November 15-16: Time Princess, Kitty Kitchen, and irrational activity

 I finished the last big monster of the day in good time yesterday, a little before 11PM. 11PM is my official "get ready for bed" time, with midnight being the "put the phone down and go to sleep" time.

After that, I played Time Princess. Time Princess resets at 11PM standard in my time zone, so I'm often trying to do a bunch of things just before and just after reset in the game. In this case, the current week's minigame is "Kitty Kitchen". I love tile-matching games and have fond memories of the first one I played, back in the 80s. "Kitty Kitchen" is something of an odd duck among Time Princess minigames. Most TP minigames neither require nor reward much skill: you have to have some competence at them, but "maximum usable competence" is easy to reach and the rewards are much more about "how many times do you manage to play the game while it ran" than anything else. Game plays are time gated: you can play X times in Y hours, with a cap of Z until you spend some of the available plays. A few extra plays are available per day if you are willing to have ads play on your phone. (Watching the ad while it plays is optional). 

Kitty Kitchen allows 1 play every 2 hours, with a cap of 3 plays -- so it caps every 6 hours. Every other Time Princess minigame has a cap that's reached after 8 hours so the hardcore addicted gamers have at least a shot at 8 hours of sleep. I don't know why they decided to be more sadistic about Kitty Kitchen.

Kitty Kitchen also rewards careful gameplay more than any other minigame. The best rewards are only available if you clear the board. The board design is such that it's almost impossible to clear the board without using several special moves. You can get one of each of three kinds of special moves by playing one ad per move, each game (but you can't stockpile these). You also earn more special moves by playing more games and/or scoring well, and by spending special moves. You can collect these rewards all at once. Last, you get Still More special moves by placing first in your section that day, where the places are based on your best progress in a single board that day, not cumulative score. So if you get 100% on a board that day, you are guaranteed first.

The various prize specials mean that if I play well and thoughtfully, I can reach 100% on one board almost every day during the week it runs. If I am willing to let bunches of ads play, I can possibly 100% multiple boards on some days.

I should not let ads play. No, I don't have to watch the ads, and no, it doesn't take long to push a button to let one play, then do something else and eventually push the button to move on. But it still takes a few seconds of my time for each ad, and added up over the course of all those games, it's probably half an hour of my life, if not more. I am a wealthy retired person. If I want a thing out of this game I should just buy it. With money. Not time.

AND YET

This time around in Kitty Kitchen, I am playing to maximize my ad plays so that I get the max rewards from the ads. No, I can't explain why. "Because I can", I guess.

I am also playing thoughtfully, which means each game takes 10+ minutes. Especially since one of my tactics is "put the game down for a minute and do something else, so that you can look at the board with fresh eyes instead of fixating on the only possible move you can see right now". 

All this means that I picked up my phone at 10:45PM to play half an hour of Time Princess, and then put it down again to realize it was now 12:30AM and I still hadn't gone to bed. 

Oops.

Also, I still had another game of Kitty Kitchen to play.

Anyway, I fell asleep around 1AM, thinking that my sleep would be even more messed up than it has been, and it's been pretty awful. 

Instead, I woke at 7AM, fell back to sleep pretty quickly, and woke again around 9:30AM. 

Which is ... pretty good?

I lazed in bed, playing, yes, Yet More Kitty Kitchen. Even though I spend much more time actually playing Kitty Kitchen than I do letting my phone play ads, it doesn't bother me nearly as much. I enjoy playing the game and do it for fun, whereas I don't enjoy playing ads and do it because I can't convince my hindbrain that, no, this is not "getting stuff for free" and it would make more sense to use money instead. Hindbrain be like "la la la use logic all you want I'M NOT LISTENING. Your rationality can't stop me because I'm not rational!"

Yes, hindbrain. We know.

Eventually I got up, at breakfast, and hopped into 4thewords. Where I decided to write this instead of working on a book, because I wanted to get it out of my head. 

Now that's done, guess I will poke at Be That Way.