I'm sufficiently vain to set a Google alert so I find out
when I'm mentioned someplace new on the World Wide Web.
Thus I found out I'm in the Acknowledgments section of a
recent academic paper.
Oh, neat!
Some nerds at a company called Scale A.I. set up a new
benchmark for AIs.
Here, a "benchmark" is a set of questions and answers; ask the
same questions to several AIs, grade those AIs based on how many
answers they get right. This new benchmark was unusual:
They gathered together puzzles
from places like
the MIT Mystery Hunt and
Puzzled Pint.
I, with esteemed puzzle editor
Neal Tibrewala,
made some Puzzled Pint puzzles, thus the acknowledgment.
(Some question the utility of this benchmark; is it useful
to measure a chatbot's wordplay ability if customers don't care
about that and instead want the chatbot's advice on, say, setting
a tariff rate on an uninhabited set of islands in the Antarctic?
This is a valid point. One nice thing about puzzles: They
have unambiguously correct answers. Grading the answers to
questions like "What tariff should we apply on these penguins?"
isn't so straightforward.)
I chuckled. I wanted to keep up with whatever other silly things
these "Scale" people came up with. I looked around to see if
they had a blog I could follow. I found their blog!
I saw some recent articles:
-
"Scale AI products approved for
purchase on AWS Marketplace for the U.S. National Security Community"
(military intelligence can use Scale's A.I. vision tech to track my
movements through a crowd so that autonomous drones can find and kill me)
-
"Machine Perception for Human Protection: Creating Vision Algorithms
to Augment Perimeter Security"
(Finally, some good news: This tech would only try to kill me if I
were on a boat, which is only rarely)
-
"Introducing Thunderforge: AI for American Defense"
(They're working with the ghouls at Anduril to make AI for military
decisions, e.g., whether to find and kill me vs
some other potential target.)
-
"Letter from Alexandr Wang to President Trump on Winning the AI War"
("There is incredible evidence about how AI can
improve government efficiency, decision-making, and service delivery."
This is technically not a lie, since "incredible" can mean
unbelievable.)
When a bunch of AIs try to solve Mystery Hunt puzzles and get 0.00%
correct, it's a fun chuckle. But when Israel's military uses AI to
figure out who to kill and ends up murdering aid workers and reporters,
nobody's laughing.
Whew! Who knew looking over a vanity alert would just lead to a
reminder that there are people playing at keeping me safe by means of
scattershot murder. Here's hoping they fail at the scattershot murder part.
Permalink
It's the third book in Curtis Chen's Kangaroo sci-fi/spy/comedy series.
It continues the tradition of witty banter, action, and intrigue.
Of course, I was mostly focused on looking out for the puzzle-y bits;
Curtis was a pillar of the SF Bay Area's puzzlehunt community while he lived around here.
This novel comes through:
Our young and snarky protagonist, seeking to annoy a fussy fellow spy,
uses the least secure variant of Pig Latin.
Yes, Curtis used puzzlehunt-y lore to demonstrate character.
(It's not puzzle-y, but I also noticed when the young and optimistic protagonist said,
of a man-made sci-fi nanobot-altered-virus disaster, "because it's in the history books now
and no one who lived through it will ever forget." And of course in my head I was already
plotting out the 30-years-further-in-the-future sequel in which our now old and jaded protagonist,
facing yet another nanobot-altered-virus disaster thinks oh for f*ck's sake, not again.)
It's fun, give it a read; or if you haven't already read the first couple of books in the series
I guess start there.
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "puzzle".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
(egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
fails so constantly and consistently that
for every day in the month of March, it was
pretty easy to find a screw-up that went with
the EnigMarch daily word. Well it wasn't always
easy; on the 25th, I was overwhelmed by choice.
Today that's maybe happening again? Hmm, "puzzle."
OK, here's a puzzle from 2021: The
C.I.A. warned its field offices:
many C.I.A. spies were being killed or turned.
It was a real mystery: How were our adversaries
figuring out who to recruit and/or assassinate?
We may never know the answer for sure, but it sure
was interesting when they
found all of those classified documents Trump
was keeping in a bathroom in 2022.
Did Trump sell secrets to other countries, thus enabling
those countries to narrow down who was leaking?
We don't know, of course.
Thank you for putting up with all of these puzzles
about Don (and, for most of them, Elon). Here's
#31, a crossword puzzle.
Notice: There are two sets of five circles each. Those are
Don and Elon, together for one last puzzle.
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "route".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
(egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
keeps threatening to take over Greenland.
He seems to think Greenlanders will welcome the USA as liberators.
Why? Because he's stupid.
(For some history of why Greenlanders might not appreciate the USA
or Denmark rule, you might refresh your memories of that time
America dropped some nuclear bombs there by accident and then some
very unhappy people had to go into some very cold water to retrieve
those bombs.)
Usha Vance, V.P.J.D. Vance's wife, planned to go to Greenland for some P.R.
Her plan: visit some friendly Greenlanders, view a big dogsled race, spread
goodwill. But when her aides scouted ahead to find
someone, anyone in Greenland who wanted to meet her, they got
no takers.
So that part of her itinerary got discarded.
Then they figured out just how popular the US isn't in Greenland right now,
and the dogsled race part of her itinerary got discarded, too.
In the end, she just visited a US military base.
To honor the efforts of her hapless aides wandering the streets of Nuuk in
forlorn hope of a friendly face, here's a maze for you to find a route
through from top to bottom. (No secret message today, just
a maze to wander.) Ice cubes are walls; black squares you can
walk on. There are some cold-ish emoji scattered about; they might
be handy landmarks.
π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§β¬π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§
π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§
π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§π§π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§
π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§
π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π¨β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§
π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§
π§π§π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π₯Άβ¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬βΈοΈβ¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§
π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§π§π§π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§
π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§π§β¬π§π§π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§
π§π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§
π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§π§π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§
π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§
π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§
π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§
π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§
π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§π§β¬β¬π§π§π§π§
π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§π§
π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§
π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§π§π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬πβ¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§
π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§
π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§
π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬βοΈβ¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§
π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§
π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§π§π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§π§
π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§
π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§
π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§π§
π§π§π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§
π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§π§π§π§
π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§π§π§π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§
π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§π§π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§
π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬ββ¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§
π§β¬π§π§β¬π§π§π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§
π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§
π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§
π§π§π§π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§π§
π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§π§π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§
π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π·β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§π§
π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§π§π§β¬β¬β¬π‘οΈβ¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§
π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§
π§π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬π§π§π§β¬π§π§β¬π§π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§
π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬π§β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬π§β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬π§π§β¬π§π§π§
π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§β¬π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§π§
Hints, rot-13'd:
These hints are the "landmark" emoji you'll encounter going from north to south.
If you were hoping for directions from south to north, maybe decode 'em from the bottom.
- zbfg bs gur jnl gb gur vpr fxngr, ohg ghea fbhgu rneyl
- ubpxrl fgvpx
- fabjzna
- fyrq
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It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "compass".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
(egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
really wanted to send a lot of water south in a hurry.
A wildfire had spread to the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of
Los Angeles. Fox News showed a big problem: hoses plugged
into fire hydrants weren't getting enough pressure to actually
spray water.
Trump knew that California had lots of water in the North;
but Los Angeles was in the South. Trump obsesses over this.
On another occasion when he was throwing tantrums about wanting
to remove federal protection from endangered species, he specifically
called out the Delta Smelt, an endangered fish species that's
been especially-endangered by California's past efforts to build
canals from the wet North to the arid South.
With fires burning, Trump wasn't going to let any fish stop him
from sending water south!
(By this point, the firehoses in Los Angeles had water pressure again. The problem wasn't a citywide water shortage, just a local problem with terrible timing. But he didn't care.)
He ordered the Army Corps of Engineers
to send water from its California reservoirs into canals.
When the Engineers
told him that was stupid, Elon Musk sent a couple of DOGE dimwits
to open up the canals anyhow.
Thus California sent a lot of water from north to south…not
to Los Angeles, those canals didn't go to Los Angeles. The water
went to Tulare Lake, which had no use for it. Let's hope California
doesn't have a drought this year, since a couple of stupid gits
dumped a big chunk of water water reserves.
Anyhow, here's a puzzle. In the North, we have some words and phrases.
In the South, we have those words and phrases with H2O added.
That is, some clown added H H and O one of the north phrases and then
swirled up the result. For example: because + hho,
anagrammed gives us beach house. That β’ under "beach house"
means that we should jot down the third letter of "because":
C. Once you match up the North and South phrases, the letters
you jot down should spell out an appropriate word.
army units
because
complicate
interesting
permits
renting
RuneScape
β
North
South
β
beach
house
β’
C
human
history
β€
mothership
β’
night
heron
β
photochemical
β©
Schopenhauer
β’
there is
nothing
β’
Some hints, rot-13'd:
- Bayl bar L va guvf chmmyr.
- Bayl 2 Tf va guvf chmmyr, bar jvgu na F naq nabgure jvgu ab F.
- Fpubcraunhre naq EharFpncr tb gbtrgure, ng yrnfg va guvf pbagrkg
Puzzle solution, rot-13'd:
p / ornpu.ubhfr / orpnhfr
h / uhzna.uvfgbel / nezl havgf
e / zbgurefuvc / crezvgf
e / avtug.ureba / eragvat
r / cubgbpurzvpny / pbzcyvpngr
a / Fpubcraunhre / EharFpncr
g / gurer vf.abguvat / vagrerfgvat
Permalink
It's about crossword puzzles: history, current bigshots, the author's personal experience attending ACPT and a crossword-celebrating ocean voyage, …
You are not shocked to learn that I apparently already absorbed a fair amount of crossword knowledge
by reading blogs, watching that "Wordplay" movie some years back, hasty research for puzzlehunts, etc.
But I did learn a couple of nifty things:
Ernie Bushmiller, the Nancy cartoonist, got his start drawing crossword grids.
Back in those days, you couldn't just ask a computer to draw a grid of squares and fill some of them with black.
Someone had to sit down with a straightedge and draw by hand.
People call Nancy "diagrammatic," maybe Bushmiller just never got over drawing those grids.
Crossfire is OK.
The author, Adrienne Raphel, writes about her experience creating a crossword using the Crossfire program.
I used Crossword Compiler, a different crossword-making program. Crossword Compiler is made for Windows
machine; I don't have a Windows machine, so I struggled to use Crossword Compiler with an emulator.
It mostly worked, but some buttons in the app just did nothing. In recent years, more buttons
stopped working. (I don't think Crossword Compiler changed; I think my Windows emulator changed,
alas, breaking some things.) Raphel used Crossfire and didn't notice a horribly
long wait when using its auto-fill feature. I'd stuck with Crossword Compiler for its fast auto-fill; but maybe
Crossfire was fast enough? Crossfire runs on several kinds of computer, even my Linux machine.
I gave Crossfire a whirl, and it worked fine. You might have noticed that for #EnigMarch so far, I made
three crosswords and uploaded them to Crosshare. I made those crosswords with Crossfire.
In my efforts to give less money to the recently-Nazi-wannabe-aligned Amazon,
I put my old Kindle on a shelf and bought a Kobo e-reader.
It works about the same as the Kindle. It's fine. This here book was the
first I read on the Kobo.
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "draw".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump, back towards the end of his
disastrous first term, tweeted about the incoming Hurricane Dorian.
He tweeted about which US states would be hit—but alas, he's
stupid, so he mistakenly
added Alabama to the list.
This confused some Alabamans, who then did something dangeous:
They asked about the mistake. Trump threw a tantrum and published
a video in which he showed a map illustrating where the hurricane
would go—a map which somebody had crudely
drawn on with a Sharpie pen, trying to extend the
path so that it reached Alabama.
When asked later, Trump said he wasn't sure who had altered the map.
Yes, who on earth had motive to edit the map to try to reflect
Trump's asinine statement? Who could it be?
Five years later, almost half of America's voters re-elected this man.
Oh my goodness. What? Oh, right, the puzzle. ahem
We had some nice words, but some clown insists
on adding AL to each of them. For example, he
saw fine and turned it to finale. We
filled in that one. Can you fill in the rest? When you do,
the circled letters spell out a better medium for the clown's
future artistic endeavors:
| Grand end of a narrative. E.g.: Question Hound haunted an attic with ghostly fire: | β»i n a L e |
| Not all animals here are poisonous! (Some are venomous): | _ _ _ _ _ _ _β―_ |
| America's Got…: | _ _ _ _β―_ |
| Good app for consumers. Not so good for Houthi PC Small Group, tho: | _ _β―_ _ _ |
| Hanlon said not to confuse it with stupidity; Trump said "Why not both?": | _ _ _ _ _β― |
| Who you'll have to ask for vaccines next year, probably: | _ _ _ _ _β― |
Loon ex-governor who still gets on talk shows somehow?
(That link is a spoiler, but I fear the young folks might not remember this loon): | β―_ _ _ _ |
| Election fraud conspiracy theorist's fixation: | _β―_ _ _ _ |
| It's salty (more as in briny than in whiny): | _ _ _β―_ _ |
| Eagle's got…: | _ _ _ _β― |
| Tasty treat that may be big and/or hot: | β―_ _ _ _ _ |
Original (Do not call them "correct") words: Austria, blot, deer, fine, mice, pin, sign, sine, tame, tent, ton
Hints, rot-13'd:
- Ubhguv CP Fznyy Tebhc jnf ba gur Fvtany ncc
- Cnyva jnf Nynfxn'f ybba Tbireabe, abj n ybba chaqvg
- Fnyvar vf fnygl
Solution, rot-13'd:
Svanyr / svar / Tenaq raq bs n aneengvir.
nhfgenyVn / nhfgevn / Abg nyy navznyf urer ner cbvfbabhf!
gnyrAg / grag / Nzrevpn'f Tbg
fvTany / fvta / Tbbq ncc sbe pbafhzref. Abg fb tbbq sbe Ubhguv CP Fznyy Tebhc, gub
znyvpR / zvpr / Unayba fnvq abg gb pbashfr vg jvgu fghcvqvgl; Gehzc fnvq "Jul abg obgu?"
qrnyrE / qrre / Jub lbh'yy unir gb nfx sbe inppvarf arkg lrne, cebonoyl
Cnyva / cva / Ybba rk-tbireabe jub fgvyy trgf ba gnyx fubjf fbzrubj
oNyybg / oybg / Ryrpgvba senhq pbafcvenpl gurbevfg'f svkngvba
fnyVar / fvar / Vg'f fnygl (zber nf va oeval guna va juval)
gnybA / gba / Rntyr'f tbg
Gnznyr / gnzr / Gnfgl gerng gung znl or ovt naq/be ubg
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "loop".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
(egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
appointed Mike Waltz to be National Security Advisor.
It turns out
Mike is the detail-oriented guy who
accidentally added a reporter to the Espionage-Act-violating
group chat I mentioned a couple of days ago.
Who was in the loop? Not Trump. Not Elon. But, yes,
Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic.
(I guess for a light-hearted puzzle it's good
to focus on the colossal screw-up of inviting the wrong
guy to the group chat. But you maybe don't want to read
the transcript of that chat unless you've braced yourself.
There's some ghoulish joy over the US blowing up
an apartment building full of civilians to kill one
hostile militant.)
In Mike's honor, here is a loop of words to fill in.
We filled in WALTZ for you.
The words overlap; the grid overlaps tell you that you're
looking for a word that starts with Z and another
word that ends with WALT. The clues down below
should help, but they're in alphabetic order, not ordered
as in the loop.
W a l t z
Z _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ w a l t
W a l t z
The _ Broncos, 1998 Super Bowl champions
The continental _ tells rivers which ocean to flow to
_ Allan Poe, wrote about cryptograms
Madison Square _, a.k.a. NYC's MSG
The _ Man, card XII of the major arcana
Comedy actor Patton _ was in "Young Adult"
Giuseppe _ composed operas like Rigoletto
Does MTV still show music _?
Dance not for klutzes, Mike
_ Shuai, runner-up at the 2024 US Open
Hints, rot-13'd:
- Gur Unatrq Zna vf n gnebg pneq
- Munat Fuhnv vf tbbq ng graavf
- Gur pbagvaragny qvivqr jevttyrf orgjrra eviref
Solution, rot-13'd:
jnygm / jnygm / Qnapr abg sbe xyhgmrf, Zvxr
munat / fuhnv / _ Fuhnv, ehaare-hc ng gur 2024 HF Bcra
unatrq / zna / Gur _ Zna, pneq KVV bs gur znwbe nepnan
rqtne / nyyna_cbr / _ Nyyna Cbr, jebgr nobhg pelcgbtenzf
tneqra / znqvfba_fdhner / Znqvfba Fdhner _, n.x.n. ALP'f ZFT
qraire / oebapbf / Gur _ Oebapbf, 1998 Fhcre Objy punzcvbaf
ireqv / tvhfrccr / Tvhfrccr _ pbzcbfrq bcrenf yvxr Evtbyrggb
qvivqr / pbagvaragny / Gur pbagvaragny _ gryyf eviref juvpu bprna gb sybj gb
ivqrbf / zhfvp / Qbrf ZGI fgvyy fubj zhfvp _?
bfjnyg / cnggba / Pbzrql npgbe Cnggba _ jnf va "Lbhat Nqhyg"
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "play".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump and his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk
don't understand gender and they throw tantrums when trans women play
women's sports. These clowns say they're worried that men will pretend to be
trans to peep in the women's changing room. As if the
problem there is trans women—anyone who only claims to want to
participate in some activity just to peek in the changing room is a menace,
no matter what their gender, even if everyone agrees on what that gender is.
For example,
Trump bought some beauty pageants. For years, he barged into dressing
pageant dressing rooms. His gender wasn't the problem, just
the creepiness.
Can you figure out what these words are supposed to be?
Some clown has stuck πΌ and π΅ labels on them, getting
it wrong every time. For example, they saw someone
playing and said they were flaming.
