosi, and I admit my experience with her work only spans season 6 episode one, and about ten minutes into episode two before I shut off the show... I think it was as much as I could have handled.  I don't usually do this, give up so easily on a show I like.  But I knew that I had seen enough.  I admit I'm no chef, I'm not there tasting what they're making, but in such a short span of time I saw her reward people who seemed like they definitely should have lost, based on the appearance of the dishes and the other judges' reactions as they tasted them.  I'll just give a brief synopsis of the straw that broke my back so quickly.  It was a two person competition involving some kind of apple pastry.  All the judges tasted contestant A, and there was no ooohing or aaahing, Gordon himself said it was average or some similar word.  Christina's praise came for the crispiness of the apple tart's crust.  Then on to contestant B, who made something unusual, unique, and fun.  Every one of the judges remarked how tasty and interesting the three pastry balls on a bed of some minced fruit and a strawberry dip were.  The ONLY negative thing said was that Graham called them a bit sweet for his taste.  Now for the vote.  Gordon, clearly impressed with contestant B, voted her.  Graham probably favored contestant B, but if he had voted B, there would have been no drama.  Graham voted A.  Now for the new girl, who should have known if she'd ever watched the show before, her job was to vote B simply based on the judges' reactions.  Whether she went temporarily insane, has a thing for Indian girls, or is just plain stupid, I don't know.  What I do know is that this pisspoor decision to vote "A" probably lost more viewers than just me, and she's only going to make more of them as the show goes on.

In my humble opinion, Christina Tosi is all wrong for Masterchef.  I'm sure her addition isn't going to cripple the show, but it's going to hurt it.  A lot.  All I can say is that I hope there's another change next year and if so, I'll give it another chance. 

Miss ya, buddy...

Masterchef season 6 sucks
Masterchef season 6 review
Masterchef season 6 change
Masterchef where's Joe?
Masterchef season six sucks
Masterchef season six review
Masterchef season six change

Monster Legends: Don't like PVP? Want to opt out of PVP?

Are you ready to quit playing Monster Legends because of the way they've set up the battles, especially the PVP section?  You're not alone.  I've looked into several forums and most people's opinions are that they'd be happier playing the game without having gold and food stolen from them.  These comments go back to early 2013 at least as far as I went looking.  Obviously the shitheads at Social Point have no intention of changing this to make their players happy.

I wrote to them recently and suggested that they simply initiate an opt-in or opt-out for the PVP battle section.  Seems like they couldn't care less.  Maybe they think people would abuse it, opt-in for only the time they're attacking then opt back out.  Simple.  Make it free to opt-out, then 100 gems if you change your mind and want back in.

I admit that I played the PVP when I first started the game, I didn't know that the resources I was winning were actually being taken out of someone's supply.  As soon as I got my first notification that I had been attacked, I stopped.  I don't want my supplies stolen, and even when I defend against an attack, it puts me off.  I just want to build my little world without anyone bothering me, and that's an attitude I found prevalent in various sites I found.

My defense to this had been to keep my gold and food down to as close to zero as I could, but the bigger my world gets it gets expensive and requires saving up both gold and food.  I stopped my close to zero thing after I wrote to them, and for about a week I thought they had done something as when I checked my PVP section, my trophy number had been changed back to zero.  That must have been a glitch, because today I saw that I'd been attacked three times in the last two days.  So, that was it for me.  Yeah by the way, I'm not spending gems to keep a constant shield up.  Cheap fucking douchebags, in my humble opinion.  Set something up that makes people mad, and offer a shield for a price.

So I give these brainless scumbags a 50/50 chance of eventually bowing to popular opinion and changing the PVP section to be something one can choose not to play.  Therefore, since their loyalty reward is currently giving away the Hellberus, (sp) then I suppose I'll keep my gold at zero, food at zero, and just stop in for three seconds a day to claim the puzzle piece.  There's a chance they'll make the changes, and I don't want to lose my progress, but I'm done playing it for now.  Maybe these shitheads will eventually get their act together and realize that it's counterproductive to piss off half your players.

Please add your voice if this or something else bugs you abut this game.  It does look like it has potential, but I'm pretty sure nobody plays a game to get pissed off.  Here's a link to Social Point's help/contact page.  http://support.socialpoint.es/games/monster-legends/

A few taglines to help with searches...
Monster Legends PVP sucks
Monster Legends change PVP
Monster Legends turn off PVP
Monster Legends personal battle sucks change turn off
Monster Legends don't want my supplies stolen
Monster Legends getting ripped off

Dragon City Event Breeding Glitch And Christmas Island Turkey Glitch Update at Bottom

Dragon City Egypt Island event breeding, Pirate Island event breeding, other special event breeding problems are not a glitch.  Not getting credit for breeding?  You think Social Point is "working on a fix"?  They're not.  I'm only posting this because I see almost nothing when I search these problems to make me think it's anything but a scam.

