Unofficial Words with Friends Rules | 01/30/12
I enjoy playing Words With Friends but with the multitude of cheating programs out there it really curtails the fun. The way I look at it, if you can't handily crush me in Scrabble, you're not going to be me by 500 points in Words With Friends. Unfortunately, there's a lot of grey area as to what's cheating and what's not. For clarification, here are the Unofficial Words with Friends Rules:
1) It's not acceptable to look up any word ever.
2) It's not acceptable to use any sort of program to check words or placements.
3) It IS acceptable to try a bunch of two letter words and let the game tell you it is/isn't a word.
4) It IS acceptable to try a bunch of three letter words and let the game tell you if it is/isn't a word.
That's it. I was just playing with Steve and had the word ATHEIST and wanted to play it against a another word that started with a U. I knew UT was a word but wasn't sure if reversing that and playing it on the other side (as TU) was so I tried it. I deem that, or doing that to me, completely acceptable.
If you've never crushed me regularly in Scrabble (so unless you're Chris Green) and your grasp on vocubulary is tenuous when you speak it, I have a hard time believing you that you know cachexic is a word. Go find someone else to play/cheat with.
Satur-Duh | 01/28/12
A new study found, shockingly, that conservatives and those with Low IQs were found to be more racist than people who were smart and liberal. I certainly don't consider myself to be liberal (except in a social issue way) or terribly smart but...duh.
2011 Summary | 01/26/12
It only took 26 days out of the new year to summarize what happened in the past year. That's pretty good, right? It was a pretty busy year:
January: Chris and Xan got married.
February: I part with almost all of my musical instruments to pay for the refinishing of the basement in Nashua.
March: Saw Big Sur along with a lot of coastal California.
April: Anika came to visit Ali from German.
May: I finish teaching at Lowell. Students reportedly overjoyed.
June: Steve and I visit the UK.
July: Hanging out with Pete and Dawn.
August: Start saying good-byes to New England and associated friends.
September: Learn there are coyotes in Calabasas when Chompy gets in a face-licking contest with one that came up over the back fence.
October: Go to the Grand Canyon via Helicopter from Las Vegas for my 32nd birthday.
November: My parents come out to visit me and we go to the Channel Islands National Park.
December: I got Chompy for Christmas (again).
May 2012 be even better.
New Zealand Painting | 12/20/11
It seems likes just yesterday I started my last painting but it turns out yesterday was January of 2010 (it's the same way I feel when I think, "I just updated my blog yesterday"). Yes, it took two years to complete but it looks fantastic and I'm looking forward to having it framed and hanging it as the first thing you see when you walk into the Calabasas estate. Below is a poorly-done animated gif of its progress over the past two years.
That is the saddest thing ever | 11/30/11
I think the hardest transition in and out of academia is losing your sense of time off for Christmas. For the first 24 years of my life, all things stopped the week before Christmas and didn't get rolling again until the end of January. I feel like academics feel like they're owed this time off and it's hard to be around this sense of adult entitlement. I'm not talking about Steve or Ali but all the D and F list friends on Facebook that do nothing but complain about no one gets how hard they're working and how they NEED that break. Get real jobs or stop complaining you hippies!
Last night I had a video game night with Steve and we played the old standby of Empire Earth 2. I wish I could get into modern games but I think the grim reality of things is that I just am drawn to pixel-y looking stuff since that's what I had when I was a kid.
