Papaya Farm

my first real blog of the new year and sure i could write one summarizing my 2009 which is what i was initially planning on doing or what my upcoming resolutions are but now that a full month of the new decade is almost over i've lost my motivation and would like to instead discuss another much more important topic...my addiction to papaya farm.

for those who don't know it's similar to farmville on facebook i've been told (i hate all those status updates by the way) where you basically plant seeds and wait for them to grow to be able to harvest enough to process them using different tools you're given to be able to sell them for money to open up more plots of land to plant on. get it? either did i at first. it's the most mindless game ever as there's no real strategy involved since after three days of logging on, you're automatically advanced to the next level and part of the fun i guess is that you can steal fruits from your friends but you're limited to just one or two at a time so even that takes some of the fun out of it. despite all this i find myself completely hypnotized by it to the point where i've set my phone alarm on timer many a times to remind myself to harvest my shit before someone comes in to steal it.

i've been playing this game ever since thanksgiving now and my addiction has only gotten worse. it's the first thing i check every morning when i wake up and my hand automatically goes towards the snooze button and through my half blind eyesight i have to make sure i harvest everything before getting a start on my day. my only saving grace is that my cellphone reception at work is horrible so i'm not able to log on meaning for a good ten hours of the day i'm papaya farm free.

what makes all this even more great is that a couple (and by couple i mean three) of my friends are also playing so over the holiday break we would constantly be having conversations of hey log on so you can water my plants or my all time favorite "hurry come plant your love bouquet in my love garden". people would look at us like we were crazy but we didn't care. and now that we're all in a different city we've moved on to sending each other text messages of "can you send me a cucumber?" and i do it faithfully because that is how papaya farm works.

there's even certain etiquette and rules one must possess and follow in order to play with us. we recently found out that not only is there a farm but also a ranch where you can grow different types of animals and well once we found that out all bets were off. a certain someone decided that his only goal was to raise animals and didn't care about the farm so his job was to only grow grass for all of us and whoever happened to harvest (aka steal) it would be responsible for replenishing our ranch so the animals didn't go hungry. and there was quite an email chain going back and forth when a tiger was bought and all they ate was meat which is quite a hard commodity to get in this game and agreements were made on who would participate in co-raising this thing. we aren't kidding around here.

another friend blindly decided on a night out that he too would download this onto his phone and well, let's just say it hasn't even been a week and he has fully quit from the game but not before being called out for exhibiting "very unfriendly papaya farming behavior." but i give him kudos for not getting sucked in because in case you haven't figured it out by now, it is a total waste of time but has brought me some great shits and giggles in the past few months.

i only allow myself to plant secret roses and tulips on friendly land because it was getting too annoying having to keep track of what i planted where and when it was ready to be harvested to make sure i grew just enough to process and nothing more. i haven't quite figured out why exactly i'm so into this game and can't seem to quit but as a friend so eloquently put it "we are simply filling a void via virtual fulfillment. that and i am obsessive-compulsive." it's probably a mixture of both of these for me right now sad to say but seriously, after all this what more can i say? oh right...

hi my name is dacurious and i'm addicted to papaya farm.