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The adventures of Rusa in Toontown (the twelfth instalment)

Freedom of movement

This is gonna sound weird, but I’m stucc.

Help…?

Okay, I admit it. I kinda did this one to myself. Not on purpose, though! I thought that I could leave the ToonHQ group after the elevator doors already started closing — after all, that’s a point of no return, right? I can’t leave the elevator after the timer has already run out, so I must be taken inside the Factory with my party members…?

Well, apparently there is a third option: getting magically stucc in the elevator until I relog. This also meant that my party just… did the Factory without me. 🤦🏽‍♀️ I pinky promise I was not trying to grief…

Speaking of transportation problems, this round of the Silly Meter included Global Teleport Access as one of the Silly Teams:

Formerly, this was kind of a neat perk — not as useful as some others in the general case, but still pretty decent. Nowadays, however, it has eroded to the point of nigh uselessness. ToonHQ’s close integration with the game means that Toons just don’t really travel much at all! You just join a group out-of-game, & then you can warp yourself in-game to the group leader at any time!

That’s not to say that this Silly Team is absolutely worthless; naturally, as a group leader, you do have to travel to the game content for which your group exists^[1], & travel is also necessary for some ToonTasks, for example. (Then again, Global Teleport Access doesn’t help if you’ve already teleport access to those places anyway…) But seeing this Silly Team show up in a Silly Meter rotation feels a little like exhuming the dead — or at least, the obsolete.

Footnotes for “Freedom of movement”

1. [↑] I suspect — but have not tested — that even this little limitation can be bypassed by (ab)using ToonHQ like so:

   1. Ensure that your Toon is not logged in.
   2. Create the relevant group on ToonHQ, with ToonSync enabled.
   3. Log into your Toon. You should spawn into the game already at the entrance to the relevant game content.

   Still, this doesn’t work for Cog Buildings, I suppose.

Manufacturing plants & manufacturing animals

As you’d expect, I’ve been doing some more SBHQ grinding. I did a fun long Scrap run where we got almost all the barrels — including this Toon-Up restock barrel in Stomper Alley:

Only one Toon can push the crate at a time, so I took the opportunity to feel like royalty being carried around on a small float or something.

Later, in the Warehouse, we fought a very naughty Telemarketer who refused to square up face-to-face:

What’s he doin’ over there, anyway?

In any case, now that I’m a Mr. Hollywood, I get to spam my favourite Cog SpeedChat phrase:

Although it serves no purpose whatsoever, I sometimes like to glitch out of bounds between phases 1 & 2 of V.P. so that I can reënter the elevator from which we came:

Oh no! I am stucc in the elevator once again…

And finally, with some more SBHQ grinding under my belt, I’m starting to get maxlaff rewards from my big promos!

TYSM PROFESSOR PETER <333

A harlot? Sure. But a traitoress? Never!

But why limit myself to V.P. spam? It’s only one of our two collective favourite Tewtow bosses, alongside the C.F.O.. I mean no offence to the C.J. & the C.E.O., but, you know, not only do the V.P. & C.F.O. have seniority, but they’re also the bosses that we all spam when we’re just tryna chill out & beat up some cartoon robots. Gnome sayin’?

So… welcome to the Cashbot Vault:

That’s a lot of marble. I may be a cute li’l level 1 Short Change now, but just you wait ’til I start C.F.O.ing!

The Vault also sports some large windows, out of which we can see what are presumably some Cashbot tower blocks:

The use of light here is perhaps unexpected. For starters, the middle window in the above image is blacked out. Furthermore, the windows in the tall office buildings (or are they residential towers?) that we can see have windows that are very clearly lit up or not, implying that it’s always nighttime — or at least, always dark — here in CBHQ.

And here’s the elevator itself, which leads into the actual vault vault:

That blurry dollar/peso sign forms part of the Cashbot insigne. Since I’m finally here to grind CBHQ, I wanted to know where this symbol came from. There are a number of competing theories — check out the English Wikipedia explanation — but the most likely one seems to be that it comes from a scribal abbreviation for pesos: ⟨pˢ⟩. The ⟨ˢ⟩ eventually came to be written partially or fully overlapping the ⟨p⟩, resulting in something very similar to the modern double-barred dollar sign.

