It's amazing the stuff you find out about people just from reading their activity feeds on Facebook or FriendFeed. Deaths in the family, divorces, struggles with substance abuse, criminal convictions and sexual liaisons all seem to find their way into the same stream that reports pokes, zombie attacks and "Which Gossip Girl character are you?" quiz results.

Maybe I just need to get used to the incongruity of seeing tectonic life events reported with exactly the same prominence and gravity as an online Scrabble victory. Or maybe I just need to take online Scrabble a lot more seriously.