April in we’ll-always-have-Paris, come she will

Wednesday, 26 April 2006 — 3:14pm | Scrabble

Three weeks going on four is the typical length of absence when people begin worrying about my health (i.e. exam-season procrastinators complain that I am leaving them nothing to read in place of textbooks).

I am alive and well, in spite of any and all reports to the contrary, including those that might have come from myself. There does exist a much longer post in progress that has not been touched in a week. I make no promises that it will ever appear, but for now it provides an implicit excuse.

So earlier this month I discovered Facebook. Although the words “social” and “networking” are red flags by themselves, never mind compounding them together, this particular message and photograph exchange is elegant, clean and eminently recommendable – thanks to the strongly-suggested, lightly-enforced norm of using real names and the restriction of membership to college-affiliated individuals (aside from some high schools in the States). It has always been my belief that Internet privacy need not be contingent on Internet anonymity, which for some reason inerrantly comes at the cost of a dignified level of discourse.

The immediate benefit of the service? Scrabblogging is back, and this time, you don’t have to wait for a huge page to load all at once like my New Orleans log (see the entirety of the August 2004 archive). At the time of this writing I haven’t added any substantial commentary to the 13 rounds that earned me $90 in Sherwood Park over the weekend, but I’ll make one special note: the best part was in Round 4 when I played BOGARTS, which is one of the new words introduced in the OWL2/OSPD4 lexicon (BOGART v -ED, -ING, -S to use without sharing). As for the twos, I’ll crunch the stats later, but I’m confident that QI has replaced QAT as the most commonly-played word in the game. This should surprise nobody.

I find it problematic that Facebook does not permit line breaks in the captions, presumably so they fit into the little tooltips that pop up as thumbnail gallery mouseovers, but no matter. If that makes annotations too difficult, I’ll write them here instead.

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