This would make the origin of the dollar/peso sign quite similar to that of the other ASCII symbols that we also seemingly inexplicably see littered throughout our programming languages’ syntaxes & such: the ampersand, the at sign, the percent sign, etc.^[1].

These sorts of symbols, by the way, are examples of ideographs (& in the case of the Latinisms, specifically heterograms), because they symbolise an abstract idea not directly connected to any particular morpheme or word or phrase in the language — even if that language may have a standard way of vocalising such a symbol (e.g. ⟨&⟩ is vocalised in English as and, except in clearly Latin use, e.g. ⟨&c.⟩ ↦ et cetera).

In particular, I’d like to point out the very large — but frequently misunderstood — difference between ideograph & logograph, the latter of which properly represents language (generally a morpheme and/or a word) in the usual way. For instance, Sinographs are logographic^[2], but are not ideographic — even if a few Sinographs may be etymologically ideographic on some historic level.

La femme fatale

Anyway, now that we know what a dollar sign is, it’s time to take on the king of dollar signs: the C.F.O.!

As you can see, the C.F.O. has the same general design as his Sellbot counterpart, the V.P.: wacky mechanical head, the torso & arms of a “normal” Cog (but larger), a waist consisting of a giant grey gear, all attached to an undercarriage that moves on a pair of treads. But who’s that on the right-hand side?

Mata Hairy is our guide through the C.F.O. run. We can see that she is, like us, undercover as a Cashbot (apparently a Tightwad, in this case), but unlike the Toon NPC that we meet in a V.P. run, she has yet to be caught. Although the run begins similarly to that of a V.P. insofar as it involves our cover collectively being blown, we will not be rescuing Hairy; instead, she instructs us to keep the C.F.O. busy whilst she sets up a trap for him.

Her name is a pun on Mata Hari, the stage name of a Frisian exotic dancer best known for being executed by firing squad after being accused of spying on the French for the Germans in WWI. She was hired by the French as a spy, but we still don’t know if she did act as a double-agent, or if the Germans just set her up by referring to her internally as a friendly spy in messages that they knew that the French would intercept & decipher. In any case, the relationship to Mata Hairy is pretty clear.

What might be less clear is the pun itself. Mata Hari is from Malay matahari ⟨ماتاهاري⟩ /⁠mä.tä.hä.ri, -tə-⁠/ “sun; [lit.] eye [of] day” (Mata Hari was not Asian, but really wanted to put the “exotic” in “exotic dancer”). So one obvious Anglicised pronunciation could be /⁠ˈmɑ.tə ˈhɑ.ɹi⁠/. However, the “foreign a” from Malay /⁠ä⁠/ can just as easily (depending on the English lect in question) be Anglicised as /⁠æ⁠/, thus yielding /⁠ˈmæ.tə ˈhæ.ɹi⁠/. For speakers with the Mary–marry–merry merger (or even just Mary–marry), which is common in Northern America, this is entirely homophonous with Mata Hairy /⁠ˈmæ.tə ˈhɛə̯.ɹi⁠/. Thus the pun on hairy & matted hair (or mat [of] hair).

Well, the Cogs start comin’, & they don’t stop comin’

Did I mention that our cover’s blown?

Keeping the C.F.O. busy is a lot like keeping the V.P. busy during the first two phases of a V.P. run: we’re split up into two groups of Toons, each of which has to fight a seemingly interminable onslaught of Cashbots being continuously birthed from the C.F.O.’s undercarriage.

It sounds a little weird if you say it like that, but it’s true. The Cog levels here can be a bit wacky as well, as evidenced by this breathtaking army of stocky little Short Changes:

For better or worse, the C.F.O. does not split the Cog-fighting into two phases, so it has just two phases in total. This means that if you’re unfortunate enough to be split on the opposite side from your friend, then you’re split up for almost the entire run. Them’s the breaks, I guess.

Financial “instruments”

After what’s often a lot of Sounding & a lot of Dropping, Hairy is finally finished setting up whatever it is that she had in mind.

I referred to Hairy as “our guide”, & I did mean that somewhat literally. Although her explanation is likely to be too brief for an actual newcomer, she does give a little walkthrough every time:

And I do mean every time. This little cutscene cannot be skipped, so it’s generally an opportunity to either eat a snack, or loudly complain at Mata Hairy for holding up your C.F.O. run. Whichever works for you.

