Monday 4:44 (crusht)

Totally demolished, I probably could have solved this with just the down clues, and I'm kinda stoned.

Been grinding down Final Fantasy VII again, going for those last two achievement trophies. I got one, Aeris's last Limit Break. That took quite some time, but you can rack up some kills by giving her offensive Magic, especially Enemy Skill Matra Magic, plus Cover and Fury in the front row to hit breaks more often. Grinding for that left me somewhat over-leveled, so I never even got to see her use it, as the later battles were a piece of cake. I remember some battles being arduous in previous runs that became a snap.

The other trophy is the Gil Overlord, where you max out your Gil. I thought this would be easy, honestly. Mastered Materia sells for a bunch, right? Actually, not so much. Mastered "All" Materia sells for a bunch, but junk like mastered Transform (relatively) doesn't. Mastered Summons, and materia you can't buy, like Morph, all sell for 1, so that's out. So I'm grinding All. Never thought I'd have Cloud with 3 All in independent slots in the Apocalypse Sword, but here we are. Already beat the Weapons, have a Master Magic and 2 Master Commands, earned the hard way, plus the ones you get for beating Emerald Weapon. I never find Alexander on the first run-through, so I'm not on track to Master Summon, but I ought to just go get him. I'm already on 4 Stars for Knights of the Round, which is still more than 100,000 AP from mastery. Because mise well, amiright? If I'm going to grind specifically for Gil (I'm still pretty far from the goal), I should just go all-in.

Monday 8:16
Tuesday 8:46

Oh, my poor neglected blog! I actually have topics to write about, but it's nearly 3 a.m. and I have to wake up at a reasonable hour in the morning (well, hopefully it will still be morning when I wake up). Topic: triggers. I promise to get to it this week.

Sunday: 44:12 (1 Google, 2 checks)

I liked this puzzle. Rex Parker HATED it. Hated it so much, he actually cheated with a "check wrong answers" 15 minutes in. I try to not do that before Thursday, but even when you know something is wrong, it can be hard to figure out exactly what so I lean on it when needed. Even my brother, who won't use Google, accepted personal wrong answer checks when he would print the puzzle at work and bring it home.

The theme of this puzzle was Magritte's "The Treachery of Images." Wait, wasn't I just raving about a puzzle like this? Yeah, it was a diagramless earlier this year. This one had circled letters that spelled "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" and when connected in that order, trace the shape of a pipe. Yeah, it had a gnarly confluence of proper names in one area, but I was able to parse it fairly (after a check) and shouldn't be that hard for a "professional" like RP. Rex also hates "notes" for a puzzle and automatically downgrades them, believing a puzzle should stand on its own merits without instructions. Well, you can't go without when you're doing something like connect the dots. And this sort of thing is HARD to construct. Building around a few long answers is not too tough, but to have that AND all these other letters that have to spell something specific and make a shape? Come on, some credit where it's due.

I will complain about this:

27-Across: N.F.L.'s Kaepernick.

RP printed a letter from an angry former xword editor "at a major publication" who thought cluing CK without mentioning Nike or his protest was inexcusable. Well, you don't have to bring Nike into it--some people really hate corporate clues, but the unfortunate fact is that Kaepernick is NOT in the N.F.L. at the moment. In fact, he's suing them for collusion blacklisting him. You don't HAVE to clue him about his protest (you don't even have to use Kaepernick, You could use Colin Powell, Colin Jost, Colin Firth), but this clue is supremely lazy and inaccurate to boot. You could clue him as GQ's Citizen of the Year 2017, or winner of Sports Illustrated's Muhammad Ali Legacy Award in 2017, or winner of Amnesty International's 2018 Ambassador of Conscience Award.

Wednesday 12:58 (like 10 guy)

Ahmagawd da keef. Haven't felt a punch like that in quite some time.

Here's a great clue from a Friday puzzle a while back that I didn't write about.

• Vessel that is 1% full. Answer: YACHT

A vessel, full of the 1%. Clever.

Yahh, so, I'm still at 10, so that's all I got.

Monday 5:04 (crusht)

I've been neglecting the puzzle this week, for no particular reason. Probably some anhedonia in there, but I'm not really that down.

