Larry Hosken: New

Today, I reached level 100 in Pikmin Bloom, a walk-around-with-your-phone game. That's the highest level achievable.

And Alexander humblebragged: "Oh woe is me, I just don't know what to do with myself now that there are no more worlds to conquer."*

Anyhow, I will soon un-install the app; I'm 🏁 done-zo 🏁.

screen shot of game screen. At the top, a picture: a Mii (Nintendo game avatar) surrounded by Pikmin (insect-like creatures) stands in a field of flowers. Below, a badge reads 'Lv 100'. Also there's a bunch of achievement badges and other knickknacks

*This is not accurate: There are more things to accomplish in the game, achievement badges to collect, etc; but I don't feel motivated to go after those. Also, when I looked up that Alexander the Great "quote" about no-more-worlds-to-conquer, I found out he didn't actually say that but rather kinda the opposite.

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2024-11-30T16:22:32.521890

I continue to check my little dashboard of San Francisco COVID numbers each morning to figure out whether going into a cafe for professionally-made coffee is worth the risk or will be an embarrassing thing to explain to the medical professionals treating my long-COVID-induced heart condition[s].

This morning, my dashboard is b0rked. Good news: The California Department of Public Health has a new dashboard for COVID-in-wastewater data. Bad news: the old dashboard, whence my dashboard fetched its data, doesn't work anymore. I can't figure out how my automated dashboard is supposed to fetch data now. Ha ha, the timing: I get to find out its broken on USA Thanksgiving, and the relevant smart folks probably won't be checking their email for a few days.

Yay, computers.

This year I'm thankful that San Francisco's other COVID numbers are low; so I don't need to worry too much despite the fact that some data is missing at the moment.

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2024-11-28T17:48:27.710715

Book Report: The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers

A few months back, I played in SFPursuit, a San Francisco challenge hunt. Uhm, where "challenge hunt" is a phrase I made up just now for "Something like a puzzlehunt, but most of the activities aren't puzzle-y, but they are still challenging." One of the activities involved looking over a physical book that had been created for the hunt. A few bookstores across San Francisco had one copy each of the special book. Each player's phone directed them to the nearest such bookstore. There, they could find the special book, gather data from it, solve the book's riddle, and enter the answer on their phone to complete the challenge.

Thus I found myself in Fabulosa Books, negotiating with fellow hunt enthusiasts to snap pictures of the pages from a false birdwatching guide. Unsurprisingly to anyone who's participated in such events, everyone was very focused on solving the riddle; nobody bought any books.

I remembered back to when I helped run 'Terngame 2012 for Twitter interns. I'd set up one puzzle at Isotope Comics and then watched over the puzzle, in case any interns needed help solving it. All of the interns were hyperfocused on the puzzle; none of them dawdled in the store after solving to browse or buy. I felt pretty sheepish for having asked the store's propietor to let me set up the puzzle there. I might as well have used a conference room back at company HQ.

That's what was on my mind when I bought a book at Fabulosa. Oh? What's that you say? What did I think of the book?

In the novel The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers, the protagonist goes on a quest of self-discovery. He's been given a crossword puzzle; he's been instructed to seek out the answers to the puzzle along his journey. So one of the answers might be BEAUTY and the protagonist might encounter a really-nice sunset and contemplate its BEAUTY. And everyone reading the book is nodding "Yep, I saw that BEAUTY when I first solved the crossword, and now here we encounter it in the story; this whole story is satisfyingly interwoven."

The puzzle's kinda weird, tho. The book takes place in England, most of the characters are English. But the central-theme crossword puzzle uses American-style definition clues, not British-style cryptic clues. The book explains the reason thusly: The protagonist doesn't think of himself as smart enough to solve cryptic clues; the quest-giver knew this, and wanted the puzzle to be solve-able. But but cryptic clues are just a small part of why British-style puzzles can be difficult. A much bigger problem is that their grids are "sparse"; not every square is part of of an across-word and a down-word. In an American-style puzzle, if you don't know the across answer, the first name of whazzerface Świątek you might still be OK: Maybe you'll know the down-answers that intersect. But in a British-style grid, even if you have all the intersecting answers, you don't have all the letters.

