Look at All the Firefolk Sitting in the Air

This image is courtesy of the Pixie Pit, a splended website offering online Scrabble and a comprehensive bevy of fairy- and pixie-related graphics and activities.

My colleagues and I play a lot of Scrabble. We're fierce competitors, in a way that online Scrabble, in particular, breeds. Without f2f contact, there's a kind of myopic ferociousness -- nobody light-heartedly defends a questionable word while the rest of the company guffaws and someone pours more wine. Online Scrabble is terse and silent, and played with so little contact that at times you log in so impatiently you barely glance at your opponent's last play or the score. All you care about is your next play.

The Pixie Pit set this amazing system up and for a year we played for free. Now it costs $10, but it's worth it in spades. The game allows me to ignore everything except the frolicsome sense of being engaged in a fierce but pointless battle. That's better than the dreary but equally pointless battle which is life without online Scrabble.