Have You Heard The Wordle?

A little while ago, I heard about this new word game called “Wordle”. All I knew about it was that you got one five-letter word a day, and you got 6 guesses and you had to see if you got it right or something. Apparently everybody is playing it. I was intrigued but didn’t get a chance to look yet.

Then my Facebook and Twitter started filling up with these images and the word “Wordle”. I was starting to get sad. Maybe this word game, something that could be completely accessible, might be lost to me because of how it was built.

Then…oh then! I came upon this piece of good news, and…I’m hooked!

It turns out there’s a Chrome extension, which is the easiest way to go, but you can also install a bookmarklet that does the same thing on your phone’s browser, or almost any non-Chrome browser, so you can Wordle it up wherever you are. Here’s how to do that.

It’s a bit of a pain in the arse to get it onto the phone, but once you get it in there, every time you go back to Wordle, it works correctly. I got it to work with Safari and Chrome, but Firefox on the phone told me where I could go with that plan. Firefox on the computer, however, had no problem.

And if you want to make your Wordle results things you share accessible, here are some tips.

The game is just basically one lingo game every 24 hours, but I did not want to be left out. And now, because of some awesome people, we’re not. Woohoo!

We Need To Change Some Wrestling Rules

Maybe I’ve written this before, I don’t know and I’m not going back to check. But we have got to do something about these triple threat, fatal 4-way, 6 pack challenge, whatever they want to call the multi-person matches in wrestling. The rules are dumb and it makes me hate them even when the match is good.

The main thing that’s always bothered me about these damn things is why they aren’t elimination matches. The first triangle match I can remember seeing worked that way, or at least it did in my head. I can’t recall who was in it, so maybe I can’t be trusted. But my point is that that’s a good concept. You have an issue between multiple people. They all want it settled. What better way to do that than put them all in the ring at the same time and let them sort it out? At the end, you have one person left standing tall. He is the winner. It can’t be argued. Problem solved.

But that’s not how it works now. Everyone is guilty of it, but I’m going to pick on WWE here because they abuse it so much. You put a bunch of dudes in a match, its a complete mess and then the first one to get a pin wins. It solves nothing because everyone else in the match gets to bitch and chew about not losing, thus ensuring that the feud must continue even if there’s no need for it to do so. Either that or they pretend the story is over, even though to anyone who bothered paying attention it clearly is not. If you can’t answer the simple question of why this guy cared last time but this guy doesn’t now, your story is arbitrary, lazy and stupid.

And I mentioned the matches being a total mess. That’s not me advocating for tags in and out, although if you want to do that it’s probably fine. What needs to change is this thing where all multi-man matches are no disqualification. That’s some bullshit. It’s another booking crutch often beaten to death by WWE in order to make endless rematches that nobody wants or to avoid beating someone they want to protect. I have two basic thoughts on this.

  1. If you don’t want to beat a guy, don’t. Either he wins or you don’t make the match.
  2. maybe just don’t make these matches if this is how you’re going to do them. If you’ve trained me that most of the time it’s going to come down to someone cheating or a bunch of assholes interfering, why would I keep caring? I’ll just wait for the important match especially if I have to pay extra to watch it.

And since the Royal Rumble is tonight, I’m going to repeat something I’m positive I’ve written before.

This shit where someone not in a battle royal can eliminate someone who is, knock it off.

  • If you are outside the ring after having been eliminated and pull someone out, it doesn’t count.
  • Ditto if you come back in and throw someone out.
  • If you were never in the match to begin with but storm down and start tossing dudes, that definitely doesn’t count.

The Rumble has been one of my favourite WWE things forever, and I like battle royals in general more than I think a lot of people do. They thankfully don’t do these bad eliminations all the time, but it ruins it for me whenever they do. Doing them at all is doing them too often.

Yoko Ono Has Never Sounded Better


There is precious little I could ever hope to add to this. All you need to know is that it’s great, that the song is called “Voice Piece For Soprano And Wish Tree”, and that this is what it sounded like before it was improved upon.

This video comes to you courtesy of Andre Antunes, who you might remember as the guy who momentarily made Kenneth Copeland tolerable.

5EGG

I’m not sure this gentleman solved any of his problems when he walked into the cell phone store and began hurling eggs and epithets, but I hope he feels a little better. Maybe Telus can let us know how he’s doing.

