The Frugal Blog

I picked this up on Ebay recently because it looked really different from the other Giga Pets I've seen, and also I love games with farms. The review is going to have to remain incomplete for now, however, because I've set it aside after struggling with it for a while. Earlier Giga Pets are known for being more difficult to care for, and that coupled with the unique gameplay that comes with having multiple pets and crops to care for was a bit overwhelming for me. I kept a running log each day and I was playing with it, so click below the cut to see my thoughts and how my first run with this one went.

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Continue reading "An Incomplete Review of the Giga Pets Farm"

I've been crocheting for years, but I never really made any amigurumi until recently. On one of my trips to the craft store, I happened to look through their book section, which I usually visit for coloring books, and came across this adorable book here. I ended up choosing the creature on the cover first, since I liked it so much, and after several months of starting and then putting off the project, I ended up with this adorable little thing:



Click the cut for details and more pics Continue reading "Unicorn Amigurumi"

So every few months or so I get obsessed with some fun thing or another, and I fall into the collecting hole. It's something I have to work to not get too spendy with, otherwise I can really get carried away, but it's fun as long as I keep an eye on it. My last interest was cassette tapes, which I'll probably end up putting on the site in some form or another eventually. This time around it's virtual pets. Bandai has been rebooting their original Digimon and Tamagotchi lines for folks like me who want to revisit their childhood toys, and they're pretty cheap right now, so I picked up a purple and pink P1 (first gen, that is) Tamagotchi, and a re-released Gigapets Pixel Puppy (they're revamping theirs too). Below are my thoughts about both of them.

Continue reading "My latest nostalgia kick - Tamagotchi & others"

Oh how I've missed this thing. Dreamhost has been having connection issues, and it ended up affecting pretty much anything that's dependent on MySQL. Fortunately, I've got backups and was able to re-upload some files, and we're back in business.

In the meantime, I've released some Pixel doll bases for those of you who also like making pixel art. Leave a comment if you use them, since I'd like to see what other come up with!

I also have a fun little toy I've been making. Over at the Melon Land Forums, one of the members, Iceologist, has been hosting a Web Jam event, similar to a game jam, but, obviously, for web pages. I wasn't able to join the first one due to some real life things I had scheduled, but they had some cool entries, which you should wander over and check out. The second one, though, has the "ASCII" theme, so I decided to make an art tool to make ASCII pictures with. I call it:

ASCII Painter

Check it out and have some fun with it! It came together more easily than I thought it would, though I did hit a few snags here and there. It uses jQuery and javascript, along with HTML and CSS. And of course, the GUI is all text only. If you want to keep up with the other entries in the webjam, here's the thread below:

https://forum.melonland.net/index.php?topic=479.0