This is where the C.F.O. run starts feeling a lot different from a V.P. run. Rather than hitting the C.F.O. in the face with pies, we hit him in the face with his own goons! The C.F.O. is stationary in this phase, but he can swivel his torso around so as to aim gear-throwing attacks at any Toon he likes, & his undercarriage remains operational. Rather than birthing Cogs, however, goons periodically emerge.

Craning

I mentioned the crane mechanics back in the “Putting the ‘funny’ in ‘funny money’” section of the ninth instalment, because TTR introduced a new minigame into Mints that’s intended to teach players how these cranes work — & give them a bit of practice — before they get to the C.F.O. fight proper. It is pretty physics-based & wacky, so it takes a lot of getting used to. Without these cranes, however, we’ve no way of throwing goons nor safes at the C.F.O., & thus no way to defeat him.

The best way of explaining it, I think, is that craning is fundamentally about momentum management. To throw something at the C.F.O., you have to really get a swing going, which often means moving your crane back, waiting for the magnet at the end to get to the apex of its trajectory, & then launching it forward (& then letting go at the right time, of course). When doing anything — picking items up, or throwing them — it’s very often the case that you’re fighting the momentum that you already have. It’s very easy to let your magnet spiral effectively “out of control”, which makes craning quite unintuitive for the uninitiated.

In the above image, I’ve just hit the C.F.O. in the face with a goon, although admittedly it’s quite difficult to see the little explosion animation.

Safes

But it gets significantly more complicated. For starters, although it’s maybe theoretically possible to defeat the C.F.O. solely by throwing goons at him, in reality, you have to throw safes as well. There’s just one slight problem: safes ordinarily don’t hurt the C.F.O.; in fact, they help him. Hitting the C.F.O. with a safe whilst he’s not dizzy causes him to wear the safe as a helmet, making him invincible to goons. (Also, sometimes he gives himself a safe-ty helmet.) The only way to get rid of the safe-ty helmet is to knock it off with another safe.

The C.F.O. can be made dizzy by dealing enough damage with goons, although the dizziness only lasts for so many seconds. For this reason, one of the main goals of craning is smacking the C.F.O. with as many safes as possible whilst he’s dizzy. To that end, it helps to have safes in opportune positions. If you have safes that are technically reachable, but not close to you, & not along the line passing through you & the C.F.O., then you’ll end up wasting a lot of time to pick up the safe, reorient its momentum, & get a good throw at the C.F.O.. That’s precious time wasted, after which the C.F.O. is unlikely to still be dizzy!

So the first thing that I do is get my safes positioned. Each craner starts with two safes, but they’re a bit far away, so I like to get nice & cosy with them:

Although this does take some time that could otherwise be used to throw goons, the beginning of the fight is pretty slow anyway, so I can catch up. Indeed, the beginning of the fight is occasionally so slow that I actually have nothing to do, at which point the game seems to think that I don’t know how to do anything:

Thanx. I’ll keep that in mind…

The amount of damage that a safe deals can be somewhat unpredictable, as the physics aren’t exactly clear. I think the best that you can do is 50, & anything over 40 or so is a solid hit. Here I am hitting the C.F.O. for a chunky 45 damage:

As you can see, the C.F.O. has stars whizzing around his head, which is part of how you know that he’s dizzy (there are sound effects as well).

It seems to me that you generally want to hit the C.F.O. as high as possible, ideally bonking him on the “scalp” (so to speak) with the bottom of your safe or so. This means making a balance between hitting hard & not hitting so hard that you whiff entirely, thus dealing no damage at all. But also, sometimes I get really solid hits that do like nine damage. Come on!!

Gooning

However, there are only four cranes in total. Since there are generally twice as many Toons, this means that the other four are on gooning duty.

I get the idea that gooning now refers to a sexual act, but I’m thoroughly unfazed by this. For starters, we’ve been using gooning in a CBHQ context for approximately five thousand years at this point, & I don’t see anyone stopping now. Plus, almost any word or phrase refers to a sexual act, so long as you look it up on Urban Dictionary. I mean, for real. I think some ≈50% of the vocabulary “documented” by UD is supposèd sexual acts whose definitions are very clearly written by people who have never so much as attempted the acts so described.

