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The adventures of Rusa in Toontown (the tenth instalment)

I did a little bit of Trolleying with fellow deer Siren, where I got the chance to do the classic Tug of War minigame — & in coöp, no less!

The idea is pretty simple: rapidly alternate between pressing ← & →. The catch, however, is that you not only have to alternate fast enough, but you also can’t alternate too quickly! The red line is what you’re aiming for, & consistency is key. The Trolley version of this game is either single-player or coöp, but it can be played Toon-vs.-Toon when played at a party — which is pretty in tents intense, if you ask me.

I was also invited to a friend’s estate, where she had a neato house. Aaaand she also had another house… which was more like this:

Oh, dear. This house is pretty much nonfunctional — you can’t even move around! It’s all lobster chairs & “Ceci n’est pas une pie” paintings!!

The painting is, of course, a parody of René Magritte’s La Trahison des Images (“The Treachery of Images”; 1929), which has the text “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”. The joke is presumably that, unlike pipe (in the narrow sense), pie in French doesn’t mean what it means in English. The French (meaning “magpie”) is from Latin pīca /⁠ˈpiː.kä⁠/ “magpie”; the English is maybe(??) related, but is probably(???) an English innovation. Then again, pīca is also the source of the term for the eating disorder in English, from the notion that magpies will eat just about anything; this could be the source of pie as “pastry filled with just about anything”.

Nose to grindstone

But that’s enough pastries for now. Or rather, not enough pastries, because I’ve still some gags to train. 🏋🏽‍♀️

Sheesh, finally! The holy Safe!! ✨ Now I finally have something that’s consistently intermediate between a Whole Cream Pie & a Storm Cloud, right?

For want of appreciation, let’s take a quick look at how much damage some typical gags deal. Because I’m talking about Drop here, I’m not going to consider organic gags other than Drop ones, & I’m not going to consider the case of merely base damage plus orange damage (because Drop gags have 0% accuracy on lured Cogs). I will consider the combination of both orange & yellow damage^[1], to get a better appreciation of how much damage Throw & Squirt are capable of, & to give Trap a chance.

Comparison of gags with no bonus damage

gag	track	cap	dmg
Seltzer Bottle	Squirt	15	21
Whole Fruit Pie	Throw	15	27
Fire Hose	Squirt	7	30
Whole Cream Pie	Throw	7	40
Big Weight	Drop	15	45
🍃 Big Weight	Drop	15	52
Safe	Drop	7	70
Storm Cloud	Squirt	3	80
🍃 Safe	Drop	7	81
Birthday Cake	Throw	3	100
Grand Piano	Drop	3	170
🍃 Grand Piano	Drop	3	196

When it comes to gags that can “just be thrown out there”, Drop is pretty crazy powerful. When taking carrying capacity into consideration, the ability to carry a whopping seven Safes at a time is what truly makes it excellent. But what’s more, it can benefit from yellow damage.

Comparison of gags with yellow damage and/or knockback damage

gag	track	cap	dmg
🟨 Seltzer Bottle	Squirt	15	25.2
🟨 Whole Fruit Pie	Throw	15	32.4
🟨 Fire Hose	Squirt	7	36.0
🟨🟧 Seltzer Bottle	Squirt	15	37.8
🟨 Whole Cream Pie	Throw	7	48.0
🟨🟧 Whole Fruit Pie	Throw	15	48.6
🟧 Quicksand	Trap	15	50.0
🟨🟧 Fire Hose	Squirt	7	54.0
🟨 Big Weight	Drop	15	54.0
🟨🍃 Big Weight	Drop	15	62.4
🟨🟧 Whole Cream Pie	Throw	7	72.0
🟨 Safe	Drop	7	84.0
🟧 Trapdoor	Trap	7	85.0
🟨 Storm Cloud	Squirt	3	96.0
🟨🍃 Safe	Drop	7	97.2
🟨 Birthday Cake	Throw	3	120.0
🟨🟧 Storm Cloud	Squirt	3	144.0
🟨🟧 Birthday Cake	Throw	3	180.0
🟧 TNT	Trap	3	180.0
🟨 Grand Piano	Drop	3	204.0
🟨🍃 Grand Piano	Drop	3	235.2

LET’S GO DROP RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH 💪🏽💪🏽💪🏽💪🏽💪🏽🎹🎹🎹

Ahem. Where was I? Oh, right. Gag training.

Another gag track maxed!! I mean, with how easy it was for me to train Lure up to Hypno-goggles, it was going to happen on its own pretty soon anyway…

Remember how my Cog Gallery was nearly completed, but I still needed some of the little low-level Cogs? Especially Short Changes, because I only fought like two (2) of them somehow? Well, I fixed that little problem…

Pretty cool. “Nice”, even. Now my Street M.A.P.S. are operating at full power!

Footnotes for “Nose to grindstone”

1. [↑] See the “Four storeys, four Toons, four stories” section of the second instalment, for more on yellow damage.

O, Donald’s Dreamland — I hardly knew ye

I won’t lie to ya; after the previous instalment, I don’t have many DDL ToonTasks left — at least, not of the written kind. Still, I have one or two parts of my Cashbot Cog Disguise left to acquire — like the upper-right leg, which I’d be getting from Hardy O’Toole:

Or rather, I got this Cog disguise part from Nina Nightlight, in exchange for bringing back a fancy new bed from O’Toole’s workshop. Nina was in serious need of a new bed, as evidenced by this image:

However, whilst I was bumbling about the streets of DDL, I stumbled upon something that I had never seen before:

This NPC (& thus this entire building) is not involved in any ToonTasks whatsoever, so I guess I just never came across him. You’ll have to forgive me for not getting the cultural reference here, but the name of this NPC is an alteration of Dances with Wolves, the titular character of 1990 epic Western film Dances with Wolves, where the character is played (& directed) by Kevin Costner. The alteration here is to suggest counting sheep.