You might worry that it's ambiguous: How did we know
it was playing and not blazing or glaring
or clawing or… Don't worry, we have clues
for the words. You can see we already crossed out
the clue for playing. OK, you can worry a little:
the clues aren't in order; you'll have to think to figure
out which goes with which word.
When you're done, the circled letters will spell
a word for a better way to celebrate our country's might
than chasing some women out of sports.
| π΅laπΌing | β
laβing |
| π΅ather | β―ather |
| riπ΅t | riβ―t |
| staπ΅π΅ | staβ―β― |
| duπΌπΌy | duβ―β―y |
| π΅ine | β―ine |
| π΅ran | β―ran |
| π΅aπΌe | β―aβ―e |
Clues:
- By choice
- Day 20
- Less ruly than a rally as protests go
- Maybe bigger than an earldom. (Definitely more fun to say.)
- Nation home to the Natanz Nuclear Facility
- One of 50 in the USA
-
Participating in a sport, perhaps
- Square
Hints, rot-13'd:
- Ol pubvpr tbrf jvgu sngure. Yrff ehyl tbrf jvgu evsg.
- Fdhner tbrf jvgu svar. Angvba tbrf jvgu Sena.
- Qhpul vf sha gb fnl orpnhfr vg fbhaqf yvxr "qbbxvr" v.r., cbbc
Solution, rot-13'd:
cl / synzvat / CynLvat / Cnegvpvcngvat va n fcbeg, creuncf
e / sngure / Engure / Ol pubvpr
b / evsg / evBg / Yrff ehyl guna n enyyl nf cebgrfgf tb
gr / fgnss / fgnGR / Bar bs 50 va gur HFN
pu / qhzzl / qhPUl / Znlor ovttre guna na rneyqbz.
a / svar / Avar / Fdhner
v / sena / Vena / Angvba ubzr gb gur Angnam Ahpyrne Snpvyvgl
pf / snzr / PnFr / Qnl 20
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It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "random".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
(egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
has done something random! He… uh.
It's at this point that I'm supposed to pick our some
action by the administration that fits the theme "random".
I am overwhelmed by choice. Whoosh. Hoo boy.
OK, hang on, I got this.
Today a reporter for the Atlantic reported that the Secretary
of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence were sharing
classfied files in a Signal chat room. They violated the espionage
act, but probably thought they'd get away with it because Signal
chat rooms can auto-delete messages after a while. But our drunkard
Secretary of Defense added a reporter to the chat room and didn't even notice.
[Update: I got this wrong. It wasn't our drunkard Secretary of Defense
who invited the reporter to the chat. It was National Security Advisor
Michael Waltz. Though it's a safe bet that Hegseth is drunk at any
given moment, it's not clear what Waltz's excuse was. I'm told that Waltz is
stupid; but plenty of other people in that chat group are stupid, and
they didn't make that mistake.]
Anyhow,
I made you a cryptic crossword. I was still feeling overwhelmed
by choice, so I used anagramming in every entry and always indicated
it with "random." Enjoy!
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "search".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
(egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
keeps flopping around trying to do things and
judges keep stopping him. Now he's throwing tantrums
again, screaming that he wants to find who's
thwarting his dimwit plans.
That's a 2020-era meme to remind you of the bad old days towards
the end of Trump's first term. Trump ruined many things during his
first term, but not nearly as many as he wanted to.
That's because when lawyers sued the Trump administration,
about 80% of the time
they were suing over something totally illegal and won their case.
Now Trump is writing orders targeting law firms. If I were tired of lawyers consistently winning cases against me
I would simply stop breaking the law every single day.
Anyhow, here's a word search. Find the old-timey words for wrongdoers and fugitives.
Highlight them or cross them out or something. When you're done, the
leftover letters should tell you who Trump tells his searchers to find:
| B
| O
| L
| T
| E
| R
| K
| D
|
| P
| E
| R
| P
| K
| T
| N
| O
|
| E
| M
| Y
| O
| E
| S
| A
| D
|
| E
| C
| O
| L
| A
| P
| V
| G
|
| R
| R
| R
| E
| G
| O
| E
| E
|
| C
| A
| I
| T
| I
| F
| F
| R
|
| V
| I
| L
| L
| A
| I
| N
| A
|
| O
| U
| T
| C
| A
| S
| T
| T
|
Word list:
BOLTER
CAITIFF
CREEP
CROOK
DODGER
KNAVE
OUTCAST
PERP
VARLET
VILLAIN
Solution, rot-13'd:
Coordinates of word starts:
obygre (ebj:0, pby:0, qve:r)
pnvgvss (ebj:5, pby:0, qve:r)
perrc (ebj:5, pby:0, qve:a)
pebbx (ebj:5, pby:0, qve:ar)
qbqtre (ebj:0, pby:7, qve:f)
xanir (ebj:0, pby:6, qve:f)
bhgpnfg (ebj:7, pby:0, qve:r)
crec (ebj:1, pby:0, qve:r)
ineyrg (ebj:6, pby:0, qve:ar)
ivyynva (ebj:6, pby:0, qve:r)
The leftover letters spell: ZL FPNCRTBNG
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "ring".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
(egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
has created a three-ring circus of incompetence.
In a three-ring circus, three acts can perform
at the same time, there's space for all of them.
Now Trump is throwing a tantrum: Judges keep enjoining him,
pointing out that he's ordering illegal things.
This is his strategy; he wants to "flood the zone."
If he keeps on ruining things, the people running along behind
him trying to fix things can't keep up. Hmm, "flood the zone" is
kind of an interesting phrase. It describes a three-ring circus;
it contains three ring-shaped letters, by which I mean Os.
With that in mind, you might take a break from dOOmscrOlling tO
enjOy this simple crOsswOrd, nOthing strange gOing On here, nOsireebOb.
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "board".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
(egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
wants to run America like a business.
Alas, he's a dimwit, and all of his businesses failed.
Well … his businesses kept failing
until he became president, then his businesses
made a lot of money "selling" to shady investors, i.e.,
accepting bribes.
You might ask: How did this loser get a reputation as
a smart businessman?
"The Apprentice" was a reality TV show from 2004 to 2017.
Contestants competed at business-themed challenges.
A business expert would judge their efforts, uh, in theory.
When the producers were first putting their show together, they
contacted many successful businesspeople, asking them to appear
on the show as the expert; all the successful businesspeople said "no."
And thus, instead of a business expert, they got Donald Trump.
Did you ever read producer Bill Pruitt's article on Trump's incompetence? (Here's an archive link in case you can't read the Slate article.)
It's just kind of sad; until you remember that this guy became
president, then it's tragic.
Unfortunately, the producers did a good job of covering for Trump's stupidity.
With enough fancy music and strategic edits, Trump seemed impressive!
At the end of each show episode, contestants would go to
a "boardroom." Those contestants who'd done
worst at the challenge would have to face Trump. He'd "fire"
(eliminate) one contestant with the creative catchphrase "You're fired!"
With that in mind, can you get from model train to a
by the following steps, eliminating a letter each
time and then anagramming?
| Machine on the Tech Nickel Plate: | m o d e l t r a i n |
| Might stick their head in a mouth (ew): | _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
| How to get a command line on a Mac: | _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
| Not animal or vegetable: | _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
| Envelope, for example: | _ _ _ _ _ _ |
| Disney Princess or Prospero's wispy pal: | _ _ _ _ _ |
| Tech Nickel Plate ____road: | _ _ _ _ |
| The Greatest: Muhammad ___: | _ _ _ |
| "Weird __" Yankovic: | _ _ |
| Indefinite article: | a |
Solution, rot-13'd:
zbqry genva / Znpuvar ba gur Grpu Avpxry Cyngr
yvba gnzre / Zvtug fgvpx gurve urnq va n zbhgu, rj?
grezvany / Ubj gb trg n pbzznaq yvar ba n Znp
zvareny / Abg navzny be irtrgnoyr
znvyre / Rairybcr, sbe rknzcyr
nevry / Qvfarl Cevaprff be Nevry'f jvfcl cny
envy / Grpu Avpxry Cyngr ____ebnq
nyv / Gur Terngrfg: Zhunzznq ___
ny / "Jrveq __" Lnaxbivp
n / Vaqrsvavgr negvpyr
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "combine", as in "consolidate."
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
(egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
wants to consolidate federal procurement
for goods and services used by many departments.
Why is he doing this? I have a theory, but he
says it's for the taxpaer. Yes, the taxpaer.
(typo still up on the WhiteHouse site
as I write this [update: but fixed as I proofread, awwww]. H/t to
Elizabeth Aer Ayer for spotting this.)
On the one hand, we have the DOGE hyenas promising to streamline
government by harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence.
On the other hand, we see they haven't yet learned to harness the
power of looking for the wiggly red line under a typo.
Bad news: Clowns armed with hatchets prowl the halls of government.
Good news: At least I know what puzzle I can write today.
Can you figure out what letter is missing from each hypothetical
WhiteHouse dot gov headline blow? Rite them in the banks provided
on the eft. We already filled in the K missing from One Monkey
Don't Stop no Show. Hen you ill in the others, you should
see my theory on hat Trump hoes to consolidate ere:
K : One Money Don't Stop no Show
_ : The Patent Protection and Affordable Care Act
_ : Scare as π Hen's Teeth π¦·
_ : On President Biden not Seeing Re-Election
_ : Tales Ladders and Chairs Match
_ : Crete, Read, Update, and Delete
_ : Video Game Addition
_ : Enzyme-Lined Immunosorbent Assay
_ : Comic Microwave Background Radiation
Some hints, rot-13'd:
- RYVFN vf fubeg sbe Ramlzr-YvaXrq VzzhabFbeorag Nffnl
- Gb n jerfgyre, GYP vf fubeg sbe Gnoyrf, Ynqqref, naq Punvef
- ESX We qbrfa'g jnag lbh gb xabj gung vg'f Cngvrag (abg Cngrag) Cebgrpgvba
Puzzle solution, rot-13'd:
X / zbarl / zbaxrl / Bar Zbarl Qba'g Fgbc ab Fubj
V / cngrag / cngvrag / Gur Cngrag Cebgrpgvba naq Nssbeqnoyr Pner Npg
P / fpner / fpnepr / Fpner nf Ura'f Grrgu
X / frrvat / frrxvat / Ba Cerfvqrag Ovqra abg Frrvat Er-Ryrpgvba
O / gnyrf / gnoyrf / Gnyrf Ynqqref naq Punvef Zngpu
N / pergr / perngr / Pergr, Ernq, Hcqngr, naq Qryrgr
P / nqqvgvba / nqqvpgvba / Ivqrb Tnzr Nqqvgvba
X / yvarq / yvaxrq / Ramlzr-Yvarq Vzzhabfbeorag Nffnl
F / pbzvp / pbfzvp / Pbzvp Zvpebjnir Onpxtebhaq Enqvngvba
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "case".
As in, "In case of fire, break glass."
Here, "case" describes a a condition.
If there's no fire, please don't break that glass.
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
(egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
has laid of thousands of federal workers and canceled
government projects to make government more efficient:
spend less, get the same benefit. (Well, except we expect to
pay more recovering from unexpected weather disasters than we
were spending on weather radar repairs; and a lot of those
cancelled contracts, we'd already paid for; OK, these cancellations
aren't actually going to save us money overall, but for
now, the government is theoretically spending less.)
Since the government is spending less, does that mean that Americans
can pay less in taxes?
Okay, so we can pay less in taxes after Trump balances the budget.
We are waiting
for the same Trump who grew the national debt by about eight trillion dollars
in his first term…(hoo boy);
we're waiting for that guy to balance the budget.
We are in for a long wait for this "case" to occur.
Here's a puzzle about some other unlikely cases. We've got some phrases that have been
split up; beginnings on one side, endings on the other. Figure out which ending goes with
each beginning. Notice that one letter in each ending is big and bold. Write that
letter down next to the appropriate beginning. (We wrote in the B from Bleeds to the
left of "When a stone" for you.) When you're done, the big and bold letters should spell out
what kind of person will enjoy reduced taxes right away, without waiting for a balanced budget:
| (B) πͺ¨ When a stone… | | …Bleeds π©Έ |
| ποΈ On February… | | …cAtsπ½ |
| π When pigs… | | …come togetheR π |
| βοΈ When the sky… | | …faLls π |
| π When you square… | | …fLy πͺ½ |
| πΏ When Hell… | | …freezes Over π₯Ά |
| π΄ When you find the haystack's… | | …Needle πͺ‘ |
| π€ When you herd… | | …sets In the east π§ |
| π When the sun… | | …tEeth π¦· |
| π
When two Sundays… | | …the cIrcle π‘ |
| π When hens grow… | | …thIrtieth 3οΈβ£0οΈβ£ |
Some hints, rot-13'd:
- Gurer ner gjb pnyraqne-l pnfrf: Sroehnel guVegvrgu naq gjb Fhaqnlf pbzvat gbtrgurE.
- Nppbeqvat gb gur fnlvat, uraf qba'g unir grrgu. (Va cenpgvpr, fpvragvfgf sbhaq n gbbgu-tebjvat trar va puvpxraf frireny lrnef onpx, cerfhznoyl yrsg bire sebz jura oveqf ribyirq sebz qvabfnhef. Znlor abj gurer ner uraf jvgu grrgu? Vf guvf ubj Whenffvp Pbbc fgnegrq?)
- Gur fxl jba'g snyy, ab znggre jung Puvpxra Yvggyr gryyf lbh. Gura ntnva, jr'ir orra jebat nobhg puvpxraf orsber. Uzz.
Puzzle solution, rot-13'd:
Jura n fgbar / Oyrrqf
Ba Sroehnel / guVegvrgu
Jura cvtf / sYl
Jura gur fxl / snYyf
Jura lbh fdhner / gur pVepyr
Jura Uryy / serrmrf Bire
Jura lbh svaq gur unlfgnpx'f / Arrqyr
Jura lbh ureq / pNgf
Jura gur fha / frgf Va gur rnfg
Jura gjb Fhaqnlf / pbzr gbtrgurE
Jura uraf tebj / gRrgu
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "machine".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
(egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
keeps imposing tariffs on goods. Thus, if you
want to buy various imported goods in the future,
you'll have to pay high taxes on them. In theory,
this could work out okay; it might encourage local
manufacture of important items. In practice, we have
bozos setting tariffs randomly. This annoys
foreign nations; it
annoys
Americans who don't want to spend an extra $1072 per year
in taxes.
"Elect a clown, expect a circus" is a funny saying,
but it's less funny when you're living in that circus.
I listed some of the top categories of US imports below.
I also researched the nations that are the top exporters of those
categories (not necessarily to the US; alas, I didn't find any info
that fine-grained). For our major imports, this turned out
to be just three countries. For each import, can you figure out
which country is the main exporter? If you can, write the short π°π°π° code
in the blanks, like I wrote in CNY (China) by Industrial machines.
Get them all right, and the circled letters should spell out a better
word for π°π°π° here:
| βΈN Y | Industrial machines
|
| _β―_ | Pharmaceutical preparations
|
| _ _β― | Passenger cars, new and used
|
| _β― | Crude oil
|
| β―_ _ | Other parts and accessories of vehicles
|
| _β―_ | Apparel, textiles, nonwool or cotton
|
| β―_ _ | Telecommunications equipment
|
| _ _β― | Computer accessories
|
List of nations (and their π°π°π°) useful in this puzzle:
| Nation | π°π°π° |
| China | CNY |
| Germany | EUR |
| Saudi Arabia | SR |
Some hints, rot-13'd:
- Vg'f zbfgyl Puvan. Jura va qbhog, thrff PAL naq pyrna hc jebat thrffrf yngre
- Treznal vf pnef gub
- Treznal vf nyfb qehtf
Puzzle solution, rot-13'd:
p / PAL / Puvan / vaqhfgevny znpuvarf
h / RHE / Treznal / cuneznprhgvpny cercnengvbaf
e / RHE / Treznal / cnffratre pnef, arj naq hfrq
e / FE / Fnhqv Nenovn / pehqr bvy
r / RHE / Treznal / bgure cnegf naq npprffbevrf bs iruvpyrf
a / PAL / Puvan / nccnery, grkgvyrf, abajbby be pbggba
p / PAL / Puvan / gryrpbzzhavpngvbaf rdhvczrag
l / PAL / Puvan / pbzchgre npprffbevrf
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "pause".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
(egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
paused federal grants back in January.
Then a judge paused the (illegal) pause.
But then a lot of grants got not-just-paused,
but canceled.
We're seeing a brain drain of scientists
fleeing the clownshoes cutoffs of American policy.
(I kinda think we saw the start of brain drain in Trump's first term,
with foreign students deciding to study someplace they wouldn't get
yelled at.) As I'm tinkering with puzzles, I see headlines go past:
Some dimwit put antivax loon
RFK Jr in charge of the National Institutes of Health and maybe now he
wants to shutdown mRNA research. (Wasn't his objection
to mRNA vaccines that they were rushed out with not enough study?
So now he wants to stop studying them? Why does he—oh, right,
I forgot: he's an antivax loon.)
Here's a harsh little story from history.
A clown named Hitler took over Germany.
He was against diversity.
Thus, he harassed many German scientists; they packed up and left
for other countries. Then Germany invaded its neighbors
(sorta like if we were to invade Canada today).
This led to a world war. There wasn't any good
anti-aircraft technology. So both sides could send bombers at each other.
But those ex-German scientists invented radar and the proximity fuse.
Suddenly, their host countries had anti-aircraft technology.
They could shoot down German would-be bombers.
Germany couldn't shoot down any bombers, though.
The scientists' new host countries firebombed German cities.
Hitler, having ruined his country, hid in a bunker and shot himself.
What? You want a puzzle, you say? OK, sure, here's a crossword puzzle. Don't overlook the constructor's note
where it says "Careful; something tricky is going on with those 'Pause' words"
It's important!
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "lucky".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
(and similarly his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
gets so angry when Americans point out
he was lucky to be born to a rich
family. His path to becoming a multi-millionaire?
Be born a multi-muliti-millionaire and then lose a lot.
