As they say, BOAST POST

This photo may not look like anything special to you, but this was my greatest Scrabble moment of 2008.

The RoBeastress and I went to a holiday party a few weekends back, hosted by WallyChung.com and Alan Negativepop. The party was awesome. A lot of people were at the party. It was a jam session. It really whipped a horse's ass.

I drank a lot of beer and ate a lot of rad food that Wally and Alan whipped up, such as poutine and baked ziti for the 4th night in a row. Then I drank more beer. We also played a wacky party game called Werewolf which involved me getting constantly (and erroneously) killed. This gave me more time to drink more and more beer.

It was finally time to go, so we walked to the train. It was fuhreezing and the train was taking 4eva so I fired up the Scrabble app on my cell phone to distract us. We chose our sides and the phone chose the first player randomly. Then it threw me the right tiles to play SECRETS - double points and a bingo on the opening move! In retrospect, I should've ended with the S in the center square so I could have gotten some extra points for a double C, but whatever, I was drunk (like in the last post which I failed to mention)!

Anyway, it's not the first time I've gotten a bingo on the opening move, so it wasn't that big of a deal, but it definitely worth some bragging points over the RoBeastress. I passed her the phone and got a glare back. She dicked around for a few minutes while I wandered around the station taking lameass macro photos with my camera. GUAR, she hands me, whatever that means.

I discover that I now have a blank tile to work with, and because I placed an S in the center, I make it my mission to come up with a 7 letter noun. A few minutes later, I've got APRICOTS!, a second consecutive bingo!!, a triple word score!!!, 86 points!!!!, a happy dance!!!!!, and a solid lead in to what may be my best game against the RoBeastress!!!!!!

We have yet to finish this game, but I am currently leading 263 to 103. I am not going to rest on my laurels because the RoBeastress is a extraordinary Scrabble Assassin, though the odds are in my favor as many of the good letters are already on the board. She's logged more victories in our head-to-head battles, so I'm pleased to be chipping away at her lead.

Speaking of being an overcompetitive douchebag... I've been playing a shitpotload of Tetris online. Or Tetris Friends or whatever it's called these days. I saw some Facebook friends playing and figured I'd join in. I started by destroying all their high scores. Then Cindy reclaimed them and the war began. Despite having redeveloped Tetris Syndrome when I try to go to sleep, I have to say that the new Tetris versions are a lot of fun. It's not just "play as long as you can for a lot of points" any more. Now there are speed events to complement the endurance ones. It's like the decathalon of Tetris now, if "deca" meant 5 and "thalon" meant "don't do anything physical outside, just play Tetris online. And there is also a new feature (new to me at least) called "hold" which allows you (surprise) hold a piece for later (fellator). Also, there is a "ghost piece" that shows up on the bottom where your piece is projected to fall. I have learned that the old way of playing Tetris is not good enough anymore and I'm learning to evolve with the times. I would definitely prefer to play with a two-button Nintendo controller because I'm actually getting finger cramps from using the keyboard, especially in the speed rounds. This new Tetris is definitely easier and more forgiving than classic Tetris (you can infinitely rotate a piece to keep it from being permanently placed), but the new features and scoring opportunities keep the replayablility factor high. As long as I don't get to this point, I'll be fine.

I should also mention that I somehow pwned the RoBeastress' family at the Jewish Version of Apples to Apples. Score one for the Atheist Goy Wonder.

Puzzzzzzzzzles

Last night I realized two very important things:

1. Samuel Adams is an anagram for A Mad Mule Ass
2. Sierra Nevada is an anagram for Raised A Raven

I also played with a Rubik's Cube for some time yesterday evening. It was a 4x4 Cube, which I understand is considerably more difficult than a 3x3. I didn't even know there were different sizes. I haven't touched one of those things in twenty years. It's sick, but I sort of can't stop thinking about it. I was unable to solve the puzzle because I don't really know how the things work. I am going to have no choice but to pick one up for myself to learn its secrets.

In other puzzle news, I officially fucking hate the new Scrabble beta application on Facebook. I know this is late pass, but I actually wanted to give it a fair shot. I am going to finish the games I'm currently playing and then never touch it again. Yeah, I know it's beta, but it's ruining my Scrabble experience. I had a game going with Kevin*, an amigofriend new to Facebook. Despite the numerous bugs and play issues, we were having a close, competitive game. Then Kevin discovered that he had had a turn skipped in an earlier. We should have abandoned the game right then and there, but because we had already invested so much time patiently playing around the problems, I decided to manually skip my turn instead, and let Kevin catch up fairly. Of course, as it was so late in the game, giving Kevin two turns in a row allowed him to get to a Triple Word Score fairly easily, which turned the tide in scoring. To make a long story short, I ended up losing by a few points and now I'm crying about it.

