I downloaded Words with Friends the other day. I will, I think, be deleting Words with Friends by the end of the day today.
We might as well start off with the honest part: A good bit of the reason why I’m done is that I’m being mercilessly dismantled by every single person I’m playing, over and over and over again. I’ve always sucked at Scrabble (which feels like it shouldn’t be true, given my vocabulary) and Words with Friends is basically just Scrabble except it’s asynchronous and has a slightly different board. I suck at Scrabble, therefore I suck at Words with Friends.
So, yeah, there’s a heavy degree of sore-loserdom here. But losing at Words with Friends is somehow worse than losing at regular things. Part of that is the asynchronous nature of it; you play a word when you feel like it, meaning that it might be thirty seconds or three hours in between turns. One of the people I’m playing with is in California, another one is in England. They’re not even awake at the same time I’m awake. This means that the time when we’re both awake and available to play is limited as is, even when you consider that everyone involved has jobs and/or kids and/or other shit to do.
What I’m saying is that the ass-kicking I’m taking here is taking days. I haven’t actually finished a game yet and I downloaded this goddamn thing like forever ago. I’ve resigned two of them when the beatings got too severe to put up with any longer, and I’m real real close to resigning another that appears to have built itself into a suit of armor where it’s virtually impossible to hang any additional letters off of anything without one of those obnoxious add-one-letter-and-make-sixteen-new-words things. Four of those words aren’t going to be real; you need access to the Special Scrabble Dictionary that tells you that “Xi” is a word (hint: it isn’t) to be able to pull this nonsense off. I can look at a list of letters and see that I’m one letter off from spelling eschatological but I’ll be damned if I can look at a table full of letters and figure out that I can stick an L in someplace and make fifteen words. My brain doesn’t work that way.
Fuck it, I’m going back to Bejeweled. I can fail at that at two minutes and start over.
Today’s my day off, which means, say it with me!: it’s raining outside and maintaining the horrorbeast that is my lawn remains impossible. I bought a chain saw yesterday and spent a pleasurable half hour or so hacking last week’s storm-dropped huge tree branches apart. I didn’t actually get around to moving them out to where the city will haul them away; that was going to be today’s job. Instead, I think I’m just going to curl up in a chair and read a book and then maybe see if I can get something productive done in the house.