I feel a little slow for only realising this now (some ≈21 years late…), but this is the origin of both Dances with Sheep & the MapleStory NPC Dances with Balrog. Which, by the way, identifies DwB as notionally Lakota, as the name Dances with Wolves is a translation of the Lakȟótiyapi (a Siouan language) phrase Šuŋgmánitu Tȟáŋka Ób Wačhí /⁠ʃʊ̃g.má.ni.tu tˣə̃́.ka ɔ́b wa.t͜ʃʰí⁠/. Moreover, English teepee, as used in the building name The Sleepy Teepee, is loaned from Lakȟótiyapi thípi /⁠tʰí.pi⁠/.

DDL part II⁤¾ et ultrā

My ability to more effectively “just grind” has been abetted by my moving past DDL’s written ToonTasks. This places me firmly in completely random ToonTask territory, & you know what that means: Task shopping. Unlike Task shopping in MML, however, DDL parts IV, III, & the latter end of II make it relatively easy to shop for Tasks that are generic as all getout.

Transcription of the above image

1. Wanted: 200 Cogs, Anywhere. 0 of 200 defeated.
2. Wanted: 30 Level 11+ Cogs, Anywhere. 5 of 30 defeated.
3. Wanted: 70 Level 9+ Cogs, Anywhere. 31 of 70 defeated.
4. Wanted: 160 Cogs, Anywhere. 67 of 160 defeated.

As you can see, I was somewhat adventurous in picking a Task that required busting level 11+ Cogs, but otherwise, these are Tasks that are just gonna complete themselves.

Obviously, random ToonTasks are less desirable than written ones in some ways; random ones have no NPC dialogue, for example. Moreover, random Tasks that are this generic could be less interesting than other random Tasks that make one go out of one’s way. Nevertheless, I can still enjoy & appreciate this kind of Tasking. I get to chill & do pretty much whatever game content seems right for me at that time, & I still get to keep track of my progress via my Tasks, giving me that extra sense of progression & completion.

I’ve five

Speaking of an extra sense of progression, my shovel levelled up!:

The 5-bean flowers are so pretty, too…

I’ve got Onelips, Whoopsie Daisies, Time-&-a-half-o-dils…

The long way ’round

But okay, bacc 2 bsns. I had occasion to do what (I think) was Rusa’s first-ever long route through the Sellbot Factory! Whoa! That means seeing quite a bit of the Factory for the first time, as any long route naturally passes through most (albeit not all) regions of the Factory.

After the obligatory first two Cog fights of seemingly any Front Entrance run (the only kind of run, post-UNM… 😭), we headed into the Boiler Room. Seemingly noöne does the short route that passes through the Boiler Room, instead preferring the Gear Room, so this was Rusa’s first Boiler Room experience:

This room really makes me feel small & claustrophobic, with all the enormous metal pipes, & the boilers that are each some three or four times my height! But the main focus of the Boiler Room is on this platform, where the Cogs stand on duty:

Coming out of the Boiler Room, we took a quick left-hand turn on the catwalk into the Pipe Room:

The Pipe Room is vaguely similar to The Doom Room™^[1] of Cashbot Mints in that it has a lozenge shape to it, with two Cog battles: each on one of the two paths around the lozenge. But there are no “third” nor “fourth” corner battles here, so there are just two battles in total. Doing the Pipe Room in any capacity thus gives a choice of doing half or all of the room.

As an aggressively useless sidenote, I do distinctly remember the Pipe Room as being infamous for its propensity to rather rudely obstruct communication. There are — or were? — some (random & client-sided) camera angles during the Cog battles of this room where you couldn’t see much of anything other than a closeup of some metal pipes. This meant that if someone said something in chat, you just… missed it. Oups! 😅

Technically, this was a medium route, because we skipped the Duct Room fight. I was kinda leading the way here, & didn’t think that any of us needed it, so we headed directly through Stomper Alley instead:

Stomper Alley is pretty much what it sounds like. I’ve gone through it so many times that I know all the dumb tricks to not get stomped. Which leads me to the Lava Room Foyer…

Huh? Where did these Cogs come from‽ It looks like UNM sneakily introduced a brand-new Cog fight into this foyer!

Formerly, the Lava Room was solely for restocking — & for passing through to the Oil Room. Of course, if you want to restock your gags & your beans, you’ll have to work for it. It’s not called the Lava Room for no reason!

The floor is, indeed, literally lava, & the only way over it is a treacherous conveyor belt, assaulted at all points by giant haphazardly-rotating gears!

After taking my hard-earned beans and G’ing TFO, I led the party into the Oil Room:

That big red button guarded by the Cogs is important. Without pressing it, there’s no way through this direction, which would make the Oil Room a rather lengthy dead end. Defeating the Cogs & pressing the button opens a door to the northern bit of the West Catwalk — the northwest catwalk, if you will.

Like any good catwalk, the West Catwalk is patrolled by goons. But it also gives a spectacular view of the West Silo.

And from the northwest catwalk, a bit of a brisk jog takes us to the Warehouse — the meeting point of all Factory routes. From here, it’s only inevitable that we shall eventually meet face to face with The Factory Foreman:

Easily done. And would you look at that! I guess you can collect equipment items from minibosses now!:

Naturally, this is new with UNM. Prior to UNM, Toontown never really had a notion of Cogs “dropping” tangibles — only a notion of Cogs “dropping” intangible ToonTask-bound “items”. Of course, this isn’t exactly MapleStory style; although tangible equipment items have always existed in Toontown (indeed, picking some of them is part of character creation), none of them have game-mechanical effects. It’s all cosmetic.

These so-called rare items must really be “rare”, because this is the only time that I’ve seen one drop! I’ve heard that there’s ostensibly some kind of “pity” system, whereby repeatedly failing to obtain a drop progressively enhances your chance of getting it next time (thus reifying the gambler’s fallacy). This is very much in contrast to MapleStory, which prefers the brutal coldness of independent Bernoulli trials & uniform distributions. Maybe I’ll get my hooves on one of these rare items myself, at some point!

Footnotes for “The long way ’round”

1. [↑] See the “Biting off more than I can choose” section of the eighth instalment.

The moneydroids’ base of operations

Here & there, I also found myself at CBHQ. Those Coin Mints won’t defeat themselves, you know!