On Saturday, employees at Quinsam Communications in Campbell River, Vancouver Island were left stunned when a man entered the store and began hurling eggs at displays, devices, and the workers.
The accused — dressed in a red sweatshirt with a grey bandana around his face walked in and began venting his frustration about Telus and its 5G technology. “This has got nothing to do with you, boys,” the accused said to the staff before pelting the business and the ‘boys’ with eggs.
According to the Campbell River Mirror, the accused believed that others were using Telus’ 5G network to gain access to his cellular devices, and based on his body language and tone, he appeared to be extremely unhappy about it.

CTV has video of him being extremely unhappy about it, and you can watch it here. I hope you like beeping.

I Am Dead. I Am Also Literally In Bees

Since we have a bit of a thing about bees around here or perhaps just because I have a thing about frightening poor Carin with stories about bees, I feel it necessary at this time to inform you that the damn things have begun evolving into meat eaters. Please enjoy the rest of your evening.

A team of entomologists, seeking to learn more about these pollen-eschewing bees, recently set up chicken baits in a Costa Rican forest. They ended up collecting a bunch of vulture bees (Trigona necrophaga) and analyzed their guts and genetics in detail.
“These are the only bees in the world that have evolved to use food sources not produced by plants, which is a pretty remarkable change in dietary habits,” said Doug Yanega, an entomologist at University of California, Riverside and a co-author of the recent paper, in a university press release.
While ordinary bees have pockets on their back legs to store pollen as they flit from flower to flower, the vulture bees have repurposed the stores as “little chicken baskets,” according to study co-author Quinn McFrederick, also an entomologist at UC Riverside.

The researchers aren’t certain why this is happening, but they speculate that it may have something to do with competition for the nectar and such that bees normally consume, which sounds totally sensible to me.

This is all a tad creepy, but it’s also pretty cool to see evolution in action like this. Just stick to dead things, bees. That’s all I ask.

So About Those iOS 14 Security Patches

Remember a few months ago when Apple announced that cool thing where you would be able to get important security updates for iOS 14 and not have to upgrade to iOS 15 before you were ready? Well, guess what. You’re ready, whether you’re ready or not.

So far there’s no official word from Apple about why they’ve gone this direction. All we have is the bunch of speculation in the second link up there. But if it’s anything other than a flaw so complex that it can’t be backported without messing up a whole bunch of other things, it’s a real shame to see it go. It was a nice, customer friendly option to have.

According to 9to5Mac, Apple suddenly stopped making security updates available to people using versions of iOS 14. The last security patch made available for devices not on iOS 15 was iOS 14.8.1, released in October. However, it’s no longer available for people using iOS 14.8 — the only upgrade option is the new iOS 15.2.1 update.

Hey Google, What’s All Of The Weather Today?

March 29th, 2022 Update: Sometime in the last few days, Google appears to have fixed this. Asking for the weather will now give you expected conditions, the high, the low, the current temperature and windchill. Thank you, Google. That makes things much easier.

Lately I’ve noticed a bug in the way that our Google Mini reports the weather, but you can work around it, so here’s the solution if you’re having the same problem.

If you ask it what the weather is going to be today it will give you the expected conditions, the high and low and the current temperature. But it won’t give you the windchill, which can sometimes be important when it’s January in Canada. If you have the Continued Conversations feature enabled and ask what the temperature is during the same chat to try to coax a windchill out of it, you still won’t get one. You’ll just get the current temperature, which you obviously already know. If you’re determined to get it, you’ll have to let that conversation die and then ask “What’s the temperature?” in a new one. At that point, she’ll finally tell you that it’s currently -13, but that due to current wind conditions it feels like -27.

And just like that, you can once again be as miserable about how freaking cold it is as I am. Eat it, winter!

What’s The Deal With Paper?

Wondering if anyone else has noticed this, especially people who have to run their mail through a scanner to read it like I do.

For at least the last few months, I’ve been finding that most of the folded paper I get in the mail won’t lie flat anymore. In order to get a decent scan, I have to hold it down with one or both hands. If I don’t, it puffs up as though it wants to stand and float away on a breeze that doesn’t exist, completely screwing up the output.

Nobody is folding anything any differently, so what gives? Has something changed about the chemical make-up of paper? Is it something to do with the recycling process? Is this only happening to me? It’s strange, whatever it is.