British crossword grid. Many of the squares are in just an across-word or just a down-word
A British-style crossword grid from Wikipedia

Maybe you're looking at S□A□E and you're not sure whether it's SCALE, SHADE, SHAKE, SHAME, SHAPE, SHARE, SLATE, SNAKE, SPACE, SPARE, STAGE, STATE, or what-have you. If the clue is British-cryptic-style, you have some hope: the clue has two halves: one definition, one wordplay. If the definition is so vague that you're not sure whether the answer is SHAPE or SPACE, probably the wordplay will clear things up. (oh, a "change" of phase, ok)

So… our not-amazing-puzzler protagonist has to solve a crossword in a British-style grid and doesn't have an answer key, so he has to just hope that he picked the right words, that □E□T□E might be CENTRE or KETTLE

Also, one of the crossword clues is wrong: it points you at a noun, but the answer is the verb form of that noun. It's weird that one clue was wrong. In a novel structured around a crossword, I either expect no mistakes (a puzzle nerd trying their hand at novel-writing) or many mistakes (a novelist who doesn't know the rules of crosswords but nevertheless wants to incorporate one).

Here's my best hypothesis: The author's first draft of this novel used a British-style crossword with cryptic clues. The author was delighted when an American publisher picked up the novel: His work would reach a big audience! But the publisher imposed a condition: Those cryptic clues had to go; you couldn't expect Americans to understand them. The author, gnashing his teeth at this slight to his culture, swapped out his cryptic clues for grudgingly-written defintion-clue replacements, not noticing that he'd messed one of them up.

Oh? What's that you say? What did I think of the book?

It was OK. It did a great job of structuring the story around the crossword. If the crossword had been a mistake-less cryptic, maybe I'd be calling this book masterful.

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2024-11-20T21:59:34.077030

Book Report: Subprime Attention Crisis

Much of the internet runs on ads; but maybe it's a house of cards. Apps, web pages, other content-thingies show ads to defray their costs. Advertisers want to show their messages to potential customers, and pay to do so. Everybody wins.

Except it doesn't always work so smoothly. A small business might want to show their ads on news sites and phone games and Google searches and other places; but maybe doesn't want to keep track of how their ads are doing at all those different places. So maybe the small business signs up with a couple of intermediary services, each service promising to show the ad to some desired demographic. Maybe everything's working fine? Maybe it's not? It's hard to tell.

The small business starts getting billed for ads. Thanks to creepy surveillance, that phone game thinks it knows its players' demographics, and thus will show the ad to the right people. But what if it has the demographics wrong? Or what if the intermediary service messed up and asked for the wrong demographic? Or what if the intermediary service is crooked, never actually places any ads, just sends a plausible-looking bill? Or what if…

It turns out, a lot of this stuff is pretty opaque. Publishers and advertisers have to take a lot on faith. We know ads aren't always shown to the right people, but we don't know how often. We know there's fraud out there, but we don't know how much.

The book's author compares the situation to the subprime mortgage meltdown: We know there are some bad assets out there. We know the rating system has incentive to be lazy about seeking out that badness. Is it all about to fall apart? Maybe. That could be darned bad news for news sites; even if the advertising markets only crash for a short while, it might be long enough for shoestring news organizations to go under.

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2024-11-15T23:47:32.464406

Poll Clerking 2024: The Paper Jam

November 5, 2024, I once again volunteered as a poll clerk for a San Francisco election. I clerked at the same garage as 2022, and it was still swanky: building owner Jay served up espresso drinks, Italian soda, donuts, snacks.

The crew was:

I mention that Victoria returned. Another returner: Kayden, our 2022 high school student volunteer. But he wasn't clerking this year; he came to vote.

Something new happened this year: We had a paper jam.

This ballot, physically, was four big sheets of thick paper. (thin cardstock?) Voters marked their sheets with a pen, tore receipt strips off the tops, then fed the big parts of the sheets into a scanner to be counted. But but one voter botched tearing the little receipt-strips off. They had ragged edges and tore into the ballot sheets. When they fed a sheet into the scanner, things didn't go great. The scanner pulled in the sheet, made some unhappy whining noises, stopped, and displayed an error message on screen.

