New games

[jbud1980]

jbud1980,

here's an example of the madness of this game.

You beat me on number of words. But because I've memorized all sorts of weird high-point nonsensical words, I managed to beat you on points. Have no idea how many points you had before, since I was beating my own record there, it just means that I had already gotten some of those the first time I played.

But you beat me on number of words both times.

I still contend you're better because you see words faster and type faster. It's just that I have the advantage of having memorized utter and useless nonsense.

Therein lies the rub.

Screen Shot 2021-11-13 at 2.37.20 PM.png

Been on a roll today.

Woo hoo! WTG, Naboka, and congrats on the high score. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm better than you as it could be subjective. If you found the high score and I found the longest word, then who would you consider better? Also, there's a pretty good chance someone will beat our scores on the grid you posted as it has only been played 13 times. I'm here to have fun and not really create or even be concerned about competitiveness. I am a very competitive person in general, but again, I play to have fun.

Good luck, and happy playing!

[Naboka]

Woo hoo! WTG, Naboka, and congrats on the high score. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm better than you as it could be subjective. If you found the high score and I found the longest word, then who would you consider better? Also, there's a pretty good chance someone will beat our scores on the grid you posted as it has only been played 13 times. I'm here to have fun and not really create or even be concerned about competitiveness. I am a very competitive person in general, but again, I play to have fun.

Good luck, and happy playing!

The reason for the post was just to demonstrate the odd disparity created by points assigned vs actual production. A person could type 90 valuable words that could be used in conversation or writing and score less than 375 points. Or that same person could type 90 words, half of which are basically useless for normal communication and score over 500. I will never use wexes, sexers or coxier. But, they sure get points.

Being competitive had its time. Now? Just trying to just relax and enjoy the show. Keeps the happy high and the blood pressure low.

There's value in challenge as independent from competition.

Competition tends to be a zero sum game. If you win, your competitor loses. Or vice versa.

Challenge is a mindset of everyone doing their best, everyone winning.

In the end it's not really about beating someone as much as rising to the challenge. It's about learning, improving your ability, and sharing what you learn.

Better isn't always just subjective. There's objective math that measures accomplishments. There's nothing subjective about the time it takes a person to run 100 meters. Or how fast one types.

You're a faster typist. Undoubtedly, a faster reader. My brain was trained to be slow and analytical--which is great for understanding and applying what's read, but not so good for this game. When the wife and I are reading something together, she requires a third of the time it takes me. The synapses in my brain are busy launching paper airplanes of possibility rather than paying attention to what sits in front of me.

I simply had the feeling you wanted to improve. So, giving you a startling example of one of the quirks that drive scores seemed appropriate.

No doubt those scores will disappear as the big sharks find them. That's why I took a partial screen shot. The chances of you running across it otherwise would be remote. So, you'd never know that someone thought of you when the madness blew open the door and littered the floor with leaves.

ps: used to live in SoCal.

[Naboka]

Screen Shot 2021-11-14 at 12.12.56 PM.png

Jbud1980,

The other side. You had 27 more words and 115 more points.

[jbud1980]

The reason for the post was just to demonstrate the odd disparity created by points assigned vs actual production. A person could type 90 valuable words that could be used in conversation or writing and score less than 375 points. Or that same person could type 90 words, half of which are basically useless for normal communication and score over 500. I will never use wexes, sexers or coxier. But, they sure get points.

Being competitive had its time. Now? Just trying to just relax and enjoy the show. Keeps the happy high and the blood pressure low.

There's value in challenge as independent from competition.

Competition tends to be a zero sum game. If you win, your competitor loses. Or vice versa.

Challenge is a mindset of everyone doing their best, everyone winning.

In the end it's not really about beating someone as much as rising to the challenge. It's about learning, improving your ability, and sharing what you learn.

Better isn't always just subjective. There's objective math that measures accomplishments. There's nothing subjective about the time it takes a person to run 100 meters. Or how fast one types.

You're a faster typist. Undoubtedly, a faster reader. My brain was trained to be slow and analytical--which is great for understanding and applying what's read, but not so good for this game. When the wife and I are reading something together, she requires a third of the time it takes me. The synapses in my brain are busy launching paper airplanes of possibility rather than paying attention to what sits in front of me.

I simply had the feeling you wanted to improve. So, giving you a startling example of one of the quirks that drive scores seemed appropriate.

No doubt those scores will disappear as the big sharks find them. That's why I took a partial screen shot. The chances of you running across it otherwise would be remote. So, you'd never know that someone thought of you when the madness blew open the door and littered the floor with leaves.

ps: used to live in SoCal.

Thank you for the advice and post, Naboka.

It's funny that you mentioned typing as I was just chattin' with a buddy today and the random topic of "useless" high school subjects came about. It was in joking manner as I really do not feel any subject in high school was "useless". However, I must admit that I have never used calculus or physics since high school. Anyway, I told my buddy that one of the the most useful subjects I took in high school was typing. This was in the late 90s and I have used this skill almost every day since graduating.

