Where Creativity Takes Wing
The post The Friday Art Cat: Shinji appeared first on Katzenworld – Welcome to the world of cats!. You may have read about Shinjji, the now seventeen year old Lynx Point Siamese mix. He’s the Assistant Site Mascot on my blog, Mindflight. I really love his markings, which are a cross between a standard Siamese…
These tips assume that you have been playing a while and know your way around. They are are simple things I have discovered that can be surprisingly helpful. Mixed in are a couple tips for beginners as well.
Finding Essence Stars
If you have a map, and are going to an Essence Star finding contest, when you arrive at the club town, set your map heading to the town. That way, you always know exactly how far from the village you are, and can stay the right distance away.
Spacing Ranches
Similarly, you can use the same trick if you are trying to build a ranch near a club town, so you know when you are far enough away from it to begin homesteading. If you are tapping maple, rubber, or dragon trees, save their location in your Travel destinations – including the time of day that you tapped the tree in the location name. That way it reminds you to go back to the tree, tells you where, and reminds you when it’s been 24 hours. You’ll be much less likely to lose your taps or forget to collect!
Ranch Size
If you want to be reminded about exactly where the borders of your ranch are located, start to build something (like a fence post) but don’t proceed with the construction. Don’t cancel out yet either. Then you can walk around and see your borders. When you are done looking, just cancel out and don’t build the object. While building, there are grid lines to help you with spacing and alignment!
Easy Stone Gathering
The easiest way to collect stone and driftwood is to mount a horse, zoom out slightly, and ride slowly over a rocky beach while hitting E repeatedly. Fall Forest beaches are excellent for this.
Ornery Horses
When you need to make a horse breedable but they are too grumpy, feed it a bunch of coconuts then pet it. Grooming isn’t necessary for breeding, and coconuts are free but help both hunger and thirst.
Which Horses to Train
Only train horses you will be using to ride or compete with. Breeding stock just uses inborn stats.
Rescuing Yourself
If you get stuck in a deep hole, you can usually jump out by pressing up arrow plus right arrow, and hitting the space bar as fast as you can. Point your view up a bit so you can see when you are making progress.
Rescuing Yourself Part 2
When you are exploring and get near a rainforest biome, where holes are frequent and sometimes hard to avoid, set a Travel location. That way you can warp out and not lose much progress.
Random Items
A cheap place to get rare though random items is in swamps, by searching pitcher plants. However, it won’t work for gathering Quests. It’s great if you are trying to find rare flowers or crystals!
Wishing Coins
If you get Wishing Coins, save them up for when you need energy or money – it’s no fun to have nearly full energy and have the Wishing Coin refill your bars.
Selling Horses
Blood Ruby Knights Club has a list of all the trader puns so you know where to find all the different breed traders, and the Newspaper has an updated list of where you can sell the horses for the best prices. Auction rare ones like horses with rare colors or affinities.
Essence Anomalies
If you are going to try for an Essence Anomaly, make sure and join the party that is going. You’ll get bonus Essence along the way if you stick with them and also you can Quick Travel to various members if you fall behind.
Essence Anomalies Part 2
When trying to get to one, start by finding the closest club that’s there. It’s worth looking at their Wagon Routes, sometimes you can get closer to the Anomaly that way. Also, they may have a tower to glide from. If you have a glider and a balloon and no launch point, because the club is on an Atoll or something, you can use the Balloon to get to the top of the Clubhouse and glider launch from there.
Conserving Travel
If you have traveled way the heck out to the back of beyond and you want to get back to civilization without using a bunch of Travel, wait till a Party Invite pops up. Then use the free travel to get back to that club. It’ll be a lot easier to teleport to wherever you’re going from there.
Remembering to collect from tapped trees
If you don’t usually tap trees, set a travel location with the time you tapped the trees. Then you know where they are, and also when to go back.
Dangerous Dig Locations
This last item is not a tip but a warning. If you are writing a Club Quest and a step involves digging, make sure you do any final editing of that spot at your dig location because the game might reset that dig spot otherwise. This is true even if you are only fixing a typo.
…and they weren’t that bad!
If you haven’t seen them, these are Skittles with various evocatively named flavors, mostly delicious, but a few of them are purported to be flavored like “rotten zombie.”
Most people who have written about them think they are absolutely horrible, and the company says that different palates may experience them differently.
I liked them.
Now, this doesn’t mean that I have a taste for well aged human flesh. To my palate anyway, when tasted with an open mind, I found the flavor of these Skittles to be rather like spiced hamburger. It was like hamburger with paprika, a hint of garlic and perhaps cinnamon, the kind of thing you might have with spaghetti. The main oddity was that it was still sweet, because it was still a Skittle. So maybe even mincemeat?
Anyway, if I had a wild imagination and was thinking of zombies, and it were closer to Halloween, they might be grosser tasting.