While I actually do side with Hasbro in this whole Scrabble vs. Scrabulous intellectual property and rights debate, I think their alternative application fucking sucks. And since the customer is always right, I will be playing Wordscraper (the further adventures of the rebellious Scrabulous coders) until either Scrabble is no longer beta, or Hasbro realizes that the Scrabulous app is a thousand times better than their POS and coughs up some compensation for that renegade code.

Speaking of shit flowing downhill, Urban Dictionary's Word of the Day has been terrible every day for a long time. On top of that, UD has also added a comments option for the WOTD that is consistently filled with an even mix of pointless spam and colorful bickering. I can't really tell if the naysaying is penned by 12-year olds with no sophisticated way to express themselves or annoyed older curmudgeons like me that have chosen to regress back to a 12-year old's insult style in protest. Either way, we all agree that most of the featured words suck.

As it turns out, the majority of the interactive users are in fact 12-year olds, as I discovered by entering UD's extremely unnecessary Chat Room. This new feature was so lame that I didn't even stick around long enough to bully the kids about their horrible taste in music. Maybe I should take all my entries elsewhere, including the one apparently still under review by "editors" who are too busy sorting through all of this bullshit:

juggalin - A term used When a Juggalo Just sits around listening 2 juggalo music,watchin a dvd or doing anything involving other juggalos! by juggalopride187

bloody sundae - when someone pops a girls cherry and holds an ice cream sundae underneath so that the blood trickles down like syrup. by ovi ghosh

Nguyen-Vy - a badass guy of asian descent who plays guitar, skateboards, and does everything else amazingly. by Naked Dang

And there you have 17 hundred thousand percent of all Urban Dictionary entries... dumbasses trying to show off their shitty taste in music, their plans to invent pointless new sex terms, or just typing their own name and attempting to define it. Fuck all y'all.

Sorry there aren't any pictures in this post--I'm using the RoBeastress's computer and I just can't do anything with a Mac. How could I? This thing thinks Delete means Backspace and it's got an Eject button where the real Delete should be. Anyway, there will plenty of photos in my next entry - The RoBeast Cola Challenge, where I make an ass out of myself and get a stomach ache!

(* name not changed to protect the innocent)

Go Fish

I had an exciting Scrabble morning. These days I play 75-point Scrabble (Hard mode) against the CPU on my cell phone. I won 3 games in a row today, bingos abound. Thrilling indeed. I attempted to open the 3rd game with "INLINED" which is apparently not an acceptable verb (or sport). I settled for "LINED" so I could get the Double Double on the D, and crossed my fingers get a C on the next draw so I could spell "INCLINED." Well, not only did I get that rackafrackin' C, I also replenished the high falootin' tootin' L, I, E, & D and bingoed any damn way.

Speaking of wacky cell phone anomalies occurring while not completing my 2007 Year-end Self-Assessment for work that was due last Friday, I keep accidentally setting off the one and only music track I've ever downloaded to my mobile. I've had this LG for two years. I'm not much of a cell phone technology chaser, so I basically just pick out the most expensive free non-Motorola phone that Verizon offers me. Two years ago, it was this goofy LG flip phone with decent stereo speakers that for some reason, the LG design decided to make face in opposite directions (like Yosemite Sam's guns). But it wasn't that big of a deal for me anyway because even with my phone enabled for VCast or whatever that music service is called, I had no intentions of ever paying $2 for a shitty quality music track that would be forever banished to my telephone, unless of course I wanted to pay even more money for a memory card or adapter thingee that would allow me to pull it off and put it on my computer where I could've already had the track for $1 from Amazon.

Somehow on Friday, I accidentally accessed that Verizon music database and saw that they actually had a free track available! It was an Eddie Vedder song from the Into the Wild soundtrack that was a low priority wish list item of mine. I heard it once on the radio and thought it was decent, but not mind-blowing. I think the reason it crept into my head so easily was because the melody is very similar to the Pearl Jam ukelele song from Binaural ("Soon Forget" I believe it's called). I downloaded it and now I have a song trapped in my cell phone. And much like General Zod, it is constantly trying to escape the Phantom Zone.


It just keeps randomly playing in my pocket. I have no idea what button is accidentally being pressed because I can't replicate the problem on purpose. I have no idea what to disable and it's pretty fucking annoying. I'll be sitting here and I think I have it stuck in my head, but then I realize it that it's just playing out loud. It's extra bothersome to me because I never use a ring tone as my phone is perpetually set to vibrate only. Yes, I could always just erase it since I've already clearly stood at the apex of modern technology (circa 2005).

Or I could just get a new phone.