And then stop being a multi-millionaire
when he went bankrupt all those times.
I guess that's why he gets so mad about D.E.I.,
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Whenever someone succeeds who didn't start out with
Trump's luck, it makes Trump look bad.
The manbaby keeps throwing tantrums about it.
(Does it seem like I'm writing a lot of D.E.I. puzzles?
It feels like I'm writing a lot of D.E.I. puzzles.
It's like Trump's obsessions become my obsessions when I let
his incompetence inspire my puzzle designs. Anyhow)
Recently someone noticed something strange on the
defense.gov website.
If you try to visit the page
https://www.defense.gov/News/Feature-Stories/Story/Article/2824721/medal-of-honor-monday-army-maj-gen-charles-calvin-rogers/,
you get a 404 not found. OK, that's not super weird.
What's super weird is that first it redirects to another address:
that /medal turns to /deimedal.
This was a web page about war hero Charles Calvin Rogers.
Rogers was black. Apparently some racist dimwit at the defense department
decided to change the address of the page by adding D.E.I. to it; and when
that wasn't bad enough, they deleted the page.
If you have a strong stomach for harrowing war stories and want to be impressed
by someone staying alive under grim conditions, you might check out
Rogers' Wikipedia page.
If you'd like a crossword that mentions one of his awards, you can
solve this crossword I just wrote.
([Update: solved by Chris D., whew!] Can you solve it? This is EnigMarch, so I just cranked that puzzle out. I didn't proofread it or ask anyone to test it.)
[Update upon update: The Defense Department put the page back on their website.]
No rot-13'd hints or solution today. That online crossword-solving interface should let you check and reveal things. If I did it right. Hmm, guess we'll find out.
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "bow".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
(egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
gets so angry when Americans point out that
he is not a king, he throws a tantrum and
declares himself king.
So I'm thinking about today's word, "bow."
I'm thinking: Trump wants Americans to bow and scrape.
Looking out for wordplay, I realize: the answer is within "scrape":
we should treat him like scrape
So here are some phrases of the form this and that,
where the middle "ha" of "that" is also a thing. Maybe you're worried:
Wow, "bow and scrape" is kinda obscure. If I don't know some of these
phrases, as seems likely, am I just out of luck?
Take a look at the list of emoji
titled "the middle parts." Notice that one of those is the poop emoji.
That's a clue that you should write in "crap" for "Bow and s____e".
Oh wait, someone already wrote that in.
Write in the others and the circled letters should remind you
what America is (hint: not a kingdom).
| Bow and | s cβa p e
|
| Blood, sweat and | t β―_ _ s
|
| Pen and | p _β―_ r
|
| Twists and | t β―_ _ s
|
| Batman and | R _β―_ n
|
| Flesh and | b β―_ _ d
|
| Black and | w _β―_ e
|
| Marks and | S _ _ _β―_ r
|
The middle parts: π¦ π© π π₯ π» π πͺ β±οΈ
Hints, rot-13'd:
- Rirel pebffjbeq svraq xabjf n xvzbab'f oryg vf na bov
- Rirel pebffjbeq svraq xabjf gung n onguebbz va Oevfgby vf n ybb
- Napvrag ahzvfzngvfgf xabj gung gurer hfrq gb or pbvaf pnyyrq crapr
- Gung jrveq funcr ng gur raq vf na hea
Solution, rot-13'd, tho that doesn't do much to obscure the emoji sry:
obj / fpEncr / π©
oybbq, fjrng / gRnef / π
cra / cnCre / π¦
gjvfgf / gHeaf / β±οΈ
Ongzna / EbOva / π
syrfu / oYbbq / π»
oynpx / juVgr / π₯
Znexf / FcraPre / πͺ
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "star".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
(egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
wants to appoint Joint Chiefs of Staff in the
Department of Defense.
He certainly didn't want to choose based on
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, because that's
liberal code for excluding failsons such himself.
Instead, he chose based on merit.
But this was an unprecedented kind of "merit."
Trump nominated John Caine, a three-star Air Force Lt. General,
to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Title 10 of the U.S. Code says that Trump must choose from
four-star generals and admirals.
But he's really scraping the bottom of the barrel, had to settle for
for Caine, who's missing a star. (In Caine's defense, he's
pretty good at flattering Trump, which might count as "merit"
in this situation.)
Silver lining: I can make a puzzle out of "missing a star".
Below, you see some anagrammed phrases. But beware:
though each phrase contained the letters S…T…A…R
(in order but not contiguous), those letters went missing
before I did the anagramming. To help you out, there are clues down below.
Each clue has one letter that stands out. When you know which clue goes
with an anagram, write that stands-out letter down in the blank on the left-hand side.
When you're done, those left-hand letters should spell out
the special character of Caine's "merit." We got you started by
unscrambling United (Sta)tes Ai(r) Force; whose clue's stands-out letter is U:
| U | DEINTU EST AI CEFOR: | βn i t e d S t a t e s A i r F o r c e
|
| _ | DFNO: | _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
| _ | GINR EQTTU: | _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
| _ | HOU ACFI: | _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
| _ | AGIMN: | _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
| _ | EIILO: | _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
| _ | ILLORTU: | _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
| _ | DFMO: | _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
| _ | AIN CIKPST ADY: | _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
| _ | BE CESST: | _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
| _ | ADDN: | _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
Clues:
- California university with puzzlehunt traditions
- Congratulations, you played yourself (but it's a card game)
- Connecticut home of the ACPT nerdfest
- Elon Musk came from there, ugh
- It's March 17 this year (and every year)
- Katharine Hepburn won four of these Oscars
- Kidlit classic The Phantom Tollbooth's was Jules Feiffer, for example
- Mark Zuckerberg's photo sharing site, now D.E.I.-free
- Required level of achievement to be considered (lol nope)
-
Service in which Caine was a lieutenant (3-star) general
- Squad of two violinists, a violist, and a cellist
Hints, rot-13'd:
- Fnvag Cngevpx'f Qnl vf Znepu 17.
- Gubfr ivbyvavfgf ner unys bs n fgevat dhnegrg.
- Urcohea unf gur erpbeq sbe zbfg Orfg Npgerff Bfpnef
Solution, rot-13'd:
h / havgrq fgngrf nve sbepr / Freivpr va juvpu Pnvar jnf n yvrhgranag (3-fgne) trareny
a / fgnasbeq / Pnyvsbeavn havirefvgl jvgu chmmyruhag genqvgvbaf
d / fgevat dhnegrg / Fdhnq bs gjb ivbyvavfgf, n ivbyvfg, naq n pryyvfg
h / fbhgu nsevpn / Ryba Zhfx pnzr sebz gurer, htu
n / vafgntenz / Znex Mhpxreoret'f cubgb funevat fvgr, abj Q.R.V.-serr
y / fbyvgnver / Pbatenghyngvbaf, lbh cynlrq lbhefrys (ohg vg'f n pneq tnzr)
v / vyyhfgengbe / Xvqyvg pynffvp Gur Cunagbz Gbyyobbgu'f jnf Whyrf Srvssre
s / fgnzsbeq / Pbaarpgvphg ubzr bs gur NPCG areqsrfg
v / fnvag cngevpxf qnl / Vg'f Znepu 17 guvf lrne (naq rirel lrne)
r / orfg npgerff / Xngunevar Urcohea jba sbhe bs gurfr Bfpnef
q / fgnaqneq / Erdhverq yriry bs npuvrirzrag gb or pbafvqrerq (yby abcr)
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "joker",
as in "clown."
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
(egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
has decided to run the USA like a business.
After all, all businessmen know that once you learn how to run one business,
you can run anything, sort of like how you might use a Joker
to form different poker hands depending on what other
cards you have.
Alas, Trump never even learned how to run one business, unless you count
"ran it into the ground."
(How many bankruptcies is he up to now?)
Here are clues to some word pairs. In each pair, the words
differ by one letter; we got a π to stand in both places.
Write the letters that π stands for in the two blanks
off to the side. But what to write in the very left-hand
blank? Look at the table down below. Using the two π letters,
look up a single letter in the table. We filled in the
first row already: hoUse and hoRse have the π letters U and R.
We look up U and R in the table and get W.
(Don't worry; if we swizzled the order and looked up
R and U instead, we'd still get W; you can't get that wrong.)
When you're done, the letters in that left-most column should spell out a word for "joker".
| W / | U R | Where reps attach riders: | H oπs e | Animal with a rider: | H oπs e |
| _ / | _ _ | They kill vampires: | _ _ _π_ _ | The S in USA: | _ _ _π_ _ |
| _ / | _ _ | _____ supremacistsβ¦: | _ _ _π_ | β¦ _____ incessantly: | _ _ _π_ |
| _ / | _ _ | Country: | _π_ _ _ _ | Theory: | _π_ _ _ _ |
| _ / | _ _ | Supreme _____: | _ _ _π_ | Vote _____: | _ _ _π_ |
| _ / | _ _ | Exhausts: | _ _π_ _ | N.Y. _____ Pitchbot: | _ _π_ _ |
| _ / | _ _ | Change, e.g., by one letter: | _π_ _ _ | Post-: | _π_ _ _ |
| _ / | _ _ | Hobo: | _ _π_ _ | Lousy bum: | _ _π_ _ |
Here's the table where you can look up the letter for each pair of π
letters. E.g., the U-R π in the Horse/House example gives a W.
We circled that.
|
| A
| F
| K
| L
| M
| N
| O
| R
| T
| U
|
| A
| K
| H
| A
| L
| I
| L
| D
| H
| A
| D
|
| F
| D
| N
| O
| R
| T
| B
| E
| E
| N
| C
|
| K
| H
| A
| R
| G
| E
| D
| W
| I
| I
| T
|
| L
| H
| R
| A
| N
| Y
| C
| R
| I
| M
| E
|
| M
| R
| E
| L
| A
| T
| E
| D
| A
| T
| O
|
| N
| H
| I
| S
| A
| C
| T
| I
| C
| L
| V
|
| O
| D
| I
| S
| M
| T
| Y
| P
| I
| C
| A
|
| R
| L
| L
| Y
| T
| A
| C
| H
| E
| G
| β¦
|
| T
| O
| V
| I
| E
| R
| L
| N
| M
| E
| N
|
| U
| D
| T
| H
| A
| S
| T
| O
| β¦
| M
| E
|
Hints, rot-13'd:
- Gurl juvar vaprffnagyl
- Nabgure jbeq sbe ubob vf genzc.
- Cbfg- zrnaf nsgre
Solution, rot-13'd:
J / HE / ubHfr / ubEfr / Jurer ercf nggnpu evqref / Navzny jvgu n evqre
V / XG / fgnXrf / fgnGrf / Gurl xvyy inzcverf / Gur F va HFN
Y / GA / juvGr / juvAr / _____ fhcerznpvfgf⦠/ ⦠_____ vaprffnagyl
Q / NB / aNgvba / aBgvba / Pbhagel / Gurbel
P / EA / pbhEg / pbhAg / Fhcerzr _____ / Ibgr _____
N / EZ / gvErf / gvZrf / Rkunhfgf / A.L. _____ Cvgpuobg
E / YS / nYgre / nSgre / Punatr, r.t., ol bar yrggre / Cbfg-
Q / NH / geNzc / geHzc / Ubob / Ybhfl ohz
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "point".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
(egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
ahem You know, I'm still hung up on yesterday's story,
or rather the aside in yesterday's story:
The crazy story of the day Elon Musk decided to personally rip servers out of a Sacramento data center.
ThrowBack Thursday: Musk had just acquired Twitter.
He wanted to cut costs, was sure he could make things run
more efficiently.
He laid off a bunch of Twitter workers, and then was surprised
when the remaining workers didn't know how to keep things going.
And, to cut costs keeping machines running, he personally went
to a Twitter data center and started disconnecting machines, even
though people told him that this would break things.
Do you see parallels to the way D.O.G.E. makes the US Government
"more efficient" by laying off workers and canceling programs…and
then, shockingly, things stop working?
Anyhow, I made you a word search. Can you find the many, many
synonyms of "point" that are hidden in the grid below? Cross them
out (like I did with Label, and the leftover letters will
explain Elon's point.
Oh no! Elon got into the grid and yanked some rectangles out and
dumped them on the floor. I guess to solve the word puzzle, you'll
need to figure out where to put those back in.
The server rack:
| I N D
| I C A
| T E D
| F M T
|
H L A
| B E L
| D I A
| N E E
|
| I O S
| T P N
| R C O
| O A R
|
|
| I A E
|
| I S M
|
| T T O
| M C O
| T I A
| T U I
|
| S N M
| T R A
| I N M
| R R N
|
| S O O
| T C E
| J B O
| O E A
|
| C C N
|
| P O U
| P P L
|
| P O L
| F A D
| D A N
|
|
| M E A
| N I N
|
| I I C
|
|
| A T N
| O C C
|
|
| T A R
| G E T
| N E M
| E L E
|
The yanked rectangles:
|
|
|
| A R P
|
| E T C
|
| O R A
|
|
|
|
| S T P
|
| G N T
|
| M A U
|
|
|
|
| O T O
|
| T I N
|
Word list:
AMOUNT
COMMAND
CONTACT
CONTROL
DIRECT
DOCTOR
ELEMENT
FACTOR
IMPORT
INDICATE
LABEL
LOCATION
MEANING
MEASURE
OBJECT
PORTION
REPAIR
STATE
TAPER
TARGET
TERMINAL
TRAIN
Clues, rot-13'd:
- "Pbageby" tbrf hcjneq va gur frpbaq pbyhza naq cnffrf guebhtu gur BEN erpgnatyr.
- "Ercnve" tbrf qbjajneq va gur frpbaq-gb-ynfg pbyhza naq cnffrf guebhtu gur ZNH naq NEC erpgnatyrf.
- Pgey-S gryyf lbh gurer'f whfg bar W va gur tevq, juvpu zvtug uryc lbh svaq "bowrpg".
Solution, rot-13'd:
Here's the restored grid; leftover letters are Capitalized;
letters used in words are lowercase:
|vaqvpngrqszg|
|Uynoryqvnarr|
|VbFgCaepbbne|
|BenVnrgvAvfz|
|GgbzpbgVnghv|
|fazgenvazeea|
|FbBgprwobbrn|
|ppAbGbcBhccy|
|CBySNQqnaznH|
|zrnavatAgvvP|
|RgpngabpPNeC|
|gnetrgarzryr|
Here's the word list; for each word there's a starting row,
starting column and a direction. Yeah, yeah, rot-13 doesn't
disguise the row or column numbers at all; but who's even
going to scroll down this far?
nzbhag (ebj:4, pby:8, qve:f)
pbzznaq (ebj:7, pby:0, qve:ar)
pbagnpg (ebj:10, pby:7, qve:j)
pbageby (ebj:7, pby:1, qve:a)
qverpg (ebj:0, pby:8, qve:fj)
qbpgbe (ebj:8, pby:6, qve:aj)
ryrzrag (ebj:11, pby:11, qve:j)
snpgbe (ebj:0, pby:9, qve:fj)
vzcbeg (ebj:9, pby:9, qve:a)
vaqvpngr (ebj:0, pby:0, qve:r)
ynory (ebj:1, pby:1, qve:r)
ybpngvba (ebj:8, pby:2, qve:ar)
zrnavat (ebj:9, pby:0, qve:r)
zrnfher (ebj:0, pby:10, qve:f)
bowrpg (ebj:6, pby:8, qve:j)
cbegvba (ebj:7, pby:9, qve:a)
ercnve (ebj:5, pby:10, qve:f)
fgngr (ebj:5, pby:0, qve:ar)
gncre (ebj:9, pby:8, qve:aj)
gnetrg (ebj:11, pby:0, qve:r)
grezvany (ebj:0, pby:11, qve:f)
genva (ebj:5, pby:3, qve:r)
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "flag".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
(egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
sold out Ukraine in its fight against the Russian invasion.
Now Twitte X keeps failing and Elon is
throwing a tantrum, blaming a massive Ukrainian cyberattack.
(Oh man, this reminds me of the time Elon carried
out a massive cyberattack on Twitter by going to a data
center and physically unplugging cables and pulling out
server racks, convinced Twitter's automatic failover could
handle it. It could…until it couldn't.
Anyhow, lesson learned: Elon doesn't understand X
as well as he thinks he does.)
This is probably a "false-flag" operation. Hackers in some country
might attack X, but not directly. First hack into some
poorly-defended computers in Ukraine; then attack X from
those computers. Oh hey, there's a puzzle idea:
A Russian hacking group has plans to attack the USA. To make sure
any US retaliation hits some other country, the hackers launch their
attacks from foreign servers. Thus, victims don't see attacks coming
from something.ru but instead something.else.ba if
the attack's coming from, say, BosniA.
Here's a list of the hacker plans: Code names, partially-retrieved false
code names, and summaries. We also have a list of countries in which the
hackers maintain botnets, previously-hacked machines ready to launch
attacks. Can you figure out the false names using the two-letter country
codes that replace ru?
We filled in one for you project banner, from Bosnia.
When you're done, the circled letters should spell out Elon's first
reaction to engineers who try to tell him how X really works.
Code
Name | False
Name | Summary
| | runner | β·Anner | Move fast to set up false flag operation
|
| truth | tβ―_th | Misleading facts about water fluoridation
|
| rumor | _β―mor | Subvert defense against disinformation
|
| cruel | cβ―_el | Disrupt desert supply lines without mercy
|
| ruin | β―_in | Perfect impostor leaves wreckage
|
| citrus | citβ―_s | LimeWire trojan used on population centers
|
| virus | viβ―_s | Hide malware in obsolete short videos
|
| rumble | β―_mble | Counterfeit bets on OKC Thunder
|
IANA ccTLDs a.k.a. "country codes"
Argentina: .ar
Armenia: .am
Bosnia: .ba
Estonia: .ee
Gabon: .ga
Ireland: .ie
Niger: .ne
Taiwan: .tw
Clues, rot-13'd:
- Gjvggre hfrq gb eha n fubeg-ivqrb fvgr pnyyrq Ivar orsber shzoyvat vg. Gjvggre zvfznantrzrag cerqngrf Ryba! (Ohg ur ernyyl ryringrq gur zvfznantrzrag gb arj urvtugf.)