You may be wondering why in the world I would want to try Skittles that promised to have a gross flavor hidden among them.
Well, curiosity killed the cat – but satisfaction brought her back.
So when my coworker handed me this fun size bag of Skittles though, emblazoned with the legend “produced with genetic engineering,” I realized that the flavor couldn’t be too gross. After all, this is a product meant to be safely eaten without having anyone sue the company for attempted poisoning.
Just like the Every Flavor Beans that Jelly Belly makes, the flavors are nasty but don’t really taste entirely like the originals. Quick example, and it’s probably not the one you’re thinking of: I ate plenty of grass as a kid. Lawn grass, beach grass, you name it. I chose relatively clean sources and long blades, I chewed grass and made whistles from it too. The grass jelly bean doesn’t taste like anything like the real green plant matter, and I should know. Therefore, I’m pretty sure that imagination has a pretty large part to play here.
So I ate the Skittles and lived. My taste buds could be worn out I suppose, and there is that caveat from the company about differing palates, but it really wasn’t that bad!
Dr. Nadja Albertsen is the ESA-sponsored medical doctor spending 12 months at Concordia research station in Antarctica. She facilitates a number of experiments on the effects of isolation, light deprivation, and extreme temperatures on the human body and mind. It is Tuesday and the time is exactly 18:00. I am sitting in an office chair…
Today we have something different. Mindflight is all about creation – whether it’s writing, painting, drawing, or even creative MMO games. Rayven joins us as a guest author and for her first post she’s writing about body image.
All my life I admired cats. They are absolutely shameless. By this I mean, they are without shame – especially the crippling kind. If a cat is fat, for example, they won’t let that stop them from enjoying a sunbeam – giant belly on full display. They seem proud of their various parts. I’ve had plenty of cats say “look at my butthole! Look at it! It’s amazing, isn’t it?” as they wave their tails in my face.
All my life I’ve been ashamed of myself. My body, the secret parts of my personality, those hidden desires I could never admit, everything. I’ve become the mistress of creative draping, hiding behind my clothes, and basically hiding all those things your average cat gives absolutely zero shits about. This has not been good for my relationships.
When I was little I wanted to explore my body, and those of my agemates. When I was four years old I was fascinated in how boys were different than me, why I didn’t have what they had, what they looked like, everything. However, when my sister was caught exploring, and given the sternest lecture I’d ever heard, I quickly realized that this was a Bad Thing and I shouldn’t ever talk about my curiosity.
Later I satisfied some of my curiosity by reading the Clan of the Cave Bear, hiding in the school library. Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex (but were afraid to ask) was a little better. Porn helped a bit too but I quickly realized it was fake. Also, back when the dinosaurs walked the earth there wasn’t any internet so I was reliant on quick peeks at people’s magazine stashes. I came to maturity with some rather funny ideas.
It wasn’t till I turned forty-one that I woke up. I had a lackluster sex life, not because of any lack of interest on my partner’s part, but because of the shame on my part. I was so inhibited and I couldn’t figure out why. I vowed to fix that part of myself, I didn’t want to die a prude. I decided that I wanted to be liberated by the time I reached the Age Of The Question. You know, the question of Life, the Universe, and everything. 42.
How to do this? I’d gotten to the point where sex was actually kind of scary, and I had trouble getting out of my comfort zone. My body was so weird, it wasn’t shaped right, I didn’t feel comfortable in it. Even the fat models and body positivity folks were fat in all the hot ways. They weren’t lumpy like me, and off balance looking, and asymmetrical like me. It was impossible to feel attractive, I couldn’t imagine anyone looking at me with desire. I always did it in the dark.
I’m not sure how this happened but I started listening to a sex-positive podcast. I downloaded a bunch of them to listen to on my long, boring commute. I started with old episodes of the Sex Talk radio show, and soon found a fabulous program – the Mystery Bod Show from Portland, Oregon.
The stories were wonderful. The entire GLBT spectrum, straight people included, were telling their stories on stage. They told of their triumphs, their failures, their joys, their fears, their journeys. They honest accounts began winding their way into my brain. I started to feel normal. One day, I was re-listening to a particular story at home, and I took a look at the woman who was telling her story. It was an incredibly kinky story – but I was stunned as I realized that I might as well have been looking at myself in twenty years! This woman looked so much like me. Her hair was the same only silver, her face like mine except with a bit more of a double chin, her top was small and her bottom big, and yet she was telling me about this wonderful proud confident sex life and all this self love and love for others, and knowledge of herself as well as her partner. Never before had I seen someone in a venue like that who looked so utterly – normal.
Seeing her gave me wings. I started looking at the other people on the program, and saw how they were thin, fat, old, young, normal looking, wild. Every kind of person was represented there – nerdy looking people and average looking people included. Yet, each one had their moment in the sun, and had the audience in the palms of their hands. Something deep eased inside me.