But I digress. The basic job of the gooner is to ensure that basically all goons in the map are disabled at all times. When a goon has only just been birthed, it’s best to let it walk a little before disabling it, so that craners have an easier time picking it up. Other than that, it’s all about aggressively stomping on these monocular robots’ hard-hatted heads:

You may notice that, in the above image, I’m not actually stomping on the goon. Indeed, both of my hind hooves are firmly planted on the ground. That’s because the goons that the C.F.O. births depend on the C.F.O.’s HP. At the beginning, when the C.F.O. has roughly ≈100% HP, it only births these miniature yellow ones. These goons are so smol that simply running into one counts as stomping on it!

You can also see that an ice cream cone is flying out of the goon. Stronger goons bear more powerful treasures that heal more laff, which is important, because these goons can get difficult to deal with if the fight goes on for too long. As the C.F.O.’s HP gets low, he can start birthing chunccy bright-red goons pretty quickly, and these ones are fast & deal 24 damage when they catch you in their searchlights! Yipes!!

Advanced strategy

Stronger goons deal more damage not just to Toons, but also to the C.F.O.. This implies that, in some ways, damaging the C.F.O. gets easier as the fight progresses. But really, that’s not generally the case. Not only is it increasingly difficult to avoid taking damage from goons (which, for example, causes you to be temporarily ejected from any crane that you might’ve been operating), but the C.F.O. doesn’t stay dizzy for as long, & he starts putting safes on his own head more often.

It’s possible to defeat the C.F.O. in “one round”, meaning that he’s defeated before his first dizziness period ends. This is basically because this first dizziness period is generously lengthier — but don’t take this to mean that it’s easy. Although I’ve witnessed a number of one-round fights myself, it’s not very common, as it requires pretty highly-skilled craners all around!

Extremely highly-skilled craners may take advantage of so-called live gooning. If a live (meaning non-disabled) goon is picked up by a crane’s magnet, then it will automatically free itself after less than a second or so. By very precise & carefully-timed craning (& a well-positioned goon), it’s possible to use this very brief period to throw the live goon into the C.F.O. & thus deal damage with it.

C.F.O. speedrunners are one of the few notable examples of multitooning (multiclienting). Such a speedrunner will operate all four cranes at once (yes, really), & via a carefully-orchestrated series of crane movements, make use of live gooning to bring the C.F.O. into its first dizzy state, at which point the fight can be ended by the addition of some carefully-orchestrated safe throws. Gooning is generally considered to be easier than craning, but it’s still quite important (indeed, often very important) to a typical run. With an experienced speedrunner, however, gooning isn’t even a thing — it’s all live gooning, & the fight is over before you know it!

Show me the beans

And once the fight is over, the C.F.O. is mostly just annoyed:

But as he leaves the Vault, he erm…

…Gets run over by a train. R.I.P.. As always, Toons never really do any direct, clearly lasting violence to Cogs; they just get annoyed & wind up blowing themselves up. Welcome to Tewtow.

Mata Hairy is, of course, pleased with our collective success. But unlike the NPCs whom we rescue from the V.P.’s clutches, we will not be getting a Mata Hairy SOS card that we can use to call upon her aid at any time. Instead, she awards us each with a Unite:

My first unite is a jellybean one, which is cool I guess, but not really what I was hoping for.

In case you were wondering, this is how beanfests work: Toons save up the jellybean Unites that they get from C.F.O. runs, & then use them in a crowd of Toons, granting each Toon the jellybean rewards. And this is 350 jellybeans per Toon, by the way; so the more, the merrier!

Unites are quite unique indeed. They’re SpeedChat phrases, but… consumable ones? That have real game-mechanical effects? It’s not just limited to jellybeans, either: there are gag restock (gag-up) Unites, as well as Toon-Up unites. Toon-Up unites in particular are extremely powerful, so we’re generally hoping for either a Toon-Up unite (of really any amount), or a good gag-up Unite (especially gag-up all, but others like e.g. gag-up Throw may also be considered quite powerful).

Being SpeedChat phrases, Unites are not constrained by the turn-based core mechanics of Cog-fighting. Except, well, TTR partially changed that. Non-jellybean Unites go on cooldown for three rounds when you use one — or else three minutes, if not in battle. But still, if they’re not on cooldown, then you really can use them whenever. This can be quite the life-saver — literally!