I started playing this game almost a year ago because it showed up on Facebook and I tried it, found it fairly entertaining and addictive in small doses.  What I didn't realize at the time is that while Social Point may come up with somewhat entertaining games, I soon discovered that in the entire history of the planet Earth there has never, ever been a group of people more greedy and annoying than they have shown themselves to be.  Unfortunately I didn't realize this until I had developed quite an advanced community of dragons, habitats, and other buildings.  Funny thing, they know they're annoying and don't care one bit.  They start by announcing every single move you make in the game, and send requests to your friends on your behalf without your knowledge.  Even after I discovered this, and adjusted my Facebook privacy settings, they found a way around this and continued to drive my friends crazy with requests.  One would think that after six months, they'd give the player the option of checking a box that says "My friends have been harassed for six months, and any of them that were going to play this game would have already started playing, those that aren't interested aren't about to become interested, so please opt me out of friend requests.  But no.

Now on to the scam in the special Island Events regarding breeding.  I've seen this in every event I've played, and I've searched for an online answer.  I've sent two requests directly to Social Point and gotten no answer.  I still see people on a rare forum here and there desperately trying to figure out the right combinations of dragons, what tricks might be involved in getting credit for breeding.  Guess what?  The only conclusion is that it's absolutely random, and they are intentionally making this LOOK like a glitch so people will use gems at the end when they haven't gotten enough breeding credits.  Just yesterday I was playing on my tablet, (WAY preferable to playing on Facebook, they don't bug your friends and when there's an event, you don't have to send invitations or gifts) and I hatched an egg.  I got the ankh symbol, I thought cool, since they come rarely.  Just then my game glitched and I had to reload the game.  I came back to the same egg, unhatched.  This time I did NOT get the ankh.  That was the end for me.

I've officially given up on participating in these events.  I can't play them on Facebook anyway, I have no friends playing the game so I have no one who's interested in an invitation and no one to send gifts to.  But the fact that they're pulling this shit on the android, that really pisses me off.  These suckholes have elevated greed to a new, very unpleasant level.  I understand that people buying gems is how they make money, but to corrupt a fun little game with this cheap punk ass crap is unacceptable.  I've gone to them with a highly abbreviated version of what I've said here, and I suggest that every one of you who reads this do the same.  Let them know they've made it obvious that it's not a glitch and they've made their shameless greed totally apparent.  Thanks!

Christmas Island Turkey/Feeding "glitch"...
Well, here we go again. (This post exists, click 2014 at the left)  Sure enough, here's another event and once again, the ass rapists at Social Point have trashed any sense of FUN by including a section that doesn't work, and are hoping everyone thinks it's just a "glitch" in the game.  People, at this point it should be obvious that they do this on purpose to make people spend gems.  I'm only writing this for those who still think it's some sort of accident.  Today I spent 420,000 food units to give a level 33 dragon ONE meal.  I was wondering how many turkey credits I was going to get for that.  Went to Christmas Island to check, and guess how many?  ZERO.  Ok, I thought maybe I have to level up a dragon.  I raised a legendary dragon from 12 to 13.  Result?  ZERO turkey.  If I had any reason to believe that this is anything but a scam to force people to spend gems, I might just use some gems once in a while in events like this.  But as obvious as it is that this is just the Social Point retards being greedy and ruining the game, I absolutely refuse to spend even one gem on the event and I hope that everyone who reads this not only does the same, but write to them and tell them that they're a bunch of assholes!  Here's the link for their support site.  Just click your operating platform and "didn't find my answer" at the bottom.  Tell them what you think, and don't spend those gems!  http://support.socialpoint.es/games/dragon-city/

A few taglines to help with searches-
Dragon City sucks
Dragon City scam
Dragon City breeding problems
Dragon City event glitch
Dragon City breeding glitch
Dragon City greedy bastards
Dragon City Christmas Turkey
Dragon City Christmas Island Turkey feeding
Christmas Turkey feeding not working
Christmas Turkey glitch
Dragon City Turkey feeding problems
Christmas Island can't get turkeys for feeding dragons

WHY did The Big Bang Theory cut Penny's hair to look like Miley Cyrus?

It seems that the producers of The Big Bang Theory have lost their "Beautiful Minds".  I tuned in, excited to see season 8, and what did I see?  Penny has cut her hair and now looks almost exactly like Miley Cyrus.  She looks terrible.  For seven years I had nothing but respect for what I considered to be one of the most entertaining comedies ever.  Last night, they flushed that straight down the toilet by turning the sweet, kinda ditzy hot chick into a cheap knockoff of a cheap teen idol, and added insult to injury by forcing her into a role she's clearly not fit to play, a high end pharmaceutical rep. 