I have heard of players using the swiping option on their phone to play WordTwist and I couldn't imagine playing that method...

Where in SoCal?

[Naboka]

Thank you for the advice and post, Naboka.

It's funny that you mentioned typing as I was just chattin' with a buddy today and the random topic of "useless" high school subjects came about. It was in joking manner as I really do not feel any subject in high school was "useless". However, I must admit that I have never used calculus or physics since high school. Anyway, I told my buddy that one of the the most useful subjects I took in high school was typing. This was in the late 90s and I have used this skill almost every day since graduating.

I have heard of players using the swiping option on their phone to play WordTwist and I couldn't imagine playing that method...

Where in SoCal?

La Jolla, up near UCSD. Rode my bike down to Black's Beach or The Shores or The Cove, pretty much every day.

Great place for riding bikes back in the day. Lots of hills and empty roads.

"Empty roads" probably seems like a weird thing to say about SoCal, but in the 70's we could pretty much drive a 100 mph down the 5 from LA to San Diego. I had a friend swear he made the trip in just under an hour. Who knows. He had a really fast Mustang and always drove fast. If it wasn't under an hour, it was getting close.

Driving north on 101 was a scenic trip with more landscape than houses. Now, it's one continuous development.

I left in 1980, probably about the time you were born--if that's the significance of 1980.

Boysmom is the king of swipers. Think he posted video somewhere.

Calculus and Physics were reserved for the smart kids in high school. So, congratulations on being intelligent.

Since I never did homework, I never had to take anything that onerous. "Lazy" probably would have been an improvement for me. Less trouble for others. Early in grade school I became aware of the brevity of human life against the backgrounds of biological, geological and cosmic history. "Wasting time" studying seemed such a waste when there were so many other things to waste time on.

Then came the realization that instant gratification was far more ephemeral than I imagined life. Add that the pain and suffering required to reach worthwhile goals was far more gratifying. And lasting. Not much of a story in eating ice cream.

Learning how amazing learning was a life changer.

Back in college I could type 60+ on an old Corona. These days, not even close. Good thing there are a lot of 3-4 letter words on Wordtwist.

[bwt1213]

Pretty much the opposite of both of you guys. Grew up where summers were brief and winters seemed to last forever, where temperatures dropped below -40 without windchill factors, and the hotspot was the town library; it was warm there. When school let out for summer vacation, there was sometimes still snow on the ground. And when school began again the Monday after Labor Day, we sometimes had accumulating snow again. We had SRA reading lessons in grade school, and I clocked well over 2000 wpm in reading speed in grade school. That's less of a trick than you'd think, if your entertainment is reading books. There was no TV then, not for anyone in town that I knew. The Carnegie Public Library in Ishpeming had a record of all the books everyone had ever checked out, and one of my friends in college told me that I'd read nearly every book in the library by the time I left town after my 10th grade of high school. I'd read all of Darwin and Marx by sixth grade. This is NOT a mark of high intelligence; it's more accurately a mark of how isolated I was and how brutal the climate was. Summer was jokingly said to be the third week of July and we hoped the weather was good then. To give you an accurate read of the town, in 7th grade we had to take standardized achievement tests for the State of Michigan. Our 7th grade class was divided into slow, average, and fast groups. No student in the slow group was below grade average in anything. No student in the average group was less than two grade levels above 7th grade in anything. And nearly everyone in the fast group was at 12th grade level in nearly every subject level tested. Most of us were in the 12+ level in everything. It wasn't so much that we were all geniuses, but that we could NOT waste our time. We couldn't go to the ocean and watch the waves. We couldn't ride bicycles. Good weather was brief. We didn't have TV. Mostly, the radio went off the air at sundown. And during the day, the radio mostly played classical music or Big Band stuff. Rock and roll came from Chicago, if you could get any of those stations 350 miles away. Kids everywhere in the world would have achieved at similar levels if they'd had the same environment. If you have to play in the intellectual world, that's where you'll play.

[jbud1980]

La Jolla, up near UCSD. Rode my bike down to Black's Beach or The Shores or The Cove, pretty much every day.

Great place for riding bikes back in the day. Lots of hills and empty roads.

"Empty roads" probably seems like a weird thing to say about SoCal, but in the 70's we could pretty much drive a 100 mph down the 5 from LA to San Diego. I had a friend swear he made the trip in just under an hour. Who knows. He had a really fast Mustang and always drove fast. If it wasn't under an hour, it was getting close.

Driving north on 101 was a scenic trip with more landscape than houses. Now, it's one continuous development.

I left in 1980, probably about the time you were born--if that's the significance of 1980.

Boysmom is the king of swipers. Think he posted video somewhere.

Calculus and Physics were reserved for the smart kids in high school. So, congratulations on being intelligent.

Since I never did homework, I never had to take anything that onerous. "Lazy" probably would have been an improvement for me. Less trouble for others. Early in grade school I became aware of the brevity of human life against the backgrounds of biological, geological and cosmic history. "Wasting time" studying seemed such a waste when there were so many other things to waste time on.