It's a little weird using italics these days. Posts on Facebook and most other places don't allow rich text, so stress is usually expressed with caps ("I'm not really THAT down"). In a way, this makes sense. All caps, since the early days of chat rooms, has meant shouting. So one word in caps would automatically be stressed. I would prefer italics, but would I really go through the trouble of highlighting a word or executing some keyboard combinations to use it in such an informal setting? Is this going to become more common in real text as well? Is this how e-mail lost its hyphen?

I kinda like the hyphen in e-mail, since as one word, "email" isn't spelled like it's pronounced. There were other ways it was formatted in the old days with a capital E, e.g. E-mail, Email. I'm not sure if every publication has folded to the non-hyphen use (if anyone would hold out, I'd bet on The New Yorker, which still uses a diaeresis in coöperation), but email snuck into the dictionary long ago. People will do anything to avoid using just one more character, one more keystroke (and let me tell you, it took nearly a minute to find the ö and place it in there).

Anyhow, Monday's puzzle was very very easy, but they did do something I don't think I've ever seen on Monday in particular (I think they once did this on a Tuesday, but I think was a holiday). The theme answers made up he phrase "make love, not war" and the answer for the decade of origin was 60s. The crosses were 6-Iron and 0-carb. Maybe because I was doing this puzzle on a Wednesday, I was psychologically ready for a slight curveball. I was definitely aware I was doing a Monday puzzle. I could tell I was going really fast, yet I hardly paused before I dropped in the numbers. Go me.

I'm too sloppy to not use auto spell-check, but Blogger has a weak dictionary. Curveball is certainly acceptable as one word, and "carb" has been in the lingo for quite some time. Anhedonia is definitely a real word. Woody Allen wanted to call his movie Annie Hedonia, but that pun was way over the head of most people, so it became Annie Hall. Adding things to the dictionary is also a hassle (it works this poor way in MS Word, too) which is that adding "curveball" does not automatically make capital C "Curveball" legit as well, so you have to add that too. I'm actually pretty amazed it recognized diaeresis, but not anhedonia? The public definitely needs to know more about one than the other.

EDIT: Blogger has a horrible dictionary. While touching up some language in the third paragraph, it tagged "snuck!" Only the most snotty (and likely British) grammar teacher would insist on "sneaked." Using snuck as the past tense of sneak dates back to the 1800s. (Aside: I'm fairly sure that an apostrophe is never correct when pluralizing years or CDs or anything else. It's 60s, it's 1800s, yet Blogger tags all of these as misspelled. Amazingly, testing some other words, DVDs works just fine, as does DVRs. Is CD just too old? LPs doesn't work either, but modern stuff like ISPs isn't accepted.) It is a strange word, though. The past tense of leak isn't luck. I suppose the closest is strike-struck.

Thursday: 14:20
Friday: 27:29 (2 Google)

"Drunk as hell, but no throwing up"

-Ice Cube

Drunk, but not wasted. It's a fine line to walk for a lightweight like me. Thursday puzzle was fun.

Saturday: 12:47

That's rather speedy, and no cheating. Clean grid, if not super-open. Looked like a Friday, and solved even easier.

More On Winning

It was round 3 of Friday Night Magic, and I was playing against my friend Craig. I had just lost to rival George. George is not very good at Magic, and I really hate it when I lose to him. But tonight, he just had a sick deck with a bomb rare, and I couldn't deal. The turn before I was going to die in the deciding game, I drew the one card that could save me, Prodigious Growth. I knew he had at least 2 Naturalizes in his deck to deal with 2 Luminous Bonds and a Heiromancer's Cage I had failed to draw that game. If he had the Naturalize, I lost. Otherwise, I won. I said "Show me Naturalize and I'll concede." He declined, so I cast the Growth and attacked. He cast Naturalize, and I flipped out, though I managed to stifle my language.