Along the way, I finally got a good shot of the Cashbot Mints’ version of the Lava Room:

There’s no conveyor belt, & no gears, but you do have to hop carefully if you want to get to the other side without a nasty lava stain on your skirt. The platforms sink into the lava under the weight of a Toon landing on them, so you have to be quick with it! Annoyingly, however, the platforms do their sinking animations even when other Toons touch them, despite the actual positions of the platforms being unique on a per-client basis. This means that someone else pushing platforms down can’t screw you up on its own, but the misleading visuals can be confusing enough to produce errors anyway.

Speaking of hopping, I spotted another Toon making clever use of the personal pronouns feature:

The individual pronouns here are:

fay

/⁠feɪ̯⁠/. More usually spelt ⟨fae⟩. Supposedly(?) coined in 2013 by Tumblr™ user shadaras. Oblique fayr /⁠fɜ(ɹ), fɛə̯(ɹ)⁠/, e.g. I met fayr and fayr dog yesterday. Ktetic fayrs, reflexive fayrself.

ver

/⁠vɜ(ɹ), vɪə̯(ɹ)⁠/. Sometimes spelt ⟨vir⟩. This is the oblique form, with the nominal being ve /⁠vi⁠/. Uncertain origin; dates to the early 1970s. Possessive determiner vis /⁠vɪz⁠/ (as in e.g. that’s vis shirt), ktetic pronoun vers (as in e.g. that shirt is vers), reflexive verself.

it

This is just the ordinary English pronoun it. From OE hit by historic aitch-dropping, ultimately from PIE *ḱe (which was a particle!), & thus a doublet of he. Obviously not a neopronoun like the other two, but still nonstandard for use as a personal pronoun. I feel a palpable irony in the fact that using the venerable it as a personal pronoun manages to feel even more alien than using neopronouns that I’ve never heard of before.

There’s also this room, which is called the… uh… crate room. Or something. Because it’s got a crate in it:

The idea is that you have to push the crate toward the wall, so that you can jump over the wall via the crate. But to start pushing, you have to go beneath the stomper! With some clever timing, it can be done without getting stomped. And if you’ve really clever timing, you can make the jump even when the crate is in its original position. It’s just a really difficult jump. Plus, UNM probably changed it to be impossible, for all I know. In any case, I just pushed the crate forward to help my party out.

Aaaand a couple ToonTasks later, I got my final Cashbot Cog Disguise part!:

Great. A metal suit. Sounds comfy.

You know what that means: I can CFO now! But I think I’ll put that off for a later time…

Suits ’n’ Tasks ’n’ suits ’n’ Tasks ’n’ suits ’n’ Tasks ’n’ …

Speaking of Cog Disguises, I really ought to get my Sellbot one. I was probably “supposed to” get it long ago, but look. Am I really gonna go waltzing into the V.P. with unmaxed gags?? I don’t think so. I mean, sure, plenty of people do it, & it’s fine. The V.P. is tough, but it’s not that hard of a boss. Plus, there are always at least a few Toons to “carry” the team, because they’re farming SOS cards endlessly anyway. I’m just a wee bit anal-retentive about having my gags maxed before I go doing anything special, so that’s just me, I guess.

Well, you know what that means. It’s time for moar Factory. Like this one, where we accidentally lost a bear:

Right. So. Here’s the thing: Factories are the only Cog facilities with routing, because others are pretty much unidirectional from beginning to end. One implication of this is that Factories are the only place where you can really, genuinely just get hopelessly lost & stranded away from the rest of your party.

If you look closely at the image above, you’ll see that the fourth Toon missing in our West Silo Cog battle is actually wayyy over there on the East Silo, battling a row of Cogs, & yelling “growl” in a hasty attempt to communicate with us. The bear on my side is instructing us to do the obvious thing of “skipping the door” that needs to be opened to press the button, yadda yadda — obviously we’re gonna run over to the East Silo ASAP.

Unfortunately, there was just no way for us to make it. By the time that we arrived at the East Silo, there was not a trace of our bear friend left behind. R.I.P. 🪦😔

But Factorying (sp?) wasn’t my only business. I was only doing these Scrap Factories in between intense Cog Building spamming sessions. Oh, yes. Yr grrl Rusa is not fuccing around with the gag grind. I mean I am absolutely hammering these unsuspecting ToonHQers with more Drop gag spammage than they can shake a Bamboo Cane at. They are crying; absolutely sobbing. “Where does she even get all these Drop gags from?” Wouldn’t you like to know!!

And no, I will not stop!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA—

😤😤😤😤😤😤 Grand Piano gangE^[1] rise the fluff up RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH 🎹🎹🎹🎹🎹🎹🎹🎹🎹🎹🎹🎹🎹🎹🎹

Sorry. I’m fine, I promise. I’m very normal — some would even say “well-adjusted”.^[2]

Well, I did another Factory. This time, I witnessed for the first time one of the Foreman’s special moves: getting vewwy angy.

Wooks wike sumwun’s a widdle fwustwated. But for real, I think this makes him deal more damage or something. And also we get the Time Down status effect (note that the turn timer starts at 40 seconds during the supervisor fight, rather than the usual 30):

It’s not abundantly clear to me that this makes sense as a game-mechanical status effect. The battle is turn-based, & the only reason why we have a turn timer at all is presumably to prevent your fellow Toons from slowing down battles — in terms of wall-clock time — arbitrarily much by simply refusing to select a move for that round. In other words, it guarantees forward progress, in much the same way that arbitrary timeouts do in, say, computer networking. The notion that, in a turn-based game, the magnitude of elapsed wall-clock time really has something intimately to do with the magnitude of elapsed in-game time is sure to elicit little more than laughter from anyone who’s ever played correspondence chess!

That being said, if it works, it works, I guess. Plus, it already has some precedent — albeit not nearly reified to this point — in Cogs joining mid-battle.

And hey, hey, hey, what can I say? Once I unloct that TNT, my Trap track eventually maxed itself…

😎

Whether or not I was the first, I’m certainly not the last to make use of biological nomenclature of deer for IGNs…

Aaaand it’s time for another batch of generic ToonTasks…! Woo-hoo!