I was standing next to the machine when this happened. I knew what to do next: We have a little booklet that explains the machine's mysterious error codes. Error 1 means such-and-such went wrong, the fix is this; Error 2 means this-other-thingy went wrong, the fix is this; etc. So I flipped through the little booklet; it didn't have an explanation for this error message. Fortunately, Poll Inspector and fearless leader Christina knew that our San Francisco Poll Worker manuals contained a second list of error messages and remedies. This list knew about the error message we were looking at: Yep, it was a paper jam. There was a remedy: Press a button to exhort the scanner to expel the jammed sheet. Alas, pressing this button caused the machine to give forth no sheet, but instead more whining noises.

We called up the Department of Elections phone hotline to find out what to do next. A nice Dept-of-E person asked for the error message, asked us to press the expel-jammed-paper-button again, and when that didn't work told us to wait for a technician to come visit and clear the paper jam. Until the technician showed up, we were to tell voters that they could either wait for the technician, or could hand over their ballots to be stored in The Auxiliary Bin: a compartment on the side of the ballot scanner. After the technician unjammed things, one of us could feed those stored ballots into the scanner.

So I, the clerk standing next to the scanner, had the not-so-fun conversation with voters: Unfortunately, we have a paper jam. You can't feed your ballot into the scanner right now. You can wait for the technician, or I can put your ballot in The Auxiliary Bin for now and scan it when the technician has fixed things.

To me, this felt sketchy. I knew that historically, sometimes poll workers are corrupt. Maybe that clerk by the scanner is lying about the "paper jam". Maybe if you, the voter, hand over your ballot to be scanned "later," that clerk will look over your choices, frown, and "lose" your ballot. (I asked many people to hand over their ballots. I wonder how many of them grew up in places with "elections" like this?) San Francisco has safeguards against this corruption: poll workers watch each other; an audit will catch sites that hand out more ballots than get scanned; probably other safeguards, too. Nevertheless, asking voters to just hand over their ballots felt bad. And this was during the morning rush—many people wanted to scan their ballots and then head to work. Now they had to pause and make a decision.

Most voters handed over their ballots without thinking about it. Some voters peered at me, thought, and handed over their ballots. A few hung on to their ballots. I found these few ballot-hanger-on voters comforting. They were keeping things honest.

Eventually, the technician showed up. You, experienced at clearing paper jams from printers might wonder: Do they really need a specialized technician to clear a simple paper jam? But this was an election, and this technician was, basically, tampering with election equipment. Most of what he did was keeping records. He stayed on the phone with someone back at Dept of Elections office, telling them "OK, I'm going to break the security seal. I'm opening up the panel." He spent a lot of time making sure nobody (including him) was committing election crimes, very little time clearing out the paper jam itself.

Then I took on my second sketchy task: Feeding those Auxiliary Bin-stored ballots into the scanner. Anyone walking into the polling place would have seen me hunched over a stack of ballot sheets, picking them up and feeding them into the scanner. It must have looked pretty suspicious. I kind of hope that some voter called up the Dept of Elections to report my actions.


A few days later, I ambled along a local retail street, seeking a sandwich. I spotted the voter who'd torn the ballot that started the whole mess. They spotted me at the same time; looked away; seemed embarrassed. I hope they weren't too embarrassed. I hope they keep voting, maybe hope they ask for help tearing off the strips next time. Nobody was born knowing how to do it, and I don't think standard high school Civics classes cover papercraft.

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2024-11-11T16:00:09.569051

I see the NYT Tech Guild went on strike, so this might be a good time for me to post links to my list of daily puzzle pages, so folks have something to do in the absence of their crossword and/or that thing with the bees:

Anyhow, puzzle on and don't cross the line.

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2024-11-04T16:01:56.573066

Comic ^W Game Report: The Beyond

I enjoyed the puzzle-y game-y comic book The Beyond, by Jason Shiga, though I played it wrong. Like his previous work Leviathan, The Beyond is a choose-your-own-adventure book, but comics instead of plain ol' text. This game's gimmick: you encounter some special items, each of those special items has a number. Sometimes when the instructions tell you which page to turn to, you use an item and add its number, so the item affects what happens next in the plot. It's a neat gimmick.