This is called a slow-roll, and it's very uncool. I maybe overreacted a little, but at least Craig agreed that it was, in fact, a slow-roll. And this story is actual supposed to be about Craig. I beat him game 1 rather soundly. While sideboarding for game 2, I asked him if he intended to play or draw. Strictly speaking, I'm not supposed to ask so early. His answer could theoretically alter my sideboard plans. That was clearly not my intent, but he seemed annoyed that I'd asked. While shuffling, I asked again. I do this because many players, myself included, sometimes forget to specify, and that can lead to miscommunication. He got really annoyed at this, like I was taunting him or something, and then went on to say he didn't enjoy playing me, because I never return his wish of "good luck." I explained I don't wish him bad luck, but to wish him good luck would be a lie. I was surprised at his affront, though. Many years ago, there was heated discussion about whether wishing someone good luck should be automatic. Some think so, some don't. I remember sitting down across from Mike Flores in the first round of a PTQ back in those old days, and he extended the hand before we even started, and said, "Lets have some fun today, Tim." Not luck, fun. I say that to my first round opponent at any major event now. I prefer the pre-game handshake because the post-game one can feel disingenuous, and even now there is debate on whether it's ok for the winner to offer a "gg" online or the handshake in real life What if the loser doesn't feel that way? Craig feels that there's something to be said for good will. In my mind, lying to my opponent or myself cannot possibly be good will. If someone is offended that I don't shake their hand after I lost to mana screw twice in a row, understand that "gg" stands for "Good Games."

I'm pretty sure Jon Finkel has never wished an opponent good luck. Here's a great story about Jon. Several years ago, Wizards got contacted by the Make a Wish Foundation. One of their sick kids wanted to meet some Magic pros, so WotC flew the kid down to Nationals or something, and he got to play some one-on-one Magic with Jon Finkel and Bob Maher. When Maher played the kid, he played nice, giving the kid advice. Then the kid played Jon and Jon systematically crushed him with no mercy. Bob was saying to Jon, "that was kinda mean." Jon said, "The kid wanted to play against the best. He wasn't there to beat us, he wanted to see the best players play their best." There is good will, and there is competition.

I view Craig as a friend. He may not like me as an opponent, but I hope he doesn't think less of me as a person because I don't wish him good luck. Many people are dear friends until they sit down across from me in a sanctioned tournament. Then they are a competitor. To treat them any differently than I would treat a professional is an insult to them and the game. I can understand, at FNM, it's not exactly the PT and we're not playing for many dollars, but Craig is serious enough, and I would hope he understands that it's because I respect him that I play hard against him.

Good night, and fair luck.

Friday: 24:08 (1 Google)

So or the past month, I've been grinding Final Fantasy VII into a fine powder once again. The Steam version has some achievement medals you can unlock for nothing but bragging rights. Most of them are just progressing to a certain point in the game or beating a required boss, so you'll get all those automatically. Then there's ones for defeating the Weapons, collecting ultimate weapons. I had all those too, but there was one called "Materia Overlord." It requires you master all the Materia. ALL OF IT. Now, since I usually grind really hard, I DO master most of the materia. All the Magic, all the summons, and all the commands I need to synth master materia with the Huge Materia in Cosmo Canyon. But ALL the materia means commands you don't need to master for master Command, like W-Summon and W-Item, which take forever to level up. It also means hideously BAD materia like HP<->MP, which switches your HP and MP, a dangerous proposition when you're fighting in the Northern Cave. I eventually got it all, but I don't recommend, would not do again.

And then there's Enemy Skill. I had never tried to master Enemy Skill, and I barely ever used it (I always have my eyes on the master materia prize, and E. Skill isn't needed for that). Blue Magic is something Square loves to use, but it never seems to work quite right. FF6 and FF7 typify almost everything wrong. If you're going to let any character use any magic, blue magic will quickly get outclassed by other other spells and summons. There are always some decent skills, like the recurring Mighty Guard, which puts Shell and Protect on the whole party (also Haste in FF6, though Miracle Shoes do all that plus Regen for free). FF9's Quina is better, since FF9 is class-based, though I only ever use White Wind a little during Cleyra, and Lvl5 Death later to sweep up Dragons. Maybe next time I'll go for learning them all, though there are some terrible ones like Limit Glove (deals 9999... if you're at 1. Nothing otherwise).