Transcription of the above image

1. Wanted: 380 Cogs, Anywhere. 0 of 380 defeated.
2. Wanted: 160 Level 9+ Cogs, Anywhere. 0 of 160 defeated.
3. Wanted: 320 Cogs, Anywhere. 0 of 320 defeated.
4. Wanted: 200 Level 9+ Cogs, Anywhere. 0 of 200 defeated.

Incredible.

The really good news about unloccing the Grand Piano is that spamming Drop until I “drop” dead is now quite a bit easier. In a Back Stabber Invasion, I did a Cog Building with some folx who were rather unaware of the usual nomenclature for Back Stabbers & Pencil Pushers:

Transcription of the chatbubbles in the above image

[cream cat]: im calling them pointy bois now

Rusa: hahaha

[aqua mouse]: XD

I can’t be the only one who calls them pointy bois, right? I mean, look at them. Pointy. Bois.

And speaking of people in my Cog Building runs having a different understanding of language than I do, I encountered someone who read my name as meaning “blonde” in their language. Of course, I had to know what language this was, & she told me that it was Bulgarian!

Bulgarian is an Eastern South Slavic language, making it closely related to Macedonian (sometimes, or historically, not considered a “distinct language”) — as well as to Church Slavonic, as I was surprised to find out^[3]. Of course, it’s written in Cyrillic, making the actual spelling руса /⁠ˈru.sä⁠/ [ˈru.sɐ].

This is the feminine indefinite singular of рус ⟨rus⟩ “blond (ADJ); blond hair; person with blond hair” (cf. the word spelt identically in Russian). In turn, this is from PSl. *rusъ “blonde; red, yellow, light-coloured”, & ultimately, PIE *h₁rewdʰ- “red”. This makes руса a (very distant) cognate of English red, ruddy, rust, rouge, ruby, russet, & even robust! OE had rēodan /⁠ˈreːo̯.dɑn⁠/ (cf. ModE redden) “[to] redden”, thus “[to] bloody”, & thus “[to] kill”. 😱

Speaking of red things, checc out my boat!!

Omagawd I did it. As you can see, I got a little bit excited, & may have let out a stray behh. 😳😳😳

Footnotes for “Suits ’n’ Tasks ’n’ suits ’n’ Tasks ’n’ suits ’n’ Tasks ’n’ …”

1. [↑] Sīc.
2. [↑] Sorry, this isn’t even funny. Please send help.
3. [↑] The Eastern Orthodox reader recognises this language for obvious reasons. Any filthy nerds reading will recognise it for a quite different reason: Old Church Slavonic is the earliest directly attested Slavic language.

Plentiful ponds, bountiful basins, & luxuriant lagoons

Wouldn’t you know it but that the Silly Meter filled up yet again! This time, the Decreased Fish Rarity Silly Team was victorious…!

…What’s that? They removed that one? Okay, I guess it’s called “Plentiful Fishing Ponds” now. Apparently the fishing rework made this Silly Meter reward no longer affect chances to catch rarer fish, which seems like a pretty big loss. Instead, the fish shadows are larger, there are three of them per pond (rather than two), & some ponds have extra docks that you can fish at!

The Lullaby Lane pond, pictured above, benefits from a whole lot of extra docks. I guess the shadows make fishing easier, & the extra docks certainly could make Fish Bingo a lot funner, so… I tried to take advantage of it.

Cool! I think that’s my first Pool Shark ever!!

And it looks like I’m starting to catch Nurse Sharks as well — so named for the real family Ginglymostomatidae, known as “nurse sharks”.

Although I do wonder how they got that name. They’re definitely sharks, but are they nurses too? Sure, they may wear white coats & attend to patients in Toontown, but I have my doubts that they do either of those things IRL (especially the former).

The scientific name isn’t much use here: Ancient Greek^[1] γίγγλυμος ⟨gínglymos⟩ /⁠gín.gly.mo̞s⁠/ [-ŋ.g-] “hinge, pivot, joint” + στόμα ⟨stóma⟩ /⁠stó̞.mä⁠/ “mouth” = “hinged mouth”.

National Geographic has this to say:

It may come from the sucking sound they make when hunting for prey in the sand, which vaguely resembles that of a nursing baby. Or it may derive from an archaic word, nusse, meaning “cat shark”.

Hmm. I got some better info from a post by R. Aidan Martin on the SHARK-L mailing list, dated 1998-01-24. It quotes Thomas H. Lineaweaver & Richard H. Backus’s The Natural History of Sharks (1970):

Possibly, some bygone observer watched a shark giving birth to live young and thought the shark was giving nurse.

Martin points out that this explanation is plausible on account of nurse sharks being ovoviviparous. But Lineaweaver & Backus continue by paraphrasing the OED:

In medieval times, the n of an was frequently transferred to a following word that began with a vowel. Huss, husse and hurse were long-ago names for dogfish and other sharks as well. Nurse survives and so does huss.

This phonological process is known as rebracketing; compare, for example, the same process — but in reverse — that caused (a) napron to become ModE (an) apron.

English Wiktionary disagrees that huss survives, marking it as obsolete, but agrees that it means “dogfish”. Wiktionary also claims that it was originally husk, & searching the Middle English Compendium yields an entry defining husk as “A kind of fish; prob. the dogfish”… although this is based on just one (1) attestation in the Promptorium Parvulorum (an English–Latin bilingual dictionary), dated to ca. 1440:

Huſk, fyſhe: Squamus.

Great.

Etymonline has basically no clue, & there are just generally no further etymologies (perhaps an English innovation?). What seems fairly clear is that it didn’t have an ⟨r⟩ in the spelling (with nuse and/or nusse being transitional forms of the word), & presumably became ⟨nurse⟩ — including the associated change in pronunciation — under the influence of nurse in the usual senses.

Summary of supposèd etymological formation of nurse “dogfish”

process	form	date
???	husk	by 1440
cluster reduction	huss	ca. 16th c.
H-dropping & rebracketing	nuss	16th c.
vowel shift and/or influence of nurse	nurse	???

