Wings Over Sealand

Just a quick bit of housekeeping here, folks, nothing much to see. I'm not used to being popular, so I'm a tad mystified by the flow of Game Center friend requests that arrive on my iThings every day from people I don't know, and who, to be honest, I have very little interest in being pretend internet buddies with. I'm 44, y'know? I very much enjoy challenging personal friends, professional acquaintances or WoSland readers at games, but not some random adolescent from Bumhole, Nebraska.

The big problem with the internet, though, is that even many otherwise sane and decent people still insist on using absurd playground nicknames to identify themselves rather than proper human names, or at least – as in my own case with Game Center – the recognisable name of their app/business/whatever. So a request from "sUP3rKEWLd00d__87" might, horrendously, turn out to be from a person I actually do know in some way and would (inexplicably) wish to be "friends" with.

Unfortunately I have nowhere near enough time to scour through dozens and dozens of individual requests searching for clues that might helpfully identify people, and while I have occasional purges I just can't keep on top of the task of filtering the list (especially in the case of the unspeakably dreadful interface on OpenFeint). I certainly don't wish to cause any offence by inadvertently snubbing any readers of this site. So in future, if you want to be my e-chum and I might not instantly recognise you from your username alone, please help me out by putting something helpful in the message text. A simple "WoSland reader" or similar will do.

And in the meantime, if you're any of the people in the image below, please let me know. Otherwise, next week the whole lot's going in the bin and I'll be starting afresh, with a new policy of instantly hitting Ignore on any request I can't immediately identify as a friend or colleague or reader. Sorry.