I'm not going to spend much time here going over what the majority of the world's population already knows, that Miley Cyrus is a poor excuse for entertainment.  Trampy, vulgar, and cheap is nothing to aspire to, and in my opinion the producers have shot themselves in the foot by giving Penny this nearly identical look.

Why on earth they felt this was a necessary change to a show that was clearly on a very popular roll is beyond me.  I'm on a mission to let as many people know about this MISTAKE as I can, and pretty much the only reason I'm going to keep watching is so I can list the advertisers and first email them, then boycott them.  I suggest as many people as possible do the same.  The producers' decision to do this has completely undermined my confidence in them delivering any kind of future that perpetuates their past success.  Given the option of this or having the series end last season, I'd choose having it end.  I'll give them three more episodes to compile my list of advertisers and to see if they may actually turn things around so the show makes more sense.  If they don't, then unfortunately I'm done with the series, and that's a huge bummer because I really loved this show.  Until last night.

THIS is Penny.  THIS is the girl across the hall we've all enjoyed watching for seven years.  THIS IS WHAT I (and I'm sure a lot more of you out there) WANT BACK!

Dragon City bothers my friends on Facebook

Has this happened to you?  They won't stop either, even after I researched how to stop it from happening.  Dragon City is completely annoying to my friends on Facebook.  I went into Facebook settings, found the app, and edited it to "seen only by me".  I still have friends telling me they're receiving invites, sent items from me, pretty much everything I was trying to avoid by telling those douche suckers at Facebook that I don't want my friends bothered.  They've even been using slick tricks to get me to click a popup I'm not even sure what it is.  It only happens when I'm collecting stored up gold, rapidly clicking the gold bars in quick succession.  By the time I see it, I've already clicked it.  It's cheap punk-ass crap like that which should make you think twice about installing it in the first place, and should make the decision to bag them much easier.  It did for me.

That's not the only thing.  The Deus daily bonus game is fixed, basically they're cheating when they use the word "shuffle".  Typically shuffle means to randomize a group of things.  Stacking the deck has always been considered cheating, and in the old west it could get you killed.  If you haven't seen it, it's three rows of three cards.  Nine total.  You click "shuffle" and it shows an animation of the cards switching around.  Then you pick one.  There are nine prizes total, seven prizes of food or gold, of various fairly insignificant amounts.  There are two prizes that I consider the ones worth getting, but one is pretty big.  Fifty gems.  The second big prize is a pretty cool meteor dragon.  I played this for a couple days before I realized that instead of randomly clicking a card, I should let the big prizes come to me.  Assuming it's TRULY RANDOM, I started just clicking the center card every time.  A month later, after having not received either of the top two prizes, I did a few test runs myself with bottle caps.  On one I drew a gem, another I drew a dragon.  I added seven blanks, and proceeded to do two runs of thirty tries, a run of thirty representing a month.  One, I got the gems three times and the dragon twice, the other was dragon three and gems twice.  In five months I've gotten the gems once and the dragon twice.  I wrote to them and asked whatup, BITCHES?  No response of course.  Tell you what, I'm mad as hell and...

WE'RE NOT GONNA TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!
The last straw came on the game I'm playing on my android tablet.  Every once in a while there are these special battle events where you can get a special cool habitat and three specialty dragons.  It's timed, and believe me, time is of the essence.  In the parts where battle occurs, they pit you against an A.I. (artificial intelligence) opponent, and there are a string of dragons you have to defeat to advance.  To keep things fair, so that people with uber strong dragons aren't at an advantage over very low level players, whatever dragon you pick for a fight, your opponent will have the same strength.  It's more about using the right attacks.  However, without getting too complicated, there are times when you just have to fight an even battle.  It's really all about who goes first who wins at these points.  Well, I'm sure most of us would agree that the user and the opponent trade going first.  Guess what?  These MENTAL DEFECTIVES who designed the game allow for the opponent to go first several times in a row at random intervals.  True, sometimes we do trade turns each time, but it seems with harder dragons they've deemed it necessary to turn fairness and equality into blood boiling rage when I have to wait two hours between fights just to see my opponent win once again because he went first for the fourth time in a row.  When time is of the essence, this will make your brain heat up and start bubbling to the point where you can actually hear your synapses snapping.  I've sent my second (and last) email to the game developers to address this and to those knuckle dragging, brainless chimps I say "IF THAT'S YOUR BEST, YOUR BEST WON'T DO!!!"

This is what the game developers see in the mirror every morning.  All I can say in conclusion is that this is an exercise in management and patience, kind of a simple version of Sim City.  For me, it's not about cute dragons but building something from nothing.  What this shouldn't have to be is an exercise in tolerance of unfairness.  Taking turns is basic to gaming, has been since we were kids.  Shuffling cards means completely randomizing them.  And sweet creeping Jesus, when the player edits the game to be private, for the love of all that's holy people, LET THE FUCKING PLAYER BE PRIVATE AND LEAVE THEIR FRIENDS ALONE!  Dragon city sucks!!!

