New Game Strategy

This post is probably of interest only to me and to those of you who play Backyard Monsters and who have not already heard me talking about this. In other words, you, Tam.

My Backyard Monsters neighbors were live-and-let-live types. No more. One day, two of my seven outposts were gone, each taken by a different person who had just arrived in the neighborhood. One of them kept taking my outposts and I kept taking them back, but I couldn't quite keep up. My plan was that if I kept taking them back, they would decide I wasn't worth the trouble and they'd move on to someone else.

Nope. Instead, a third person moved in and started attacking. Well, I'm honored that they think it takes three people to take me on, but being down to two outposts and having to wait to gather the resources even to try to take one back, I decided that it wasn't fun anymore. Seriously, all three guys moved their main base to within 2 hexes of mine. And they are mostly not even taking anyone else's outposts, just mine.

So plan B is to let them take my last two outposts and basically play dead, hoping they will get bored and move on. At which point I will take my outposts back. My plan may not work--it may just get harder and harder to take my outposts back, but hey, I don't need to spend this much time on the game anyway.

Keeping Job Applications

I got rid of a lot of papers over the last couple of days, about of half of which were old job applications. I've found it's good to keep my job applications throughout a job search for several reasons:

1) In case someone calls me for an interview after I've forgotten all the details, I'll have everything at my fingertips to refer to.

2) When I want to apply to several jobs at the same place and the place has a long, obnoxious job application, having the old one handy means I can just copy everything without having to look up anything else.

3) It's good to keep track of how many jobs I've applied for and how many interviews I've gotten so I can keep track of when it's time to give up. Last time I gave up after "only" eight interviews (over eight weeks), but almost immediately after that I read that it takes ten to fifteen interviews to get a job offer. So then I started again and got the offer for the job I have now.

However, it is no longer a good idea for me to keep any of my old applications.

1) Things have changed in the 10.5 years since I got my job. A bunch of those places don't even exist anymore; it would be better to start my search for employers from scratch. In addition, most applications are probably online by now and would have to be filled out only once. And even the applications themselves have changed drastically (at least for the one employer I know about).

2) It's depressing to see the wide variety of jobs for which I could not get even an interview and just how crappy some of them were. If I start another job hunt, I don't need all that garbage around reminding me that I suck, because I don't actually suck, so it's counterproductive and no fun.

And now I have more file space, too!