The Null Device
Posts matching tags 'scrabble'
2010/4/6
Apparently there aren't enough young people playing Scrabble these days. (Perhaps the demographic of bookish cardigan-wearers and cupcake-crafters tends too much towards the mid-to-late 20s for maximum shareholder value.) In any case, Mattel have decided to attract a younger audience by changing the rules to allow proper nouns and "introduce an element of popular culture into the game". So now EDWARD, BIEBER and LADYGAGA are valid moves.
They will still sell an oldies' edition with the staid, fusty no-sparkly-vampires-or-pop-stars rule. It'll presumably be distinguished by tastefully monochromatic packaging (the regular pop-cultural edition will undoubtedly be printed in a vomitous mix of fluorescent colours, with the letter tiles in Comic Sans).
Update: the rule changes will not apply to Scrabble as such, but rather to a new "yoof-oriented"/"extreme" variant named "Scrabble Trickster". (Thanks to Jessamyn for that link.)
2009/9/29
A Scrabble enthusiast has found what is believed to be the highest-scoring move found so far, possibly the highest-scoring possible: "SESQUIOXIDIZING", for 2,044 points.
Of course, actually having the board in a state where this can fall into place would require quite a bit of luck, to say the least.
2008/1/13
Hasbro take legal action to shut down Scrabulous. I'm surprised it took them this long. I wonder whether they'll be smart enough to come to a deal, either acquiring Scrabulous or licensing it in return for a share of the (considerable) ad revenue, or whether they'll just sue it into oblivion to teach them a lesson, undoubtedly cheered on by the Ayn Rand fanboys loudly defending anything they may choose to do in the comments.
The Scrabulous servers are in India, which may be hard to shut down, though Facebook could block the application immediately. And the authors should probably avoid any country with an extradition treaty with the US unless this is settled.
2007/12/12
Merriam-Webster's 2007 Word of the Year is w00t:
expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word "yay": "w00t! I won the contest!"The article gives the etymology of "w00t" as an acronym for "we owned the other team"; I agree with Cory Doctorow that this seems like a back-formation of the word. I suspect that the word comes from the UNIX superuser account name "root", via hacker/cracker culture (as in "I've acquired root privilege (on some machine)" -> "root" -> "w00t").
Incidentally, w00t is probably the only word in the dictionary with digits as letters (though please correct me if I'm wrong); which means that Scrabble players may soon need the L33T Tiles.
(via Boing Boing) ¶ 0