Then again, it’s pretty hazy… The etymologies connecting it directly to nurse in the usual senses really seem like folk etymologies — but what if they’re not? I guess we’ll never know.

Oup! Would you look at that. A little bit of fishing, and I’ve my 4^th trophy already…!

Thx, Larry!

Footnotes for “Plentiful ponds, bountiful basins, & luxuriant lagoons”

1. [↑] I ought to start calling it Old Hellenic (OH for short!), but maybe that’s too insufferable even for me.

Presidential vice

At this point, I’ve fought a decent number of minibosses — Factory Foremen & Mint Auditors, to be specific. But regardless of your personal level of familiarity with Toontown, you might be wondering: when is Rusa gonna fight some real bosses?

The answer is now. Right now. Let’s go!!

But first: gag check!

Transcription of the above image

Laff meter: 86⧸86.

Gags

track	XP	level	organic
Toon-Up	9412 ⧸ 10000	6
Trap	398 to Go!	7
Lure	0 to Go!	7
Throw	0 to Go!	7
Squirt	0 to Go!	7
Drop	395 to Go!	7	level 3

Oh, the irony. Toon-Up was the first gag track that I picked — way back in TTC! — & it’s my last one to be maxed… It be like that. But in any case, I’m in pretty good shape. Toon-Up is nearly maxed, & everything else is maxed. And at just 86 maxlaff, too! Not too shabby.

In the “Suits ’n’ Tasks ’n’ suits ’n’ Tasks ’n’ suits ’n’ Tasks ’n’ …” section above, I remarked that many — indeed, most — players start V.P.ing well before their gags are even nearly maxed. And they’ve usually not completed the DDL ToonTaskline, either (thus putting them in the double-digit amounts of maxlaff, e.g. 54)! But although I am admittedly also in the double-digits, I’ve done my homework! My gags are (very nearly) maxed as he’ll^[1], boi!!

So it’s time to fight the ruler of the Sellbots, the original Toontown boss, & perhaps still my favourite one: the V.P.. Suit up!

Naturally, we start at the very bottom of the Sellbot corporate ladder: a level 1 Cold Caller. Honestly, the Cold Caller suit is kinda adorable. It’s so smol & round.

Having such a Sellbot Cog Disguise is necessary for entering the Lobby of the Sellbot Towers:

Yes, the two towers on either side of the staircase have giant green googly robot eyes. Terrifying. That thing in the back is the elevator, which is jumbo-sized so that we can fit a full party of up to eight (8) Toons very real Cogs that are definitely not Toons in it! That’s how you know that the V.P. is not messing around: it’s one of just four pieces of content in the game that accepts a party of (up to) eight, rather than four.

In any case, ToonHQ makes finding V.P. groups pretty dang’d easy. The run starts with, as you’d expect, an elevator ride, followed by the elevator doors opening up on the top of Sellbot Towers. Believe it or not, however, it’s possible to peep out of the elevator before it even opens, by making use of One Weird Trick™.

I actually took this screenshot after the doors opened, but even so, it’ll be some more seconds before we’re supposed to see the Toon NPC in the cage up there. By making my client’s display super tall & skinny, the cage & NPC inside it are bizarrely visible! …Albeit from a strange warped angle, & only from behind.

You might wonder what’s the point of seeing the NPC some ≈20 or 30 seconds earlier than normal, but we’ll get to that later.

As you can see, the V.P. is one chunccy lad. He kinda looks like a giant version of a “normal” Cog between the waist & the neck, but the rest is… I mean what is he? A tank? With two telescopes for eyes? Terrible.

The basic premise here is simple: a Toon has been caught snooping around Sellbot Headquarters, & was subsequently imprisoned by the V.P.. Our job is to put together Cog disguises, fake our way into the V.P.’s… office(??) at the top of Sellbot Towers, & then rescue the Toon. In the screenshot above, the V.P. thinks that we’re just new Cogs who are looking to get promoted.

Oh, lord. Bridget!! You can’t just give us away like that!!!

Ah, vveh. Looks like it’s time to fight.

A complete V.P. run consists of three phases. The first phase splits us up into two parties of four (assuming that we’re eight in total), & consists of pretty standard Cog-fighting, in the style of a Cog Building. The main differences from a Cog Building are that the Cog levels are wildly varied — just as easily huge level 12s as tiny level 2s — & that they just don’t stop coming. Obviously it eventually ends, but during the fight, any destroyed Cogs tend to spawn just as many new ones in their place.

With the first phase completed, we have to wait for the V.P. to get his slow tushie up a ramp. What, is he running away? Scared of a few Toons?? In any case, this is a good opportunity to chill out in the void:

Okay, it’s time for the second phase. This one is similar to the first, except that we’re up higher, & more importantly, the Cogs are tougher. Also, they’re Skelecogs. Here the levels are not so wildly varied, as every Cog is a pretty tough level 8〜12 one.

Now that we’ve fought our way past the first two phases, Baker Bridget is almost free…

But there’s still a whole phase left, & this one is very different. We started with turn-based Cog-fighting, & now it’s time for some live-action boss-Cog-fighting! The basic idea is to throw cream pies at the VP, pushing him backwards, until he can’t go backwards anymore. But just throwing cream pies at his extremely strange robot face doesn’t do anything on its own; he can only be pushed back if he’s stunned.

The V.P. can be stunned by throwing a pie into his undercarriage. That’s the big grey box in between his pair of treads. The problem is that the undercarriage is usually sealed up, & is only opened when the V.P. wants to use it to attack. This means that there’s a very limited window of time during which Toons have the opportunity to sneak a pie in there, and that window of opportunity involves gears shooting out of the undercarriage. Getting hit by a gear not only takes away laff, but knocks you down so that you temporarily cannot throw pies. If the V.P. is successfully stunned, it only lasts for a few seconds.

But the undercarriage has two hatches: one in the V.P.’s front, & one in the back. Stunning from the back is certainly considerably easier than stunning from the front. But if only back-stuns are performed, then you’re effectively missing out on half of your stun opportunities! Worse yet, when the V.P. isn’t busy being stunned, he likes to continue attacking Toons, & to creep forward bit by bit. If you aren’t at least somewhat consistent with stunning, then the V.P. fight can drag on indefinitely.

