hahahahaha.... I didn'
t really THINK you were a gemini, RJB, too funny.
I played real-life scrabble with my mom. I kicked her ass. I feel funny. Anyway, I ended up with over 400 points and played a bingo!
why do you keep leavin' those straight lines out there, ms. k?
<torturing geminis again, she is>
How is that a straight line? Run with it and show me.
The "I feel funny" bit.
I'm working on my restraint skills this afternoon.
too tired to think it through.
Don't worry 'bout it.
Take care of yourself.
What a weird weekend it's been.
LionTamerX wrote:< goes back to chewing qat leaves. >
This reminds me, I've wanted to collect useful Scrabble words. Ya know, like qat and suq. Also azo, um OK I can't remember any others right now but jotting this down while it's on my mind. Will come back to it.
Oh, "qaid"! That's another good one.
(I played a game earlier today, VOID as usual, where a gal put "roque" ending right before the tws. I had a buncha letters including a d and a t. Put down something ending with "d", nope, "roqued" ain't a word. Put down something starting with "t", whaddya know! "Roquet" is a word. Gotta love VOID. My opponent wasn't very amused though.)
I just lost to ehbeth who was kind enough to stoop down to my level. She won, of course, but it wasn't the total rout I feared after noticing she had shortened the game by a few minutes. johnboy/poor puppy still has trouble with the clock.
You made an interesting observation, Soz. If you were to look at the games from those of us who are not very good at this, you would see a lot of two or three or four letter words that are not in our everyday vocabulary. When you observe games from the highly rated players, you see five, six and seven letter words that are also not in daily useage. Us simple folks can keep words like QI or KA or ZOA in our heads but do the really highly rated players know those big words?
I was amused by the earlier reference to QAT ("chewing qat") as that was a word that came up in a discussion on another thread several months ago. I assumed that the poster was making an oblique reference to that, but, as I recall, she/he wasn't a participant then.
Poorpuppy didn't run out of time on a 16 minute game!
Of course, we didn't get to chat on the side as we usually do, a bit. Poorpuppy had the lead past the halfway point of the game - I fully expect he's gonna beat me soon.
I think it's just that it's kind of the epitome of the kind of word I'm talking about. (As in, I think LionTamerX used it purposely in context even if he wasn't around for the earlier conversation -- though I think maybe he was.) It's always panic if you're stuck with a q and no u, and pretty likely an a, t, or both would be available.
Sure, I think a big part of the game is learning the words that are high-scoring and/ or are ways to use letters that are otherwise hard to use. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I've been plenty grateful for qat since I learned it a couple months ago or whenever we started this. Ka is a great one, too. I keep adding new ones as I go. (Both "roque", which I've used before, and "roquet" are now lodged in my brain...)
zoa is good
qua
oxo! Just learned that one.
I'm so jealous that ehbeth gets to use "qi."
"jo" is an old standard, one of the few I knew before I started at that Scrabble site.
also "joe"
I only 'get' to use qi when I'm playing Sowpods. Since I bounce back and forth between TWL and Sowpods, it's important to remember when I can use it.
double-vowel words:
aa
ae
oe
ai
Any others?
Also just learned "mm" from littlek
On not having time to chat: Had I had the time, I might have mentioned that when my mother was about 16, she worked at a diner in Wisconsin called (johnboy is not making this up) The Chat and Chew. It was during Prohibition and the owners eventually got busted. So my mother moved onward and upward to a position at the Dew Drop Inn.
Yall dont know what you are missing from not chatting more and playing a little less hard. I'm serious about that comment. Yall don't know what you are missing when you speed the game up. Words and wordplay are fun, but sometimes the stories behind them are even more interesting.
Oh, I know what you mean. I do get a lot of chatting in with the 15-minute games. Have added a couple of people to my buddies list 'cause the chatting was so nice. One gal from Hawaii especially, forget her name, really cool. Also two or three people with Indian names.
I'll grant you that the tone is different at "higher" levels, though, in general. I tend to say "nice!" for, like, cool or interesting words, like if they make 3 or 4 words at once or something, regardless of points. The response is often "but that was only 32 points" or whatever.
Happened today with "oxo", I'd put "bit" one down from the left tws column, went through various vowels (abit ebit ibit) and thought eh, no word can be made from that. Then the guy made "obit" and "oxo" on the tws, and I was like ohhh, cool. He was kinda grumpy about it.
I only regularly get "nice one!"s for bingos.
At any rate, I have nothing in particular against longer games except that I almost never have the time. Sometimes I do retroactively -- that is, an hour passes without interruption and then I know I had an hour, but I almost never know in advance whether it'll be an hour. 20-30 minutes is a much safer bet.