Party fauna

Now, I wouldn’t exactly characterise the C.F.O. as a “party game”; as I mentioned previously, it’s pretty easy to get randomly split up from someone for the majority of the run. Granted, you can still largely communicate from across the virtual room.

You’ll perhaps be surprised to learn that — at least, in my experience — the C.F.O. appears to be the № 1 party game for experienced Toontowners. It’s not at all uncommon for me to end up in runs where I’m one of maybe 1〜3 randos in a group otherwise dominated by a clique:

Transcription of the above image

• Dizzy
• Dizzy’s +1
• Dizzy’s +2
• Dizzy’s +3
• Nibbles
• Rusa
• Mystic
• Prof. Bonkers

Going To: Cashbot Vault

The group was originally just Dizzy +5, meaning Dizzy & five of his friends. The only reason it’s “+3” in the above image is because two have already been added.

And, I mean, it makes sense. V.P. & C.F.O. are like the… Zakum(??) of Tewtow, you know? Except without the stratification based on character level (because Tewtow doesn’t have an equivalent of that concept). It’s fun for the whole family, but even Endy-End-McEndgamers™ are still motivated to do it… Right? You get what I mean.

Footnotes for “A harlot? Sure. But a traitoress? Never!”

1. [↑] Or, should I say, ⟨&c.⟩…?
2. [↑] When used for Sinitic languages, Sinographs are more specifically morphosyllabic, because one logograph corresponds to one morpheme corresponds to one syllable — with very scarce exceptions. Nevertheless, non-Sinitic languages like e.g. Japanese may use Sinographs in a way not well-described as “morphosyllabic”.

Vulcānus

Ahh… I finally found an example of someone using the non-ASCII characters that are allowed in Toon names for good… Or at least, something that makes some sense:

Volcánico /⁠βo̞lˈkä.ni.ko̞⁠/ is a Spanish word meaning “vulcanic”, as you’d expect from its cognatehood with the English word. It’s just as likely to be the figurative sense of “passionate”, as it presumably is here. It is, in turn, from Vulcānus /⁠wʊlˈkäː.nʊs⁠/, the Roman god of fire. 🌞

Mentha cervina

With the C.F.O. on my radar, it looks like I’ll be doing some more Mints sooner rather than later. However, my reïntroduction (if it can be called that) to Mints was not exactly what I expected.

You see, it all started with a silent invite from Petalbump. And I do mean “silent”, because for reasons beyond my comprehension, boarding group invites have no associated sound effect (very unlike, for example, the distinctive whisper sound).

At first, Petalbump was seemingly sending these invites randomly, even when I was clearly busy with something that entirely prevented me from accepting them. I sometimes reply to such invites with something like “Sorry, I’m in a Cog Building right now — just one more floor, though!”, but I was getting them frequently enough that it didn’t make sense to individually apologise every time. Eventually, Petalbump managed to send one at an opportune time, & so I ended up assisting them with a Coin Mint.

By the end, I had done some three or four Coins with Petalbump. We initially ran as a party of myself, Petalbump & Beige Cat, & one other rando Toon. One of the first things that I noticed was that there was never any ToonHQ involved. This explained the relatively spammy invites that I was getting via friendlist (not complaining — I actually love getting invites via friendlist & always accept them if possible), and also meant that getting that fourth “rando Toon” literally meant hanging around the Coin Mint entrance & hoping that someone to whom Petalbump could shoot an invite would simply… show up in the map.

I also quickly noticed that Petalbump & Beige Cat (both of whom are beige cats) were both chatless, meaning that they can neither read nor write any SpeedChat+ messages. It became clear to me that they know each other IRL, & presumably live together (perhaps as partners — I don’t know).

Here we are at the most challenging of Mint JQs, just as Beige Cat times out:

As you can see, the shelves stocked with dollar bill stacks slide into the wall (i.e. rightward in the above image), so as to allow passage without completing the JQ. But in exchange, Beige Cat is damaged for 20 laff. (I’m also semi-transparent in this image, because of a visual bug where you get the “you took penalty damage” animation despite not actually taking penalty damage.)

I wondered how Petalbump came to be on my friendlist in the first place. I suspect that they probably sent me a friend request after a Cog Building run, because I had used so many SpeedChat phrases. I do enjoy using SpeedChat when it’s not necessary to resort to SpeedChat+, & I think that there’s humour to be derived from the use of SpeedChat as well. But I’m not exactly chatless!

