Jan 14 2022 - Wordle of the Day

 

I checked out the news in Google News.  I found this WORDLE, The Daily Game.  I don't normally go to Google News - it is a news aggregator service developed by Google. It presents a continuous flow of links to articles organized from thousands of publishers and magazines. Google News is available as an app on Android, iOS, and the Web.  This is the service opposed  by news organizations and countries over licensing and the lack of it by Google.  They even thought that displaying snippets of content without licensing seemed to be ok.  Where there is licensing, the company is under investigation.  France has fined Google and other countries such as Germany are involved in an antitrust probe. But what we noticed in the News Feed was the Wordle of the Day.  What is Wordle?  The New York Times on January 3rd, 2022 says that it is a love story - a game designed by Josh Wardle in November 2021 for his girlfriend.  It now has over 300,000 players.   "It’s been a meteoric rise for the once-a-day game, which invites players to guess a five-letter word in a similar manner as the guess-the-color game Mastermind. After guessing a five-letter word, the game tells you whether any of your letters are in the secret word and whether they are in the correct place. You have six tries to get it right. Few such popular corners of the internet are as low-frills as the website, which Mr. Wardle built himself as a side project. There are no ads or flashing banners; no windows pop up or ask for money. There is merely the game on a black background". It is based on five-letter words - around 12,000 in English.  Here is what it looks like: Here is the New York Times article about it HERE.  Isn't this a wonderful news story of the day!  A game that will soon become beloved world-wide.  This was a bit of graffiti in St. Catharines.  It has been colourized and given a painterly effect.  All of my manipulation software tools have to be upgraded and uploaded and then tested.  Both Photoshop and Lightroom moved to new releases, and plugins stopped 'plugging in'.   The original is below - itself an interesting image with a graceful composition.

Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

What's Your This or That?

Need some more entertainment?  Can you imagine that question today?  We are avalanched with entertainment.  Suffocating in a sandpile a mile high of grains of entertainment sand. OK. Here is a simple game:  This or That Questions List.  A game from the past, but this one online has a noticeable  number of tech choices.  These seem inconsequential to me.  Netflix or YouTube is an example.  Or Facebook vs Twitter.  What is the personality preference or identity statement is there in these choices?   Dog or Cat? Netflix or YouTube? Phone Call or Text? Cardio or Weights? Facebook or Twitter? Ice Cream Cone or Snow Cone? iOS or Android? Form or Function? Pop or Indie? Cake or Pie? Swimming or Sunbathing? Big Party or Small Gathering? New Clothes or New Phone? Rich Friend or Loyal Friend? Football or Basketball? Work Hard or Play Hard? So I wondered if there was some discourse on this topic.  I do find the question being asked - at medium.com:   "Tribalism around tech decisions still exists, but feels less and less relevant. Even if your colleagues swear by Windows and you use Mac, chances are you’ll all be working on the same Google Sheet through a web browser. Tech’s maturation in the third millennium has been a force of flattening technological nuance to a point where pretty much everything can do the same things in mostly the same way. So the devices we carry and use for so much of every day end up looking basically the same too." "This increasingly strikes me as peculiar given the other objects we engage with daily. People’s clothes carry a mark of themselves. Their vehicles — from bicycles to Teslas — say something about them. And it’s rare to go to someone else’s house to find an identical print or poster hanging from their wall as the one’s you’ve got at home. When we all clearly have our own tastes and desires to manifest our identities through them, why are we all buying the same tech and using it in the same way?" Yes - there was a time - just past - when choosing Apple was an identity statement.  But now we're farther down the road.  Today this or thatis about which apps are you using and linking?  Things like are you using a different browser than Google such as Dolphin? Or deciding which messenger service to use.  I can see the mountain of apps.  Must-have apps for your iPhone from lifehack.org include: billguard -bank app and spending habits buffer - sends out your social media posts to designated sites such as facebook, twitter, instagram dashlane - saves payment and confirmation info that would be lost in your email fooducate - health app for the grocery store SleepCycle - measures your sleep cycle to adapt your alarm clock Myfitnesspal - looks like a fitbit, well sort of This is the landscape of the questions today.  And our image? Autumn Sumac gives the colour to this motion blur image.