The Empty Cabinets of my Mind

Pennies While You Sleep

A few years back I set out to write an article exposing online PTC sites as fraudulent and got quite a surprise when my research showed me that some of them are legitimate.  The bad ones, it seems, give all the good ones a bad rap. 

For me, getting the internet give me a few dollars a day is a fun game.  While I don't earn enough online at PTC to pay the rent, I do make enough for an occasional meal out, usually at some trendy bed and breakfast.  So I am always on the lookout for yet another way to pick up a little cash without doing much. 

Needless to say, when one of my favorite PTC sites started up a new sister site, I joined and bought a platinum upgrade right away:

The next morning I already had 10 automatic referrals and 40 cents in my account. What is a referral?   That is someone who joined after  you and every time they earn something you get a percentage for having referred them. This is why a few cents show up in your account every night while you are sleeping. 

PTC-Box is unique in that they guarantee you will earn back the cost of your upgrade or they refund the portion that you didn't earn back.  Since this is brought to us by the same people who came up with MatrixMails, I believe them.  But I've already earned enough at MatrixMails to pay for my PTC-Box upgrade and more, so whatever... this is like playing with house money.

 

 

 

 

 

Big Money

Did I mention that I'm still trying for the Silver Upgrade on WorldWinner games?  Here is my progress so far:

 

 

Maybe by the time I get to 100,000 points I will hate this game ;-)

 

But I doubt it.

Premier Games at Worldwinner

For a while Worldwinner games would not load properly on my computer so I got far behind in playing them, choosing King.com instead.  But lately there are some new improvements.  So I went back to try playing some 99 cent specials in Big Money.  Naturally, I got interested in knowing what their Premier Club is all about.   King.com has something like that too, and I like their games better, but I think Worldwinner has a higher percentage of payout and their current promotion falls back to a lifetime membership for players who achieve any level. 

Currently I have 16,872 points out of the 100,000 needed for the Silver Upgrade and only 18 days left to compete in this month's progress.  Then they reset the counter. 

More on Bubble Witch

I took a deep breath and played two cash games of Bubble Witch already and won both of them.  That puts the pressure on. 

I have discovered that it is necessary to win two out of every three King.com games  to get beyond the fees.  Sometimes they have specials on the entry fees to make the games more affordable.  Those are neat. 

I hope not to dream of spiders (not even those cute golden ones) if I play any more tonight.

A New Game

They do not let us get bored over at King.com because they are always bringing out new games, and my latest favorite is called Bubble Witch and they brought it out just in time for Halloween, but I expect it will stay year round.  The graphics are cool, and I just love trying to keep the cauldrons bubbling.  

Arcade Games are Fun

They used to have a Pizza place near my vacation home that had a huge arcade area with games attractive to little tykes and also a really wonderful and inexpensive all-you-can-eat-pizza buffet.   I usually went there for an early lunch, right about the time their vegetable supplier drove up in his delivery truck, bringing the fresh farm produce that made their pizzas outstanding.

The youngsters were not loud or annoying.  In fact it was kind of fun to watch them getting a big thrill out of the arcade games.   Interestingly, the brand name of the machines was the same as that on a popular online gaming site that I frequent.  So the company has it covered...they appeal to all ages. 

I don't think that funbrain is a word, at least not in English. But if it were, or brainfun, one of those words would express how I feel about using online games to de-stress and keep the mind active at the same time.

There are quite a few free game sites, and some of the games are pretty simple, while others are complicated. But they all give us a chance to practice hand-eye coordination and think in a different way than we do in our daily routines. I like that. I like the skill gaming sites where you can win money playing such games, too,  but most of those require a lot of close attention and when I am relaxing a bit before bedtime I prefer somewhat mindless games that can be played at one's own pace or even while multi-tasking.

Games and Cheats

Since one of my favorite ways to fry my brain is learning how to play new games that pop up online, often without a lot of documentation as to how to play, I spend an little bit of my recreation time looking for cheats. 

This naturally brings up pages and pages of information that I can barely decipher, as was the case when a search brought up cheats for poptropica games. One of the lines in that one reads that the "pig is in the under groundplace (sic) where there are spiders."  Ewww, I think I will stay out of there. 

As much as I like online games, I have been pretty good about staying off them while on my smart phone.   But after Virgin Mobile gobbled up Helio, the makers of my beloved Ocean, and then Sprint gobbled up Virgin Mobile, I was pretty much forced to upgrade to an android phone.  Well, Sprint made me an offer I could not refuse. 

So the first thing I notice about it is that it came preloaded with Bejeweled.  I used to play Bejeweled on one of the leading skill gaming sites from time to time, for money, and win...from time to time.   Good thing my new phone has respectable battery life. 

Addiction Alert!

I don't know which is more addicting for me -- playing online games, or familiarizing myself with new game sites.  I like short games that you can play while multitasking, rather than the ones that require high speed and high concentration.  

When Noggin offered to pay me to write a post about their site I was pretty happy because I had never heard of them before.  So I went right over here to have a look:

noggin

It was sort of hard to drag myself back here, but eventually I decided that the frogs in the Froggy game might become extinct if they depended on me to rescue them. 

Later I went back to check out their classic pacman for a while:

noggin games

I play these kind of games to take a little mini-break from time to time while working online.  So after a while I decided to see if I could be of more assistance to the lost frogs.   This time I got 3 frogs safely across the road and across the river.  

Although registration is not required to play the games, it was easy to register and upload an avatar.  The games I played online there did not require special plugins or downloads.  Since the games are free, they do display ads when each game is first loaded, but they are short and do not interfere with the play.

I did not check all of the games out, as they have over 300, but the ones I played seemed appropriate for children.  However, I think they would also be fun for casual gamers of any age.  

In addition to being relaxing and fun, according to some recent studies casual games play a role in health and wellness. 

One of my favorite online games

Actually, I have challenges turned off, but I thought being able to link my profile here was extremely kewl:

View my profile Play more games

Yet More Fun and Games

When I was a tadpole nerds had not yet been invented.  But that would have been me.  Except they called us "drips" back then. 

It never became respectable to be a drip, but nerds have sort of a following now, one step up from geeks. When I learned about the gaming forum called Rugged Nerds I had to think about that name and try to figure out what exactly a rugged nerd might be. A trip to the urban dictionary fixed that. Rugged basically means "awesome" as in part of an oxymoron.

gaming forum

For that matter, "gaming forum" might be an oxymoron. 

I like computer games, but not the time-consuming role-playing kind.  I tend to avoid the violent games, too.  The Rugged Nerds site has eight arcade games, including tetris, snake, and hexxagon.  To get to play them you have to be registered.  To be registered you have to know something about gaming, because they ask a test question.  But if I figured out the right answer, you can too.  If you are interested in gaming, go there.  If not, you can drop the name and impress your wicked nerd friends.

Speaking of names, there is some controversy about where the word "nerd" came from.   Of course there is the Dr. Seuss character, but there are a couple of other interesting theories about its derivation.  My favorite is that since nerds don't tend to drink anything stronger than cola beverages and their arch enemies are really into getting drunk the word "nerd" was originally spelled "knurd" and was simply the reverse spelling of drunk.  Cute, but a more plausible story is that N.E.R.D. was a division of a Canadian firm that hired a lot of those guys who used to run around wearing pocket protectors.  I got that from a web page written by Jim Burrows who describes himself as a hirsute curmudgeonly nerd.