In any case, the most salient part for me was when the spot previously filled by assorted randos was instead filled by Zebulon^[1], who was invited via friendlist. I had previously run a Factory with Zebulon, & already knew that they were similarly chatless. So here I was, the only one in a full Coin Mint party of four who wasn’t chatless.

I wondered at the ways of these chatless Toons. Although Zebulon occasionally said something (especially “Thanks!” upon being Toon-Up’d), I found that for the most part, they were doubly chatless: lacking SpeedChat+, but also not really using SpeedChat either…? How did they even come to befriend one another?

Then, I was a little slow to go back & loot a gag restock barrel. It’s normal to see a gag barrel, do the next battle (or however many battles) with the knowledge that you can use the corresponding gags more liberally, & then go back to restock said gags. Usually I’ll say something along the lines of “brb getting gag barrel” in SpeedChat+, but there’s nothing closely related in the SpeedChat menu. I could have said “I’ll be right back.”, but it didn’t occur to me, & it’s pretty nonspecific anyway. My three party members seemed mildly perplexed, & sort of loitered around, apparently just hoping that I would come back. 🤭

Later in the run, I did something very similar — but this time, I was very quick about it. There’s a particular room where there are a few battles on one floor, & then another battle at the end of the room, one floor higher (accessible via a flight of stairs). After the first battle, you can peek into a tucked-away corner where there’s one laff barrel & one random gag barrel. You can then do three battles, immediately turn around & drop (from the higher floor) into the tucked-away corner, & without too much running about, make your way back up the stairs & onward to the rest of the Mint.

Like I said, I was rather quick about it, but my party members nevertheless noticed that I turned around & dropped down, instead of running forward with them. Like last time, they seemed to just be patiently loitering in the general area of the battle that we’d just completed. When I came back up the stairs to continue to the rest of the Mint, I noticed that they were still mostly facing in the direction that I had gone (i.e. facing backwards, from my perspective), & so maybe didn’t see me come up the stairs.

I thought I was fast, but not that fast. I expected that they had at least enough grasp of what I was doing to figure out that I’d looted the barrel & moved on, so I did exactly that. A good bit of light JQing later, & I had arrived at the next battle.

…

Erm. A—are… are they coming?

Worried that I really had inadvertently pulled a fast one on them, I ran back. Back through the JQs… And indeed, when I arrived back at that room, they were no longer loitering in quite the same place; instead, they had dropped to the lower floor, searching the place as if they were going to find me hidden in some nook or cranny of the walls & shelves. And where else could I be? I dropped to the lower floor, clearly didn’t go back to a previous room, & yet had somehow vanished! Gone!! Can deer just turn invisible like that?? 🦌😶‍🌫️🫥

With a handful of “Hello!”s, “Hi there!”s, & “Follow me.”s, I managed to get their attention after a handful of seconds. 😅 I guess it was a “you just had to be there” kind of moment, but I can scarcely bring to mind a funnier moment in Rusa’s Toontown adventures so far.

Putting aside any comedic value that this particular scenario may’ve had, I will say that I was a bit disappointed — but of course happy for them — when Petalbump finished their ToonTask to defeat however many Coin Mints. Running with these chatless folk — especially with all three — was a very chill experience, which is really the lion’s share of the ideal Tewtow experience — for me, at least.

There’s also something distantly, vaguely special about being able to share an experience — even if it’s just battling a few dozen Cogs here & there — with someone(s) whom you’d otherwise have no ability to contact nor to communicate with. Is making a look for your virtual “Toon” a form of communication? Is picking the Toon’s name, or its gags? Is battling Cogs & JQing alongside others? Is SpeedChat??^[2] I don’t honestly know, but we do it anyway. 🤷🏽‍♀️ Welcome to Toontown Online.

Footnotes for “Mentha cervina”

1. [↑] This name is more usually ⟨Zebulun⟩, from Biblical Hebrew זְבוּלוּן ⟨Zĕbūlūn⟩ */⁠zɐ.buːˈluːn⁠/, son of Jacob & Leah.
2. [↑] God, semiotics is hard.

Sunday funnies

Funny papers (crossword puzzle not included)