I played it wrong. I followed instructions: in the game, I found an item. Later on, I used the item and that affected what happened next in the plot, neat. But I failed to notice that in the comic, my character had left that item behind. Later on, I encountered other special-number items, and then a situation where I could use them. Not realizing that my character had left the first special-number item behind, I "used" it, again adding its number to decide which page to turn to—and jumped to a page in the book that the author didn't expect. So I was looking at a bit of comic with an abrupt transition. But I knew that Jason Shiga is a tricky writer, and I can be pretty tricky myself, so I "cleverly" constructed a probable plotline in my head, bridged the strange transition from my old situation to my new situation, figured that the author had just elided some parts and expected me to figure out what had happened. Then I encountered a puzzle where I was supposed to use my knowledge of the number that had brought me to this point…but of course I had used the wrong number. So when I applied my "knowledge," things got weirder and I figured out that I should start over. And when I played again, I finally noticed how the book was trying to call my attention to that first item getting left behind. Ahem. Anyhow. I eventually finished the comic-game legit.

I notice that the computer game version of this comic-game-thingy is coming out in a few days. Maybe it will have an "inventory" system that keeps track of which items you carry with you (or leave behind); maybe it won't, though. I dunno. Anyhow, if you like books, get the book. If you like computer games, get the game. It's tricky, and if you're too-clever-by-half, you can make it even trickier.

cover art for the comic, which features our protagonist carrying a harpoon against a background that suggests comic panels

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2024-11-02T18:32:45.759821

I donated to the A.P. News Service today. Now I'm a paid subscriber, sort of.

I was dismayed when the Washington Post's owner killed some stories about why Trump should not be president of the USA. I subscribed to the Post for its national news; but apparently, I couldn't trust it. So I unsubscribed.

Where should I get national news then? Not the Washington Post, apparently. Not the New York Times; I remember groaning about their confident-but-wrong tech reporting many years back. If I couldn't trust their reporting in a topic I knew, how could I trust it in a topic I didn't know? Maybe I could give them another chance; a lot can change in a few years. But, thanks to trust issues, the New York Times wasn't my first choice.

I noticed I read a lot A.P. News stories, mostly because of links shared to social media. So… I already get a lot of my USA national news from the A.P. Could I subscribe to A.P. News? They don't have paid subscriptions. I'd like to pay for my news. You can get daily emails from the A.P., but you can't pay for them. You can follow them on various social thingies, but you can't pay for those. Their web site does have a Donate button, however. So I donated; so now I'm a paid subscriber, sort of.

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2024-10-27T13:44:10.995028

*unpins the browser tab devoted to the Washington Post daily crossword puzzle web page*

So long, old friend. I hope you understand why I had to unsubscribe.

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2024-10-25T18:32:54.433527

Book Report: Shift Happens, Vol. №2

It's the second volume in a set of books about the history of keyboards, text entry, the user experience of working with text on various devices. This volume got into more modern history. Sometimes I was learning stuff, but other times I was just wallowing in nostalgia. Or maybe "nostalgia" isn't the right word. What's the word for when you find out that you misunderstood what was going on at the time? Decades ago, I thought I cured my repetitive strain injury by making sure I used different types of keyboard at home and at work. Now, reading this book, I figured out that what really cured my RSI is that the new "different" keyboard I bought for home was thinner than older keyboards, and thus didn't encourage my wrists to bend so much.

(OK, there was regular ol' nostalgia, too. Talking about Japanese text entry, I remembered how the then-newfangled Canon WordTank was so much easier to use than my Nelson's paper kanji dictionary. At the time, such a game-changer. Nowadays, the idea of a separate dictionary device seems absurd, tho.)

Anyhow, there's modern keyboard history, how keyboards migrated onto our phones, then (alas) to our phone screens. There are a couple of chapters about modern keyboard enthusiasts who soup up their keyboards with custom designed keys, custom-built boards… Uhm, I didn't really try to follow those chapters too closely because I already have enough hobbies. (Also, I would feel bad if I spilled snacks on a nice keyboard, so that's a deal-breaker.)

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2024-10-24T00:29:03.642600

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