Wordtwist Bucketlist

[Naboka]

Finally!

The last item on my Wordtwist bucketlist...

is accomplished.

Been so close to hitting 900 so many times and failing with clumsy fingers.

Was shocked to look up and see this score. Thought it was gonna be in the 700's as typing still feels oddly awkward. Been in the hospital for several days and have been having trouble finding the keys.

Pretty sure I'm not going to add anything new to that bucketlist. Sometimes events in life force us to reevaluate our priorities.

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[bionicflutist]

Congratulations! I've gotten over 800 a handful of times, but I haven't hit 900 yet. Maybe someday.

[adiposeur]

Congratulations!
I was strutting around the room like Mick Jagger after scoring 422. Once. A long time ago.

[Emerging]

Congratulations. I've gotten over 800 twice but never close to 900. Your arsenal of long and/or unusual words finally got you there.

A while ago you posted a list of unusual but high-probability words. And I thought I'd provide a vivid illustration of how useful those words are while at the same time readdressing why it's unusually gratifying to beat you. Below is what typically happens when I play one of your boards (sorry for the poor copy/paste). Thirty-nine more words but one hundred six less points.

Great job!

[dannyb]

In the Hospital? Hope it wasn't anything too serious. Congrats on 900 points! Well at least I know why I beat one of your top scores this month. I haven't done that in a few years. I'm glad your back on your game.

[Naboka]

In the Hospital? Hope it wasn't anything too serious. Congrats on 900 points! Well at least I know why I beat one of your top scores this month. I haven't done that in a few years. I'm glad your back on your game.

Don't think the doctors ever did figure out what was going on.

At first they thought tick bite. Think I remember you ending up hospitalized with a tick bite and how painful it was. I've had COVID a few times and suffered the after shots misery, but none of that compared to whatever hit me this time. My white blood cells were down to 1.3 and platelets down to 60. My blood pressure was 81/51. I was sleeping 16 hours a day and tired the other 8.

None of the tests for ticks came back positive. Even Mayo couldn't figure it out. But they treated me with the heaviest antibiotics they had. They were beginning to think bone cancer and had planned on biopsies. But then my numbers started improving so that was both a relief and a signal not to do the biopsies. Nothin like a near miss to make you reevaluate all the stuff you take for granted.

Doing fine now. Or so I want to believe. Who knows what evil lurks around the corner.

You'd undoubtedly be beating more of my games if I wasn't such a weasal dumping games that flounder off the tracks. At least half of the games I start end up in the dump. And that doesn't count the games I open with no intention of finishing--merely to practise finding stuff without the pressures of typing.

[Naboka]

Congratulations. I've gotten over 800 twice but never close to 900. Your arsenal of long and/or unusual words finally got you there.

A while ago you posted a list of unusual but high-probability words. And I thought I'd provide a vivid illustration of how useful those words are while at the same time readdressing why it's unusually gratifying to beat you. Below is what typically happens when I play one of your boards (sorry for the poor copy/paste). Thirty-nine more words but one hundred six less points.

Great job!

Thanks.

I'm never sure if anyone pays attention to those lists of red words (UR) I post, but I would have loved that advantage. Early on a player posted about esne, esnes, enses being a very common and useful combination. Helped me out, and lit a fire about other such combos.

Efficiencies fascinate me. How do you make an inefficient system efficient? Especially in the face of inherent, systemic flaws/limitations/weaknesses.

As far as I know, you weren't playing here when I began toying with the idea of approaching the game as a foreign language. Not a language of complex meaning, simply a language of alpha-patterns that had binary meaning: yes or no. Yes for ultra rare and no for everything else. I filled up lots of notebooks with words and their point values, then filled up more notebooks trying to capture common groupings of letter patterns for ultra rare words.

Every time I hada spare moment, I'd scan a page and memorize.

Eventually, I realized that ultra rares could be sub-categorized to mirror the other word categories. There are common, wide, rare and ultra-rare ultra-rare words. Some words I'm familiar with aren't even counted here. So, the endless quest for new words suffers dramatically from diminishing returns. The most return on investment comes from a couple of thousand common/wide ultra-rare words that you're gonna see over and over and over.

I can't type all the words I guess are there (and for me it's mostly guessing without reading the actual letter sequences--cause I'm a slow reader.) So, it made absolutely no sense typing common words worth 3 points when I could get 6 for another 3 letter word. I'm going to end up leaving dozens of words untyped anyway, so they might as well be the words that don't have much value.

You've already seen the result of that approach.

I love unusual words that have unusual meanings. Words like calypses. The things people invent as meaningful enough to assign it language.