Animal Crossing Pocket Camp

November 4, 2020 1 of 8

That “1 of 8” is kind of a joke today. It’s 10:58 pm. If I can write seven more posts today, I’ll be very surprised. Particularly since I’m pretty close to dead tired and I have an early shift tomorrow.

In December, I may go back through and straighten out the numbers, making them “1 of 3” or “1 of 1” or “1 of 20” (as if!).

Anyway, I play three phone games, primarily.* Pokemon Go, Harry Potter Wizards Unite, and Animal Crossing Pocket Camp. I know I’ve written about Pokemon Go, I think I’ve written about Wizards Unite. Have I written about Animal Crossing Pocket Camp? I don’t know. So that’s what I’m going to do now.

As I’m writing this, I realize that gameplay is actually fairly complicated. I may have to write this a just a basic outline and then go into each item in more detail in other posts (but not tonight; It’s 11:27 now and I’m pooped).

Animal Crossing Pocket Camp is, just like it says on the tin, one of the Animal Crossing family of games. In this one, though, the player is managing a campsite for animal villagers to visit. There are four animal villagers at other places in the camp, and you have to bring them items from other (or occasionally their own) part of the camp.

So, the lower right-hand corner is the saltwater beach. You can collect saltwater fish, shells, and coconuts there. Then, progressing counterclockwise, there’s a forest with fruit trees, a freshwater river, with more fruit trees and freshwater fish, and a tropical island with bugs and coconuts.

You trade with the villagers kind of like this. The villager on the bug island wants an apple, and you have one in your bag, so you give them the apple. In exchange they give you things – in-game currency, raw materials for manufacturing things, etc.

Then you take the raw materials to make clothing, furniture, amenities, and so forth.

There are smaller things, like a booth where you can buy fortune cookies that contain more clothing, furniture, and so forth. There’s a boat that you can send to smaller islands to trade for raw materials, clothing, and sometimes the boat will bring back a map that leads you to new villagers. There’s a marketplace where several vendors switch out from time to time. You also have your own campsite and a cabin.

Then, while you’re doing all this, there’s a monthly rotation of events — a gardening event, a fishing event, and a scavenger hunt. Each of these also brings you clothing, furniture, decorations, etc.

Everything cycles around. Every three hours, the villagers leave or arrive at the campground and all have new requests. Alongside this, every three hours the event flowers mature, or the fish come back. The scavenger hunt refreshes more like hourly.

Then, the first week of the month is the gardening event, then there’s a small event for a couple of days, then the fishing event, then another small event, then the scavenger hunt. Then the next month it starts all over again.

Relaxing? Maddening? You decide.

You may be wondering what the point is. I haven’t figured that out myself. You accumulate more furniture, clothing, amenities, and so on. You gradually build more bonds with the villagers. Occasionally they have special events where you can use leaf tickets (the premium in-game currency) to buy limited-time items. They recently had an event where you could buy yukata and interior design items designed by Japanese designer Sou Sou.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time (and then bed!). Today is The Strangers, the first book in the Greystone Secrets books by Margaret Peterson Haddix. Chess, Emma, and Finn, kids of a single mom, are living a happy life until three kids with their first and middle names and birthdates disappear. Then their mom takes off, and leaves them with a woman who protects abused women and children. But the kids don’t take their mom leaving lying down. They’re determined to find out what happened to their mom. The Greystone Secrets series is supposed to be a trilogy. I hope the rest of the books are as good as this one was.

Content Creator: The Try Guys

November 3, 2020 4 of 8

<Keith Habersberger voice>In 2014, in Los Angeles, California, the people at BuzzFeed decided to make a video called “Guys Try on Ladies’ Underwear for the First Time and so was The Try Guys born.</Keith Habersberger voice>

I think I’ve told this story before. In 2019, one of my Facebook friends (I think it was Thomas’s brother) posted an article claiming to have proof that people who see live concerts live nine years longer than those who don’t or something. My guess is that, to the extent this is true, it’s probably more that the people who have that kind of disposable income probably have more food security and better health care. Either way, though it inspired me to look at the list of upcoming concerts and found someone called The Try Guys.

Now, the name sounded familiar. I was pretty sure that some of my Facebook friends had posted links to videos by them. Now memory is malleable, but I think that one of the first videos I thought of was their impaired driving series.

So I went digging and watched every one of their videos over the course of, I don’t know, a week or two? And they were every bit as funny as I recalled.

The Try Guys, as I recall one of the Guys saying, became a sort of thing because they were the four guys at Buzzfeed who were the most comfortable taking their pants off in front of a camera. In fact, one of their running gags is that Ned likes the way his butt looks. That trope goes all the way back to the beginning. It’s there in Guys Try on Ladies’ Underwear for the First Time.

In 2018, they left Buzzfeed and began their own production company, 2nd Try LLC. This is why, if you search YouTube for them, you’ll see that some are published by Buzzfeed and some are published by Try Guys.

The Guys have stuck together through all of the stresses of the creation of their own company. They have group videos and also have their own video series, and in 2019 they began a series of podcasts. The main podcast, called TryPod, is the podcast of the central four Guys. The they started one called You Can Sit With Us, which features Ned’s wife Ariel, Keith’s wife Becky, and Zach’s fiancee, Maggie. I don’t know if Eugene’s partner, Matt, has ever appeared on that podcast. He kind of stays out of the limelight. And recently, Ned and Ariel started a podcast called Baby Steps, which is about their growing family.

The Try Guys has long been sort of my “home” on YouTube. It’s the first channel I check for new videos, it was the first channel I subscribed to, and if I ever have Patreon money, it’ll be the first YouTube channel I donate to the Patreon of.

I can’t subscribe to their Patreon, but I have given the Guys some actual money. I bought their book, The Hidden Power of F*cking Up, and both Keith and Zach have started sideline businesses, Keith sells a hot sauce specifically for chicken, and Zach sells tea. I’ve bought both, but every time I have chicken, I forget to try the sauce. And this reminds me that I haven’t tried Zach’s tea yet, either. It’s 11:30 pm right now, which sounds like a good time for his Mission Chill bedtime tea. The tea smells heavenly. I hope the taste is half as good as the smell.