- Jngre syhbevqngvba svtugf gbbgu qrpnl.
- Gurer ner znal pvgvrf va Verynaq; pbairefryl, "vr" vf va "pvgvrf."
Solution, rot-13'd:
ehaare / Onaare / Zbir snfg gb frg hc snyfr synt bcrengvba / Obfavn / on
gehgu / gRrgu / Zvfyrnqvat snpgf nobhg jngre syhbevqngvba / Rfgbavn / rr
ehzbe / nEzbe / Fhoireg qrsrafr ntnvafg qvfvasbezngvba / Netragvan / ne
pehry / pNzry / Qvfehcg qrfreg fhccyl yvarf jvgubhg zrepl / Nezravn / nz
ehva / Gjva / Cresrpg vzcbfgbe yrnirf jerpxntr / Gnvjna / gj
pvgehf / pVgvrf / YvzrJver gebwna hfrq ba cbchyngvba pragref / Verynaq / vr
ivehf / ivArf / Uvqr znyjner va bofbyrgr fubeg ivqrbf / Avtre / ar
ehzoyr / Tnzoyr / Pbhagresrvg orgf ba BXP Guhaqre / Tnoba / tn
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "house".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
lives in the White Hous—oh whoops SPOILER REDACTE—too
late, you say? OK, The USA clown President Trump lives in the White
House and nobody is happy about it. Even he
would prefer to live in Florida, much to the dismay
of Floridans.
Welp, I guess I accidentally spoiler-ed the first item in this puzzle,
so I can write it in. If you write in the other items, the circled
letters should spell out where Trump can live after he's been
deposed and exiled:
| Trump is a disgrace to this very place: | White β½o u s e |
| Boston sluggers: | Red _β―_ |
| Rarity (If about once a year is rare, I guess): | Blue β―_ _ _ |
| You can avoid this by faking bone spurs: | Purple _β―_ _ _ |
| β« I'll see you on the dark side of the moon β«: | Pink _β―_ _ _ |
| Nice Olympics souvenir: | Gold _β―_ _ _ |
| β« Our friends are all aboard β«: | Yellow β―_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
| Shoreline home to Putin's Palace: | Black β―_ _ |
Some hints, rot-13'd:
- Gehzc'f "obar fchef" xrcg uvz bhg bs HF zvyvgnel freivpr, fb ur jvyy arire rnea n checyr urneg.
- Gubfr zhfvpny byqvrf ner Cvax Syblq naq Lryybj Fhoznevar
- N oyhr zbba vf ener, vs ~naahny vf ener
Puzzle solution, rot-13'd:
juvgr / Ubhfr / Gehzc vf n qvftenpr gb guvf irel cynpr
erq / fBk / Obfgba fyhttref
oyhr / Zbba / Enevgl
checyr / uRneg / Lbh pna nibvq guvf ol snxvat obar fchef
cvax / sYblq / β« V'yy frr lbh ba gur qnex fvqr bs gur zbba β«
tbyq / zRqny / Avpr Bylzcvpf fbhirave
lryybj / Fhoznevar / β« Bhe sevraqf ner nyy nobneq β«
oynpx / Frn / Fuberyvar ubzr gb Chgva'f Cnynpr
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "hollow".
Hmm, does "hollow" have any interesting synonyms? Oh yeah, gulf.
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
(egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
wants to rename The Gulf of Mexico to The Gulf of America.
And he throws a tantrum whenever anyone points out how
stupid that is.
I looked through a bunch of Wikipedia pages to find other
The Thingy of Other Country things
he might want to rename next. We already filled in MEXICO
below. Fill in the others and when you're done, the circled
letters spell out a geographical feature that might be appropriate
to name after America soon.
| The Gulf of America | M E X I βΈ O | Better than "The Gulf of SpaceX Debris," I guess |
| The Penguins of America | _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _β― | TV show maybe set in Tuxedo Park or something |
| The Times of America | _ _ _ _β― | Home of the prestigious Cricketer of the Year awards |
| The Prince of America | _ _ _ _β― | Maybe Moses lived in Utah at some point (double-check this) |
| The Russian invasion of America | _ _ _ _ _ _β― | Might be a sore point, hmm. |
| The 2003 invasion of America | _β―_ _ | Makes more sense; USA really had WMDs at the time |
Nations: Egypt, India, Iraq, Madagascar, Mexico, Ukraine
Some hints, rot-13'd:
- Uzz, zbfg bs gurfr pbhagevrf unir qvssrerag ahzoref bs yrggref.
- Gur Cevapr bs Rtlcg jnf n Qernzjbexf zbivr. Gur Crathvaf bs Znqntnfpne jnf n Qernzjbexf GI fubj. Pbafvfgrag!
- Pevpxrg'f xvaq bs n ovt qrny va Vaqvn, V guvax?
Puzzle solution, rot-13'd:
thys / zrkvPb / Orggre guna "Gur Thys bs FcnprK Qroevf," V thrff
crathvaf / znqntnfpnE / GI fubj znlor frg va Ghkrqb Cnex be fbzrguvat
gvzrf / vaqvN / Ubzr bs cerfgvtvbhf Pevpxrgre bs gur Lrne njneqf
cevapr / rtlcG / Terng frggvat sbe byq Puevfgvna fgbel, whfg nfx Wbua Fzvgu
ehffvna vainfvba / hxenvaR / Batbvat fvapr 2014
2003 vainfvba / vEnd / Znxrf zber frafr, HFN unq JZQf ng gur gvzr
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "ship".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
(egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
wants to take away birthright citizenship!
It's in the USA constitution, but it's not like he
swore an oath to uphold that old rag, right?
Anyhow, federal judges keep stopping him.
This must be very frustrating.
So let's take away from some other -ships. Below are some
clues for some -ship words. The clues are kinda vague, so
you probably want to look at the "What remains" section down
there. For each of those, you want to add one letter, then
re-arrange, and then put a -ship on the end. That will give you
one of the -ship words. You can see that we added a T to
carotid to get the dictator in dictatorship.
Keep track of those letters you added. When you're done,
you'll get the name of a ship that was directed about as
well as Trump directs the USA.
It feels like he's trying to reach Autocracy; but his
track record says he'll hit Bankruptcy (again) first.
| Autocracy: | dicβator ship
|
| Political tilt: | ____________ship
|
| It might be marital: | ____________ship
|
| Nice board seat: | ____________ship
|
| Good will: | ____________ship
|
| Following: | ____________ship
|
| Bankruptcy: | ____________ship
|
What remains: aileron, carotid, fired!, reverie, rich man, spartan, spliced
Clues, rot-13'd:
- Nvyreba trgf n G.
- Vg gheaf bhg qvfpvcyrfuvc vf n guvat. Frr, V'z glcvat vg urer naq gurer nera'g nal erq fdhvttyrf.
- Jub'f zbfg yvxryl gb trg n punveznafuvc?
Solution, rot-13'd:
pnebgvq / qvpGngbefuvc / Nhgbpenpl
fcnegna / cnegVfnafuvc / Gvyg
nvyreba / erynGvbafuvc / Vg zvtug or znevgny
evpu zna / puNveznafuvc / Avpr obneq frng
sverq / sevrAqfuvc / Tbbq jvyy
fcyvprq / qVfpvcyrfuvc / Sbyybjvat
erirevr / erPrvirefuvc / Onaxehcgpl
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "quarter".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
(egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
have canceled science grants to study mice because
they think the scientists are trying to make mice
transgender. This is, of course, stupid nonsense.
How could they believe it?
One theory: They don't know the difference between the words
transgender and transgenic. It would be nice
to think that the people pointlessly wrecking so much did so
because they were just ΒΌ wrong. (Does -der/ic count as three
letters or two? If we split the difference and say 2Β½ letters, that's
about a quarter of the word.)
(The Snopes fact-checkers pointed out a hole in
this "transgenic" theory. They think Trump believed a
remarkably-wrong investigation that "found" university
experiments turning mice transgender. The investigation was
stupid; it would only convince the most gullible… Oh no!
Anyhow, let's stick with the "transgenic" theory for now because
I can make a puzzle out of it.)
So now I see we must explain the differences between words,
because those words are mostly the same. But in each
pair of words, one has IC, and the other has 1-3 other letters.
E.g.: here we see that Voice and Volume are mostly the
same (looking like Vo_e), but Voβββe has a few different letters,
which we circle:
| π£οΈ: | v oπΈπ²e | v oβββe | π
|
| Fashion ____: | πΈπ²_ _ | β―β―β―_ _ | Robber _____
|
|
|
| Indifferent a la Zeno: | _ _ _πΈπ² | _ _ _β― | π
|
| Lies in literature: | _πΈπ²_ _ _ _ | _β―β―β―_ _ _ _ | Form follows _____
|
| Nice, as in view: | _ _ _ _πΈπ² | _ _ _ _β― | Aroma, as in p-u
|
| Rigid: | _ _ _πΈπ²_ | _ _ _β―_ | Swagger
|
| It must flow: | _ _πΈπ²_ | _ _β―β―_ | Rampage, but for shopping
|
Ic-words, transposal'd: Cceins, Ceiov, Ceips, Cfiinot, Cino, Ciost, Cirstt
These are the IC-words, each a transposal
(that's old-timey wordplay jargon for "anagramming").
We crossed out Ceiov, because we already figured out Voice.
When you're done, the circled letters should spell out a
science-y way Congress might try to find a spine.
Some hints, rot-13'd:
- Uvfgbevnaf zvtug pbzcner gbqnl'f byvtnepuf gb lrfgreqnlf eboore onebaf
- Gung jrveq sybj pyhr vf n Qhar ersrerapr
- Yvrf va vairfgvtngvba ner yvrf, ohg va yvgrengher jr whfg chg gurz va gur svpgvba frpgvba
Puzzle solution, rot-13'd:
ibVPr / ibYHZr / π£οΈ / π
VPba / ONEba / Snfuvba ____ / Eboore _____
fgbVP / fgbC / Vaqvssrerag n yn Mrab / π
sVPgvba / sHAPgvba / Yvrf va yvgrengher / Sbez sbyybjf _____
fpraVP / fpraG / Avpr, nf va ivrj / Nebzn, nf va c-h
fgeVPg / fgeHg / Evtvq / Fjnttre
fcVPr / fcERr / Vg zhfg sybj / Enzcntr, ohg sbe fubccvat
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "link".
There's no story or secret message today.
This is just a word ladder. If it's working correctly,
then typing a letter in one square will make that letter
also appear in the appropriate squares in the
same row and in the adjacent rows above and below.
But if typing in letters haphazardly is no fun, know
this: these are the names of USA presidents since 1937 ordered
by their average approval ratings in polls. Highest
approval rating is at the top, lowest is at the bottom.
Lowest average approval rating, hmm. Who could it be?
If you would have preferred a tougher step-linking challenge,
check out the Raddle daily
puzzle page. I tried it out and I liked it so far.
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "turn".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump
(egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
needs to appoint cabinet members and agency heads!
He certainly doesn't want to choose based on
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, because that's
liberal code for excluding failsons such as himself.
Instead, he will choose based on merit.
But, to fit the theme of this puzzle, he must give
the meaning of merit a 180-degree turn.
For each dunderhead listed below, choose a job for them
based on their qualifications. Write the four-letter
job code in the blanks. You can see we already
wrote ECON in for Kevin Hassett. When you're done, the
circled letters should spell out another word for "turn".
- EβΈO N :
- Kevin Hassett
He coauthored Dow 36,000, a book which predicted
a 4x rise in the stock market (a year before the market fell 37%).
In early 2020, he predicted coronavirus deaths would be near-zero by May
and thus encouraged the administration to re-open the economy.
- _ _β―_ :
- Linda McMahon
When vetted for the Connecticut Board of Education, she
lied about having a bachelor's degree in education.
- _β―_ _ :
- Sean Duffy
His understanding of climate change
could explain his later elimination of electric vehicle incentives:
"If you say the climate's changing, is it coming from CO2
or is it coming from the sun?" (Must have been a strong
contender for head of NOAA, but that job went to the Sharpiegate
guy, so find another job.)
- β―_ _ _ :
- Pete Hegseth
Encouraged Trump to pardon soldiers convicted of war crimes.
- _ _ _β― :
- Robert F Kennedy Jr.
Spread anti-vaccine misinformation and disinformation.
- _β―_ _ :
- Billy Long
During his time representing Southwest Missouri in Congress,
he pursued legislation to abolish the Internal Revenue Service.
Job codes (and full titles)
DEFE : Secretary of Defense
ECON : Director of the National Economic Council
EDUC : Secretary of Educaction
HEAL : Secretary of Health and Human Services
REVE : Commisioner of Internal Revenue
TRAN : Secretary of Transportation
Hints:
- I guess you could Google these people, but I bet you can figure
it out by reading their qualifications.
Solution, rot-13'd:
Xriva Unffrgg : rPba
Yvaqn ZpZnuba : rqHp
Frna Qhssl : gEna
Crgr Urtfrgu : Qrsr
Eboreg S Xraarql We. : urnY
Ovyyl Ybat : eRir
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "trap".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk)
said he was doing his part to help the economy by imposing
tarriffs, but in fact fell into a trap. Now investors have
figured out that the economy is trashed and they're
selling off stock in American companies.
Kind of interesting how trap and part are
spelled backwards-ly.
Anyhow, solve this puzzle and the circled letters will tell you
a word for someone who does things backwards-ly from what he said.
| π¦π¦π¦: | β―_ _ _ | _ _ _ _ | :πͺπͺπͺ |
| sketch: | _ _β―_ | _ _ _ _ | :protect |
| Not PCs: | _ _β―_ | _ _ _ _ | :trap |
| πͺ’: | β―_ _ _ | _ _ _ _ | :Honky-____ |
| March 1: | _ _ _β― | _ _ _ _ | :πΊ |
| πΎπΎπΎ: | _β―_ _ | _ _ _ _ | :π |
| π¦: | _ _ _β― | _ _ _ _ | :River-side plant |
| Having double nature: | β―_ _ _ | _ _ _ _ | :Praise |
| Catan is ____ 10+: | _ _ _β― | _ _ _ _ | :Game machine |
|
|
| πππ: | β―_ _ _ | _ _ _ _ | :β |
| ____ Neeson: | _ _β―_ | _ _ _ _ | :π¨ |
| πΏ: | _ _β―_ | _ _ _ _ | :Not pre-recorded |
| πͺ’ part: | β―_ _ _ | _ _ _ _ | :Merge |
Some hints, rot-13'd:
- Xabg naq gbax ner erirefrf. Lrnu, gung jrveq rzbwv vf fhccbfrq gb or n xabg.
- Qrre naq errq ner nabgure cnve. Lrc, gung'f n qrre.
- Cnjf naq fjnc tb gbtrgure. Gung rzbwv xvaqn fhttrfgf fjnccvat, fbegn.
All the puzzle data, also rot-13'd:
o / ongf / π¦π¦π¦ / πͺπͺπͺ
n / qenj / fxrgpu / cebgrpg
p / znpf / Abg CPf / genc
x / xabg / πͺ’ / Ubaxl-____
j / sybj / Znepu 1 / πΊ
n / cnjf / πΎπΎπΎ / π
e / qrre / π¦ / Evire-fvqr cynag
q / qhny / Univat qbhoyr angher / Cenvfr
f / ntrf / Pngna vf ____ 10+ / Tnzr znpuvar
e / engf / πππ / β
n / yvnz / ____ Arrfba / π¨
v / rivy / πΏ / Abg cer-erpbeqrq
y / ybbc / πͺ’ cneg / Zretr
Permalink
It is once again March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "heart".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump and his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk
have canceled hundreds of contracts while accomplishing nothing!
Alas, they have disrupted government operations, breaking many things.
Below are clues for many broken things, specifically broken seven-letter
words. Each word was broken in half. We gathered up the left-halves and
the right-halves. Whoopsie, we lost the middles, the "hearts," as it were. Using the clues, can you figure
out the broken words? You can see how we figured out "Madison" from mad and
son.
Some might think Trump and Musk are heartless, but when you've figured
out the words' missing hearts, you'll find another adjective.
| Father of the Constitution: | M a d / βΎ / s o n |
| Source of hot air: | _ _ _ / β― / _ _ _ |
| Place for a cabinet: | _ _ _ / β― / _ _ _ |
| Out of control: | _ _ _ / β― / _ _ _ |
|
|
| Captain or one who flees town: | _ _ _ / β― / _ _ _ |
|
|
| Group of vehicles(!): | _ _ _ / β― / _ _ _ |
| $, slangily: | _ _ _ / β― / _ _ _ |
| Swamp, e.g., Washington DC: | _ _ _ / β― / _ _ _ |
| Tried to make a deal: | _ _ _ / β― / _ _ _ |
Left-hand words: cab, car, fur, kit, mad, off, run, ski, wet
Right-hand words: ace, age, and, hen, per, red, son, van, way
Some hints, rot-13'd
- Gur svefg frg bs sbhe urneg-yrggref sbezf n jbeq. Fb qbrf gur ynfg frg bs sbhe urneg-yrggref.
- Fxv naq cre tb gbtrgure
- Pnoontr vf byq-gvzrl fynat sbe zbarl
Puzzle solution, also rot-13'd:
znqvfba / Sngure bs gur Pbafgvghgvba
sheanpr / Fbhepr bs ubg nve
xvgpura / Cynpr sbe n pnovarg
ehanjnl / Bhg bs pbageby
fxvccre / Pncgnva be bar jub syrrf gbja
pnenina / Tebhc bs iruvpyrf(!)
pnoontr / $, fynatvyl
jrgynaq / Fjnzc, r.t., Jnfuvatgba QP
bssrerq / Gevrq gb znxr n qrny
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "psychic".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump and his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk
don't understand gender and
it's led to a bizarre pronoun-phobia!