So anyway, Enemy Skill in FF7 is kinda lame though you can get some good spells. There are a couple you can miss, though. Trine is only cast by 3 enemies, and they're all one-time boss encounters. The really annoying thing is that you can find 4 E. Skill Materia in the game. One of these is picked up extremely late (after you get the airship), and if you did the Pagoda sidequest at Wutai earlier, you will not be getting Trine on that one (which sucks, since it's one of the better skills). The other one you can miss is Pandora's Box. Only a Zombie Dragon casts this, and only once in a game for some reason. If you fight one of these, they cast it, and you didn't have the materia equipped, that's that. I didn't know about this, but thankfully, when I started going for it, I hadn't encountered it yet (it only appears in one part of the Northern Cave). Beta is another annoying one. You can only learn it from the Midgar Zolom. When I decided to go for all the Enemy Skills, I was already level 99, post Weapons and everything. Zolom goes down like a prom dress. I can equip Cloud with the Buster Sword, and it won't be one-hit, but even then, I had a hell of a time getting it to cast the spell, and it will also randomly eject a character from battle, and you don't want it to be the guy with the materia. Apparently, if you're hardcore, you can fight the Zolom the first time you meet it (this is very early, and the game expects you to get a chocobo to bypass it) and pick up Beta at that point if you can survive, and it's a wicked spell that early, but I do OK. The other hassle is Chocobuckle. It's not hard to get with a trick, but its obscene that it's even included since I think you can ONLY get it with the trick. So, when you meet a Chocobo in battle, it will run away if you don't feed it or otherwise kill the enemies around it very quickly. If you attack the chocobo, it will peck at you and then run. But, if you run into a level 16 chocobo (you can tell by which enemies you encounter with it), feed it some good greens so it will stick around, then use the Enemy Skill Lvl4 Suicide, it will counter with Chocobuckle, which deals damage equal to the number of times you've run from battle. That is horrible, even if you run from every battle. The Japanese version was much better, where it multiplied that by the caster's level. Considering how hard it is to get, the least you can do is make it worth it.

And yet there are 2 achievements I haven't met. One is the Max Gil which I might have been able to do if I'd sold my last set of mastered Magics instead of synthing them. The other, I cannot do on this file. It's teaching Aeris her final limit break, and that is no picnic. First of all, you have to grind her pretty hard. To get the second limit, you have to use the first one 8 times. To get to the next, you have to kill 80 enemies (with her dealing the killing blow), then use that limit 6 times, then kill 60 more guys, then use that limit 5 times, and THEN you can use Great Gospel to teach her the final one. Other characters have similar thresholds for their breaks, and outside of Cloud, I usually grind this stuff in the Northern Cave. That's not an option for Aeris of course, and killing enemies with her is infrequent, to say the least, and difficult to game. Not to mention getting Great Gospel is a giant pain too. You have to take the boat back from Costa Del Sol to Junon to run into a guy who will only talk to you if the last 2 digits in the number of battles you've fought match (shades of Super Mario Bros.) and he'll give you some Mythril. Take it to a guy outside Gongaga, and you can get Great Gospel from him. Every time after my first time through, I generally neglect Aeris. Why bother? Aeris is weak, and I prefer the date with Tifa anyways. Maybe one more time through, just for that? FWIW, Great Gospel is amazing, and wouldn't be so bad for some of those tough Dragon fights in the Temple of the Ancients, since you're required to bring Aeris anyway.

Thursday: 8:59 (crusht)

That might not be a personal record for a Thursday, but it's hella fast, especially for a rebus puzzle, but I got the trick almost immediately. On a Thursday, when the grid is fairly basic, with no grid-spanning answers or at least a low word count (more white space), it's not hard to anticipate, but I don't think I noticed. Putting one right there in 1-Down helps too.

Listening to Phish live stream their concert in San Francisco. First set just ended. I could have gone to see it myself for $100, but I spent a lot going to GP Sacramento last weekend. Almost got to Day 2, but fell short in the last round (I felt lucky to even get that far, to be honest). I'd like to blame poor luck, but I think I just built the deck wrong. I had a Dragon: Arcades, the Strategist. Elder Dragon Legend? Easy color choices! Well, turns out Arcades is not too good. My Bant cards weren't awful, but my black was rather deep, and I should have thought more about it. More experience might have helped, but Arcades is Mythic, so I might have caught on to how it's not even close to Doran, and is embarrassing against a mere Giant Spider. Oh well. Sold some stuff, got paid.

Crossword 15:57

That's about 10 minute faster than Thursday.

So, careful what you wish for. Was running another Zelda random seed, and fuck this seed. I was getting nowhere fast, so I finally turned to the spoiler, which tells you where everything is. Look:

Progressive Sword Locations:

Swamp Palace
Master Sword Pedestal
Mimic Cave (the one inside Turtle Rock)
Ganon's Tower

Mirror location: inside Turtle Rock.

