Shit, I should have written this down: I tried logging onto the old MySpace -- not the new MySpace, the old MySpace -- probably Wednesday evening, though I'm not absolutely sure. I wanted to make sure I got my day's free card for my poker hand on Mobsters ... or is it Mafia Wars? But when I hit www.myspace.com, instead of getting a choice of which version of MySpace I wanted to go to, I was immediately shunted to the new MySpace. And I don't know where or how I can get to the old MySpace. I think it's gone -- the babes I've friended, my guy on Mobsters/Mafia Wars, the betting picks I made, all of it. And I don't think I can get it back.
Yeah, some warning would have been nice. Not that I was the most on-the-ball with MySpace, old or new. Hell, I forgot if the game I was playing was Mobsters of Mafia Wars. I think it's Mobsters, but now that my character's been erased, who the fuck cares? But I'm sure I was the only person who continued to use its blog feature. Shit, disregarding musicians and entertainment professionals, which, according to this article, were the only people still actively using MySpace at all, I may have been the only civilian still using fucking MySpace period. I think I was entitled to a heads-up.
Oh well. This new MySpace is tailored towards music. Unfortunately a lot of people are bitching that (again, according to the article I'm linking to) all the artists that built their friends/fan bases before facebook came and Red Wedding'ed their asses had all their numbers wiped out upon this conversion (either when they had both sites up and running a few months ago or when they closed down the old MySpace a coupld days ago). Moreover, not only are those bands and singers starting from zero fans, they even would have to register with the new MySpace. Starting all over again, you might guess, is alienating, and with so many other social media with which to connect with old and new listeners, MySpace basically, according to my supervisor at my grading project a couple weeks ago, gave itself a "Smith & Wesson pedicure."
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Meanwhile, another change, this time on facebook, has happened recently, and at least these guys were professional enough to give all of us advance warning. The game Poker Palace was shut down some time yesterday/Saturday. For the past, oh, two months when I signed onto the game I saw a message warning all of us that Poker Palace would be put down June 15. I technically was able to get onto it in the early morning Saturday, but I tried again when I was at the library in the afternoon and I got a message essentially saying it was all gone.
While I was able to get to the game, I didn't actually "sit down" at a table and play it. Haven't done that in weeks; in fact, most of the time when I "got on" Poker Palace I did not play. So why did I go on? As an enticement to play, I got free chips every time I did hit the link, regardless of whether I then started playing. And the chips increase if I come back on successive days. I think you hit the maximum after "playing" a week straight, but I remember coming back on early Saturday afternoon to collect my bonus, which I believe was for the eighth day, and I thought it was a little higher than it the day before.
Linking to Poker Palace every day to get the escalating bonus chips became sort of an OCD obsession for me. I never did it before, and I never really cared about the game, but they introduced this feature a long time ago, and whenever I came back to the game after several days (or even weeks) off, I felt like I missed, and even wasted, free chips offered to me. I felt bad, though not enough to do anything about it until I learned that the game was being shut down. Then it became important.
I had a more intense fleeting compulsion/short-term memory problem with the poker hand on Mobsters/Mafia Wars on MySpace v.1.0. Like with the bonus chips, this game gave a hand's worth of cards for a hand of poker every week. The better the five-card hand you eventually got (although you could trade in bad cards if you had enough, what is it, points?), the better prize you would get. I think I got a straight once, which gave me either a good weapon or a bad-ass motorcycle. Anyway, I kind of got obsessed with the poker hand, much moreso than the free chips. I think it's because if you missed a day, you missed the card, and when you did get back onto the game, you would see the hand and a spot of the missed card, which would shame you by spelling out "Missed Day 'x.'"
I didn't want to miss days; I didn't want holes in my poker hand. So I did my damndest to login to MySpace every day to get my Mobsters/Mafia Wars poker card. But even though I tried hard, I often still missed it. I get busy, I forget, the modem at home doesn't work, but honestly, since the game started with these playing cards, I think I filled up a week, oh, four times in total. Much of the time I would see my hand and be surprised that I missed a day, and really, I got very sad. I would get really depressed if I missed the first card of the week, because then they would keep that first card for you, but push out the beginning of that week until you logged in and played the game. Because of that I was determined to make sure I would get all seven cards from Day One, but nearly every week I would trip up at some point and see that damned "Missed Day" sign.
Well, with both old MySpace and Poker Palace on Facebook both shut down, I won't have to worry about feeding my OCD issues with those two issues.
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