Larry Hosken: New

Here are some of my popular posts from 2025. Now I can post a link to this post on the various social networks where I'm 99% dormant so folks can catch up. (If you're wondering about my active socials, that's mostly Mastodon and a little Bluesky.) Anyhow, behold the posts:

art-deco(?) style building with a sign on the corner that says Mart SF (but was blank for a while and said Twitter for a while before that)

Screen shot of a web app. There's a big green square that has dice scattered across it. Down below are some buttons,some of which have die-face titles; others just have black dots. It's very mysterious

storefront window painted to advertise: AI integrated PoS system

I once again wrote many-many small puzzles during the month of EnigMarch. This one was popular, having a laugh as DOGE made bad budget "cuts" along with typos. (This one was funnier before the reports of the hundreds of thousands of deaths resulting from those budget cuts came out, so pretend that news hasn't hit yet when reading): One Money Don't Stop No Show
I snapped a pic of the building that housed Twitter HQ after they took down the Twitter sign. I guess this one was popular with my former co-workers.
A short post quoted in its entirety here:
Still wrapping my head around the new reality: My cousin quit his job with the federal government and went to work at a startup, thus increasing his job security.
That was before the 1½ month federal government October-November shutdown. My cousin figured out which way the wind was blowing a few months ahead of time.
I wrote Walkzee, yet another little phone web app to entertain you during walks. (Also, I blogged about it, and the blog post "did numbers," thus reminding me that happened just this year though it feels like forever ago.)
I took photos around my neighborhood, including one useful for juvenile humor about LLMs: an advertisement for "AI Integrated PoS System."
I walked around San Francisco on the new Roundabout Trail. (Also, I blogged about it, and the blog post "did numbers," thus reminding me that happened just a few months ago though it feels like forever. Wow, 2025 was a long year.)

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2026-01-05T14:36:03.415566

Stencil artist Eclair Bandersnatch knows that it pays to increase your word power. Consider phthalates: if these chemicals are good for softening PVC plastic, maybe they can also soften your bones? The best way to find out is through experimentation, perhaps by eating microplastics or absorbing phthalates that are in cosmetics for some weird reason?

sidewalk stencil graffito on metal, maybe an underground utility thingy cover? there are some human and animal figures and some text. The text: What re phthalates? Phthalates are in all synthetic flavors and fragrance. Each one teach one. Phthalates DPB DEP DEHP ''Fragrance `'parfum

sidewalk stencil graffiti. Lots of human and animal figures. The humans tend to wear makeup: lipstick, mascara. there are some inverse-drawings, in which the figure is the absence of paint, a technique well-suited to stencils

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2026-01-01T14:39:34.048108

I have once again updated the Phraser phrase list and word list. These are big text files that list out some common phrases, along with a hazily-computed score number for each phrase; high-score phrases might be good candidates for puzzle answers; low-score phrases are so-so candidates. If you're a computer programmer and you want to write a little program to find the solution to a word puzzle, these files might come in handy if your logic is too gnarly for nutrimatic.

I gotta keep updating the lists, though. The list I generated six months ago doesn't think labubu is a thing. It acknowledged the existence of demon hunter but not kpop demon hunters. The old list doesn't know paramount skydance, the new list recognizes this modern monument to nepotism. The new list knows about phrases that have trended recently, including such gems as: in july 2025; in september 2025;… (many similar)…; sequel video games. OK, maybe they're not all gems. Anyhow, if you find these files handy for solving and/or designing word puzzles, head on over to the Phraser page and download the new ones.

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2026-01-01T14:31:25.862171

A couple of weeks back, I once again spent an afternoon helping to playtest the MaPP Challenge '26, a puzzle hunt aimed at math-enthusiastic high school students. When university math outreach nerds run hunt at various cities, hopefully things will go smoothly because dedicated playtesters Dave Moulton and I bumped into all the rough edges so the MaPP people will have a chance to sand those down.

The youth might think it's "sus" that I was playtesting their puzzles: It's been 30+ years since I was a high school student. But it's fine: as a precaution, I forgot all of my university math and most my high school math, too. OK, that's an exaggeration. There were a few times during the playtest when I thought, "Oh, I recognize this! It's a [spoiler redacted]!" But I swear I failed to remember anything about [spoiler redacted] that would actually help solve the puzzle.

When I hauled my phone out of my pocket and ran the ClueKeeper app, it was still showing the MaPP Challenge 2025 playtest, which tells you how many puzzling events I've attended lately. (Zero (0))

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2026-01-01T14:35:54.792637