Hi. How are you? It’s Friday, which means it’s time for a Friday Open Thread! This is actually my very first open thread, and I’m a little nervous but a lot excited. It has been a very long, sickness-filled week for me, and there’s nothing that sounds better to cap it off than an afternoon with you beautiful people. I’m sure you’re all anxious to hear this week’s theme, and I promise I’m going to share that momentarily. But first, I want to tell you all a story.
I was sitting on the train the other day, mindlessly flicking animated candies around my phone screen in order to avoid staring at the nearest stranger’s buttcrack, when I had a thought: I don’t think I like Candy Crush. I certainly enjoy being good at it (i.e. I feel powerful when I breeze through levels a four-year-old could probably pass) and I play it almost constantly. It’s a very good way to feed my ADD’s need to multitask with something that doesn’t take too much of my brain power away from the actual task at hand.
via Lovatics <3/Google+
But as far as enjoyability goes, Candy Crush kind of sucks. The levels are either laughably easy or impossible to beat, which allows the game to constantly goad you to purchase in-game boosters that probably won’t actually help you beat the level anyway. The company has grown increasingly dependent on Facebook, so if you don’t have a wifi connection, you get screwed out of like half the game options. The actual game play isn’t awful, but the experience has suffered so much from its need to monetize, something thousands of grumpy old people have written about in App Store reviews. (Those are hilarious, by the way, and worth a read if you need a pick-me-up sometime.) It even requires you to ask your real-life friends (!!!) for help, so if you’re like me and totally ashamed of playing a game that even my mother has declared she is “so over,” you strategically send requests to Facebook friends you’ll never see in person and therefore never have to make eye contact with again.
Yet still, I play on. Because it’s my little guilty pleasure, my mind-numbing way to kill time or to watch Twin Peaks but have something else to pay attention to when I get too freaked out. It serves a very specific purpose, and it serves it well.
So this week, I’m wondering, what are your guilty pleasures? What do you do to pass the time, get you through boring meetings, keep yourself entertained or looking busy in the cafeteria so you don’t have to make small talk with your annoying coworker? What do you do on your phone when you can’t sleep on a weeknight but don’t want to get out of bed and wake your partner? What colorful games do you refuse to connect to Facebook for fear of your cool friends seeing you indulge? What do you do on your phone when no one is looking? Tell me, please, in the spirit of honesty and community that we have worked so hard to create here at Autostraddle. I’ll only tease you about it a little bit.
How To Post A Photo In The Comments:
1. Find a photo!This is the easy part. Find a photo on the web, right click (on a Mac, control+click), hit “Copy Image URL” and then…
2. Code it in to your comment! Use the following code, and use a DIRECT LINK to the image. Your image link should end in .JPG or .GIF or .PNG or .CallMeWhateverYouWant even. I don’t care, but it should be an image suffix!
<img src=”http://imageurlgoeshere.jpg”>
If you need to upload the photo you love from your computer, try using imgur. To learn more, check out Ali’s step-by-step guide.
How To Post A Video In The Comments, Too:
1. Find a video on YouTube or Vimeo or WHATEVER and click “embed.” Copy that code, but first make sure it’s for 640px wide or less. If your player is too large, it will not display properly.
2. Copy the code and paste it directly into your comment.
3. Go forth and jam.