Pronouns are handy referential-ish words; it's hard to communicate clearly without them.
The first word of the US Consititution is a pronoun.
(Then again, those guys do their best to ignore the Constitution…)
They removed the pronouns from several words and names below.
Fortunately, we kept track of the pronouns, so now we can add them back in.
We figured
out that MAPSYCHCGRL was really Mai the Psychic Girl.
Can you fill in the others to restore clear communication?
When you're done, the circled letters should spell out
a referential-ish word, itself made up of four pronouns.
| 1980s manga | MAPSYCHCGRL | he, i, i, it | MβΆi t h e p s y c h i c g i r l |
| Uncanny, Death, or Ohio | V | all, ey | _ _β―_ _ _ |
| Sounds like "Lost Wages" | LG | as, as, ve | β―_ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
|
|
| Audio art | MC | i, us | _β―_ _ _ |
| Γ· | DON | i, i, vis | _ _ _ _β―_ _ _ |
|
|
| Legacy | AGE | her, it | _ _ _β―_ _ _ _ |
|
|
| Body of water | R | i, ver | _ _β―_ _ |
| A republic, if you can keep it | ARCA | i, me | _ _β―_ _ _ _ |
Some hints, rot-13'd:
All the puzzle data, rot-13'd:
zncflpuptey / zNv gur cflpuvp tvey / vg, ur, v, v / 1980f znatn
i / inYyrl / nyy, rl / Hapnaal, Qrngu, be Buvb
yt / Ynf irtnf / nf, nf, ir / Fbhaqf yvxr "Ybfg Jntrf"
zp / zHfvp / hf, v / Nhqvb neg
qba / qvivFvba / ivf, v, v / Γ·
ntr / ureVgntr / ure, vg / Yrtnpl
e / evIre / ire, v / Obql bs jngre
nepn / nzRevpn / zr, v / N erchoyvp, vs lbh pna xrrc vg
Permalink
It is March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "staff".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump and his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk
are halting
a huge-yet-arbitrary chunk of research at the NSF,
NIH, and possibly
other science agencies I overlooked!
Alas, our puzzly chemists' supplies were disrupted. They tried to make some words,
but each word is missing two chemical symbols. For example, they tried to make
"staffers", but were missing flourine (F) and iron (Fe), so they got
staFFers = stars. Can you reconstruct the other words they were trying to make?
Each is missing two symbols. Despite what you might think from that "staffers" example,
the symbols might not be right next to each other.
When you're done, the circled letters should spell out the general
character of the disruption.
| Organization people | stars | s t a β» F e r s
|
| Assocation | many | _β―_ _ _ _ _
|
| Without reason | ram | _ _ _ _β―_
|
| Not precipitate | soon | _ _β―_ _ _ _ _
|
| Resistance | option | _ _ _ _ _β―_ _ _ _
|
| America's pastime | bell | _ _β―_ _ _ _ _
|
| Device | mine | _ _ _β―_ _ _
|
Missing chemistry symbols: Ac, As, Ba, Co, F, Fe, H, Lu, Nd, O, P, Po, Si, Ti
Some hints, rot-13'd:
- Pbonyg naq cubfcubehf tb gbtrgure.
- Arbqlzvhz naq bkltra tb gbtrgure.
- Npgvavhz naq Ulqebtra tb gbtrgure.
All the puzzle data, rot013'd:
fgnef / fgnSsref / Sr S / Betnavmngvba crbcyr
znal / pBzcnal / Pb C / Nffbpngvba
enz / enaqBz / Aq B / Jvgubhg ernfba
fbba / fbYhgvba / Yh Gv / Abg cerpvcvgngr
bcgvba / bccbfVgvba / Cb Fv / Erfvfgnapr
oryy / onFronyy / Nf On / Nzrevpn'f cnfggvzr
zvar / znpUvar / Np U / Qrivpr
Permalink
It is once again March and the
lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers
to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "flow".
Oh no! The USA clown President Trump and his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk
fired hundreds of people at the NOAA, the USA's weather prediction agency!
We can expect billions of dollars in damage to transportation and other sectors
that rely on weather. We can see the effects already below. E.g. That "heat
flow" has a problem: it contains letters from "waft" but should have
letters from "wind". So we cross out the letters W, A, F, T from heat flow to get
H E L O. Then we add the letters W I N D to the right places HELO
to get Whieldon, as in the influential pottery-maker Thomas Whieldon.
(Gee, that's kind of obscure, like a puzzle designer was pretty desperate
to shoehorn "flow" into this puzzle somehow. Let's hope the rest of the answers are easier!)
No doubt that "Thomas _____" is the clue that points to Wieldon, so write it into
the top set of blanks. Now do that for the rest of the entries.
When you're done, the circled letters should spell out the root of the problem (and dare we hope its solution?).
| at the age | | Thomas ___: | W h i βΊ l d o n
|
| directional | | Knowledge: | β―_ _ _ _ _ _ _
|
| East Timor | | Disaster: | _ _ _ _β―_ _
|
| footprints | | Teachers: | _ _ _β―_ _ _ _ _
|
| forget | | Innovative: | _ _ _ _β―_ _ _
|
heat flow | WINDβ | Jeremiad: | _ _ _ _ _ _β―_ _
|
| mornings | | Hand-eye _____: | _ _β―_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
|
| narrative | | Anarchy: | _β―_ _ _ _
|
Weather phenomena: calm, clear, corona, dry, fog, frost, gale, heat, ice, mist, rain, scud, smog, sun, waft, wind
Some rot-13'd Hints:
All the puzzle data, all rot-13'd:
urng sybj / jnsg / jvaq / juvRyqba / Gubznf ___
zbeavatf / fzbt / tnyr / Yrneavat / Xabjyrqtr
ng gur ntr / urng / qel / gentRql / Qvfnfgre
rnfg Gvzbe / zvfg / fphq / rqhPngbef / Grnpuref
aneengvir / enva / vpr / pernGvir / Vaabingvir
sbbgcevagf / sebfg / pnyz / pbzcynVag / Wrerzvnq
qverpgvbany / pyrne / pbeban / pbBeqvangvba / Unaq-rlr _____
sbetrg / sbt / fha / hAerfg / Nanepul
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Every day, I play the puzzle game Collections.
It starts out kinda like the game show Wheel of Fortune: You're looking at three sets of blanks. You ask about some letters. The game shows you where those letters are in the blanks. When you have some idea what words you're looking at, you figure out what collection (category) they all belong to. Guess the collection correctly to win.
To ask about a letter, you spend points. You want to spend as few points as possible to win. From that description, you might think "Obviously the best strategy is to ask about E first, it's the most common letter." But wait: The game designer thought about that. You spend 10 points for E, but only 1 point for Q. If you start by asking for E, your best score will only ever be 90. If you start by asking for rare, "cheap" letters, maybe you can do better. Which letters should you pick? I guesse hypothesized I should start with the cheap letters, but wasn't too sure. So I wrote a computer program. I tell the program what I've guessed so far, which letters are in which blanks. The program knows the phraser word list and knows how much letters cost in this game. Based on that, it recommends which letter to pick next.
Here are the letters it recommended for several recent Collections games. Here, the line zJxqkyFvwhGBdlNcS means in one puzzle, start with Z, then J, then X…. One line per puzzle. The program pretty consistently suggests starting with the cheapest letters: Z, J, X, and Q. Then prrrrobably the next cheapest: K, Y, V, F, and W. Yay, I will stick with my hypothesis with more confidence now.
zJxqkyFvwhGBdlNcS
zjxqkyfvwhGBdMpu
zjxqkyFvwHgBMDCPlUn
zjxqkYfvwhgBMDSpU
ZjxqkYvfWhBgmdPNu
zJxqkyvfwHbGMDuAp
zjxqKYvfwHbGMPdLN
zjxqkyvfWhGBdMLNp
zjxqKYvFwHGbdmlnR
zjxqkyvfWHgbdSmPn
zjxqkyVfwHgbdSpMA
zJxqkyvfwHgbMApd
zjxqkYvfWhGbmdPL
zjxqkyvfwHgBmdSlN
zjxqKyvfwhgBmdSP
zjxqkyvfwHGbmDsPL
zjXQkyvfwHGbmdSpN
zjxqkyVfwHgbmSdA
zjxqKyVfwHgbpDmluC
zjxqkYvFWhGbPlDU
zjXqkyvfwHGmdPlN
While I'm content with this result, some more rigorous thinkers will note problems:
β1 The program chooses a letter trying to narrow down the number of word possibilities overall. In general, that's a fine strategy. But suppose you're looking at _____, __YX, _____. That middle word is onyx, Styx, or oryx; if you knew which, you could probably figure out the collection right away, even if you don't know anything about the other words. But the program doesn't think narrowing three choices down to one as being very useful; instead, it will mostly try to narrow down the thousands of possibilities for those _____ all-blank words.
β2 The phraser word list is just what I had handy. It was created as a general word list, not necessarily words that you'd expect to see in Collections puzzles. For example, the phraser word list thinks that "eagle" and "helped" are roughly equally awesome. But I bet "eagle" shows up in lots more Collections puzzles. Maybe the category is Birds. Maybe it's golf scores. Maybe it's things on the Mexican flag. When I try to think of categories I'd clue with "helped," I think of… Uh. Hmm. I think of… Yyyyeah. Ideally, my word list would have "eagle" but not "helped".
Not the most important thing going on these days, but a topic on which I can provide expertise, so here ya go.
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While investigating the question "Why doesn't phraser know about [[Redacted MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle solution Redacted]]?" I found a bug: When reading Wikipedia, if there was an absurdly long paragraph, phraser
thought it had reached the end of Wikipedia. Back in 2016 when I was writing phraser and looking carefully for problems, Wikipedia
didn't have any absurdly long paragraphs, so everything seemed to be working fine. In the intervening years, alas, that changed.
I was no longer looking carefully for problems and, alas, didn't notice.
I fixed that bug, yay. (Less notice-ably, I fixed another bug, and thus did something to help phraser find [[Redacted MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle solution Redacted]]. When considering Wikipedia cross-references to, say, Critique of Pure Reason, I was counting "critique of", "of pure", and "pure reason" more than I meant to.)
Anyhow, you might want to download the latest phrase and word lists from the appropriate page. If you run phraser yourself, this would be a good time to refresh and pick up the latest code.
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I have updated
the Phraser word and phrase lists.
Those of you who find these lists handy for solving/designing
word puzzles, rejoice!
This update incorporates an epiphany!
(It also has updated content from Wikipedia,
etc, but you already expected that.)
tl;dr I fixed many many mistakes, and I like the
quality improvement. If you want the details, read on…
You may recall a quandary: Crossword constructors have hand-crafted
lists of cool phrases, idioms, and such. I can download a few of
these lists, and Phraser can see that SHORTANDSTOUT is a nifty
phrase. Crossword constructors don't care about spaces in phrases;
but I'd like to know where the spaces go.
So Phraser first tries to figure out a list of phrases that have appeared
in text. It reads lots of text-sources: Wikipedia, text files from project
Gutenberg, etc etc. But it doesn't realize that
"short and stout" is a more-interesting phrase than
"copyright 1995", which appears more often.
So it then goes through the crossword lists,
notices that crossword constructors think SHORTANDSTOUT is cool,
notices that "short and stout" is SHORTANDSTOUT
with spaces, and boosts the score of "short and stout".
But what if Phraser never figured out that "short and stout" is a thing?
Maybe it figured out the phrase "short and" and the word "stout" are things,
but never sees that teapot song and thus never realizes that "short and stout"
goes together. In that case, when it sees SHORTANDSTOUT in a crossword list,
it just kinda shrugs, thinks "I don't what to do with that" and moves on. What a waste.
One time, I wrote a program that looked over my crossword lists for SHORTANDSTOUTs
for which Phraser couldn't figure out where to put spaces. For each, it would look
for a pair of phrases that could be combined. So if Phraser had spotted
"short and" and the word "stout", this other program would spot that
those phrases could be combined to make "short and stout". I kept the output from
that program, and fed it to Phraser on subsequent runs. Thus, it would
know "short and stout" was a thing the next time it ran; and when it saw
SHORTANDSTOUT in a crossword list, it would know to boost the score of
"short and stout".
My phrase-combiner program didn't get it right every time.
Like, if a crossword constructor like the very-obscure word BLUNGE,
my phrase-combiner program would guess that must be "B LUNGE".
But it was right most of the time, and the results were good enough such
that I kept using it.
A few days ago, I was looking at one of the wrong phrases that
my phrase-combiner program had come up with:
diuretic ally
That's not a thing. "Diuretically" is a word, sort of. You can look at it and figure
out it's an adverb to describe something acting in the manner of a diuretic, I guess.
It's reeeeeeeally rare, though. If you look up diuretical
and diuretically on the Google ngram viewer, you can see that they show
up not-quite-never in books.
And diuretically appears so very rarely in texts that Phraser figured
"aw, that's probably just a typo" and forgot about it.
But crossword lists agree that
"DIURETICALLY" is a kinda-important thing. So my phrase-combiner, trying its
best, had come up with diuretic ally. And a couple of days ago, I was
staring at that and wondering: OK, why do all these crossword
lists think that "diuretically" is good thing to put into a crossword, given that nobody
uses this word in real life? That's when I had the epiphany.
The epiphany: DIURETICALLY is a valid Scrabble word.
I looked through my crossword-word-lists and saw a fair number
of words-only-Scrabble-players use.
As near as I can tell,
crossword constructors are pretty forgiving about Scrabble words that nobody uses
but are figure-out-able.
(They're not so forgiving about obscure scientific terms; there's no obvious
way for a solver to figure the name of a rare sheep disease by applying
grammar-suffixes to a common word, I guess.)
So I hauled out a SOWPODS list (list of Scrabble words), looked through the list of
best-guess-phrases from my phrase-combiner tool, and thus found many other of my
mistakes like diuretic ally. And I purged them.
I'm now much more confident in the surviving best-guess-phrases; so I increased
their "boost" so that they're more likely to appear in the 5-million-phrases file.
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If a puzzlehunt nerd happens to
spam nutrimatic,
does that mean they apply something
almost, but not quite, entirely unlike ham to something
almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea?
This semi-coherent thought ramble was inspired by the puzzlehunt team named
πΆNutrimatic Spamilton, our name is Nutrimatic Spamilton. And there's a million puzzles still unsolved, but just you wait, just you waitπΆ,
as reported in the
VeheMusical Wrapup
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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...
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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 tha...
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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 ...
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Hello! It is not March, but the excellent EnigMarch folks occasionally send out a prompt word nonetheless. Today's prompt word is LETTER, in honor of International Literacy Day. That tells me it's a ...
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I have updated the Phraser words- and phrases-lists. As you recall, these are text files with words and phrases commonly-found in Wikipedia, books, and other places; ranked by amazing-ness.* They can...
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In the constructor notes for today's Puzzmo crossword, Zhouqin Burnikel says her original gimmick idea (not used) was people whose names had a fruit-word and a season-word. But she could only find on...
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Tammy McLeod isn't just my teammate on MIT Mystery Hunt's Left Out; she isn't just a sudoku champion; she's also a world record speed jigsaw puzzler. She started a YouTube channel with another speed...
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To celebrate California's Juror Appreciation Week, the Judicial Council of California created, uh, a word search puzzle(β½) ...
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I enjoyed the gimmick of today's Puzzmo crossword (which ?might? be the same as today's AVCX crossword?). ...
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Book Report: The Puzzler
It's a survey of puzzles: word puzzles, logic puzzles, physical puzzles, jigsaw—you get the idea. I'm not really in the target demographic for a survey; I already knew most of this stuff from, ...
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It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is sequel). So it would be good to know som...
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It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. Today's word is book. So I pulled a book off the shelf: S...
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It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is surprise.) There is one suprise in each...
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Heads or Tails
It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is coin.) Below are some blanks with some ...
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It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is rule.) Below are five words and five tr...
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Five Cryptic Clues
It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is clue.) Here are five cryptic crossword-s...
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res ipsa loquitur
It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is raise.) "Raise" and "raze" are interest...
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It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is power.) Here's a classic Puzzazz daily ...
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It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is neither.) "Neither snow nor rain nor hea...
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It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is cloud.) In wordplay, a letterbank is a ...
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Mixology
It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is mix.) Mixology is the study of cocktail...
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But here there are no cows.
It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is neighbor.) In the Robert Frost poem "Me...
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It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is odd.) "I want to write a parody. What ar...
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Club Bangers
It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is club.) Here are some song lyrics. Alas,...
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Happy March 17th! It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is ancient.) How often d...
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Many Hands Make Aight Work
Happy March! It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is hand.) Although I am an en...
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3D Movies
It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is 3D.) See if you can figure out what mov...
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Happy Pi Day! This round's on me. It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is spirit. ...
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Happy Marsh March! It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is wave.) The Marshall Is...
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It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is shield.) The language of heraldry and t...
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Happy March! It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is bridge.) To abridge is to sh...
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The Attention We Bring To It
It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is zero.) Someone who'd thought about such m...
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You Spin Me Right
It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is thread. Kinda spooky coincidence when you ...
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It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is rock.) So I made one of those fancypants ...
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It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is watch.) What does a watched pot never do...
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Like a Record, Baby
It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is round.) It's neat that if you move the la...
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Oh hi, Mark
Happy March! It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is sign.) That's kind of neat,...
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Case-by-Case Basis
It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is shift.) Did you ever wonder how keyboards...
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March March March March March
Happy March! It is #EnigMarch, and each day the excellent EnigMarch people post a prompt word; then puzzle nerds try to design puzzles around that word. (Today's word is musical.) Since it's March, ...
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False Friends
It is still #EnigMarch. Thus, each day the EnigMarch people post a prompt word; and puzzle nerds such as myself attempt to design a puzzle to that prompt. (Today's word is false.) A false friend i...
