Most Obvious New Kids Exercise Yet

From MonkeyFilter Wiki

oumonerc4t The longest ongoing MoFi activity to date (7 May 2005) is a multiple-thread game in which each comment must be an anagram for the previous one.

Example:

Sobbing excessively time
That irritates my ego
Equally galling objection
etcetra, etcetra...

The concept is not original. It started on 20 May 2003 here (go to the bottom of the page) with "This is the first sentence" and ran for exactly 3000 entries at this site until 25 November 2003. MetaFilter member coudal posted a link to the original game on 30 July 2003, and simultaneously started a new game there. By the time MeFi's automatic 'close after one month' kicked in, the thread was 1033 comments long.

On 3 December 2003, known troublemaker Wendell brought the game to MoFi, using the acronymic title Most Obvious New Kids Exercise Yet.

After 361 entries, on 22 December Monkey a cheeky monkey started a new thread here that ran another 153 entries until some go-getter opened a new thread here on 20 January 2004. That thread attracted 179 entries, then some forkin' tofu lover started the appropriately inaccurate New Kids IX: Math Is Hard on 21 February, which ran another 137 posts.

On 05 April, the Originating Monkey (who was a little ticked off that his "M.O.N.K.E.Y." game had been re-titled "New Kids") seized control over the game here for another 305 entries, then here on 15 April for another 195, and then here on 1 May for another 665 entries!!!

By 08 September, the obsessive-compulsive Wendell was no longer obsessed about the "New Kids" title, because he had become preoccupied with how often the word "Elephants" was used to finish another entry, so, for the next extension of the game, he gathered up a dozen of the previously-used Elephants acronyms to start the thread. But The All-Authoratative Monkeybashi was not pleased and threatened to delete any future game threads. One of the wiser old monkeys (emphasis on OLD) asked "Can't this game be hosted somewhere else for those who like it?", but that suggestion was pretty much ignored and the thread went on for 351 entries through 06 October.

After a week of inactivity, one of MoFi's better petes tempted fate and started a new game on 13 October 2004 under the title Semantic Simian Savannah and it collected over 1900 entries resulting in a supremely slow-loading web page before 03 April 2005, when one of the game's premier players, a wacky bee, suggested moving the game back to its original location. The suggestion was unanimously applauded and all the players packed up and went to the M.O.N.K.E.Y. thread (except for a lone Suocialist who was caught playing with himself). As of 11 July 2005, that thread has grown to 1237 comments, resulting in yet another behemoth sloth-like web page. Our favorite bee proposed MOVING DAY? on 12 July 2005, which brings us full-circle to Attack of the Clowns.

A quick totalling of all the M.O.N.K.E.Y. game threads in the last 17 month comes out to... (1237 153 179 137 307 195 665 351 1976) WHEW! 5200 entries to date!!! More than the two previous incarnations of the game combined!!! (although a small amount, about 1%, were not actual entries but comments about the game and another 1% were entries that accidentally duplicated the target word, which shouldn't count either, but I'm not going back to count them all)

Now, in light of MonkeyFilter's recent outage, Wendell is making a modest proposal to help save bandwidth at the MonkeyHouse: to move the game to its own place, a domain unilaterally chosen as WORDPOWERS.COM and hosted by Wendell using some free blogging software.

To be continued, indeed...