Hemoid toponymy

hemoid (adj.): resembling blood.

toponymy (n.): the scientific study of the names of places

While I was looking up the definitions to the above two words, I happened across morewords.com. This is a pretty nice site, in that in addition to telling you what's a word and what's not (and linking to a definition), it tells you a lot of cool things like the anagrams of certain words, what words can be formed with a subset of the letters of a given word, and even what words can be formed by adding one letter to the current letters of a given word (and then rearranging).

It also happens to have a list of all words that contain a certain two letter pair (like 'rp' or such). Now, this happens to be somewhat relevant, at least with respect to the game Ghost (if you don't know what this is, Wikipedia it; note that the variant we play is actually SuperGhost, and no, I'm not talking about the cancelled Blizzard game).

Ghost happens to be one of those games that you can play during boring lectures and events; and, since I often find lectures and events to be boring, I consider myself to be a pretty decent Ghost player - at least, in two player Ghost. And one of the best strategies in Ghost is to use words with really strange letter patterns.

What do I mean by this? Well, for a lot of people, finding a word that contains "rpsh" is not the easiest task (you can try this by the way, and comment if you get an answer - it's not incredibly hard though). But you don't really need 4-character long patterns to confuse people, especially new people. For example, for some reason a lot of people can never figure out what word contains "pb".

My response to the challenges that usually come after I put "pb" down is "cupboard". I also knew "upbeat", "upbringing", and "raspberry" contained "pb" too (you wouldn't believe how many people are stuck at "spb" =P). But, after looking at the page, I realized there are actually a good number of words with "pb" in it. Like, hipbone, clipboard, scrapbook, upbraid, shipbuilder, stepbrother, etc. Really, the key to being good at Ghost is thinking of random compound words like that.

On the subject of puzzles, Josh's puzzle wasn't too hard to beat, especially with Tennis->Australia->Echidna->Anteater->Aardvark. That's a chain of four. And when I said, it wasn't too hard to beat, that was a complete fabrication, since it did take me the better part of an hour. But I was bored. Anyway, I do believe there is a tool that can check for the shortest path. Perhaps there's one in three steps (or two, but I highly doubt the two).

Also, GAMES Magazine, which they happen to stock in our school library, has a bunch of good logic puzzles, many of which I end up doing during chemistry class. Although, there's probably an excess of good logic puzzles floating around the Internet already, so you probably shouldn't waste your money subscribing or your time looking for it.

As for Guitar Hero vs. FFR... my biggest point is that Guitar Hero mainly sticks to one genre, rock, so most of the music sounds like somebody tuned the radio to right in between radio stations. That being said, there are some decent songs (from what I've seen the Dragonforce songs are okay, and when they occasionally sneak a techno/trance song in, like this). But you can play music of any genre on FFR (and by FFR I'm also including all the equivalents, like Stepmania and O2Jam), so you're not forced to listen to static.

Secondly FFR is generally much more intense, in that the BPMs of the songs are generally much higher than those in Guitar Hero (there are easy songs in FFR, that actually are easy, but still have higher BPMs than some expert songs in Guitar Hero). Intensity is good, especially in a rhythm game that gets very boring quick if you're not pushed hard. Some might argue that GH is intense because you've got your fingers in a slightly odd position on a fake guitar, so it's harder to move them around accurately to press the buttons, but that's not really intense - that's more awkwardness.

Just because you're playing a fake guitar doesn't make the game good. GH is a good game because it sort of innovated in the rhythm genre and introduced a fake guitar that you could pretend was a real guitar, and could listen to static while mashing buttons with your left hand because your right hand has to be occupied repeatedly mashing a strum bar thing . Nevertheless, I'm serious when I said it's good. They did design it pretty well, ignoring the stuff above. Just I think I'll go with the simpler, much more entertaining game where you don't have to pretend to play a musical instrument, and just press keys to the (decent) music.

(You see... people even prefer this to the music that comes with guitar hero =P)

-squidout