#puzzlelife
I have joked a lot that over the past months, puzzles have replaced a social life. It is not actually entirely a joke.
Puzzle stuff in my life:
- Puzzled Pint, virtually, every month, though we've pretty much adopted the policy that if the puzzle requires us to print out and cut things up, we skip the puzzle. So we didn't solve the meta this month.
- Matt Gaffney's Weekly Meta Crossword Contest and sometimes the WSJ Friday Crossword Contest, which are a fun twist on crosswords where once you solve the crossword you have to find the hidden answer somehow clued in the puzzle's clues or answers. I really, really like the MGWCC, it's a strikingly satisfying experience to solve them and for whatever reason my brain is fine with it if I don't solve the hard ones.
-The NYTimes crossword basically every day, even when it annoys me. Maybe I should stop that. The Inkubator biweekly crossword, which almost never annoys me. I've been co-solving crosswords online with a bunch of people, using squares.io, which is awesome for group crossword solving.
- Cryptic crosswords with
primeideal and
liv, mostly from the Enigma. I'm still bad at them but I seem to be getting a little better.
primeideal and I somehow solved this ridiculous puzzle where half the clues were cluing French and Spanish words.
- The Boswords crossword puzzle tournament is having an online crossword solving league this fall, with weekly puzzles to solve every Monday night. I placed in very nearly 50th percentile in the Boswords virtual tournament, so I do not expect to do well in the league, but it should be fun. If you like crosswords and have a half hour to spare every week, I recommend this. You don't need to be super-good at crosswords, there are three divisions with variable difficulty in the clues.
I am going to be doing badly in the league, because I technically meet the level for the A division, but just barely, so I signed up for the A division and fully expect to be at the bottom of the pack.
-Tuesday,
ghost_lingering and I played with National Puzzlers' League flats, this ridiculous 19th century puzzle style where complicated wordplay is clued with doggerel poetry. Sometimes really well done doggerel, though! I've just started solving flats over the past couple months and I don't understand a lot of the base types yet but we had fun picking through the easier ones, which were still often very brainstretchy.
-Mystery Hunt has gone virtual and my team has been having conversations about how we're expecting to coordinate a hundred people co-solving puzzles virtually, which is exciting and scary. This entry was originally posted at https://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/355100.html. Please comment there using OpenID. There are
comments.
Puzzle stuff in my life:
- Puzzled Pint, virtually, every month, though we've pretty much adopted the policy that if the puzzle requires us to print out and cut things up, we skip the puzzle. So we didn't solve the meta this month.
- Matt Gaffney's Weekly Meta Crossword Contest and sometimes the WSJ Friday Crossword Contest, which are a fun twist on crosswords where once you solve the crossword you have to find the hidden answer somehow clued in the puzzle's clues or answers. I really, really like the MGWCC, it's a strikingly satisfying experience to solve them and for whatever reason my brain is fine with it if I don't solve the hard ones.
-The NYTimes crossword basically every day, even when it annoys me. Maybe I should stop that. The Inkubator biweekly crossword, which almost never annoys me. I've been co-solving crosswords online with a bunch of people, using squares.io, which is awesome for group crossword solving.
- Cryptic crosswords with
primeideal and
liv, mostly from the Enigma. I'm still bad at them but I seem to be getting a little better.
primeideal and I somehow solved this ridiculous puzzle where half the clues were cluing French and Spanish words.
- The Boswords crossword puzzle tournament is having an online crossword solving league this fall, with weekly puzzles to solve every Monday night. I placed in very nearly 50th percentile in the Boswords virtual tournament, so I do not expect to do well in the league, but it should be fun. If you like crosswords and have a half hour to spare every week, I recommend this. You don't need to be super-good at crosswords, there are three divisions with variable difficulty in the clues.
I am going to be doing badly in the league, because I technically meet the level for the A division, but just barely, so I signed up for the A division and fully expect to be at the bottom of the pack.
-Tuesday,
ghost_lingering and I played with National Puzzlers' League flats, this ridiculous 19th century puzzle style where complicated wordplay is clued with doggerel poetry. Sometimes really well done doggerel, though! I've just started solving flats over the past couple months and I don't understand a lot of the base types yet but we had fun picking through the easier ones, which were still often very brainstretchy.
-Mystery Hunt has gone virtual and my team has been having conversations about how we're expecting to coordinate a hundred people co-solving puzzles virtually, which is exciting and scary. This entry was originally posted at https://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/355100.html. Please comment there using OpenID. There are
comments.