For these reasons, I like to be the one on front-stun duty. If someone else clearly wants to do it, then I let ’em at it, but back-stunning tends to be more popular on account of its ease. Part of what makes front-stunning so difficult is that you get a lot of really gnarly angles. As far as I know, it’s always technically possible to front-stun, no matter what the V.P.’s position is. But the physics is a bit wonky, so front-stunning in certain positions can require strange, difficult, & sometimes inconsistent tactics.

I used to like doing long shots when the V.P. was on the second ramp, like this:

This is an unusual tactic that I’ve often found to be more consistent than always standing close to the undercarriage. That being said, I think I kinda forgor how to do it, because I was having very little success. So maybe I’ll just learn how to do all of my stuns up close.

There are a lot of nuances, but this is the basic idea. It’s extremely rare to see anyone going sad (or even getting close), because the V.P.’s attacks can be easily dodged (with the slight exception of front-stunners in some cases…), & you can throw a pie at another Toon to heal them for one laff. Moreover, this third phase doesn’t usually last more than a few minutes. Then again, I have a lot of experience with the V.P., so I can guarantee at least a certain minimum of stuns.

In any case, once the V.P. can go backwards no longer, he falls off the edge of the Sellbot Towers…:

See ya!

With the V.P. no longer here to stop us, we can rescue the caged NPC:

This is how you get SOS cards. Each successful V.P. run awards two of them, & each one can be consumed during a round of a Cog battle, in lieu of a gag pick. But not all SOS cards are created equal! In this case, the caged NPC was Baker Bridget, who — true to her name — restocks Throw gags. This makes her a pretty decent SOS, because restocking Birthday Cakes can be pretty powerful in some situations.

I will shop until I drop

That being said, there are plenty of SOS Toons that are generally considered to be superior, & also plenty inferior. So, I mean… if we can see who the SOS Toon is almost as soon as we enter the elevator, then we can just d/c if we don’t want it, right? This is called SOS shopping.

Personally, I love shopping. But it’s a team sport. That’s part of why I love it, but also why it can be hard to do. In theory, you could just join any random V.P. groups that you could find, & then d/c on SOSes that you don’t want. But that’s pretty rude, because this can either mean that the run is stuck — for the entirety of its duration — with fewer Toons than expected, or — especially if multiple Toons d/c — that the run is toast. As you might expect, people have — at least, historically — still done it anyway, & people have even been banned for it on many occasions (unwanted shopping is considered to be “griefing”, in MapleStory terminology).

Nowadays, I think that there’s less incentive to do this, & also, the aggressive shoppers are probably all banned already. The lowering of incentive that I have in mind is due to the existence of dedicated SOS shopping groups on ToonHQ:

Transcription of the above image

SOS Shopping VP

district	Zoink Falls
location	Sellbot HQ
Toons	7⧸8 Toons
last activity	just now

🗘 This group is synced in-game with TTR

Toon	# in Party	Joined
Good ol’ Dizzy Dynopop (134 maxlaff)	1	4 mins ago
[…truncated…]

---

🗪 Group Chat

Good ol’ Dizzy Dynopop: is this ur new girlfriend

Good ol’ Dizzy Dynopop [automated message]: Is everyone ready?

I’m unsure whose “new girlfriend” I was supposed to be, but I succeeded in convincing Good ol’ Dizzy Dynopop that I — a level 2 Cold Caller — did indeed know what “shopping” was. For whatever reason, no-shopping groups are vastly more popular than shopping groups (😢), so it’s not at all unlikely that a nooby-looking Toon who joins your shopping group is just lost, thinking that they joined an ordinary V.P. group.

ToonHQ makes the shopping process much smoother, in addition to making fellow shoppers easier to group up with. When we go inside for the first time, the ToonHQ group is not automatically destroyed (although it is hidden from anyone not in the group, for obvious reasons):

If we decide against the SOS Toon that’s offered to us, then we d/c & log back in. The leader of the group may then go back into the Sellbot Towers Lobby, where creating a group will automatically reconstitute the boarding group in-game (made possible via ToonHQ’s intervention). Although the precise details are understandably a bit hairy, the result for shoppers is that they can re-log, & either already be in the lobby in the correct boarding group, or can wait a bit (if they were faster than the leader) & then teleport to their leader. This eliminates a good deal of routine prō fōrmā work, & furthermore, makes it more likely that the group stays coördinated.

Recently, ToonHQ added a little extra support for a special kind of SOS shopping: low-star shopping. The SOS cards that a given Toon possesses are capped at a maximum of 100^[2] of each card. If you are an absolute shopoholic, then it’s possible to already have a boatload of high-star cards (which are usually the better ones), but to want to shop for others.

Transcription of the above image

Low Star Shopping VP

---

🗪 Group Chat

Substantial: staying for barbara, clumsy ned, all lures, cogs miss
also staying for good 4s and 5s

ℹ️ Note: Looks like you went in! We’ll keep your group around so you can coordinate shopping.

I think that the vast majority of the population is simply confused by this new feature. Given that most do not shop, & that some might not even V.P. much or at all, this is arguably targeting a niche within a niche. The niche does exist, & it’s not terribly uncommon that I find myself in a V.P. with a crazed shopoholic who’s maxed out on most SOS cards. But, you know.

That being said, the interpretation of “low-star shopping” perhaps shouldn’t be overly literal. We might interpret low-star to mean “3-star or bad 4-star”, because 3-, 4-, & 5-star SOSes are the only ones that exist^[3]. In the above image, the group leader Substantial is looking for some low-star cards like Barbara Seville (3-star Sound), Clumsy Ned (3-star Drop), Stinky Ned (3-star Lure), & Flim Flam (3-star Cogs Miss). But they’re also looking for high-star Lure & Cogs Miss, as well as “good 4-stars & 5-stars”. So the idea is perhaps more like “shopping, but where at least some SOSes that are ordinarily considered undesirable are considered desirable”. 🤷🏽‍♀️

Which brings us to the question: which SOSes are ordinarily considered desirable? There are 29 distinct SOSes in the game, & I think that I can basically break them down into three categories: good SOSes that shoppers will generally accept; bad SOSes that shoppers may or may not accept, depending on their biases; & ugly SOSes that shoppers will generally reject. The entries in each of the following tables are in vaguely decreasing order of desirability.