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Welcome to the month of March! It is #EnigMarch anew. Thus, each day the EnigMarch people post a prompt and nerds try to design puzzles around that prompt. (Today's word is door.) _ β― _ _ Caramel...
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I didn't go to school at MIT, but I've played in the MIT Mystery Hunt. So I've sent in some thank-you money, and thus landed on their alumni fundraising mailing list. They just sent me a postcard abo...
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Martin Renfried is going to send out a cocktail-themed cryptic crossword every couple of months; if you subscribe to his Patreon, he'll send those crosswords to you. He wrote a couple of cryptics for...
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The Hearst Newspapers News-sites, no doubt jealous of the NYT's puzzle section, have launched their own syndicated puzzle page, Puzzmo. Each day there's a cool mini-crossword from the AVCX folks and...
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Everybody likes to complain about crosswordese, but this puzzle does something about it. (I heard about it via xwords by a ladee) ...
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USA Chain Restaurants Word Ladder
I made another word ladder: USA Chain Restaurants. This one was pretty tough for me, a San Franciscan who doesn't make it out to other parts of the country these days. I look at _A_BY'S and do...
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Like many San Franciscans I've recently struggled played with Chris Arvin's excellent Name SF Streets game. Crossword fiend that I am, I thought Remembering street names by looking at a map is hard; ...
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I walked past a storefront near 33rd Ave and Judah and saw some big Braille out of the corner of my eye. I snapped a hasty pic through the window, but didn't try to get a better one—inside the ...
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I updated the lists of "popular" phrases and words over on the phraser page. These new lists have fresh data from Wikipedia and some other wikis. Perhaps making the biggest difference between this up...
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The Richmond Review, my horrible neighborhood paper, has reached a new low. Yes they still, in the year 2023, publish a column by Quentin Kopp. Yes, they publish letters from residents who threaten c...
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I have gone five million steps while playing the Pikmin Bloom phone game. Look on my walks, ye mighty, and despair! (Yeah, yeah, I know some other people have more steps than this. I bet there's...
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It is #EnigMarch, and when dared to design another puzzle, I say there's no going back now. I'm thinking of some words. For each of these words, you can form a new word by reversing three of its let...
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It is #EnigMarch, and I might design a puzzle if given a nudge. It's interesting that PULL and PUSH are antonyms and yet have the same number of letters. Not just about the same, give or take, bu...
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It's #EnigMarch, and when dared to design a puzzle, I do what they say. When I was searching Bartlett's Familiar Quotations yesterday, I decided to write some new quotations. But that was difficul...
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It's #EnigMarch, and when challenged to design a puzzle, I'm inclined to try. Punctation mark that annoy's when misused In electronics, phenomenon by which one circuit's signal interferes with ano...
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It's #EnigMarch, and when dared to design a puzzle, I can handle the heat. If you fill in this fire-kissed crossword, the circled letters spell out a kind of fire. Across: 1. Not many 4. George...
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It is #EnigMarch, and when they challenge us to design a puzzle, I ask "how high?" In the three sequences below, you will grow words. You'll start with a two-letter word, then add a letter to get t...
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It's #EnigMarch and there's a daily puzzle design challenge. Today's challenge is KNOT. Alas I do not have some new knotty puzzle idea. FWIW, I wrote a knot puzzle some years back, tho. ...
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It's #EnigMarch, and when challenged to design a puzzle, I make time even if I feel kinda buried. In this crossword, most clues are cryptic, but the clues that just say undead don't have any wordpl...
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It's #EnigMarch, and I'm still attempting these puzzle design challenges, even ones that sound kinda random. I'm thinking of a six-sided die, but with a letter on each face instead of a number. He...
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It is #EnigMarch, and thus there is a new puzzle design challenge today, as has been foretold. To crack today's code, figure out what the opposite of colorblindness is and use that, I guess. ...
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It's #EnigMarch, and I'm still attempting these puzzle design challenges, even ones that sound kinda random. I'm thinking of a six-sided die, but with a letter on each face instead of a number. He...
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It is #EnigMarch, and if it sounds like they have a puzzle-design challenge, I listen up. Some fiend has split each of these six-letter words into two three-letter words! The letters within each th...
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It's #EnigMarch, and when dared to design a puzzle, I take the bait. "All fishermen are liars." If someone tells you that they caught FriedrIch NietzScHe but had to let him go, they probably just ca...
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It's #EnigMarch, and I still respond to puzzle-design challenges, even if they seem really out there. The spaces between these words seem OK but are supposed to be letters: … with &nbs...
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It's #EnigMarch, and I respond to a puzzle design challenge, even if it can be a pain. So here's a puzzle: Waayaahtanwa chief, as described by foreigner, maybe: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ β― King's...
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It's still #EnigMarch and when I hold the internet up to my ear, I think it's telling me to write a puzzle, so here you go: shell wily even sway year Adele tests kayak wavy mean away care dense I...
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It's #EnigMarch, and when dared to create a puzzle, I do. To find today's hidden message, you will need to cut out a stencil from the key-card. Which letters to cut out? The ones that form the c...
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It is #EnigMarch and when dared to design a puzzle, I still make space in my schedule. Across: 1. Runway pavement 7. Get new loan from S&L, perhaps 11. Who might sell you a pedigree pup ...
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Happy Ο Day! It's still #EnigMarch and so I took a moment to respond to a challenge by putting together a puzzle: Already-published book, revised: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ES...
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It's still #EnigMarch and today's puzzle-design challenge lit a fire under my ass. Find matches for what to try if you can't find matches: 5 FLINT BUTANE 4 LIGHTER GLYCERIN ...
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It is still #EnigMarch and when they dare us to write a puzzle, I do. When faced with a tower of books, you need a word ladder, obviously. When you've climbed that tall ladder, how will you ente...
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It is #EnigMarch, and I am again exhorted to create a puzzle. "Be bold" is a fun phrase because "be" sounds like B, the first letter of BOLD. With that in mind: βB BOLD and mighty forces will come ...
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It is #EnigMarch, and I have been once again baited into creating a puzzle. This puzzle uses interstate words: words formed by placing 2-letter USA state abbreviations in other words. E.g. in the fir...
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It is still #EnigMarch, and I am still ruled by double-dares to create puzzles. Neo: Just had a little dΓ©jΓ vu. Trinity: What did you see? Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that look...
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It is still #EnigMarch, and I am still taking double-dares to create puzzles. When folks cuss on internet forums, they replace one or more letters with symbols. The QWERTY standard swear-rule the sy...
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It is still #EnigMarch, and I am still succumbing to double-dares to create puzzles. In my previous puzzles, I've started out with instructions; this time I'll supply no directions, you should be ab...
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It is still #EnigMarch, and I am still reacting to double-dares to create puzzles. Here's a cryptid I mean cryptic clue: Bull-head one takes Jupiter's six relating to cattle. (6) To get you in the ...
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It is still #EnigMarch and I am once again responding to a dare to create a puzzle. The jeweler knows that an uncut gem doesn't look right; you need to chip away a bit to see the precious stone. On...
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It is still #EnigMarch and I am once again responding to a double-dare to create a puzzle. Here's something I'd like to use as a cryptic crossword clue gimmick, but I think traditionalists would thro...
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Once again, I respond to an #EnigMarch challenge by writing a puzzle. This one has a lot of flavortext, but fortunately I outsourced the work to L. Frank Baum: TikTok the Machine Man …Dor...
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#EnigMarch is a daily puzzle creation challenge; each day during the month of March, it double-dares everyone to create a puzzle. I made a puzzle today: We place "egg" words in "nest" words and hope...
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#EnigMarch is a daily puzzle creation challenge; each day during the month of March, it double-dares everyone to create a puzzle. I made a puzzle today: I don't know if I'll stick with this all ...
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I'm just now realizing that the head of the San Francisco Sheriff's Department Oversight Board is Jayson Wechter, the guy who ran those Chinese New Year parade Treasure Hunts. Wow, hmm. Wow. OK. Tha...
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The puzzles.mit.edu https certificate expired two days ago. Is this a puzzle? ...
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π Spaghetti 2023 is happening https://www.ericberlin.com/2023/01/05/a-serving-of-spaghetti/ π "A #puzzle by its nature is something purposefully constructed, often with painstaking effort so as to ...
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W- were they on sale? Suddenly ballards are all over Golden Gate Park. (Pictured: Ballard, ballard, ballard. Bollards, ballard. Ballard, barrier, ballard. Ballard, barrier, ballard.) Oh...
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I see the New York Times Guild is going on strike tomorrow and puzzle nerds are realizing they can't play Wordle (assuming they don't want to cross the picket line to play with puzzles). I'll post li...
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rephrased Phraser word+phrase lists
I updated the scored word and phrase lists over at the phraser page, using data from a recent copies of Wikipedia and other wikis. Soon after I updated them, I saw that my over-enthusiastic tool tha...
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In theory, the "Mumbled Artist's Instructions" puzzles were a challenge to figure out some absurd thing an AI had tried to draw. Reverse-engineering an AI is a fun challenge. But it turns out AI is ...
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If Monday's Mumbled Artist's Instructions puzzle was too hard, good news: there is now a "reveal answer" button. ...
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Mumbled Artist's Instructions Puzzle 2022-11-21
This is a puzzle. I gave an artist some instructions, a two-word English comic book title. Alas, I mumbled those instructions and the artist did their best to depict what they heard and came up with ...
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If Monday's Mumbled Artist's Instructions Puzzle was too difficult, I have good news: There is now a "reveal answer" button. ...
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Mumbled Artist's Instructions 2022-11-14
This is a puzzle. I gave an artist some instructions, a two-word English phrase. Alas, I mumbled those instructions and the artist did their best to depict what they heard and came up with this: ...
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I just went through the emotional rollercoaster of watching someone solve a puzzle live on video. It was a puzzle I helped write, so I was pretty much either yelling "no no no" or breathing "whew!" t...
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If Monday's Mumbled Artist's Instructions puzzle stumped you, you'll be glad to know there's now a "reveal answer" button. ...
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Mumbled Artist's Instructions 2022-10-31
This is a puzzle. I gave an artist some instructions, a three-word English phrase. Alas, I mumbled those instructions and the artist did their best to depict what they heard. The artist gave me four ...
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Laberinto Verde: floreciendo
Folks continue to decorate the car-free portion of JFK Drive Promenade. There's a new road mural, Laberinto Verde: floreciendo by JosuΓ© Rojas, assisted by Anthony Jiminez. I suppose to really ca...
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If you were stumped by Monday's "Mumbled Artist's Instructions" puzzle, you'll be glad to know it now has a "reveal answer" button. ...
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Last year, I spotted some Hallowe'en riddle decorations at a neighbor's house. Alas, I didn't spot them until after Hallowe'en, too late to be useful. So this year, I'll post a link back to my last-y...
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Mumbled Artist's Instructions Puzzle 2022-10-24
This is a puzzle. I gave an artist some instructions, two words. Alas, I mumbled those instructions and the artist did their best to depict what they heard. Can you guess the original phrase? If...
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If you stared at Monday's Mumbled Artist's Instructions puzzle and still couldn't figure out the answer, you'll be glad to know it now has a Reveal Answer button. I'm just impressed because my paren...
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Mumbled Artist's Instructions Puzzle 2022-10-10
This is a puzzle. I gave an artist some instructions, a two-word name. Alas, I mumbled those instructions and the artist did their best to depict what they heard. Can you guess the original phra...
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If you were still stumped by that Mumbled Artist's Instructions puzzle despite the hint, there is now a Reveal Answer button on the page. ...
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If you were stumped by that "Mumbled Artist's Instructions" puzzle, it wasn't just you. The puzzle page now has a hint button. Press that button for a hint. ...
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Mumbled Artist's Instructions Puzzle
This is a puzzle. I gave an artist some instructions, a three-word English phrase. Alas, I mumbled those instructions and the artist did their best to depict what they heard. The artist gave me four ...
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phraser improvements
Phraser, the tool for generating word+phrase lists useful for solving+designing puzzles, is now smarter when reading crossword constructor dictionaries. Thus, hundreds of thousands of words+phrases g...
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I've had a good time playing the word puzzle game Cell Tower at https://www.andrewt.net/puzzles/cell-tower/ ...
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Maybe a secret message; maybe a wild goose chase, I dunno: I saw this sign hanging behind a door on Douglass Street near 18th: If you dig up your trusty puzzlehunter's decoder sheet and start r...
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I'm feeling lucky. Just days after I figured out how to extract a list of titles of well-known movies and TV shows from IMDB data, today's Toddle puzzle category is movie titles. Toddle challenges y...
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crunching IMDB data
IMDB, the Internet Movie DataBase, has a lot of information about movies, TV shows, actors, directors, gaffers, animators, etc. I just crunched some exported IMDB data to build a crossword dictionary...
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I updated the big ol' list of words and the big ol' list of phrases on the Phraser page. A couple of months back, I noticed that The Collaborative Word List Project was now free. I've used the C.W....
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Thr33dle
I made Thr33dle, a version of 3-Polydle with an auto-suggest function. That's a strange statement with a lot to unpack. In the past few months, I've played a lot of Polydle, a Wordle variant tha...
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The Collaborative Word List Project is a darned useful resource for word puzzle constructors and now it's free.* This is a list of phrases and hand-tuned scores. Here are a few lines from the file: ...
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Genius ...
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Daily 5-dle #0007 11 : 5&8&6&11&10 polydle.github.io/?classic/daily/5 β¬β¬β¬β¬π¨ β¬π©β¬π¨β¬ β¬β¬β¬β¬π© β¬π©π©π©π© π©π©π©π©π© β¬π¨β¬β¬π¨ β¬β¬β¬π¨β¬ β¬π¨β¬π¨β¬ β¬β¬β¬π¨π¨ β¬β¬β¬π¨π¨ β¬β¬π¨β¬π¨ β¬π©π©π©π© π©π©π©π©π© π¨π¨β¬π¨π© β¬β¬β¬β¬β¬ π©β¬β¬β¬β¬ π¨β¬β¬π¨β¬ β¬β¬β¬π¨β¬ π©π©π©π©π© π¨β¬β¬β¬β¬ π©β¬β¬β¬β¬...
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Wrungβ½
When I noticed that Wordle's list of potential answers had ARISE but not BOXED, I figured that it only used "root" words: single number, present tense, etc. But WRUNG was an answer. And now I peek at...
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Link: "Puzzle World" Discord
I joined the Puzzle World Discord, a set of chat rooms for puzzlehunt and gnarly-puzzle enthusiasts. If you're not into Mystery Hunt and peek at this Discord today, you might think "oh gee whiz maybe...
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Okay, now RAISE is my new Wordle starter word. As before, I am not the first to figure this out. Last night, I was measuring a starting word's quality based on how many green and yellow squares it yi...
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Update: This blog post, which superceded another blog post, has since then itself been superceded. Try to keep up. Also, my "only root words" explanation wasn't quite right. Apparently, non-root wo...
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UPDATE: This post has been superceded. I've been playing Wordle, the online game that's like a cross between Mastermind and guess-the-word. It occurred to me that the ideal "starting word" would hav...
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Rest in Peace, Stephen Sondheim
Along with his Broadway accomplishments, Sondheim was important to puzzles and puzzle hunt culture. He collected puzzles. He ran puzzle hunts. He wrote "The Last of Sheila," a movie that features a s...
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On Hallowe'en evening, kids in St. Louis don't just say "Trick or treat," they ask jokey riddles. Unfortunately, these little kids make up their own jokes, and the results are abusrdly unfunny. Each ...
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Book Report: Planning Your Escape
It's a book about escape rooms and it's pretty interesting. I came at the book as someone who knows plenty about puzzle hunts and some things about puzzles and has picked up a fair amount of immersiv...
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I got wind of a new-ish public word list for crossword constructors, the spread the word(list). So I grabbed a copy and tossed it into the big pile of data that feeds the "Phraser" phrase and word li...
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Palace Games: The Attraction
Today I helped play the The Attraction escape room experience at Palace Games. It was awesome and fun. As usual with escape rooms, there's not much you can say specifically about them, lest spoilers....
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I had a fun time solving Patrick Berry's puzzle extravaganza "Containment Policy." It took a while to get through. The puzzles were pretty straightforward to solve, but then I spent a while staring a...
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Consider this a "soft re-opening" announcement for Octothorpean. Also, I'm asking for bright ideas on a UI/usability thing. Update: a couple of smarties suggested using "Import/Export" instead of "...
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I'm working on getting the # Octothorpean # puzzlehunt back online. You know how the first 80% of the project takes 20% of the time? I think that's about where I am on getting this thing ba...
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wordnet, is-a
ColinTheMathmo asked folks to think of animals that were also verbs, like "bug". I thought of some and then it occurred to me: wordnet ("wn") is a computer tool that knows the meaning of many many wo...
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I enjoyed this crossword puzzle's gimmick: https://www.theatlantic.com/free-daily-crossword-puzzle/?id=atlantic_20210221&set=atlantic&puzzleType=crossword ...
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I had some thoughts about automatically-generated mazes rattling around in the back of my head and figured out a way to apply an algorithm from that Mazes for Programmers book to a problem I'd notice...
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The US Postal Service announced new stamps for 2021. One title especially caught my eye: "Mystery Message." Wow, a stamp with a hidden message. Sounds like something right up my alley. According...
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Book Report: Mazes for Programmers
This book is about randomly generating mazes by writing computer programs. Before reading this book, I'd tried randomly generating some mazes, but those mazes hadn't pleased me: too many little nubbl...
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If you're in the SF Bay Area and your COVID pod contains enough puzzle nerds to take on an escape room, check out Trivium Games, a.k.a. the folks behind the Ghost Patrol puzzle hunts. They made a Gho...
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I got an email from a game show that's casting. If you're a trivia nerd in California, they'd love to hear from you: I'm Joanna, one of the Casting Producers for the hit quiz game TV show, "The Cha...
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When I read that Puzzled Pint now has a Code of Conduct, my first thought was "What about scissors?" … and they have a clause about scissors. They thought of everything.* Nice job, f...