Game of Thrones, House Stark Drawing

Yet another show where I binge watched while doing drawings of it.  First Breaking Bad, then The Sopranos, now this.  It's tough to go from watching as many episodes in a row as I want to having to wait week by week like some kind of animal.  Now we have to wait for the next season.  This is ridiculous.

The client is undecided on what he wants next.  I've suggested a collage of "the badasses",  here's a photoshop rough draft of that.

He's thinking more along "family" lines, and wants to wait to see how things continue to develop which means some down time, at least on the commission end.  I think I might just draw the badasses anyway, and I need to do another Walking Dead piece to cover some main characters that weren't in the first one.

Here's the Stark piece in a nice mat and frame.  My tablet takes crappy pictures indoors, I should have used my camera.  Bummer.  Still, it came out awesome when done.  The frame is rough, cold looking wood, with dark grays and in the grain, an almost ice blue.  Light blue mat over dark gray.

I have a smaller piece with Daenerys and Drogo half done.  Maybe I'll finish that up this weekend and post it. 

By the way, I just started printing posters of the two Game of Thrones pieces I've done, as well as The Walking Dead piece.  They're on ebay, my store is chuckd_art and you should be able to find the others by searching like "Game of Thrones Stark Poster".  The Walking Dead original is there as well, also a nice topless babe in jeans.   Thanks in advance for your purchase!  :D

Malaysia Flight 370

I guess it's time I weighed in on this thing.  I'm going to start with "I have no idea where it is and am not going to speculate."  I do, however, have a few issues with how it's being handled.  First of all, Malaysia's PM needs to be slapped into consciousness and maybe he can be of some help in all of this.  Second, I'm going to get into why I don't accept that an airliner can just disappear.  You may disagree with me now, but read on.

I'm certainly not a high tech computer whiz, but I know something of today's technology.  I know we have the ability to sense when a car goes into a ditch.  OnStar will immediately ask how you are and dispatch an ambulance.  I don't know if this is cell towers or satellite, but it doesn't matter.  It's probably satellite, and check them out...

That's just the close ones.  They go out quite a ways.  I don't have an I-Phone but I know if it's lost or stolen, it can be tracked and located at least up to the point at which it was reprogrammed.  I saw someone arrogantly attempt to insult someone on a news board the other day, someone who said "Nothing, especially an airliner, should be unfindable". I tend to agree.  Anyone who says "Ok, lose your I-Phone in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and see how easy it is to find",  I say take a look at what scientific research is doing and you should have been making this a part of your business since it was invented.  I think we're already implanting our children with GPS locators, and I bet if they were somewhere in the Indian Ocean, they'd be found.  Just like anything else, large or small. 

A year or so ago I saw this article on a particular great white shark, Mary Lee.  I added the app to my android.  It tracks this shark's (and a lot of other sharks) every movement.  It's a tag about six inches long that gets stuck by the dorsal fin.  Just for the heck of it I've been following this shark.  Any reason why EVERY jet on the planet can't have a little transponder like this thing we stick into the backs of sharks?  REALLY?!

Click on any image to get the full size.  I really don't think that anything should be unfindable on this planet considering how many satellites are out there watching what's going on.  I think the only way any "wreckage" from this plane will be visible if it crashed into the ocean.  There's a chance the pilot landed it softly, and the plane sunk in pretty much one piece.  In that case, we'll never know, at least not in this lifetime.  Some day we'll map the entire ocean floor and find it, but that's a long time off.  Either that or it flew into enemy hands, seen by northern radar, but they'll never tell us.  Do this a few times and watch how it affects worldwide plane travel. 

All these things considered, I come back to the fact that if we can track Cadillacs, I-Phones and sharks, then why not passenger jets?

Game of Thrones, House Lannister Drawing

Here's the first of probably five Game of Thrones family portrait collages I've been commissioned to draw.  I've only just started watching them, I was thinking it's a cross between Lord of the Rings and a porn film.  My friend told me that everything on HBO is crossed with a porn film.  LMAO.  I'm looking forward to seeing all the episodes and drawing the rest of the families.

Update 3/20
Here it is very nicely framed-

Click it to see it bigger.  The frame is one of a whole new series of hip, edgy stuff.  A little expensive but well worth it for the right look.

The Walking Dead Drawing

Here's a five in one at 18" X 24".  I've wanted to do a Walking Dead for a while, and I just got the chance.  I think this one justifies me getting my prices back in the respectable zone.  I can't be making around minimum wage time-wise on the portraits I just did recently.  I think this is a nice piece and I'm not chumping out on the price.  You hear that, world?  FUCK OFF!!!  I don't give the furry crack of a flyin' rat's ass if I never sell anything else, I ain't selling ultra cheap.