Inside Pozirk Games

So many ideas, so little time.

26 Feb

What was wrong with Flash?

I have never had any problems with Flash Player myself.
But I’ve heard lots of complaints about 0-day vulnerabilities, etc. Of course, no support for mobile browser. Browser don’t want to support plug-ins. Flash Player is not open source.
Maybe, maybe…

Anyway, I’m still keeping Flash version of my games on the website as they are still working for me and some diehard players don’t want to switch to HTML5 version.
Moreover I still play my games like Resistance Is Useless and Mad Tanks from time to time.

06 Feb

Not an investment advice

Image Source: Internet

I’m investing my extra money (cause inflation, you know) and I’m not an expert for sure, but just to spice up my blog that no one reads…
Anyway, not an investment advice 🙂 , but I have my (maybe totally wrong) theory about all this GME, Reddit, short squeeze, etc. craziness.

Back in 2017, when I knew even less about investing than now, I’ve followed an advice of some not so good “expert” on SeekingAlpha (his name was Brad, in case you are looking for an advice on SA) and bought shares of Tanger Factory Outlet (SKT) at ~$25/share.
Since then I became a “happy” bagholder as price of SKT kept slowing going down and down and down.
Here is a nice chart showing my pain:

Chart Source: Yahoo! Finance

Don’t get me wrong, I still like the business. Even though brick and mortar is in a decline, I think Tanger will definitely survive, in a much smaller size though.
And company was paying good and growing dividends until 2020.
Fast forward, COVID, blah-blah, no dividends, the stock price at the bottom down to $4.05, only ~16% of my initial investment.
What a sucker am I, right? 😀
Next came January 14, 2021 and Tanger reinstated dividends, much lower than before, but nonetheless.
Reddit “squeeze the shorts” mania began around the same time, and SKT happened to be in top 10 most shorted stocks.

I was able to average down quickly to $16.21 and sell everything for little profit at $17.57 before stock collapsed to current price of ~$13-$14.
Short squeeze didn’t happen, short interest actually grew from ~49% to current ~52% and I couldn’t nail the top of $20.96, but I was able to make ~39% gross (including dividends, of course) on my poor initial investment in around 3 years.

Back to my theory, which can be totally wrong, or most likely partially true.
The were lots of big players, but sad bagholders of these poorly performed stocks (compare them to Tesla, right?) like GME, AMC, KOSS and others.
They wanted to get rid of these stocks badly and they’ve found the way.
Whether they have just poured more gas on “short squeeze” fire or started it themselves, I can’t tell.
What matters is that lots of holders were able get rid of these stocks with descent gains, including myself.
Those who were able to sell GME close to the top (also check KOSS, 52 week range: $0.80 – $127.45 🙄 ) got rid of it with fabulous gains. Тесла нервно курит в сторонке.
Those who bought at the top, well… well… Welcome bagholders!

12 Dec

iCrap

Did you know, that after around 5 years your iPad/iPhone will start to work slowly, apps will start freezing or crashing.
The same might happen to Android tablets.

It happened to my iPad Mini, that I only used for testing. The battery is still fine and I kind of can use it to read books.
It has iOS 9.3.6, it is still working, but veeeeeery slow.
Most apps stopped working, my own games just crash. Even Book Reader crashes from time to time.
Battery is still fine, but Apple needs more sales, thus the results:
Apple fined for slowing down old iPhones.
The same happened to my test Samsung tablet, so it’s not just Apple.

The reason I’m writing about this is an email from one of the players:

If you can choose your next device, choose laptop. It small enough, it can work without battery, you can always delete ugly windows 10 and install whatever you want.
Only if you drop it, it will die in 5 years or sooner. 🙂
Online version of All-in-One Solitaire is always available to play in any modern web browser.

If you still want a tablet, try to not download and install system updates, stay with original version as long as possible.
Usually every new update has more “features” thus consuming more resources and making your device slower.

26 Oct

All-in-One Solitaire, 4 new games and 1 new review

I have released new version of All-in-One Solitaire game with 4 new games:
Picture Gallery Solitaire
Eight Off Solitaire
Babette Solitaire
Diavolo Solitaire
Picture Gallery Solitaire Eight Off Solitaire Babette Solitaire Diavolo Solitaire
Babette was one of the hardest to make, because of non-standard dealing of cards.

