The Nittany Turkey

Primarily about Penn State football, this is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

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Friend List Maintenance

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Ahhhh, Facebook. Such a waste of time, yet so useful at times for contacting old friends, some of whom are actually still interested in talking with me. But on social networks the only operative definition of “friend” has nothing to do with longevity, devotion, trust, or any other traditional friendship determinant. “Friends” on a social network are simply the collection of other users who appears on your friends list at any given instant.

Being “friends” on Facebook opens up the door for two-way communication, which has many uses other than the traditional friendly, two-way chats with which we are all familiar. The most obnoxious communication by Facebook friends is the plethora of requests for various types of game crap, such as a new pig for their Farmville farm, a new ho for their Cyber Pimp stable, or whatever. Over time, I’ve collected “friends” who never communicate about anything else, not even a “How’s the weather down there?” These are hard-core game addicts who could have friends lists full of real friends if they didn’t devote so much damn time to harassing people about what they need for their silly games. These are people who piss me off.

Facebook provides a mechanism for ignoring “friends” who post things, and there is also a mechanism for eliminating postings from any particular application. Many of these game requests originate while the “friend” is accessing the game application, so it is easy to ignore them by ignoring all posts from the application. However, some “friends” also make such requests while being logged onto Facebook. ???? ?????? ???? ?????? If you ignore them completely, you risk missing something meaningful. A small risk, but one I find it difficult to take with real friends. So I give them the benefit of the doubt.

If, after six months or so of “friendship”, all I get is game requests, the soon to be ex-friends go into my “In Limbo” friends list, where I have dialed up security to the point where they can do next to nothing. There, they wait until I do my next friends list purge and dump them completely.

I did the purge yesterday and then realized that there was one more group of users who get on my nerves: those who post recycled “theme” statuses and then tell me I’m a dick if I don’t re-post it as my status for a while. You know the kind: “If you know someone who died of cancer, you must post this as your status…” or “I’m posting this to let you know that you’re all my friends and if you feel that way too post this as your status…” or “I think Facebook should have a ‘dislike’ button; if you agree, put this as your status…” or, more perniciously, “A little girl was abducted on highway 9 in Smallville…” Don’t tell me what to “put” as my status, people, especially since you — or whoever concocted the stupid status message 23 generations ago — can’t spell or form a proper sentence. Don’t tell me about the same little girl being abducted who was first “abducted” in an Internet e-mail chain letter 12 years ago. These stupid things are bandwidth wasters fully equivalent to stupid chain letters in which one is exhorted to re-send the letter to 20 friends. Idiots still pass them along, even though they’ve been debunked in snopes.com for years and years.

So, what to do with these folks? They don’t seem to get the message yet. Yesterday, I posted the following as my status:

I trimmed my friend list to get rid of those whose idea of friendship was nothing more than asking for crap for Farmville, etc., but I forgot about those who ask to repost their stupid, warmed over status message about true friendship, who hates cancer more, etc. So, please don’t “put this” as your status for even one fershtunkenah hour, or I’m guaranteeing that you’ll be next!

(Fershtunkenah is Yiddish for “steenking”.)

In other words, don’t waste my time or my wall with this crap. Annoy your other “friends” with it. It does absolutely nothing for nobody except bolster the ego of the originator who one day will be so thrilled to see his or her dumbass status coming through the viral network. Get a life! If you want to do something for a charity, give your time or your money. Posting statuses isn’t going to make cancer go away any more than honking if you love Jesus is going to make this a better world.

I checked my friend count after I posted the facetious status above and found that it had quickly dropped by one. That was hilarious. I didn’t even have to initiate the excision. Whoever it was became insulted and decided he or she had no use for me. ????? ??????? Thank you! Great concept — the subliminal, passive-aggressive “get yo ass off my friends list” message, which pares down friend list maintenance time for you even while you sleep.

******

This reminded me of way back when I was working in the Operations Analysis department of a  Fortune 500 company in New York. In rough times, we were the ones who had to determine who would get laid off and, in some cases, be the bearer of bad tidings. This was very unpleasant for us, let alone the poor employees. During one stressful period, one of my colleagues suggested that if on Monday each week we hung up pictures in our floor’s elevator foyer of employees who were going to be given their notice on Friday, after a few weeks people would get the message when they saw their picture on Monday and, consequently, we would not have to deal with them on Friday. They could go straight to Personnel (which is the real name for what is now called “human resources”) to deal with severance issues. ???? ???? ??????? ???? Needless to say, this idea was never implemented.