I wept as I realized that I finally was no longer alone. My early explorations? Normal curiosity. My asymmetrical body? More common than I knew. That weird thing I liked my partner to do when I was feeling brave? Not new. A huge weight lifted from my shoulders. I could be me, kinky sides and vanilla sides together. I could give in to my butchy side if I needed to, that part of my that I call “my inner old guy.” I could be fem if I wanted to also, enjoy the hair and the nails and the frilly clothes. I could have a dramatic day if I want to, in this persona that is growing inside me, the one with milky white skin, deep blood red lipstick, heavy cat-eye liner, and shining black wig. All these things could be part of me and I could sample from this incredible buffet of experience and not have to eat the same thing every day.
Knowing these things, I realized I could finally loll in the sun, enjoying the warmth, unmindful of how big my belly was.
-Love and fantasies, Rayven Mystere
This is a guide for potential members of a club, as well as new club owners.
For most people the biggest advantage is being able to have a store. You can sell items, mobia, horses, or offer stud services, and this allows you to make quite a bit of money if you price your wares right.
Another advantage is having other club members to talk to and do events with, everything from competitions to beauty shows to Essence hunts. This varies widely from club to club, but usually clubs are pretty up front about whether they have a lot of events or not.
You can also take part in auctions, and can restrict that auction to other club members if you like.
If you are a Gold ranked member, you can have a ranch that is within 1.5 kilometers of the club. Silver ranked members can hold competitions if courses have been built.
You can only join one club at a time. Also, many clubs have dues, usually a certain amount of gold, wood or stone per active game day. Some clubs are sticklers for that, others just ask that you contribute as you can.
Clubs can pick a percentage of gold dust to add on to your store prices, and that money goes straight to the club. Same goes for trainers etc. It’s better to pick a club with a low markup because then your prices will be lower and you’ll get more sales.
For example, my club has a 5% markup so if someone buys an item for 1000 gold dust, it will cost 1050. On the other hand, another club I knew had a 50% markup, so that same item would have cost 1500 gold dust. No thanks!
If you leave a club, you get 40% of your gold, stone, or wood back, up to the amount you can currently carry.
First of all, it costs $80 US to buy a club, or the equivalent amount of Mobia. That money goes straight into supporting the game, and you own that club forever. You can only have one.
Once you have enough Mobia either purchased from other players in game, or bought with real money, you can buy your club. At that point you are just reserving your name.
Next, travel around the world until you find the perfect spot. Make sure you really like it because you can’t move or delete a club. It’s best if the spot is relatively flat so it’s easy to build on, and is close to various useful biomes. For example, mine is in Deep Jungle, but is close to Open Jungle, Wonderland, Mountains, and Geysers. It was founded in a spot that had a naturally open area surrounded by trees, with a couple of useful paths leading away from it.
You can choose to travel really far away from others, or be a bit closer to another – some clubs also choose to ally with other clubs, having reciprocal wagon routes and such. It all depends on your goals.
At this point I have many buildings and that whole place is surrounded with cool stuff. I’ll be adding decor fairly soon too. That tiny little building is the Club House, which is the first building that needs to go up. I took the picture when my club was just founded. As it grew, it looked like this:
At this point though, my club is pretty well decorated and has a fair number of stores and such, so it looks like this:
There’s holiday stuff all over because of the time of year, but take a look at how much taller that Clubhouse became.
When you first start out, you can only have five club members including yourself, so try and find people who are motivated to donate to the club. After all, the more donations there are, the more amenities there are, and the better it is for everyone. If you want to make two of any given building, which is useful for things like trainers and horse traders, it will take extra Building Slots. So your first trainer takes one slot, but your second would make two.
If you intend to add more buildings in a certain place, it also makes sense to leave extra space near them so you don’t have to go and rearrange later.
Have a plan in advance. Take a really good look at the area you have chosen and think about what buildings you want. For every club level you have, you get five building spots, though club stores don’t count towards that total. Think about what most people use a club for and set those buildings up first.
For example, my club started out with a horse trader, a breed identifier, a trainer for speed, some club stores, and an importer so we can get things like iron, wool, and garden seeds. I built up from there and I also asked my clubbies what they would find most useful.
Pick a good color scheme. Whether the color scheme is meant to be tasteful or wild, put some thought into it. I’d be more likely to spend time in a club I liked the look of, then stick around in a place that was all black and hot pink, for example, with low contrast store signs.
Have fun with profiles. Some stores allow you to put up a profile, which is short but still enough to put in a few sentences. I chose to describe what each shopkeeper looked like and I think it adds something to the club village.