Also iOS version of All-in-One Solitaire has been reviewed by PlayingCardDecks website.
Although my game was lost somewhere between many other solitaire games, it’s always nice to be noticed anyway.
You can check all the reviewed games, including mine, here: The Best iPad and iPhone Apps for Playing Solitaire

30 Jun

Keep calm and play Solitaire

Some random thoughts/events that happened to me last year or something. 😀

1. I’ve removed games for Mac and Windows 10, mostly because it was quite annoying to update them and not really profitable. You need Mac to build Mac games and you need Windows 10 to build Windows 10 games. (thanks cap!) Both OSes suck, one is overpriced (I can buy 2-3 regular laptops for the price of 1 macbook), another is soooooo buggy and annoying and always downloading some stupid updates. I haven’t seen BSOD since XP, but Windows 10 reintroduced it again!

2. I have added dark mode to all my game websites, was easy and fun to do it.
For example, All-in-One Mahjong website. Don’t know, if many players will appreciate that, but I’m liking dark mode in everything more and more.
Now need to do something with Pozirk Games website design and this blog…

3. Google Adwords keep telling me that my paused Solitaire ads are gambling ads and violate their policy. First time I’ve contacted them and they have fixed the problem, but second time I had enough and just stopped using Adwords. Bing is cheaper and no stupid emails about violations.
Same problems caused by Artificial Stupidy Intelligent with Admob and Google Play.
Admob was telling me that another developer’s game is violating their policies and I have to fix it. Seriously?
Google Play sent me an email that my games are not 64-bit compatible, but when I login to check I see “This release is compliant with the Google Play 64-bit requirement.”
In general, all the services from Google are getting worse and worse, and support is getting more and more useless.
As a client I’ve abandoned Google some time ago, switched to another email service and DuckDuckGo search.
As a developer… well, it will take more time.

4. Bing is cheaper, but generates fake clicks, they are aware about that, but decided to do nothing.
When I’ve contacted them with the following problem, 2 clicks per 1 view:

They told me it happens and offered me some promo codes.
The problem is, those double clicks happen everyday and while I can catch “2 clicks, 1 view”, what should I do with “3 clicks, 36 views”? How many of these clicks are unique and actually real?
Here is the answer from Bing support:

I believe Bing don’t have these fake clicks in US unlike in Canada, Australia and Europe.

5. Lots of clowns are still trying to “hack” my website. Everyday. I don’t know what their problem is, cause trying “admin/123456” as login/password didn’t work before and will never work, but so far almost 7k blocked IPs. Cool number, but this blocking is not really helping as every day I get another “admin/123456” attempt from new IP.
I mean, it is not always “admin/123456”, sometimes it’s “admin/password”, “admin/pozirk”, “pozirk/password”, etc. But result is always the same.
More fun details here: https://inside.pozirk.com/2018/09/28/cool-hackerz/

6. I’m planning to add 14 more games to All-in-One Solitaire, but waiting for a stable port of Feathers UI to Haxe/OpenFL.
One big flaw in my games is menu scrolling, it’s painful for players (I think so :)), cause I made it myself and it works really bad.
Feathers UI has nice scrolling component and should save me.

7. Suddenly I’ve changed theme for this blog to something simple, my old theme had some Flash elements.

8. Google is sending emails and calling me asking to advertise with them. No, thank you!

NASDAQ is a bubble, btw.
To be continued.

16 Oct

All-in-One Solitaire, now all-in-one for real

One of the players gave me a good idea to put all the games both from Solitaire and Solitaire 2 in one game.
After some thoughts and hesitation, mainly because two games has different databases for records, I have finally combined them in one real All-in-One Solitaire that has more than 38 games now and more games are coming!
I have also fixed lots of bugs and made some optimizations, so gameplay is much more smooth now.
All-in-One Solitaire 2 was also updated with some improvements, but I will not add new games to it anymore and will release updates only to fix bugs.

Here is a list of all the games available at the moment:

31 May

All-in-One Mahjong, HTML5 version

After moving All-in-One Solitaire, I have finally finished with HTML5 version of All-in-One Mahjong game as well.
Even though, Flash performs better on dekstop and has more features than HTML5, at least if I use OpenFL, I have no choice here.
Google is forcing everyone to move to ARM64 as well now. Unless Adobe does something, Adobe Air will be dead very soon too.
The painful part is(will be) to explain players, why they need to move to new version… 🙂

Instead of adding new games, most of the 2018, and now part of 2019, I’ve spent upgrading games to “new” technologies, modifying them to comply with new policies and fixing bugs (eah, my code is horrible :D).