You can't get into Turtle Rock without a sword (you need a sword to use medallions) and you can't get into Swamp Palace without the Mirror. Which means the first sword you can get is on the goddam Pedestal! Two pendants were in the Light World and I got them, but the the third is Ice Palace. I hate Ice Palace, and it's not made more fun by not having a sword. I have everything else I need: Bow & Silver Arrows both Rods, both Canes, Hookshot, Boots, Book, Flippers, Lamp, Cape. It would have been fun to watch a professional take this on, to see at what point they realized they were going to pedestal. Even if you find out a sword is there with the book, you really want to find a different one somewhere else. In all the races I've seen, Pedestal was only forced twice, and it was for something much more mundane than your first sword. Eventually, you get pushed there. You also find Cape in Ice Palace,and you need that to get the Boots, which are needed to clear Desert Palace, a Crystal. That fact might cause people to jump out of Ice as soon as they found that, hoping that the locations opened by Boots got them their sword. So, troll of a seed to play, but watching someone else struggle would be fun.

Tuesday: 13:53 (15x16 grid)

A little slow, even with the oversize grid. There was a gun theme, and the author of the official Times crossword blog recused herself from writing about it (geez, it's just a puzzle), so Will Shortz filled in. He actually talked about the clues that he changed, which almost never gets talked about. Shortz says that usually about half of clues get reworded or reclued completely, although the number for this puzzle was low enough that he was able to talk about specific examples. Interesting stuff, if you're into that kind of thing.

My obsession with Link to the Past Randomizer has not abated, to the point that I just recently played my very first. There's an easy mode, but I played normal, similar to the tournaments I watch on YouTube. The seed I got was pretty swift. I was hoping or something a little tougher, to be honest. Not that I cherish a seed with a wicked forced route, but after Uncle gave me the Cane of Somaria, I found the first sword in the very first chest. The first guard I killed after that gave me an 8 bomb drop, so I didn't need to worry about that either.

By the time I left Kakariko, I had the Master Sword, Book, Flippers, and over 400 rupees. The Floodgate got me both Tempered sword and Boots. Mini-Moldorm got me money for Zora, and Zora sold the Flute. I fluted up to Death Mountain, and the Ether tablet had Hookshot, right on time so I could explore the whole thing (got mostly nothing but money and hearts). I got the Gold Sword in Desert Palace, the first dungeon I went to. The Gloves did troll me for a while. I was forced to defeat Aghanim to access the Dark World, but once I muddled my way over to the Village of Outcasts, Thieves Town had the Gloves, and Skull Woods had the Mitts and the Hammer. Bow was in the Mire Shed, while Silver Arrows were right next door in the Checkerboard Cave, right on time for wrecking the boss (although Gold Sword is pretty effective too) I was never forced to double-dip (although I did so with Eastern Palace, when looking for the Gloves). I suppose I'll finish this seed up tomorrow, but I want to try again, get a little more of a challenge.

Crossword: 20:44 (1 Google)

5:40 a.m.
Pretty good Saturday time. Felt more like a Friday. I spent an amount of 4/20 drifting a bit. I fell asleep for s few hours, woke up at 9:30, made a throwaway post, and I'm up still.

I used to run the midnight prerelease. In New York City, it was never a real problem, with 24-hour eateries and 24-hour transportation. It was also easier when I was in my twenties. I still ran a few when I first moved out here, but I cnt really handle that shit anmore. I'm really looking forward to Dominaria, but if I went to a midnight prerelease, it would probably be finishing up right about now. And then what? Walk home? Go back 4 hours later and do it again? I lose my whole week. A midnight movie, I can still handle. A midnight tournament, forget it. Even with free cookies.

Thursday: 16:32
Friday: 23:58

Ah, April 20th, the one day where I can smoke pot all day and not feel like a total failure.

Monday: 6:21
Tuesday: 7:17
Wednesday: 11:12 (16 x 16 grid)

I should just not watch the Mets. When I first checked the game, we were down 3-0. I looked again later and it was 3-2, so I tuned to a stream. The Nationals promptly hit a lead-off triple into a sac fly. I wandered off to the store for a bit, and returned to the fading cheers from Yoenis Cespedes hitting a grand slam, capping a 9-run 8th inning. I missed everything.

