I just made a very sad discovery...

For months, maybe even years, I've been playing this woman named Anna C. on SongPop.  She had an attractive profile picture that she never changed and was supposedly from New York City.  When she first started playing me, she was not a particularly good player.  It was easy to beat her.  Then she got a lot better, even to the point of scoring impossibly high by picking the right songs almost instantly.

I also noticed that Anna never seemed to make any progress toward mastering a certain playlist.  I wondered how it was that she could play certain playlists over and over again and never make progress toward completing them.

Yesterday, I got a random challenge by some person in another country.  I usually get irritated by these requests because a lot of the time, the person's music tastes are not compatible with mine.  I end up having to guess on playlists from Brazil or horrible techno rap or something.  So I went looking to see if I could find a way to stop the random challenge requests.  I was unsuccessful in my search, but then I found a discussion going on about SongPop's computer generated "bots" that trick players into thinking they are real people.

When it comes to SongPop, a little goes a long way.  I like playing a couple of games a day, but I don't like it when someone constantly wants to play.  Besides that, I think it's creepy that there are random bots out there trying to start games with people.  Why not let me know you're a bot before we spend months or years challenging each other?  I guess if that were possible, Anna would be a human and not a bot, right?

I probably should have realized she was a bot when I saw that she had so many games going.  I have enough on my hands with less than ten games.  Some people have over 100 games at a time.  Who's got the time or the patience for that?

Ah yes... the things I do to keep from going crazy from boredom.

I just knew it...

You know how some people say that people come into and out of your life for a reason?  Well, a couple of months ago, I wrote here about a drama I was involved in with the music department at my college.  It involved another non-music major student who studied voice with me and was two years behind me in school.  I don't really want to rehash what happened because you can read the post and get the whole lowdown there.  All I want to say is that I hoped that once I left our college, our paths wouldn't cross again.  While what happened was really idiotic and trivial, I try to give a wide berth to people who engage in blatant smear campaigns, even if they're really petty.

And our paths haven't crossed... exactly.  Except last night, a Facebook friend of mine who lives in Boston posted this hilarious story about how she accidentally flushed the key to her rental car down a public toilet.  I know this woman from working with her at a restaurant in Williamsburg, Virginia.  We have some mutual friends from other places, too.  For instance, she's friends with the guy who was my resident advisor my sophomore year and was the R.A. for the one men's hall (for freshmen guys) the year prior.  I had a lot of friends on that hall, so I knew him before he was my R.A.  He came on the thread and we reminisced a little about Longwood.  Then our mutual friend had another friend whose sister also went to Longwood and was two years behind me.  My friend's friend wanted to know if I knew her sister, since Longwood is a fairly small and cohesive school.  It turns out I didn't remember her sister, but then the sister got involved in our Facebook thread too.

The other Longwood graduate from the class of 1996 noticed we had a few mutual friends who were involved in music.  So she asked if I had been a music major.  I said I was an English major, but took a lot of music courses.  It turned out her roommate was a music major... and she happened to be friends with the wench who was trying to smear my name back in 1994.  I remember the two of them were conspiring like witches in a coven over that drama.  And then it also turned out that the wench who smeared my name was the Longwood grad's suitemate.  So she asked if I knew either of them.  I said I did, but didn't volunteer anything more, because she apparently is still friends with both of these women and the last time I want to do is reopen that ridiculous drama with them.  It still embarrasses me greatly that it actually happened.

I guess it just goes to show that there really are six degrees of separation in a lot of things.  Out of all the people out of the class of 1996 I could have interacted with, I had to run into the suitemate of the two women who caused so much petty drama during my last two months as an undergrad.  Crazy.

A new Facebook game...

My friend Summer introduced me to a fun game on Facebook which I think will lead to all sorts of new Dungeon of the Past posts.  The game is called SongPop, and it's basically like the old game show, Name That Tune.

You hear samples of songs from different genres and try to guess the name of the song or the artist.  You earn coins so that you can buy new categories.  The more you play, the more songs you unlock for each category.  The faster you identify each song, the more points you earn.  Summer and I are pretty well matched, which makes it fun to play with her.  We are equally strong in several categories, but there are others that she's better at than I am.

It helps to have a speedy modem when you play this game, since you're timed on how quickly you react.  Summer lost several games at first because her Internet connection was slower than mine.  When she switched computers, she became a lot harder to beat!

I recommend SongPop.  It's a lot of fun, especially for music fans wanting to kill some time.  Check it out if you're on Facebook!

This isn't me and Summer; it's just some random YouTube user...