“Good” SOSes

Toon	stars	type
Flippy	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐	Toon-Up
Professor Pete	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐	restock all
Barnacle Bessie	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐	Drop
Moe Zart	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐	Sound
Clerk Clara	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐	Trap
Julius Wheezer	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐	Cogs Miss
Lil Oldman	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐	Lure
Sticky Lou	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐	Toons Hit
Franz Neckvein	⭐⭐⭐⭐	Drop
Sid Sonata	⭐⭐⭐⭐	Sound

“Bad” SOSes

Toon	stars	type
Daffy Don	⭐⭐⭐⭐	Toon-Up
Baker Bridget	⭐⭐⭐	restock Throw
Melody Wavers	⭐⭐⭐	restock Sound
Mr. Freeze	⭐⭐⭐⭐	Cogs Miss
Clerk Penny	⭐⭐⭐⭐	Trap
Nancy Gas	⭐⭐⭐⭐	Lure

“Ugly” SOSes

Toon	stars	type
Clumsy Ned	⭐⭐⭐	Drop
Barbara Seville	⭐⭐⭐	Sound
Flim Flam	⭐⭐⭐	Cogs Miss
Stinky Ned	⭐⭐⭐	Lure
Madam Chuckle	⭐⭐⭐	Toon-Up
Soggy Nell	⭐⭐⭐⭐	Toons Hit
Soggy Bottom	⭐⭐⭐	Toons Hit
Sofie Squirt	⭐⭐⭐	restock Squirt
Clerk Ray	⭐⭐⭐	restock Trap
Shelly Seaweed	⭐⭐⭐	restock Drop
Professor Guffaw	⭐⭐⭐	restock Toon-Up
Doctor Drift	⭐⭐⭐	restock Lure
Clerk Will	⭐⭐⭐	Trap

Personally, I think that there’s some undue bias as a result of the star ratings. The biggest offender has to be Clumsy Ned. Yes, he is 3-star. He’s also ridiculously overpowered, & is simply slept on. I wasn’t sure where to put Daffy Don because, in reality, he’s just “Flippy Lite™”, which is to say “really good”. But people tend to not see it that way, & I suspect that his 4-star rating has something to do with it. Sticky Lou is 5-star, but since Toons Hit was nerfed, I think that he might be bad enough now to warrant a downgrade from “good” to “bad” (not that Lou is actually a bad SOS, but you know…). And I’m personally a big fan of Madam Chuckle & Barbara Seville — the big-headed purple cat ladies — in spite of their 3-star ratings.

Clerk Will, though? Deserved. Will is the actual worst. Honestly should be 2-star…

Ready for promotion!

But SOSes are not the only thing that you get by successfully defeating the V.P.! You also get a promo, of course. Every level of every Sellbot species is possible, so I went from Cold Caller level 1, to level 2, 3, 4, 5, & then a larger promo to Telemarketer level 2!:

Awh. Now I’m skinny. I want my Cold Caller suit back!

Eventually, it’s possible to get special rewards for certain promotions. First, teleport access to SBHQ. Then, a series of +1 maxlaff boosts that culminates in +5 total maxlaff at Mr. Hollywood level 50‽ Real Cogs don’t get nearly that high level! Hopefully Rusa will get there eventually, because it’s a good source of maxlaff that I can get by grinding the stuff that I really enjoy doing.

But these promotions have to be earnt! In between each V.P. run, I have to earn the Merits necessary for promotion, which can only be acquired from Sellbots outside the Sellbot Towers. This is the main “use” for Factories, although any Sellbots will give at least some Merits, including e.g. those in a Cog Building.

Thus, this is the SBHQ grind, which mirrors that of the other three Cog HQs: defeat the V.P., spam Factories etc. until ready for promo, rinse & repeat.

I’m a big fan of SBHQ for various reasons, & I hope that I can rack up plenty of juicy SOSes on my journey to level 50 Mr. Hollywood. I do have to slightly relearn how to front-stun, but I’ve been encouraged so far by occasional comments from people praising my performance! ☺️ So prepare for many a Sellbot in Rusa’s future!!

Footnotes for “Presidential vice”

1. [↑] Sīc.
2. [↑] I believe it was 255, presumably because it was stored in a byte, but TTR lowered the cap at some point. 100 is still a huge number, so I’ve no idea why they went to all that trouble, but there you go.
3. [↑] 2-star, 1-star, & 0-star SOSes existed in very late versions of TTO, but TTR’s revamped version of Field Offices (from which such SOSes were obtained) does not award SOSes.

Vvehcation

It’s not all suits & business, though. I found myself having a little fun goofing off OOB in the TTC gag shoppe by teleporting to someone who was behind the counter (intended to be accessible to NPCs only):

If I recall correctly (questionable), this particular OOB is achieved by teleporting to someone at just the right time, as they’re going through the door to leave the gag shoppe. Naturally, the timing is quite tricky, & there might even be a little bit of unpredictable networking delay involved.

In any case, I think the main utility of this little glitch is that you can make a Toon that copies the look of a gag shopkeeper, & then… impersonate them. Not that I’ve ever done that, but, you know… I understand the desire to become Clerk Clara.

I also found that, in a way, the new (to me) Tab-completion feature of SpeedChat+ makes it a bit easier to accidentally stumble upon unexpected whitelist entries:

This is a pun on vacation, where vveh is of course the sound that I make to greet my fellow deer. 🦌 In fact, not only is vvehcation in the whitelist, but so is vvehcationvibes (all one word)!

I accidentally typo’d Toon as *⟨toom⟩, & found this one:

What kind of secrets? o.o

toomanysecrets

Well, maybe we can find out. Although Tab-completion does make some whitelist entries easier to stumble upon, it also makes others more difficult. This is because, formerly, any word that was typed would remain in normal black text until the word was not a prefix^[1] of any whitelist entries. Any word that wasn’t a prefix, then, would display in oblique bright red text. Simple, right?

