This month – being Mardi Gras – the Ringer’s enabled the holiday masks, so I decided to celebrate by choosing one for Lillythanne to wear for a while.  Since the masks don’t come in any LE colors (unless you waste a chroma on them), I chose a standard colored outfit for her to wear with it.  And since it’s Lillyth,  it was either going to be black, or gold.  I opted for gold – more specifically, her gold and maroon harem girl outfit with a gold and red cat mask.  Lillythanne looked so cute I decided to get a portrait made – but which one?  I tried several….OK, I tried 12 of them –  3 of them with dolls (1: Werewolf, 4: Yeti, 10: Ghost doll borrowed from Meijinn)  – a couple of BK Trinkets (9: Ectoplasm, 12: Spectral chain) and one BK egg (5:Gretchen Goldfang, in honor of my part in Everclearboy’s portrait).  I though maybe to do a couple of gold trinkets (2 because it’s iceblue, 3 because it looks like the monkey is reading the book) because they weren’t in YPPedia yet.  The potion bottle (11) looked interesting, the Katana (6) matched the outfit, the cannon (8) was in my inventory at the time, and the gold cit trophy (7) just to see what it would look like.  In the end, I went with this…

After all, Cat Girl isn’t afraid of a little werewolf, is she?

Oh yeah, I ended up buying the silly serpent sloop too…

In the end, it has been a busy month – lots of cades, some successful cit runs (and a lot of unsuccessful ones too), and a lot of BK hunting.  I also managed to make a few POE speculating on the wildly fluctuating Dub market this month.  Maybe next month it will settle down some.  We’ll see…

Every month (or most months anyway) the ringers come out with a new sloop for us to blow our hard earned POE on.  And the truth is, it’s a lot of POE when you get right down to – each ship works out to usually be 90K plus 40 dubs (which these days works out to around 96K).  So that’s quite a bit for something a little bit fancier than the usual ship.  And I have 15 of these Limited Edition sloops (along with 3 sloops that are less expensive but require plans that cost trinkets, a longship that needs extra plans, a war brig that requires extra plans, and a limited edition cutter).  Even the one regular sloop I have has been custom painted and outfitted with cannons, helm, and figurehead that you can’t get anymore – making it a limited edition of sorts as well.  That’s almost 4M (that’s 4 million) POE spent on these ships.  And I don’t even take them out.

So, they decide that for this month they’re offering what they call the “Serpent” class sloop in honor of the Chinese year of the serpent.  The ship looks like a bad mixup between snakes, a sloop, and a junk (another ship you can buy).  In fact, I think a junk would have made a far better choice for this months LE ship, but no.

So did I get it?

No, I bought this little cutie instead.  75K and 75dubs – so it actually ended up costing more (close to 250K total) – but I think I’ll end up using this more than any of those sloops I bought.

I just have to think up a nice name for it…

… That means Brigand King – not Burger King (although Burger King is pretty good too, now that they’ve changed the fries again).

First, it was getting all 8 of the BK banners for the wall (Madame Yu’s banner is in Shigeko’s room).

Then, it was getting all 8 of the BK eggs.

Now, it’s this…
That is all 24 of the Brigand King Trophies – bronze, silver, and gold.  I guess I could call it finished on the BKs, but I’m hoping that someday we’ll have the chance to get BK dolls – so I’m going to keep going on any reasonable BK hunt I see on the notice board.  Besides, it’s a good way to keep my conqueror rating  at Illustrious, and I hope to someday see Lillythanne’s name on the top 10 board.

Of course, since most of the people on the top 10 board are the ones I’m going out on BK hunts with, it could be a little tough…

OK, there’s not really a pirate of the year – but if there was, this would be my vote.  But first, the explanation.

Lately I’ve been going out BK hunting with Everclearboy.  He’s always good for a decent amount of POE, with a minimum amount of puzzling – and I still have trinkets and trophies to get, last night I added a lucky rabbit’s foot to my trinket collection, and another gold BK trophy (in addition to one the night before).  But he’s not my nominee…

After Everclear’s BK run, I jobbed on with a Cit Run with one of my preferred bnavvers, and after the usual waiting around to fill, we finally go in.  Unfortunately, like too many cit runs these days, we went one citadel too long, and ended up sinking (like Everclear had done before the BK run).  So we all end up on the shore – hoping we have a new injury, but mostly seeing what color our latest fish was – with nothing but the aforementioned fish and a small handful of POE.  I go back home, then head to Wensleydale to re-arrange some clothing – when there’s an “All Hands” call.  I think, maybe the bnavver decided to give some consolation POE to the jobbers for the their time, so I answer the call.  I was right, it was consolation POE — 400K worth of it.  Then, before I can finish a thank you message, there’s another call to vote on the division of another 100K.  I ended up making more on this sink than I usually do on a Friglantis run.

So, for this reason, I would definitely vote for Viator for pirate of the year.  I certainly will start referring to him now as Gentleman Jake…

Take a look at this picture – notice anything strange about it?

How about now?

If you were wondering about the missing scarf on the yeti doll, or the strange colors on the toy cannon, you’d be correct.  I first placed the cannon at our crew hall, and it turned wine colored – it has also been grey, brown, tan, seagreen, and blue.  The color glitch depends on what type of building or ship it’s being placed in – lt blue here, wine at the crew hall, the other colors on different ships.  At first, I thought it was just me – until Meijinn saw it too.

