A TALE OF TWO PORTRAITS

A crazy idea popped into my head this week.  Maybe I can look into being employed by NYPD as a sketch artist.  I don't even know how much the pay is or if they work crazy hours.  I certainly love to draw, maybe getting paid to sketch people of interest based on vague description by eyewitnesses is the thing I want.  Sure beat cartoon syndication, maybe.  If I do go that route, I'll let you know but below are two drawings I made recently of some Facebook friends.

I like this drawing of C a lot.  It actually looks like her.  C graduated from high school with me, same year, although it was a big school so we didn't know each other.  While planning a reunion 25 years later, I friended her on Facebook and eventually learned that we share the hobby of running.

I think I failed miserably with this drawing of my Wordscraper friend H, but she was generous enough to say that it's just my interpretation of her appearance.  So nice of her, I should send her a 12-unit sonobe orb with photos.

Merry Wordscraper Christmas

Merry

Christmas

to

my

Wordscraper

friends

on

Facebook

Check out the game at http://apps.facebook.com/wordscraper .

If you find waiting for your turn unbearable, play some "word games"in the forum.

My favorite forum games are "Sleepless in Seattle etc" and 

"Quite Witty Even Reasonable Typewriter Yack"

Facebook Death

I recently found out a Facebook friend of mine died. I used to play Wordscraper with him. It was probably Scrabulous, which was the forerunner of Wordscraper before the Agarwalla brothers got sued by Hasbro. Not that it really matters to this story.

One reason I remember "Mr. B" well is that most Wordscraper players, in my own experience, are Canadian women. He was one of the few non-Canadian male players. Together we wasted some time playing the word games, chatted from time to time about the game at hand or other topics that happened to come up. I now recall that he had a pizzeria business and had an iBook. The last remark he made was when I played the word REBAR. He joked that he did not know that I was in the construction business.

Oddly enough, for some reason I thought he unfriended me, since he no longer appeared on my friends list. Maybe I forgot what his last name was and could not find him in my friends list. No harm, I myself unfriended people from time to time, whether for lack of activity or some offending status update by the person. Recently I decided to visit his profile and saw that someone had written "Rest in peace" on his Wall. Probably someone who knew him outside of Facebook. That explained the lack of activity. I think I started some games with him only to delete them because he would not play his turn. Re-visiting his profile, I found a few keywords that allowed me to Google for more info about him. It turned out he passed away a little more than a year ago. Time flies and Life is fragile. Rest in peace, indeed, Mr. B, though I hardly knew you.

Fabulous Scrabulous

It turned out this business with chronicling the Lone Gunman's Voluntary Simplicity is not as easy as it sounds. I started by going into the SameTime log on the company machine to find mentions of things LG got rid of. Much as I like SameTime, the task was still done on a company machine, on a Windows machine, too. It sounds too much like work, not something I want to do in my free time. Thus, I've been having a sort of Blogger Clogger, I know what to write but something was clogging the path from brain to blog. But here's something I have no trouble ranting and raving about... Scrabulous!

As mentioned some time ago, I was not that crazy about Scrabbles. There are only so many useful words you get out of it. Those that are good in the game, i.e. gain you high points, are of little outside it, in real life. Still, I gave Scrabulous in Facebook a try and got hooked on it. It was a total rip-off of the Hasbro game but who cares. It had good features like chatting, word look-up, notes-keeping, and more. Noted that I used past tense in referring to Scrabulous. Apparently Hasbro cared enough about the copyright infringement and had successfully gotten the app to shut down, at least in the U.S. and Canada, where Hasbro owns the license. The first few days Scrabulous went down, I was so desperate I challenged a Scrab friend to a chess game. She said she was good at it and I needed to play something. Some people tweaked their web browsers' proxy setting, or some other setting, so that they could play Scrabulous from servers in other countries. I didn't want to go that far, having read that the practice was not always successful. At about the same time, Hasbro came out with their own official version on Facebook. I thought that would be the fix but it turned out to be awful. Slow, no playing with strangers and potentially making new friends, no keyboard support, and did I mention slow? Luckily, the Agarwalla Brothers came up with Wordscraper. With the introduction of 4W and 5L (quadrupled word and 5-timed letter) tiles and random board layout, technically Wordscraper is not an exact copy of Scrabble. However, you can build your own board that, uh, can happen to be exactly like the real thing. Would Hasbro also sue to block Wordscraper? I hope not, as I've been enjoy it a lot. I even gave Wordscraper Blitz a try last night. It's just Wordscraper except that you play in a group. Everyone has their own but identically laid out board, and competes to get the highest point in 4 minutes. You won't get to make use of fancy, useful words as there is too little time for that. It is really intense and sometimes I found myself with a dumb mode, not able to come up with any words. I wasted only an hour or so and will try to stay away from it to spend more time on the blog.

Keep re-visiting, readers, Qaptain Qwerty is still around.