Horse Isle 3 allows for some flexibility in thought, so I’ve used that to enhance things for my members and visitors. For example, I bought a land parcel as close as possible to my ranch, and made sure one of the paths led to it. I built a breeding barn there, which is a structure anyone can use, then put a lamp post near it, and put up a sign in the club letting people know where it was. I also placed a water trough for use by thirsty horses. That way it’s something useful for visitors but isn’t a pre-designed, official club amenity.
Some clubs also have signs with helpful hints and tips on them. This can be fun and also helpful for newbies. I have seen signs that tell when the club is accepting new members, ones that show where the different wagon routes go, ones that talk about different characters in the club, and more. I have even seen signs with dye recipes on them!
Workshops and Breeding Barns – since workshops can now be shared, having one near your club (or a wagon route to one) can be really handy. At TigerTon, ours is near the Breeding Barn. It can be a great boost for new players who can’t afford a ranch yet.
Courses – Folks like places to ride their horses. Some clubs have marked out long endurance trails to interesting places in the area. My own club has a speed track I made around an oval path, a Sled-Pull, and also a multi-use course that is an easy Sled-Pull, but the low fence can also be used for jousting.
Not only that, but if you have good courses, they might be randomly selected for the Mane Event, which brings players to your general area.
Towers – now that you can build really tall towers, they make great glider launching spots and can be a popular amenity.
Gardens – some clubs have relaxing areas with benches and plants and such, so that people have a peaceful place to sit while they sort their horses or go through Super orders and such.
Quest Table – not only are quests fun for your own clubbies to do, but they will also bring other people to you when they are looking for new quests to do! Having a variety of easy, medium, and hard ones is best.
Consider lighting. It gets pretty dark during our ten minutes of night, so plan carefully when placing your lamp post. It’s usually helpful to put it somewhere players will want to go , like near the trader, or the vet. You can even pick what color your lights will be, to help create mood.
Pick a theme and purpose. One club I know of found a club area on a mountainside and picked a Greek Mythology theme. My own club is supposed to be a village of friendly traders who live in the jungle. Others focus on breeding, or competitions. One really awesome club has a knightly theme with some really cool quests. So if you know what you most like doing, and you have some special interest that can be turned into a theme, that will lead to a cohesive club that is a pleasure to come to, and return to again and again.
Think Ahead With Building Placement Keep in mind that new people will want things to be easy to find. You may want to group all your stores in one place, your horse facilities in another, and your services still somewhere else. You may want to create a ring of buildings around a clear area, or along a path. You may want to create streets. Keep in mind that it’s pretty hard to build more than one or two lamp posts, so save those for important places. For instance, I have a lamp post near my horse traders, that also shows the way to the vet and the trainers, and another lamp post near my competition area. You can also use trees and other plants to add interest and draw the eye where you want it. I have planted a huge flower near the closest cave entrance to my club, so people will look over there and see it.
Name things! If you have names for various land forms around your club, use them. If you build a directional sign, for example, and want to point to a nearby mountain, you could say “this way to Blue Peak.” When setting destinations for your Wagon, you don’t have to list the destination plainly, like “plains biome” or “mesa and sandstone.” Why not make it immersive by listing them as “Sunlit Plains” or “Rattling Gulch.” Of course, if it’s really hard to guess, you may want to put a sign nearby explaining what everything actually is.
Since the Epic Finds were introduced, we now have a new way to get more of those. Each time a player is the first to discover a new Epic Find, they get an Epic Token. Those can be donated to clubs and traded in for more building/decor slots. They can also be sold and some players will just do that to make a little extra money. Each time a club owner trades them in the amount increases for next time, but it’s still a great way to make clubs a little bigger than they otherwise would be.
As stated above, it’s a good idea to have several courses nearby so the Mane Event may come to you.
Another quick thing to do is to log in when the new horse traders are picked each day, or have a club member do it, and look at the horse traders your club has so that they will appear on the main trader board. That way people are more likely to come to your club in search of a trader. If they like your general atmosphere, they just may join.
Similarly, holding events fairly regularly gives people a reason to come to your club. You could also have information in your club profile that is useful. Check out TigerTon, Blood Ruby Knights, or Where the Drafts Go for examples of useful lists and information.
Quests are another fantastic draw. If you have an Adventure Table with at least a couple playable quests, then nearly everyone will come to you – eventually.
Lastly, having a good description of your biome in your club profile will be helpful to those using the Biome Sort function to find a club. For example, “Jungle near Volcanic” rather than “Nice warm place” or the different climate descriptions that autopopulate at the top of the screen. The Biome Sort function is alphabetical based on the description so a no-frills description helps here.
Have fun!
Interested in joining?
Click HERE or go to the HI3 site and put in my user ID, 1023. If you decide to buy a subscription, even for one month, you’ll be rewarded with 10 Esroh Essence (good for more energy) and 1000 gold dust to help you get started!
Mindflight 
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