Crossword
Sunday 53:22 (I did this one-handed, lying on my side in bed because I was lazy or high or something)

So, mostly good puzzle. Nothing too bad, and then you come to 39-Down: Proceed well enough. Answer: GO OK. See, but there's no space in the puzzle. It would have been trivial to turn those squares into MOOK, changing the linked AGENT to AMEND, and the OCT linked to the end to OCD, and avoid having a straight-up racist slur in your puzzle.

Crossword
Saturday 24:42 (1 Google)

Whew. Solved this one just a touch faster than Thursday and Friday, so a weird week for times all around. This puzzle worked pretty well. Nothing too obscure (I had to look up Urania, one of the Muses) or forced. If I were in charge, I would have swapped this week's Friday and Saturday. But they like to show off flashy grids on Fridays (because many fewer people attempt the Saturday puzzle), and yesterday did have a neat grid and a very low word-count.

Crosswords
Thursday: 26:02
Friday: 25:45

Thursday was a rebus puzzle with four boxes containing cable TV channels (AMC, HBO, BET, USA). Woe to the person who finds the USA first. They've done USA rebus puzzles before (answers like medUSA, for example), so the cable channel theme would be elusive. I found BET first (uglyBETty crossing gloBETheater), which also led me a little astray, but recovered with dreAMCatcher and the rest wasn't so bad. Friday had the excellent clue "High points?" for UMLAUT. Good misdirection and a false plural.

FNM tonight, still on Ixalan. Dominaria next weekend and I can't wait.

Crosswords
Tuesday: 9:07
Wednesday: 9:33

Puzzles are not progressing normally as the week goes on, or at least Monday-Wednesday are all around the same time (I didn't mention it at the time, but Monday was abnormally hard for its slot). A good deal of the extra time today can be attributed to the gimmick, which used a lot of cross-referenced clues.

I took a break from FF4 to run through FF9 again. I wanted to do the super-chocobo run. Using the fast-mode assist, you can run super-fast around with your chocobo in the hot-cold game and dig super-quick as well, yet the counter runs down at normal speed. I was getting limit bonuses almost every game. Initially, I was thinking I'd get a Robe of Lords just playing in the Forest, but I ran out of Chocographs to find and wanted to progress. I did have enough points for a Robe of Lords before the Desert Palace, though. I've upgraded chocobos to Ocean-walking pre-Desert Palace before (you can't get Sky until you acquire the airship), but early Robe of Lords is mighty sweet, especially against the Dragons at Mt. Gulag (it negates Wind damage, and the Dragons like to cast Twister. I usually stick an Octagon Rod on Vivi, who is a required to be in your party for the area. Octagon Rod absorbs Wind damage (and also teaches the -ga level elemental spells). In the latest run, all my other guys got killed in one of the battles, and they'd almost die again right away if I took time to revive them, but the Dragons constantly healed Vivi with their spells, so he took them down alone with physical attacks, very very slowly (a similar thing sometimes happens against the Earth Temple boss when you're wearing Gaea Gear, allowing you time to steal). But it's nice to keep everyone alive for the Exp. and AP boost. Quina can actually learn Twister if you manage to eat one.). Other Chocographs as well as Dead Pepper locations get you some other stuff way early, like Freya's and Dagger's best weapons, plus a really good one for Amarant, White Robe (Holy to Eiko), Black Robe (Flare to Vivi), and Light Robe (Half MP for everyone) and famous Genji Armor.

Still, the run was a little sloppy. I'm up to Hades in the last area, so I'm well past the point of no return. I missed a little early sidequest stuff in Alexandria, I missed two items in the Desert Palace, and there's no way to go back and get them again. Additionally, one of the items I missed there could have been bought, but now that area is blocked off. It's the only item that teaches Vivi Death. I'm past the point where Death is useful (Death can work on the Mt. Gulag Dragons, for one), but I like to get everything, as I've said. I might get a Rank-S treasure hunter after I finish Memoria, but I'm not sure (like it matters). I've had a very encounter-light run as well. I did the entire Desert Palace (although I probably saved a minute missing those items) with no encounters. I didn't turn off encounters, I just didn't have any. To be fair, I hate the encounters in Desert Palace, since Dagger is randomly useless at times, and there are annoying guys who switch weakness between physical attacks and magic. There's no bonus for a full bestiary, so I don't care too much. Everyone there has a level multiple of 5, so you can get Lvl-5 Death and win every encounter with Quina, but I like to take him/her with Zidane to get Frogs at the Qu Marsh on the Forgotten Continent.