The addition of Tab-completion, however, did not extend this logic in a straightforward way. We’d naïvely expect the same behaviour, except that words in black text would be followed by grey text filling out the remainder of the shortest^[2] whitelist entry of which the typed word was a proper prefix^[1] — or else no grey text at all, if no such entry existed. Instead, some entries are ✨special✨ — call these hidden entries — because they are never “filled out” by any grey text.

For example, consider a hypothetical whitelist that contains only a single entry: abc. Typing b would result in the b being displayed in oblique red text. Removing the b & instead typing a would result in the a being displayed in black text, followed by bc in grey text. Pressing Tab would then result in abc being fully written out in black text.

If we start over, & change the sole whitelist entry to be a hidden one, then typing a would result in the a being displayed in oblique red text, with no text following it. Adding b to the end would result in the ab being displayed in oblique red text, again with nothing following it. Adding c to the end would result in the abc being displayed in normal black text (again with nothing following it).

Thus, the only way to discover that the whitelist has any entries in it at all is to guess all the way to abc in “one shot”, rather than searching for an initial a that then immediately gives away the existence of abc in the whitelist — or, in the old system, searching for a, & then searching for b, & then searching for c^[3].

It’s hopefully now obvious that finding these hidden entries in-game is extremely difficult. This is presumably because, well, you’re not supposed to find them in-game.

Inside the game’s installation directory is a subdirectory conspicuously named allowlist/. Inside is a single text file with a name that appears to be a 16-byte hash, written in hexadecimal. To noöne’s surprise, this is the whitelist. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to contain any information about the blacklist, but whatever.

Because I’m a Perl genius (either that, or I copy-&-pasted this command from a Stack Overflow™^® post & prayed that it wouldn’t blow my computer up), I was able to easily sort this text file by line length:

$ cat $WHITELIST | perl -e 'print sort { length($a) <=> length($b) } <>'
[…]
dociousaliexpiisticfragilcalirupus
joff-tchoff-tchoffo-tchoffo-tchoff
ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding
suoicodilaipxecitsiligarfilacrepus
supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia
www.toontownrewritten.com/help/apply
https://www.toontownrewritten.com/help/apply
chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
accordingtoallknownlawsofaviationabeeshouldnotbeabletofly
accordingtoallknownlawsofaviationbeesshouldnotbeabletofly
llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

Oh, my!! These super long ones are all hidden, & perhaps for good reason — we wouldn’t want to spam players’ Tab-completions with this stuff, right? But, uhm… what is “this stuff”…?

supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

A song from Disney™’s musical film Mary Poppins (1964). A nonsense word nevertheless formed from real morphemes that occur in English (albeit not generally ones of Germanic origin).

suoicodilaipxecitsiligarfilacrepus

The above, spelt backwards.

dociousaliexpiisticfragilcalirupus

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, but with the morphemes in reverse order, except that the first (viz. super-) becomes rupus. This reversed version appears in the song’s lyrics, albeit with an epenthetic l absent in TTR’s version.

joff-tchoff-tchoffo-tchoffo-tchoff, ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding

Onomatopœia for fox vocalisations, from the lyrics to Ylvis’s The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?) (2013).

hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia

The fear of long words. So coined for its humour; the usual word is the also lengthy sesquipedalophobia.

chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg

A humorous exaggeration of the name of Lake Chaubunagungamaug, located in the U.S. state of Massachusetts. The original (non-fanciful) version of the word is a Loup A (an Algonquian language) word meaning “fishing place at the boundary; lake divided by islands”. Loup A is known almost entirely from a word list & reconstructions based on related languages. The pronunciation would have probably been vaguely like */⁠t͡ʃäwˌpu.näˌkun.käˈmäwk⁠/, but I’m not so sure.

pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

Another word coined for its length. Supposedly a form of silicosis acquired from inhaling vulcanic dust, but no such condition is known to actually occur.

accordingtoallknownlawsofaviationabeeshouldnotbeabletofly, accordingtoallknownlawsofaviationbeesshouldnotbeabletofly

A concatenation of the words of the opening line to DreamWorks™ Animation’s animated film Bee Movie (2007). The actual line is “According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way that a bee should be able to fly”.

llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

A village on the Isle of Anglesey, in Wales. Similar etymology to Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg; the excessively long name was a publicity stunt. The village was originally Llanfair “[St.] Mary’s church”, & so Llanfair y Pwllgwyngyll to distinguish it from various other Llanfairs in Wales. The more usual name is Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll, or simply Llanfairpwll for short.

Phewf! I am dizzy from these ridiculously long words, & I think we’ve coined enough of them already…

Until next time. 🙂 🧡

Footnotes for “Vvehcation”

1. [↑] Prefix here is used in the formal sense, not in the linguistic sense. One implication of this is that any string is a prefix of itself — but not a proper prefix of itself.
2. [↑] Breaking ties lexicographically, presumably. The tie-breaking is irrelevant here.
3. [↑] This is called breadth-first search (BFS), where the maximum number of nodes searched at each level is usually 26 (the size of the ModE alphabet) or so, depending on what you’re looking for. BFS is practical to perform to find non-hidden entries (in both the old & new SpeedChat+ systems) only because all nodes along the path to your destination are directly detectable. Without this, the number of nodes that you must search per level is exponential in the level (basically ${26}^{\mathrm{level}}$ or so). Switching to depth-first search (DFS) does not help.

Sunday funnies

Funny papers (crossword puzzle not included)

Transcription of the above image

[sea green cat]: bye bye big eyebrow man

Rusa: eye brows? more like bye brows

ℹ️ The following two images were carefully extracted from the unyielding clutches of 𝕏itter™^® (pronounced /⁠ˈʃɪt.ə⁠(ɹ)⁠/), adapted from No Context Toontown (@NoContextTTO) posts.

Transcription of the above image

[blue crocodile with obscenely smol eyes]: I know you have that horrid content pack on

[Cartoonival Blue cat]: :)

[green dog]: Good.