The week's excitement in ACWW is not one, but TWO massive game glitches. Kotaku has blurbs on both: the "red tulip" plague starts with a bogus letter in your mailbox, containing a screwed up red tulip item that becomes an invisible, immovable block if you drop it in your house. Further rumors suggest that this was actually a numbskull move from Nintendo - they let an All Players letter slip out before it was ready - and that Nintendo will soon offer restitution to any players affected by the glitchy tulips. Rare furniture please, Iwata-san!

The other one is being attributed to nefarious players, where your town gate suddenly becomes a museum, thus blocking you from heading up to see Copper and go online. The articles that discuss this are all really vague, which doesn't help anyone much at this point. So there's your warning.

Pictured: me, Taylor, Cameron, Daniel. I'm wearing my Village People Tribute gear.

I've had a ton of visitors to my Animal Crossing diaries lately, thanks to some very nice mentions and writeups on memepool, Game Set Watch, Clickable Culture, and Kotaku. My offline Friend List is now beyond full, so I've been juggling codes around to try to give the new requests a chance at getting in to Adamsvil. And it's not because Adamsvil is awesome, not at all. It's because a common refrain I hear in these emails is "I don't know anybody else who has this game, and I don't trust most of the message boards out there."

I take that as a very serious compliment, because I'm in the same boat. First of all, I'm happy to appear as a trusted Animal Crossing commentator... and I agree that the high traffic message boards out there probably have just as many jerky griefers as they have genuine cool players. I wouldn't visit IGN or wherever and beg for Friend Codes. And secondly, were it not for these diaries, I wouldn't have very many people to visit either. It's not like I'm in high school and have a wide circle of DS-wielding friends with which to trade Snowman furniture. There are three names on my Friend List (online and offline) that belong to people I know in real life.

And as we've learned, the fun of Animal Crossing Online is in the sharing. Showing off new items and decorations and patterns. Discussing the strange things that go on in this game. Seeing how each player makes the game his or her own... growing at his or her own pace, creating designs, collecting favorite furniture sets. So the more people you know, the more of the game you get to see.

Speaking of that, what was up with La-Di-Day and Yay Day? Are these non-events supposed to replace all the awesome holidays we had on GCN? Not bloody likely! Instead of collecting special seasonal item sets offered by Jack, Franklin, Jingle and others, we now have regular holidays where no one gets anything. La-Di-Day is pitched as the day to choose a new Town Tune, and all the animals talk to you about it, hoping their tune will be selected. And yet, there was no voting, no discussion, you couldn't even see the tunes the animals were supposedly working on. Did I miss something?

Yay Day was even worse. Everybody just had something nice to say. New built-in text balloons does not a holiday make. What a waste! Where's Tortimer with his special holiday items?!? I'll be interested to see if the Official Nintendo Strategy Guide has any insight on these two events - but it's precisely the kind of thing that Nintendo will never explain, other than to yammer about how much fun it is to compose a new Town Tune. Spare me.