Then came the realization that instant gratification was far more ephemeral than I imagined life. Add that the pain and suffering required to reach worthwhile goals was far more gratifying. And lasting. Not much of a story in eating ice cream.

Learning how amazing learning was a life changer.

Back in college I could type 60+ on an old Corona. These days, not even close. Good thing there are a lot of 3-4 letter words on Wordtwist.

I'm in the Los Angeles area, so not too far away from SD. I have been to SD a few times and one memory that sticks out is getting ditched at the SD zoo by my college buddies as a prank. Haha, fun times!

I'd like to see how the swiping feature works out of curiosity. Perhaps he has posted a YouTube video playing WordTwist as with MegaWord...

[jbud1980]

Pretty much the opposite of both of you guys. Grew up where summers were brief and winters seemed to last forever, where temperatures dropped below -40 without windchill factors, and the hotspot was the town library; it was warm there. When school let out for summer vacation, there was sometimes still snow on the ground. And when school began again the Monday after Labor Day, we sometimes had accumulating snow again. We had SRA reading lessons in grade school, and I clocked well over 2000 wpm in reading speed in grade school. That's less of a trick than you'd think, if your entertainment is reading books. There was no TV then, not for anyone in town that I knew. The Carnegie Public Library in Ishpeming had a record of all the books everyone had ever checked out, and one of my friends in college told me that I'd read nearly every book in the library by the time I left town after my 10th grade of high school. I'd read all of Darwin and Marx by sixth grade. This is NOT a mark of high intelligence; it's more accurately a mark of how isolated I was and how brutal the climate was. Summer was jokingly said to be the third week of July and we hoped the weather was good then. To give you an accurate read of the town, in 7th grade we had to take standardized achievement tests for the State of Michigan. Our 7th grade class was divided into slow, average, and fast groups. No student in the slow group was below grade average in anything. No student in the average group was less than two grade levels above 7th grade in anything. And nearly everyone in the fast group was at 12th grade level in nearly every subject level tested. Most of us were in the 12+ level in everything. It wasn't so much that we were all geniuses, but that we could NOT waste our time. We couldn't go to the ocean and watch the waves. We couldn't ride bicycles. Good weather was brief. We didn't have TV. Mostly, the radio went off the air at sundown. And during the day, the radio mostly played classical music or Big Band stuff. Rock and roll came from Chicago, if you could get any of those stations 350 miles away. Kids everywhere in the world would have achieved at similar levels if they'd had the same environment. If you have to play in the intellectual world, that's where you'll play.

Wow! That seems like an incredibly harsh environment in which to grow up/live. I have never been to MI yet I've heard wonderful things about that state, and it's on my bucket list to visit, same with MN and New England. The closest I've been to MI is probably Chicago, and I was there in January when I was 21, yet I didn't think it was that cold. Perhaps the skyscrapers were keeping me insulated as I walked around the city.

[bwt1213]

The UP is incredibly uninhabited. It's beautiful and huge parts of it are basically unvisited by humans. In the summer (thanks to climate change, it's warmer than it was) the insect pests are ferocious. I was born there and lived there until I was nearly three, then returned at age five and stayed until I was fifteen. During that whole time, it never reached 90 degrees on the hottest day of the summer. One day it got close and the whole town shut down from the heat. Everyone went to one beach or another and went swimming. I understand that temperatures in the nineties are quite common now. We used to average about 250 inches of snow a year, with a high of more than 350 inches. The last 20 years or so, the average has been about 120 inches. The precipitation has been about the same, but more of it falls as rain now. Climate change is real. If Ishpeming returned to the kind of weather it had from 1945 - 1965, it would be a huge shock to the people living there now. That is not to say that the weather there is exactly balmy, though. Ishpeming is about 350 miles north of Chicago, almost due north. There are good roads to Ishpeming and to the UP in general. If you're going in good weather, it will be about a 6 or 7 hour drive from Chicago, most of it really boring. The last few hours will help you understand just how isolated the whole place is and how uninhabited it is. But it is beautiful, and for a short time in the good weather you can appreciate it and not suffer too badly. The shores of Lake Superior look a lot like Maine, except it's fresh water and so clear you can see the bottom 300 feet down. There are lakes, rivers, and creeks everywhere. Deer herds number into the hundreds, bear will invade towns for food, and you can see wolves in the wild -- I did. And I saw the Northern Lights often in the winter, and heard them sing like sleigh bells in the distance. One of the joys of my life came in one of the low points, when my father died and we went to Ishpeming to bury him. It was October and the Northern Lights took over half the sky, and my wife got to see them for the only time in her life. She cried. It was that gorgeous. And don't forget the serviceberries (we called them sugarplums) and thimbleberries (like huge furry raspberries growing on giant geraniums), both of which ripen in late July or early August. The shrub blueberries and wild strawberries are great, too. If you love nature, please visit. Third week of July is best. Trust me on that one.