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The really unsettling thing about out-in-the-world puzzle hunts, eldritch horrors aside, is days later when you think you see puzzles everywhere. Just looking down at the sidewalk and you think you s...
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Curtis and DeeAnn of Team Snout were in town. We played the Edison Room over at the excellent Palace Games Escape Rooms. And and and Curtis had Puzzled Pint stickers with him, so now my laptop is ext...
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I was unintentionally cruel a while back. I posted a photo saying "ha ha ha, this wall decoration could almost be Braille, I see codez everywhere ha ha ha". And then some nice folks pointed out that ...
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Were you excited to hear that I'd written a set of Puzzled Pint puzzles, but on the evening in question you felt really lazy and you just stayed home? Yeah, me too. All is not lost: the excellent PP ...
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The building across the street from the Temporary Transbay bus Terminal continues to be constructed. Recently, the building-side facing the bus terminal got decorated. Basically, it's a dark wall wit...
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Puzzled Pint is coming up on Tuesday. I wrote this month's set, aided (a lot) once again by excellent Puzzled Pint editor Neal Tibrewala and excellent anonymous-to-me playtesters who I love even thou...
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Aftermath
I stopped resisting, just downloaded β« Semper Paratus β« and added it to my folder of walking music. #mysteryhunt ...
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New plan for the coming year: #mysteryhunt Thank you, #SETEC! We had a blast. And now, bed. ...
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This crossword puzzle auto-fill program coincidentally got ΒΎ of the way to a mini-theme by randomly picking phrases out of a hat… M S I O INSIDEUSA T R U N N O ERIKSATIE N E G ...
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Book Report: Puzzlecraft (Humble Bundle edition)
I flipped through this book recently. Maybe "flipped through" isn't the right phrase. I was viewing the .pdf on a tablet. I'd already read an older edition of the book, now I wanted to flip through i...
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Comic Report: Form of a Question
It's an autobiographical graphic novel structured around the author's run on Jeopardy!. In the world of trivia, there are clear answers, but not so much in the real world. I'm guessing not so many fo...
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Book Report: The Unseen World
It's a novel about a young lady who grows up amongst researchers at something kinda like MIT's AI Lab, but different. There's learning and forgetting and machine learning and I suppose machine forget...
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Book Report: The Woman Who Smashed Codes
Before I read this book, I vaguely knew that Elizebeth Friedman was a skilled codebreaker but figured I would never know the deets since her work was classified. But this biography pulls some impres...
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Puzzle Extravaganzas are Everywhere, even Waterholes Worldwide
I wrote a set of puzzles for Puzzled Pint. And I'd like to write some notes about what it's like for a puzzle-designer to go through the Puzzled Pint process. But I'm just now getting around to it be...
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If you like puzzles and/or beer & are free this Tuesday evening, maybe you want to do Puzzled Pint. In a bold departure from making puzzles about the # typographic symbol, I drafted some puzzles ...
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Book Report: Can You Solve My Problems?
It's a book about puzzles and brainteasers. There are puzzles, there are brain-teasers, there are essay-ish bits exploring some ideas in detail. There were some puzzles that I hadn't encountered befo...
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Looking forward to a few days of knowing what needs to be done with no idea how to do it. ...
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Book Report: York / The Shadow Cipher
It's YA fiction in which the city of New York has a puzzlehunt embedded in it that residents have tried to solve for decades. You might think that's an overly fanciful premise—cities change con...
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Remember that list of phrases and/or that list of words in a text file handy for designing/solving word puzzles? I updated those lists again with some fresh content. While I'm here: Happy Thanksgivi...
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Long before the Two-Tone Game puzzlehunt
…there was a two-tone ska single decorated with a crossword puzzle, as seen on the Puzzlenation blog. ...
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Curtis Chen has a new novel out and a new game-ish thingy to provide some backstory. Go visit www.kangaroo2.com to learn more about the novel Kangaroo Too. And then visit __.kangaroo2.com for the gam...
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Remember phraser, that tool for generating puzzle-design-friendly word lists? I just updated it. I found OMDB, a big database of movie info with a public API. (Did I find it? Or did one of you tell m...
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You should do Puzzled Pint this month
I playtested this month's Puzzled Pint puzzles. They're fun! You should scoop up some friends and go solve them Tuesday. ...
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Book Report: The Lost Frenchman
It's a thriller in which puzzly geocachers are unusually qualified to seek a treasure. It is fun in much the same way the National Treasure movies are fun, but with better puzzles. If that sounds lik...
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Book Report: Thunderstruck
It's two intertwined biographies. One is a biography of Marconi, inventor of the wireless telegraph. One is a true-crime biography of a fugitive who was caught due to the wireless telegraph. The Mar...
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Iron Puzzler 2016 announced
Iron Puzzler is once again coming to the SF Bay Area. This is that weekend-long combo puzzle-design and puzzle-solving contest in which teams spend Saturday creating puzzles using "secret ingredients...
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phraser, a word list generator
When you construct word puzzles, it's good to have a nice list of words to work with. Over the last several weeks, I've been tinkering on and off to build phraser, a tool that chugs through wiki data...
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Today I handed out puzzle pieces for Shinteki. If you're a SF-area puzzle nerd, you probably perked up when you read that and though Aw FOMO, I better not have missed a Shinteki event. Settle down: t...
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That was an amazingly fun playtest! I am just back from Palace Games, the folks who do the Houdini Escape Room in San Francisco. They're putting the finishing touches on a new room. After we playtest...
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Worlds Colliding, well, Lightly Brushing anyhow
QuizUp, a trivia quiz app, is built using Pants, that build tool I wrote documentation about. ...
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No Exit
"No Exit: Play by Sartre where he's forced to play a really boring Room Escape game." –Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl Hell is other peop...
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Yesterday, I passed the site of SCRAP's upcoming escape room game, Escape the Jail. It was a little bittersweet to consider that "Escape the Jail" theme. On the sweet hand: Run More Games, yay. On...
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Puzzled Pint is now in San Francisco's East Bay. Because spending more time in traffic than in puzzling is for chumps. ...
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When puzzle nerds get crafty… Not only are you doing a mystery quilt, but you're also solving a murder mystery! With each month you get both a chapter of the story and a new quilt block to ma...
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Today's mail brought a batch of Kickstarter goodies from Oubliette Escape: a booklet of short stories and some pretty postcards. I remember that some of these are puzzles and some aren't. I don't re...
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I drew five letters in chalk, one letter in each of five sidewalk squares. I drew slowly, deliberately, neatly. Maybe ten seconds per letter? So figure it was about a minute before the security guard...
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Team Archimedds Boogs did not win the bar trivia. But we didn't come in last place, either. This was especially impressive since (a) we missed the first round and (b) there was a whole round of golf ...
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Book Report: 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5 + RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It's a book about a little "one-liner" Commodore 64 BASIC program. What happens when a bunch of academics want to talk about the good ol' days of 1980s home computer programming? A book like this, th...
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Team up for SF Puzzled Pint?
Puzzled Pint is tomorrow evening.* I wanna play. Would you like to team up to play in San Francisco? If so, I'd love to hear from you. (I went a couple of months ago. That time, I trusted to my luck...
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Game: Broken Age
The Broken Age game is pretty; it's like playing a painting; and it has funny jokes! There are also some not-so-funny jokes; one challenge in the game is a puzzle in which you have to set up a funny ...
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"Indexing"
When I reported on the book How to Puzzle Cache, I mentioned The book uses "indexing" to mean something other than what my local puzzling tradition calls "indexing". …you might have wonder...
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Book Report: How to Puzzle Cache
How to Puzzle Cache teaches you how to decode/decipher/unpuzzle many, many ways of hiding secret messages. I'm a puzzlehunter, so I was reading it and thinking it's useful for puzzlehunting. It's int...
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Puzzled Pint @ Zeitgeist
Puzzled Pint has been around for years, but until tonight I hadn't been. It was always far away. It was a monthly puzzling get-together. Folks would gather at a bar to solve puzzles. A few days ahead...
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It's like the opposite of the sunk cost fallacy. I've put hours into roughly prototyping this puzzle. Now I'm hoping that playtesters think it's totally boring so I don't feel obliged to put in the t...
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Who's running Puzzled Pint in San Francisco? (Yeah, I guess I could have found out by going. But that would have required remembering to look up from the computer. Ha! As if.) ...
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MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle idea: Code of Conduck Conunudrum. I don't know what to do with it, though. ...
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Link: Braille Notation for Complex Cello Music
"Feldmanβs piece in particular, which uses geometric figures over the course of a graphically represented x-axis of time, cannot be transcribed at all into standard braille music encoding." ...
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There's a National Puzzle Day (but I'm not sure which nation it's for). There's an International Puzzle Day. I think I planned something for one of those Puzzle Days. At some point in the past, I se...
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Link: How to Puzzle Cache
A little bird told me about a new book: How to Puzzle Cache. It's about puzzle-geocaches. The author's Cully Long; he's one of the folks who put together the Dastardly Manhattan Puzzle Caches, some ...
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Link: puzzle blog turtlegraphics.wordpress.com
Remember the math professor in St Louis who inspired both teams who played in the year I site-monitored DASH there? He made an escape-the-room game and started a blog to write about it… and, I...
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Book Report: Cool Gray City of Love
It's a book about San Francisco. Something of a cross between a history and a gazetteer; it's a collection of 49 essays, each using a San Francisco neighborhood as a leaping-off point for talking abo...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even ExitGames.co.uk
It's not just about escape-the-room games: This site has launched a major new section that has always been intended to be one of its primary focuses. This site talks about puzzle hunts frequently, ...
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Tonight's Adventure Design Group presentation was about The Go Game. They got their start around here. Thus, it wasn't 100% surprising when founder Finn mentioned early on talking with Alexandra Dix...
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Book Report: The Maze of Games
The Maze of Games is a puzzle extravaganza: about 52 puzzles leading up to four meta-puzzles leading up to another meta, along with some bonus puzzles. The variety was fun; and on those few occasions...
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Link: A Conversation with Puzzle Master Wei-Hwa Huang
This person enjoys puzzles. ...
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Book Report: The Puzzle Instinct
This book talks about how humans think their way through puzzles. It mostly does this by walking you through several classic puzzles. If you're already somewhat jaded of the classic puzzles, then lon...
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The Snoutcast interview with Yuan is a pretty good behind-the-scenes view of Puzzled Pint. ...
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Book Report: Undiluted Hocus-Pocus
It's Martin Gardner's autobiography. It's about his life. It's not about logic puzzles, tricks with matchsticks, or computer simulations. Those are things he wrote about. His autobiography is about t...
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Nautical Flags, Richmond
Posting this just in case it shows up later as a Shinteki puzzle site, you know? ...
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Book Report: Random House Puzzle Maker's Handbook
It's a book about how to make crossword puzzles (and other word puzzles) from 1995, a revision of a book first written in 1981. It's about how to make (and edit and market…) crossword puzzles ...
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Link
THIS every-state-in-continental-USA driving route is even MORE optimal (if you're optimizing for Scrabble). ...
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Dave Schweisguth knew about a couple more Escape-the-Room games, including one whose grand opening is Friday! ...
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Started a list of Escape-the-Room games on the Bay Area Night Game wiki. I know the list isn't complete—Tyler Hinman mentioned someplace I hadn't heard of… but of course I already forgot...
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Adventure Design Group: Presentation and conversation with JP LeBreton and Brandon Dillon (Double Fine)
I'm up past my bedtime, so just some scribbled notes. They're both game nerds from the computer/video game company Double Fine. They've both come up with project ideas interesting enough such that I ...
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Book Report: Puzzle Craft
"The subtitle's a lie, of course. We can't fit descriptions of how to make every type of puzzle into one book." And yet this book does show examples of many many kinds of puzzles. Along with each exa...
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Is this like Puzzled Pint for RebusRally folks?
If I knew Swedish, maybe I'd know whether RallyPub is like Puzzled Pint for RebusRally fans… or not. I don't know Swedish, so all I can do is toss around tautologies. ...
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Link: "It's My Party," a memoir about some Jim Propp puzzle parties, written by David "Pablo" Cohn who it turns out isn't in Antarctica all the time. ...
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Book Report: The Magus
ARGers and Situationists talk about this novel: its plot is something like that of the movie The Game, a sort of paranoid story in which several people playact around our protagonist, hoping to effec...
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Jotting Notes from Kazuya Iwata (Real Escape Game North America) at Adventure Design Group
This spoileriffic talk was not recorded. So I'd better jot down some notes. Steering around the spoilers, but that's OK, because the non-spoilery stuff was interesting. Pizza ahead of time was fun. ...
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Book Report: Uncertainty In Games
Greg Costikyan has designed more games than you have, so I pay attention when he writes something. Uncertainty in Games didn't contain any startling revelations that knocked me out of my chair, but i...
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I'm Feeling Coincidental
A blind man asked me for help boarding the bus, so I helped him board the bus. That almost never happens. A while later, looked down and remembered I was wearing a Braille-Google-logo shirt, somethi...
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But if you meet a friendly horse / Will you communicate by Morse? ...
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Book Report: The Code Busters Club
It's young adult fiction in which young adults solve a Real Crime by solving some common codes. Set in the alternate universe like this one, but if you want to get a message to nice people without th...
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Jotting notes on Odyssey Works' talk at the Adventure Design Group, 2013
A few months back, some folks from Odyssey Works gave a talk about their art. I heard about it from the Adventure Design Group meetup. Though I scribbled my thoughts afterwards, if you weren't there...
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Book Report: Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
Like every novel-reading San Francisco bay area tech worker, I enjoyed Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. Its computer and code bits are more science-fantasy than hard science fiction, but they support...
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This isn't jotting notes on @writerguygames' presentation at the Adventure Design Group meetup hosted by the lovely folks at The Go Game. Rather, this is notes on the conversation afterwards. Because...
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The Secret Puzzle Hunt Cabal is a treasure. You can tell 'em "I'm thinking of running a hunt on the 13th" and, between them, they know when the MS Intern Hunt is, the NPL convention, the MS Puzzle Sa...
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Listened to Snoutcast discussion on puzzle-y activities to keep a team enthused during the months between hunts. Does it make sense to create a wiki listing puzzle extravaganzas? Is puzzle extravagan...
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I attended a talk by some folks from Odyssey Works (the inaugural talk of the Adventure Design Group Meetup). O.W. presented about their art: situations, each with an audience of one. It works like ...
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Things Will Shortz doesn't want to do
…perhaps revealed via this New York Times job posting for a Director of Games, which I found out about thanks to the excellent Octothorpean playtest team WBYeats. Optimize games for discover...
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Jotting Notes on Jana Pouchla's LARP talk: Welcome to Larp. Let's Play
It's Nordic LARP Talks Oslo 2013, specifically Jana Pouchla's talking about how to make LARP more accessible and welcoming to newbs. It's not a GC Summit talk; LARPing is not The Game; but I'm jotti...
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Jotting Notes on Lars Nerback's LARP talk: Three Ways to Make Games More Inclusive
It's Nordic LARP Talks Oslo 2013, specifically Lars Nerback presenting three ways to make games more inclusive. (Thanks to Sara Thacher for pointing out that these talks are online) It's not a GC Sum...
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I played The Cave and it was pretty good
All those good things you read about The Cave are true; you should go play it. All those good things you read about The Cave are probably more interesting than anything I'd write; there are a lot of ...
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Link: The International Code of Signals
I watched the new Studio Ghibli film, "From up on Poppy Hill" and of course all I could think about was the marine signal flags. In the movie, our heroine, who lives in portside Yokohama, hoists sig...
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Buying tracks to construct a music puzzle. Don't even want to think about what my Amazon recommendations will look like after this. ...
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The Maze of Games is going to be a book with at least 30-something (I lost count) puzzles by folks you've heard of. These are the last 30-something hours of its kickstarter. So if you haven't ordered...
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Have you gotten around to ordering @MazeofGames yet? It's gonna be a puzzly choose-your-own-adventure book. Like The Dextrus of Tempus, only moreso. (But I bet if you know what The Dextrus of Tempus ...
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Link: Alice's Puzzle Page
This was a fun puzzle trail. Trail? Extravaganza? Set of interlinked puzzles? You know. One of them things. Give it a whirl. New blog post: One of my favorite #puzzles! Alice's Puzzle Page vroospeak...
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Better decorating through anagramming
From a crafty blog post on making a sign of hanging letters: I would have spell Hanuka the "normal" way, Hanukkah, but I ran out of scrapbook paper since I kept having issues until I figured out...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Kickstarter
The Puzzazz folks want to send you a puzzle a month, a sort of time-release extravaganza. Or something like that, check it out. Be sure to watch the video for a new entry in your "Wei-Hua Puts His To...
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Book Report: Lightning Man
It's a biography of Samuel F. B. Morse, the namesake of my favorite puzzlehunt code. So it's about time I read up on the man's life. He wanted to be an artist. He wanted to paint beautiful scenes, n...
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When we figured out that Black Bart's Hidden Hoard would take us to a labyrinth in SOMA, I was certain what GC meant, but wasn't too pleased. Though it turns out I was certainly wrong. On 8th Street,...
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Book Report: Many Subtle Channels in praise of potential literature
In honor of USA's Buy Nothing Day, a report on a book that I checked out of the library: Many Subtle Channels It's a book about the OuLiPo. You've probably heard of them: they're a literary cabal in...
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Book Report: How to Sharpen Pencils
I'm a technical writer. I write instructions. I often team up with a "Subject Matter Expert," someone who's really good at doing something. I ask them what they do and they write it down. You might w...
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Jotting Notes on Fundamentals of IRL Game Design
It's a seminar by @jettstein. (You think I'm typoing "GC summit talk by Bob Schaffer" really badly, but no: instead of watching a GC Summit video today, I did something else.) I attended Fundamentals...
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Saw a Hash House Harriers pack run past, my first time seeing a live pack instead of just leftover chalk marks on the ground. At first I was kind of disappointed. I thought "If I were the hare, I wo...