So, I did what I seldom do, and went to the forums for info.  That’s when I discovered the glitch with the yeti doll too (I hadn’t noticed it before).  It turns out that many of early toys have this glitch – the question is, are they going to fix it?  I have a lot of toy cannons, but only the one that color shifts – and only the one naked yeti doll.  Will they suddenly be fixed, or will they stay weird forever?

And will that make them worth more?

One thing about this game that some people are obsessed with (while others never think about) is fame.  The game itself has it’s own system for recognizing ‘reputation’ – but it’s based on things that the game can measure.  The game really can’t determine what we humans would call reputation, because it’s a very subjective thing.  For instance – am I famous?  I’m not a well known bnavver, I’m not always posting on the forum boards, or winning tournaments – I don’t own a popular shop, and I’m not the governor of an island.  I’m the monarch of a small vanity flag – one that exists mainly so Meijinn, Eumica, and I can wear tiaras and the like whenever we want.  I can get on most Cit Runs, but that’s mainly because I have a Gold Citadel prominently displayed on my pirate page.  So, I’m not exactly basking in the glow of public adulation…

So it was really cool when Everclearboy invited me to participate in this…

Everclear had just become the first person to win all the possible brigand king trophies, and he decided to celebrate by creating his own version of a group Brigand King portrait.  From left to right is — Revkoolaid as Vargas the Mad, Lillythanne (temporarily with brown hair) as Gretchen Goldfang, Scrim as Brynhild Skullsplitter,  Everclearboy as Admiral Finius, Jillie as the Widow Queen, Heyfunnygurl as Madam Yu Jian, and Hops as Azarbad the Great (missing from the picture is Barnabas the pale – too bad).

So, does this make me famous?  Of course not – but I think I’m satisfied with knowing that the famous people know who I am anyway.  It’s less pressure that way…

note: Everclearboy was not necessarily the first person on the ocean to actually have all the trinkets – a player named Shooshy (I think) is said to have had all the trinkets first – but not all of them had her name on them.  Ever had verified this with one of the developers beforehand, so he could legitimately claim the bragging rights.

Vacation is over, the kids are back in school, and I’m back on Puzzle Pirates on my home connection.  I ended up with a plethora of toy parts – and if the value for them ever goes up at the trading post, I’ll make some more toys.  I say that, because despite having made a healthy chunk of change working some blockades and some fairly successful SMH and Cit runs, I”m still a little light on cash.  Partly because of this picture…

Obviously, the picture cost the usual dub and poe amounts — but I also shelled out 60k to get the black dress top and knickers.  Still, I think the “Dread Pirate Roberta” outfit turned out pretty good – for a cartoony version of the outfit from ‘The Princess Bride’.

I was also so pleased with the way this outfit turned out…

… I bought another one to wear when this one finally wears out.  Then there was the latest Limited Edition sloop to buy, and since there’s no promo for dubs going on I ended up spending poe on them (I needed dubs to buy a new Senior Officer badge).

So money coming, money going.  Oh yeah, I won another Karkinos too – Atlantean and silver this time…

I’ve been on vacation for the past few days (most of you know where, so I won’t bore you with the details).  Needless to say, my playing has been limited while I’m relying on my 3G mifi unit.  I can log in the game with it, and do stuff – the bandwidth requirement for the game is not terribly high – but I’m not sure I’d want to rely on the sometimes sketchy connections to do serious puzzling with.  We did go down to the activity center (with the high speed wifi connection) yesterday so my wife and daughter could watch a movie, but by time Cartrunner finally got his SMH organized and ready to go, I didn’t have enough time to go in with him.  Oh well, a few more days and I’ll be back at home and earning money – which I’ll immediately spend to assemble more toys.  Oh well, easy come, easy go…

… and I’m almost all out of POE again.  Why?  You did read the recent wardrobe post, right?  Anyway, I’ve been out a lot with Everclearboy doing BK hunts.  A fair amount of POE, new trophies, more BK trinkets, and most importantly – toy parts.  Anyway, while I’m busy collecting toy parts, I hear the little fanfare and much to my surprise I see that I have finally reached illustrious conqueror.  I am finally a Notorious Corsair!  So obviously, I had to buy clothes to match.  Pricey clothes.  I also found a fair deal on a pair of black/black fancy boots.  Some extra wine clothes and a really cheap atlantean/navy outfit.

So now I’m broke again — but I’m lookin’ stylish…

So I’m on a cit run with Amurica, and unfortunately Hardrockers shows up in the same map, to do the same thing.  Since 2 ships can’t really cit run on the same map, someone either has to leave, or sink.  Hardrockers decided to sink us.  Not exactly a happy making experience for the jobbers, but it happens.  What happened next was just stupid…

Some greenie named Kurtrussell (and I mean greenie because he had a green name – but he was probably someone’s alt) who had been less than useful during the cit run starts ragging on Amurica in jobber chat.  Amurica dismissed him from the crew – but someone jobbed him back in – presumably so he could continue with his trash talking.  Amurica dismissed him again, and he got jobbed back in.  I checked the crew list, and the most likely person to be jobbing Kurtrussel in was a pirate named S***** (I don’t know for sure, so I’m not going to put her name down).  Anyway, a lot of nonsense went down, and Amurica left the crew (“Did he ragequit?”  “Dismissed”).  I don’t feel to bad for Amurica – his alt is still in the old crew, and he’s now in the same crew as Cartrunner.

And S*****?  She’s not in the crew either – she’s gone, and is in different crew too.  Don’t you just love people who start s**t then leave…

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postscript:  2 days later, Amurica is doing another cit run.  Hardrockers is one of his jobbers…