Facebook Scrabble

Last night, I was playing Facebook Scrabble. Facebook Scrabble isn't particularly good or challenging. It doesn't have a proper rating system or game clock. It's basically a lazily done app (big shock, I know) that is vastly inferior to Scrabulous, which was an unauthorized free Scrabble site that was forced to cease and desist (It became Lexulous, and offered a Scrabble-like copy which just wasn't the same).

Anyway, I start up a 2 minute per turn game (which by the way, is really stupid....could they not have had an overall time limit for all your turns in the game? How difficult would that be? If you make your move in 10 seconds, then your next turn is still limited to 2 minutes....and if you are playing someone who feels the need to take the entire 2 minutes to play every turn, a single game can take an eternity. It's pretty stupid....but I keep playing and keep going to Facebook....so yeah).

I lost my first game. I played against a lady from Canberra who seemed to have an idea of what she was doing. It was a pretty tight game throughout and unfortunately, I picked up the Z right at the end with no vowels on my rack and no places to put it.

My second game was against a weird guy who was one of these annoying people that take the entire time limit to play their turn. He was also asking a lot of personal questions. That is not cool. Saying "Hi and gl" is fine. Asking where you are from is fine. Asking your gender and age is a little creepy, like asking a/s/l in IRC....who does that? Also, you can see the first name of the person you are playing against, and my first name is pretty unambiguously male. Other tedious questions followed....What is your job? Do you have a girlfriend? What are your hobbies?

So, I play along and answer the questions seriously. I figure, he must be slightly mentally disabled in some way...better to be safe and be polite. I found out that he had two jobs. One was some kind of data entry job. The other one was... the other one was... It was... I think he was trying to be mysterious by not typing it out straight away. He must have been waiting for me to be intrigued and say "What is it?"....But I didn't, because I wasn't really interested and I was trying to build a seven letter word (which I did, SWIFTER going through a triple word score with the W on a double letter score, 106 points).

So after about four attempts at being mysterious, he lets me know that his second job is as an online performer. In this role he can earn 300 for a 4 hour show or 1000 for an overnight visit. So, I decide to look at his profile. Profile picture is a far shot and kinda blurry....but he appears to me to be a middle-aged overweight guy. I look through his pictures....half his pictures seem to be of adolescent boys. I look at his friends list.....Well.....nearly all of his friends are male......some of them have profile pictures of themselves half naked.....some of them have pictures of their naked butts.....oh and there was this one dude whose profile picture was a penis. Fantastic.

So Mr Middle-aged Fat Internet Porn performer/Escort starts telling me about the dangers of his work. He got beaten up recently by the boyfriend of a client of his. In future he is going to be more careful about who he goes out to see..... At no stage was I encouraging him to reveal all this to me.... I just provided polite short answers to his questions and didn't ask any of my own.

My timing was pretty good, because I managed to take my final turn, write "Thanks for the game, good luck with your job" and win the game right after he wrote "I'm feeling horny right now".

The whole thing was a bit unusual and a bit sad. I'm not sure what his intentions were or why you would engage in that kind of conversation with someone in an online Scrabble game. Did he think we would transition from Scrabble to cam sex? I could appreciate it if it was just someone doing it as a mindfuck/practical joke, I'm still hoping that it was. I mean really......Scrabble? Scrabble is the opposite of sex. It would be like going to a chess tournament hoping to see streakers. The only people sad enough to play Scrabble on Facebook are people who, you know, kinda just want to play Scrabble.....not have a wank to some chubby, ugly, middle-aged dude...

August

I am a huge fan of Rilo Kiley's album "Take Offs and Landings". Melodic, cheesy pop gets me every time. I really like Jenny Lewis' singing voice.....something sexy about a plain Midwest accent. She is also on the list of "redheads who I didn't find good-looking at first glance but who I am attracted to".... Mick Hucknall is not on this list.