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Speaking of "what's this kind of puzzle called?", what is "Put together the letter-triples ION ISS NSM TRA to form a word"? It's kind of an anagram, but easier since you've got three triples instead ...
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Tauba Auerbach's 50/50 Floor is on display at SFMOMA. You may recall that Auerbach is an artist who can think like a code-y puzzler though she sidled away from signal and over to noise for a while. T...
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http://ericberlin.com/?p=5066 is Heisenbergian puzzling: the observer gets an answer though it's not a puzzle. ...
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This week's snoutcast had an interesting tidbit "future events: bikes? Seattle? stay tuned!" And also some thoughts on puzzle-based learning if you're an educator. They're interviewing a math teache...
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Book Report: The Vanishing Violin
It's another YA puzzle-mystery featuring the Red Blazer Girls. (You might vaguely remember that I read the first book in the series a while back. This time, the puzzlehunt story is a bit more believa...
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Link: Anagramr anagramming game
This is me with the high score at an anagramming game: Leaderboard: @lahosken:170 @stalefries:111 @nwerneck:67 @ixpu:56 @ckolderup:55— An Anagram Game (@anagramr) August 30, 2012 You might wo...
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Book Report: The Mysterious Benedict Society
It's a young adult adventure novel that starts out with a puzzly quiz. Kids who do well in the quiz team up to battle an evil conspiracy. This book is science fantasy, and the fantasy lost me. It's t...
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Pencil Bandolier: Subtle Counterweight
During puzzle hunts, I run around wearing a bandolier to hold my pencils jauntily across my chest. Pencils don't weigh much, but they weigh something. Thus, I put a counterweight on the back of my ba...
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Book Report: Kobold Guide to Board Game Design
Professional game designers write essays on topics in Board Game Design. Along the way, they get into project management, prototyping, usability, playtesting, and other good stuff. As a professional ...
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Pencil Bandolier: the new configuration
Before: After: I tested out the pencil bandolier at the Real Escape Game. You ask: How did it go? I say: That's why we test. Perhaps the bandolier's boldest feature were the colored carpenter penc...
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Pencil Bandolier progress is as difficult as you make it
Look, ma, no pins! You may recall a few months back I'd attached an over-heavy counterweight to the pencil bandolier with vague intent of letting some of the extra lead weight. Today, I got around to...
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Book Report: Glued to Games
It's a book about the psychology of games. Why do we enjoy them? It's all very well to say that "Games are fun." You could say "Paper clips are fun," but then folks would tell you that you need to be...
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Book Report: Crossworld
You'd think that I'd like to read a book about competitive crossword-puzzle solving featuring a first-hand report on playing in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Crossworld is such a book, fr...
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More Tyro Crossword Construction ramblings
Some days ago, I posted some noobish thoughts about crossoword construction. I'd figured out that Nutrimatic's default word lists were good for Nutrimatic's use case, but not so great for a list of c...
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Crossword Compiler Noob Diary
Unsurprisingly, creating mediocre crossword puzzles is easy but creating good crossword puzzles is hard. Mind you, I don't feel pressured to create great crossword puzzles. For puzzlehunts, I only ne...
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Crossword Compiler is a Windows application. The last time I tried running it on Linux, a few years back, it didn't work. But today it works. Kinda. Far enough to fill in a grid with words, which is ...
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Comics Report: Torso, Goldfish
It was a good holiday season. My cousin-once-removed Paul was in town, and once again wanted a treasure-hunt game. And once again, he wanted to be on Game Control, not just playing. So he and his dad...
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Dr Who's Martians as Puzzle Designers #badpuzzles
Cramming for the Doctor When game, I watch Doctor Who. The Pyramids of Mars arc aims at being puzzle-huntish... kind of... Towards the end, there's a Martian stronghold guarding a treasure chamber; ...
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Two steps forward, one slide back I bought a couple of clip-on lights. Also, I bought a new counterweight. To keep this whole mess from sliding forward (until all the pencils are under my elbow), I'...
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Link: Chess Story
Dave Hill writes about playing chess for money in Zucotti Park. Right, that Zucotti Park. ...
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Now with carpenter-pencils clipped on. I found carpenter pencil clips for sale online, and they arrived. It turned out they weren't small enough to be "snug" on the pencils so I had to help them ou...
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I'm on my way to a new level of handiness or dorkiness... or maybe both at the same time. ...
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Book Report: Tactile Morse Code
Sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover. I don't feel that I need to read the book Tactile Morse Code because its cover explains its system pretty well. Bonus irony points for being a book about...
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Book Report: Deep State
If you've been listening to the recent Snoutcast podcasts, you've heard interviews with some ARG (Alternate Reality Game) folks. If you listened to this week's podcast, you might have heard of a Walt...
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Why I love Puzzalot Forum
Post by Robotguy: I am working on a type of crossword that is played on the surface of regular polyhedra... [more explanation...] I would appreciate any feedback. And this yielded relevant, practic...
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Book Report: Adventures in Puzzling
The cover promises multi-puzzle extravaganzas, and it delivers. There's a fun variety of puzzles here. And they're organized into extravaganzas—into groups of puzzles, with each group leading u...
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Book Report: Puzzle-Based Learning
I recently reported on the first couple of Winston Breen books. And then Joe Fendel asked me if I'd read the Gollywhomper Games book. Apparently, puzzle-based young adult fiction is a thing? Back in ...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even in NYC audibly
Remember how I went to New York and kinda figured out that some of the puzzle nerds there were into some kind of puzzly-geocaching combination thingy that I never really figured out? This week's Snou...
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Book Report: Knuth: Selected Papers on Fun and Games
Don Knuth is, of course, one of our greatest scholars of Computer Science. If someone asks you, "What's an efficient way to to sort ______ for quick retrieval?" you are always safe bluffing the answe...
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Swedish Rebusrally team name I would gladly steal: Baron Bosse BehΓΆver BetΓ€nketid. I don't know what that means, but I'm sure I betΓ€nk like a bosse. On the other hand, not so much: The Sammanswet...
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Why is Corey Anderson so fast at puzzling? Constant practice. While most engineers scribble their designs on whiteboards, Corey draws his backwards on a transparent sheet of glass. Dude is badass. ...
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puzzlehuntcalendar.com makes a difference
A few people have been playing the 2-Tone Game this past weekend—referred by puzzlehuntcalendar.com. I checked the IP addresses of three of the players; they were from the East Bay, Spain, and ...
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Book Report: Colossal Book of Wordplay
It's a book by Martin Gardner (the Mathematical Games guy), edited by Ken Jennings (the Jeopardy! guy). So you might expect it to be pretty amazing. But it's a book of little word puzzles of the so...
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PhotoCity Pervasive Capture-the-Flag Photo Game Part II
PhotoCity is this game where you "capture" areas of a city by photographing them. But you can't play in just any neighborhood. The game only works if you start in a place that they've "seeded". I h...
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Wonderella reminds us that following trails of puzzles is dumb. ...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even the Art World
There's this comic book artist, Jason Shiga. He makes these comic books that are puzzles; choose-your-own-adventure books that play with the flow of pages and frames within a comic book. You might ...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Meridian High School in Idaho
Tonight I played in a puzzle event. The puzzles were pretty cool! They were designed by Mike Selinker, Thomas Snyder, Tyler Hinman... and maybe others? Eric Harshbarger designed the prizes; he's a ...
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Shopping is Hard; Let's Coin Phrases
It turns out that REI's selection of headlamps is not as good as Hallmark's, depending on your criteria. In related news, the Triclops Headlamp is still missing; all hail the Quadruped Headlamp. ...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhen: That Article that mentions Sondheim's 1968 Hallowe'en Hunt
A while back, the Puzzalot blog had an interesting article on Sondheim's 1968 Hallowe'en puzzle hunt. There was a lot of information there, most of which didn't come from this article by Allan Brien...
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So basically this poem says that codes lack the passion of poetry... well, the passion of good poetry. Maybe still better than, say "Pangolin Bowling" ...
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Braid is a fun game—and ported to Linux. If that's good news to you, don't get too excited right away. It was part of a bundle that's not available right now. But you can sign up to get notifie...
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Wikipedia article data is available again: http://download.wikipedia.org/enwiki/latest/ Now you can tinker with nutrimatic. ...
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Graph Pebbling and a Proof that there is an Infinite Number of Composite Numbers
Yesterday, a plurality of the folks hanging out were math nerds. I'm not a math nerd, but I likes me some recreational math. Graph Pebbling has some fun little problems. The idea is that you have...
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Jotting Notes on Scott Blomquist's 2010 GC Summit Talk: Confidence and Acceleration in Puzzle Theory
I'm jotting notes about another Game Control Summit 2010 talk: Scott Blomquist talks about Puzzle Theory, conceptual thinking about puzzle design. (Yeah, he talked about puzzle theory in 2009, too.)...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere within and without the bounds of convention
A few months back, Ian Tullis talked about puzzles, specifically puzzle-hunt puzzles, and how they've evolved. The quest for novelty drives puzzlehunt designers away from the "plain" puzzles that mos...
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Book Report: Tilings and Patterns
I know what you're thinking: Oh no, Larry tried to read another math book. No doubt this means the blog's"unfinished" tag will soon be attached to another book report. But I made it to the end of t...
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Link: Jet Lamp video/talk about Text Adventure Games
Yesterday after work I went out to see a movie, sort of. And I recommend you go see it, depending on where you are. The movie is "Get Lamp", and I haven't actually seen the whole thing yet. It's a...
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Comic Report: City of Spies
My parents did pretty well playing the 2-Tone Game. Like, I don't think that the Burninators team needs to worry any time soon. But my parents did pretty well. And as they were walking from the &l...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Sveden
A page with a couple of RebusRally photos makes me think that Rebus Rallies happen more than once a year, though I rarely hear about them. ...
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Link: PhotoCity Pervasive Capture-the-Flag Photo Game
Just watched a video of a recent talk by a University of Washington professor named Popovic. His schtick is crowd-sourcing difficult tasks by turning those tasks into games. (Have you heard of Rosett...
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Book Report: When You were a Tadpole and I was a Fish
What's that you say? The Gathering for Gardner was this last weekend? Then I'm a few days late to be topical with a book report on When You were a Tadpole and I was a Fish. But books are a slow me...
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Comic Report: Meanwhile...
The local members of the National Puzzler's League had a party last weekend, their Equinox party. I didn't go—I'm still not quite enough of a puzzle enthusiast to want to join the NPL. But I wa...
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Book Report: Between Silk and Cyanide
It's the autobiography of the codemaster of the SOE an English spy organization during WWII. Wait! Dont' run away! It's not just math and cryptography and war. There's good stuff in here, too. Th...
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Link: Puzzle Forum @ Puzzalot
If you're a puzzle-huntist, I'm sure you're already subscribed to the excellent Puzzalot blog, so I don't know why I even bother to link to link to his post announcing that he set up a puzzle forum. ...
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Puzzle Things are Everywhere, with Local Witnesses
A while back, I blogged about Stuart Landsborough's Puzzling World, a tourist spot in New Zealand with a big maze and other weirdness. Why do I bring this up? Local gamist Chiu-Ki Chan went there, a...
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Book Report: The Snowball
It's a biography of Warren Buffet. It's pretty long. But there are some good stories in here, the writing is good, and it smells well-researched. It edges around some touchy topics, but it's prett...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even the world of corporate training... hey, don't fall asleep when I say that
At work, I work in a training group. I was just listening to one of my fellow trainers talk about an outfit that makes some service for education/train-ish folks. It's called Moving Knowledge. It's...
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Link: Stuart Landsborough's Puzzling World
Puzzling World is a tourist destination in New Zealand. It started out as a big maze for people to wander around in. Then they added some strange attractions. Some of the ad copy worries me, thoug...
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Book Report: Lewis Carroll in Numberland
This book is about Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson as a mathematician. There were errors in the parts that I understood. So I didn't trust the other parts to help me to understand new stuff. Maybe I...
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White Ninjas-Specific Show Report
Hey, somebody tell Bay Area Night Game Team White Ninjas that I found the perfect band to play their theme song. It's Leather Feather! Most of the people in the band dress up as white ninjas! (Or ...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even the Marin Headlands and maybe the Seat in Front of me on the Bus
There was that awesome Shinteki Decathlon game a couple of weeks ago. One of the clue sites was Hawk Hill, a high hill in the Marin Headlands. It seemed like a neat site, so... yesterday I went bac...
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Book Report: Super Spy
It is a comic book, a collection of little spy stories. I bought it because it was an Amazon recommendation (albeit a tepid Amazon recommendation) and it had Morse Code on the cover. I didn't like ...
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Jotting notes on Scott Blomquists' GC Summit 2009 Lecture "An Analytic Framework for Estimating Puzzle Quality"
[I re-watched another 2009 GC Summit lecture. In this one, Scott Blomquist of Team Sharkbait talks about measuring puzzle quality. It's kinda a measure of puzzle simplicity--avoiding putting stuff ...
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Zine Report: Wired 17.05 (May 2009)
I picked up the latest issue of Wired. A bunch of famous puzzlers made puzzles for it. There's, like, hidden puzzles inside. I didn't make it very far. There's a lot of stuff in Wired magazine. ...
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Link: Ken Jennings roolz San Francisco
City Hall runs this town. And who runs city hall? Not Gavin Newsom--he's bumbling around, grooming himself for a gubernatorial run. Fortunately Jeopardy star Ken Jennings stepped in to keep city ha...
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Link: Warren Spector, Playing Word Games
Warren Spector does not, as far as I know, play uppercase "T" The uppercase "G" Game. But he designs lowercase "g" games. He worked on some good stuff for the Paranoia pencil-and-paper RPG... uhm, ...
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Book Report: Going Postal
Skott raises an excellent point: The diskworld novels also have golems. E.g., I read Going Postal. I read this Diskworld novel because it's where the puzzler team "The Smoking GNU" got their name. ...
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Jack O' Lantern Hidden Message
Pumpkins? This year, I can't deal with pumpkins. This year, I'm leting Hallowe'en slide. My free time goes into BANG 19. Puzzles and logistics, logistics and puzzles. That's plenty to think about....
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Not exactly Puzzlehunts
Tom Lester and Annie Burnham got married today. You might remember them from BANG 13... but it's been a couple of years, so you don't have to feel bad if you don't remember. But they're married now,...
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Puzzles from Down Under
I don't know anything about the puzzles announced at the Google Australia Blog which is a little frustrating because I'm apparently not supposed to register to look at them.Labels: link, puzzle scene...
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PuzzleHunters.com : Register or be Anti-Social
Behold a lovely forum for discussing puzzle hunts, puzzle magazines, and stranger things. It's new, so there's not much there yet. Scott Blomquist set it up and seeks your frankest feedback. He wri...
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Puzzle Hunts aren't really Everywhere
I saw a campaign poster for Obama. It read Fired Up And Ready To Go ...laid out with those line breaks. I'm so acrostically minded that I found it crudely funny. I blame the puzzle hunts. (I a...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, I Get Tired Just Reading About Them
Dave Hill posted his write-up of Hot Springs Midnight Madness 2007, which sounds like it was pretty awesome. These people are outside, at night, in the snow solving puzzles, if I'm interpreting thos...
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Not-exactly Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere
Item: Saturday, I wanted to vote, so I walked through the Haight and down to City Hall. In the Haight, I noticed some young folks in matching t-shirts scurrying around. So I observed and eavesdroppe...
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Puzzles are Everywhere, Maybe Even mental_floss
I work at an internet search company. I think that the awesome part about internet search is that you don't have to remember stuff anymore. If you might need to know the capital of California in th...
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Book Report: Brainiac
It's a book about trivia by Ken Jennings, that guy who kept winning at Jeopardy!. Fortunately, this book is about a lot more than just Jeopardy!. The author explores the world of trivia--the histor...
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Link: Changing Roles of Katakana (and Italics)
I just read an article with some conjectures about the cultural significance of the rise and fall of katakana amongst Japanese writing systems. Hey, gimme a break, I'm waiting for a slow download, I...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, but I guess they get lost anyhow
I don't read Eric Harshbarger's LOGOLOG blog very often. Hey, give me a break--it doesn't have a feed. Thus, I have to remember to check it. I checked it today, thus finding some week-old ne...
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Book Report: Ilium
Raymond Chen, celebrity blogger, gave a talk at my place of employment yesterday. Afterwards, I went up to ask him a question. (Well, OK, to request that he apply his combination of knowledge of En...
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Not exactly a Book Report; Not exactly PuzzleHunt-Related
If you've always meant to check out the magazine Giant Robot but never got around to it, now you have some more motivation. Issue #44, in stores now, has an interview with Tetsuya Nishio. Yeah,...
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Link: Iron Puzzler
If you're on the Bay Area Night Game mailing list, then you already know that Iron Puzzler is coming up. So I don't know why I even mention it.Labels: puzzle scene...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere / Sad News
If you've played in bay area puzzle-hunt games, you might have met a sweet dog named Libby. She traveled in the company of Alexandra Dixon, captain of Team Mystic Fish. Libby died on Friday night; s...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere as Is Music
Yes it is the Shinteki Decathlon II report, in which team Underlying Metaphors ("We will not be understood until it is TOO LATE") sweats a lot. Fair warning: there's not much in there abou...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everything I Read About, Even When They Aren't
Saturday, there was a lot of puzzlehuntish activity on the peninsula. I wasn't playing in it. Well, not much. I knew that a bunch of folks were gathering for that PerplexCity hunt--people would ru...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere I Go
Long day at work; long bus ride back to my neighborhood; I blearily walk along Irving Street, thinking about dinner. But then I recognize the map-festooned jacket ahead of me. It's Dwight Freund, f...
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Links: Quality Content on the Internets
Wow, it's a blog entry with a small pile of misc links. That's so retro. If you're into puzzles, set up your Personalized Google Home Page, and add some content to it. What content should you add?...
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Hiding Data in Metadata
I'm flipping through this telegraphic code book which E. E. Morgan's Sons used for encoding messages long ago. Most of it consists of code words to convey phrases. E.g., instead of sending "one hund...
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