Defriending that you’re still around

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This one is for my Facebook friends and my former Facebook friends. The lyrics are sung to the tune of “The Great Pretender” by the Platters. If you’re under 50, you might not remember the song, but sing along anyway.

Oh yes, you're a great defriender
Pretending that you're doing well
Your need is such
You defriend too much
You're angry but now I can't tell

Oh yes, you're a great defriender
Adrift in a world of your own
Facebook's the same but to your real shame
You're drinking your Kool-Aid all alone

Passive-aggressive is your feeling of make-believe
Too furtive an action that Facebook will conceal

Oh yes, you're a great defriender
Just laughing and gay like a clown
You seem to be a crackpot, you see
You defriend me and don't make a sound

Too slimy an action that Facebook will concealllllllll

Oh yes, you're a barking moonbat
Wearing tinfoil hats like a clown
It must be my inflammatory posts, you see
You defriend me and don't make a sound
Pretending that I...
Pretending that I care you're not around.

CyberScrabble Strategems

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This Turkey has been sporadically playing interactive games via computer since long before there was such a thing as the Web. I don’t play a lot because I lack the reflexes for shoot ’em ups and I lack the patience for real-time card and board games, which entail baseball-like pauses in the action while the opponent makes a move, a bet, or whatever. In the past few years, I settled on a couple of board games on Facebook, both of which allow players to make their move and go do something else while waiting for the other guy to move. One such game is the Dot Game, a computer version of dots and crosses, and the other is Scrabble, which is the subject of this article.

I’m pretty certain that you all know what Scrabble is—a crossword game in which players earn points for valid words they spell out on the board. The on-line version is identical to that which you would play at home on a card table, at least in terms of the mechanics and rules of the game. However, there is a significant difference in how players determine which words they will play.

In the card table version, players agree in advance on house rules regarding the use of dictionaries or other aids in various situations. Bending those rules is not possible without agreement among the players. In the on-line game, a spelling validator and a list of valid two-letter words are provided to each player with the intent being to level the playing field. It is assumed that all players have access to these tools and that they are free to use them. However, there is generally no discussion among the players about the use of aids.

When I started playing on-line Scrabble a couple of years ago, I noticed that I was being clobbered with regularity by people from diverse backgrounds with varying levels of education. While I have a pretty robust vocabulary, these people were coming up with words that I had never encountered in nearly six decades of reading. It didn’t require consultation with a Mensa member to figure out what was going on. At least some of my opponents were using computers—either via the Internet or local—to generate plausible words, including some rare ones that stuck out like sore thumbs. What to do? I decided to fight fire with fire.

I did a little research to find some convenient Scrabble crutches on the Internet. The simplest are anagram solvers, which merely generate all the words that can be formed with the letters one inputs. On the next higher rung are anagram solvers with sensitivity to Scrabble boards, where the user inputs the letters on hand in the rack plus potential prefixes, suffixes, and internal letters on the board. This one allows the user to input “blanks”, the Scrabble equivalents of wild cards and it generates words with specificity to the board situation presented to it. One more step up is a program into which the entire board can be entered, along with the contents of the user’s rack. This nifty tool will, in split seconds, tell the user exactly what the best play is on the entire board. With certain browsers, this program has a plug-in that allows it to import the board in one fell swoop. Finally, at the top of the heap of cheats is a fully automated “bot” that runs on a local computer and will play one’s opponent without human intervention once it is turned loose.

Experimenting with anagram solvers, I found that many times the program would find words I would have missed. Moving up to the program that keeps the state of the entire board saved in memory and displayed on the screen, it was pretty easy to stay on top of the heap. However, being an honest Turkey, I quickly developed conscience pangs, so I began to tell opponents that I was using a crutch. A few of them gave me an “lol”, stating that everybody else did, too, but no one usually tells anyone about it. “Sometimes,” said one, “I only use it when I get stuck.” Oh yeah, well that makes a big damn difference, doesn’t it! LOL!

After playing this way for a while I decided that it was getting boring. I was leaving the heavy thinking to the computer. There was no real joy in winning. It wasn’t my brilliance doing the winning; it was a 3 GHz Core2Duo. [Read more…]