Yay Day and Other Weirdness [WWW-Month 2]

Well, work is going miserably, so instead of spending no unpaid weekend
time toiling over files, I just played my game.

NO SPOILERS IF YOU'VE BEEN PLAYING RECENTLY

I finally caught my Dung Beetle! Man, this guy was annoying. Not only
is he rare, but he's seasonal, and he competes with Snowman for your
attention. I ran across him about five times before I nailed one.

Okay--if you build Snowman, you no longer have chance at the beetle for
the day. But--if I wait for the end of the day, I'm so rattled and
tired that I usually screw up Snowman. Well, anyway, I finally started
carrying my net at ALL times and started obsessively looking for moving
snowballs. Amusingly enough, while I was trying to build Snowman, a
beetle started moving one of my built-up, larger snowballs. While FAR
away from water. BINGO!

Anyway, since then, I've been building Snowmen in the morning, while
I'm still chipper, and I'm winning every time. I think I just have one
last item to go. Looks I have every other winter seasonal item, so it
looks like my winter collecting is done. Thank goodness. The *only*
other "seasonal" thing is the mole cricket, and I've been slowly
working on my strategies for _that_ one...

By the way, Dung Beetles are nocturnal, according to their entry in the
InsectDex. Gamefaqs was wrong; you guys were right.

Yay Day strikes me as utterly pointless. Unless something strange
happens in the future, it must really me a major waste of time. At
least La Di Day got me to change my town tune to something new...Oddly
enough, I'd *never* changed my tune. I kinda like my new one, in fact.
But...a holiday? Eh.

The whole "mailing fruit to get fruit" didn't work for me at all. I
tried five letters, all well written, and got nothing but furniture. I
might try again, though. Possibly, at the time, the post system was
overwhelmed. After about 8 to 10 letters, it pretty much shuts
down...You can't order anything from Nook--you can't even look at your
catalog. This seems to include Snowman letters waiting to go out and
other such in-game letters. Any extra letters sent out after Nook turns
off the catalog just seem to get lost.

I finally ran across Gracie the other day. Is the a question-based
deal, like Harriet in the beauty shop? I'm guessing so. From my three
characters, I got two moldy shirts and one subdued print. At least I
don't have to drink four cups of coffee before I'm so twitchy that I
can wash her car in my sleep...

I'm still miffed at how my visitors are showing up. I've have Katrina 3
times, Wendell twice, Saharah once, and now Gracie once. I *know*
Gulliver is in this game, but where is he? He used to be weekly, no?
Well, at least Redd is certainly weekly now...But if you look at your
weekly events, it seems there are only _four_ days for random visits.
Saturday is Lyle, Sunday is Joan, and one day is allocated to Redd. And
of course, some days, no one comes. Hmpph.

My house is almost ready for its last stage. I'm at 220K in debt and
falling fast. It definitely helps to have all the space for night
fishing storage. And my reflexes are up to the point where I can catch
tuna and dinofish with no significant difficulty.

OTHER LARGER SPOILERS FOLLOW

My picture collection is growing. I just managed to get Portia to give
me one, bumping my total to 7. Again, they don't show up in any kind of
catalog/inventory. Odd. Looks like just about the hardest thing in any
game would be to collect every picture, so that's what I'm now working
on.

I can't quite figure out what the rules for getting a pic are.

A) It coud be totally random.

B) It could be based on how long the villager has lived there.

C) It could be a function of how many times you've talked with the
animal.

D) It could be related to how many things you've done or how many
questions you've successfully answered for the villager.

E) It's probably a combination of all of the above.

Anyway, so far I've had 12 villagers and have 7 different pics. 3 left
without, 2 are "new", and one gave me her pic twice (!).

Anyway, I'm going to try to do some real-world work now, so I'm going.

The way to get fruit in the mail that I used was to send sea shells or fruit
to residents and make sure the letter is really short, just a few words.
The length of the letter seems to determine the gift you get back. And only
write 1 letter to each resident each day, so you are mailing out 8 letters
(a full town) every day. Hope this helps.

AceoHearts