The Hall of Fire

Oh, and , so I suppose I'm unhappy with yellow too. It really irks me when a puzzle rejects a valid answer for no better reason than "it's not the one we had in mind."

I have multiple beefs with today's connections. I discerned all four categories, but all but the yellow consisted of three good candidates and one misfit. Did the regular person take the day off or something?? I have never heard of using "ice" used to mean "to assure victory." To...

The more I think about it, the more I think they named the modes backwards. You have a far larger set of alternatives to choose among in "easy" mode, and that very nearly matches the technical definition of a "hard" problem...

Glad I wasn't the only one who struggled, though once I got there, I was pretty sure I wouldn't be. I play on hard mode, which I think is something of a misnomer, since it actually makes it substantially more difficult to fail as long as you don't give up. In fact, it would be an interesting twist o...

One Connections+ failure mode is that I see what the author did and am annoyed by it. But there are also ones where I have no idea what the actual frick is going on and just have to assume drugs were involved somehow:

Interesting Dave. I have other games where I've played alternatively made games, making the original easier, but connections still gets me sometimes, as it did today. I had to play a hunch for today's (I had a group of three and a straggler that could plausibly be the fourth provided a certain thin...

Having long-since exhausted the official supply of archived Connections, I've turned to the streets (fan-made puzzles) to get my fix. These are decidedly bad. The groupings are tenuous, or based on spelling/pronunciation*, or built around specialist knowledge, or rely on outright spelling/comprehens...

Jude wrote: ↑Sat May 11, 2024 7:37 pmI'm stuck on the last word in Strands - which means I know what all the letters are, but I can't form them into an actual word.

Yeah I didn't know where to put all those extra vowels either, but one of the combinations eventually worked.

I don't usually share, so you can imagine this is how it works out every day:
Wordle 1,057 2/6

This was already done long ago, right? As a fan-made thing?

Edit: Yes, and WB is evidently taking aggressive take-down action against it.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-ente ... 43004.html

Jude, it's a silly internet meme thing, and I was surprised/annoyed to see it show up in what's supposed to be a general knowledge puzzle.

The Mini was amusing. And Strands was very easy. Extremely hit-and-miss, that one.

I'm talking about Strands anyway, and the answer is that things have changed since my memory formed. But they also changed before that. There is no truth, everything is relative!

Alatar wrote: ↑Wed May 01, 2024 9:31 amThis was tricky, and I'm pretty sure it must be US Centric!

I don't know what it was--with a couple exceptions, it's certainly not how I remember things. Either they're doing some wordplay that went over my head, or things have changed since the last time I checked.

(Connections spoilers to follow) Rose; yeah, I was aware of the thing, just not the name. There were multiple false leads too. I spent way too many brain cycles (and mistakes) trying to construct a "blind" category from mole, faith, and mini (pencil blinds are a thing, right?? :upsidedown:...

I don't know if today's puzzles were especially hard, or if I'm just not all there, but I struggled with all of them. In all cases I got there eventually, but it took forever (in my defense, I'd never even heard of a <spoiler>). I'm gonna blame it on donating blood yesterday evening. poodle skirt

The ones that require pop culture knowledge are the ones I don't get, and I'm also terribly annoyed when a category is something that depends on the structure of the word rather than its semantics ("bird names minus the final letter"), but otherwise I love it.

Here's a problem someone at work ran into today with the AI assistant. . swapnibbles.png . (for the non-coders, you probably know that computer information is quantified as "bytes." Sometimes in code you have to deal with half a byte, and some smart*** back in the day decided to call that ...

I'm started playing these little NYT games, and Wordle and Strands are fun and all, but Connections is so far ahead in the best game competition that it's not even close. I could play that game for hours on end (and have; there are archives).

This was the first Strands I've seen where one of the word paths crossed itself (made an X). I didn't realize that was allowed, and I'm not sure I approve...