Here at youshouldknowjasonparks.blogspot.com*, we strive to bring you a smorgasbord of interesting content to make you think, (hopefully) laugh, and shake your head in amazement/disgust. My expressed goal is to bring it with each and every post. Sometimes that means I write about my thoughts about God. Sometimes that means I keep you up to date on my Fantasy Football team. Sometimes that means I deliver some ideas about humanity in the world we live in. But today, for the first time ever, I'm going to talk to you about my absolute favoritest card game that I play on the computer- Free Cell.
If you haven't played Free Cell then please stop reading this blog right now, go over to the program menu, click on the game menu, highlight Free Cell, and get ready to have your mind blown. Free Cell is like solitaire if solitaire was King Leonidas played by Patrick Dempsey if Patrick Dempsey was Patrick Swayze. Yeah, it's like that.
The thing I love most about it is that it requires a good amount of strategy and planning. In solitaire, you're at the complete mercy of the deck. All you know is the cards on the top- most of the deck is a complete mystery. And the stock too is completely blind- so to me it's much more of a game of chance than it is strategy (although there are elements of both, to be sure). So when I win a game of solitaire I feel good- but I also feel like I was more like a mouse in a box, led by a series of pre-designed pellet droppings to an already determined outcome.
With Free Cell, it's all on me. Everything is laid out there. Win or lose, it's most likely due to some sort of human error I made instead of some random placement of cards. In fact (and when I say 'fact', you should know I'm taking my facts from Wikipedia), there is only one unwinnable Free Cell game out of 32,000 (from the original Windows), while the estimated number of unwinnable games in solitaire is between 8.5-18%. Basically if I lose in solitaire then it's 20% likely that I had no chance before the game even started. Meanwhile a Free Cell game will pretty much always rise and fall based on my abilities (which I should tell you are substantial).
And I like that. I like the feeling of being in complete control of my game destiny. That means that when I win, I win because I was smarter than a stack of computer generated playing cards. I was able to use my mental faculties and precognition to triumph over my inanimate enemy. If I lose, it's because I made a wrong choice or got ahead of myself- no mystical force leading me astray. No computer defense to accuse of cheating. The only person to throw the controller at is myself.
But hey, the point of this blog post wasn't really to trumpet the superiority of Free Cell over solitaire (ATTENTION- FREE CELL IS SUPERIOR TO SOLITAIRE). My point is to let you know that I am challenging myself to my own Free Cell football league. Yes, my efforts to incorporate football into every facet of my life knows no bounds.
Let me explain what I'm doing. I'm going through a series of 16 game 'seasons', if you will. At the end of each 'season', I advance to the playoffs depending on how many victories I achieve. 9-11 wins gets me in the Wildcard round, and 12-16 gives me a first round bye. If I make it to the playoffs, then I follow the NFL playoff format until I win the 'Super Bowl' or lose (whichever comes first). My first 'season' I went 12-4 but lost in the equivalent of the conference championship game (note: the only way that I could make this possibly cooler is if I somehow managed to clone myself into any multiple of four and set up equal divisions that I could compare records against and actually set up a literal playoff tree against myself. Science, get on this please). I was devastated to be sure- so I went out and made some impressive moves in free agency and drafted shrewdly to fill some needs. I'll let you figure out what that means.
Last 'season', which I finished tonight, I went 11-5. Not my most impressive finish, but considering I started 1-4, it was quite a feat- especially since I won the Super Bowl! That's right, I managed to overcome a 1-4 start to finish with a playoff berth and like the Green Bay Packers of last year, I won four straight games to reach the pinnacle of my trade. Move over, Freddie Mercury- I am the champion, my friend.
Rest assured faithful reader, I'm not going to be bringing you frequent updates of my Free Cell successes and failings. This will probably be the only time you have to read about these shenanigans. But I did think that the world needed to know that I take my Free Cell as seriously as I do my Fantasy Football. Which is to say that I take it way too seriously.
*I suppose that hyperlinking to a website that you're already at is a little superfluous. It's like giving you a map to a door, and the door is in the middle of the room that you're already in. But that's okay because it's just nice to know that there's no place like home.
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