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I had my first Wordle fail today. It's the only way you can fail if you're paying attention (and playing in hard mode where you have to include all your greens and yellows in each turn), which is to get loads of letters early and then be left with more words with the one remaining letter than there are goes. I played shame, shale, shave, shade and shape. It turned out to be shake.
Lots of people told me that I could have avoided defeat by playing a word that included 3 of the possible letters (paved for example) which would have either shown me the right letter or discounted three instead of one. Yeah, sure, if I was a baby who wanted to play the easiest possible game. And a coward. I had a chance to get the wordle in 2 (and then 3 and then 4 and then 5 and then 6) and I wasn't going to waste a turn trying to cheat.
I enjoyed winding people up on Twitter, trying to create a rivalry between the baby easy mode players and the cool heroic hard mode players. It was fun to pretend that it was at all important or that anyone would care that much.
But weirdly, as with all divisive issues, over the course of the day, I became genuinely annoyed with people who though they were being tactical geniuses for having thought of burning letters up in a single turn and who were patronising me for not having thought of it. OF COURSE I THOUGHT OF IT. And then discounted it because it's not an honourable way to play. If you want to play like that then just play three words with fifteen different letters in them and you should pretty much definitely be able to solve the puzzle in four. YOU HAVE TO USE THE LETTERS YOU ALREADY KNOW OR THERE IS NO CHALLENGE TO IT AT ALL. Yes, once in a hundred goes you might find yourself trapped as I was and be unlucky enough to guess wrong five times in a row (where I think there were only 6 possibilities), but that should also encourage you to be a bit bolder with your choices earlier on to avoid such traps and not just play words like STARE that contains lots of common letters (usually helpful, but not if you hit three or four of them).
The easy heretics were claiming that their way showed more skill and I couldn't believe how stupid they must be to think that. There's nothing worse than a stupid person thinking they are clever (just ask anyone who knows me). My joke rivalry somehow became real in the course of the day and I would happily have firebombed every easy mode twat's homes.
This is how the world is. Fighting over nothing. Even when one side is objectively correct.
I took some of the energy into the final episode of series 2 of Twitch of Fun. I had managed to get some good writing on the book done in between Twitter spats, but had also had to choose some news stories for this show. I hadn't had time to prepare much at all. Which is partly why I decided I should knock it on the head until the book is written (as I will be losing a day a week to RHLSTP too). But sometimes the less I prepare the better Twitch of Fun is and though I didn't feel like doing it, loads of good things came out of it and I almost regretted my decision to stop for a bit. When it's fun, it's really fun. When it's crap it's a bit heartbreaking though!
You can watch it and see what you think here. I like the old style routines that emerge fully formed from nowhere. And hadn't expected to revisit the oeuvre of Adam Ant.The ventrioloquism is getting spookily good (in places).