I did go kinda deep on the card game and get some rare ones, but that especially doesn't matter. At all. There isn't even an achievement attached to the cards other than playing 10 games, which triggers once. It doesn't add to your Treasure Rank, and they doesn't get you the kind of thing that the cards get you in FF8, where they are crucial for maxing out (and some hard-to-manipulate rule variations can fuck everything up). At least the card game in FF8 is pretty easy to figure out. I'm still pretty confused about how the Tetra Master cards work, but you can get a few strong ones through chocographs and do well enough. I did some Hippaul racing too (though not enough to gain the achievement), which can get some rare cards. And I fought the optional Tantarian boss (though I cheated with battle assist), so my game wasn't entirely without swag. I did the friendly monster quest, so I could probably take on Ozma (like it matters), though ideally I'd like to get Angel Snack and Magic Hammer first (annoying at this point in the game, but I've done it before). Neither of these is 100% required, depending on your strategy. Angel Snack is mostly useful in removing Mini status from multiple characters at once. But Mini doesn't matter for Freya's Dragon Crest, which will deal 9999 every time once I kill a hundred Dragons (I've got ~50 now), and it's also not too relevant for your spell-jammers. Magic Hammer is an alternate kill, where you try to take all of Ozma's MP, which just kittens him. It's more of a "might as well" strategy, since after Zidane, Eiko, and Freya, your 4th character doesn't matter too much.

But the really bad thing is that I sold off some items I should have kept, and it's impossible to go back and buy them again. You need early stuff like Mythril Rod and Mythril Sword to synth for great items at the Black Mage Village at the endgame, but nobody sells them anymore. It's especially stupid because I've made this exact mistake many many times. The bookkeeping needed to avoid this is minimal, so there's not much of an excuse. I could forget all this and finish within a few hours. My characters are strong and leveled, but I really feel like giving it another go.

Crossword: 8:33

I had plans to do things today, grand plans. And then I did none of them.

Friday: 43:09 (wide 16 x 15 grid, 1 Google)
Saturday: 29:40 (3 Google, many errors)
Sunday: 38:28

The Times has been breaking out of the 15 x 15 mold quite a bit lately. Thursday's puzzle was also wide. Friday had two triple-stacks of 16-letter answers. Because the 15 x 15 convention is so ingrained, I'm not sure THATSWHATSHESAID has ever been in any newspaper-published puzzle outside of a Sunday, and probably none of the other grid-spanners have either. (Actually, one of them is "Do You Want To Dance," a popular song in 1958, but also popular later on for the Beach Boys and the Ramones, who covered it as "Do You Wanna Dance," which is 15 letters and has probably been in a lot of puzzles, so kind of new but not really.)

I feel like ranting about Trump, but it just takes so much energy. There's just too much, every day, it's overwhelming, and probably not good for my health. But fuck that guy.

Crossword: 27:33

This puzzle was somewhat like a long Beethoven joke I know, but what I'm really high on right now is the diagramless puzzle officially published Sunday but online now. It has an asymmetric grid, but the clues are relatively easy to fit together. They outline the shape of a pipe, and the theme is Rene Magritte's "The Treachery of Images" (Ceci n'est pas une pipe). Magritte is one of my favorite painters, so naturally this is one of my favorite paintings. It's a rather crude approximation in grid form, but it's a perfect example of what a diagramless ought to be like. Figuring out the shape of the puzzle was itself another theme clue. Nice job.

Tuesday: 10:56
Wednesday: 14:51

Today's puzzle was co-written by Weird Al Yankovic. The theme answers are, appropriately, movies with cheese puns "Feta Attraction" and such. Kinda tricky otherwise, since that time is on the longer side for a Wednesday.

Crosswords

Wednesday: 13:39

Thursday: 17:30

Friday: 16:00

Saturday: 33:03 As an early April Fools, half the clues were entered backwards)

Sunday: 48:18 (1 Google)

Monday: 5:44 (crusht)

Love Letter to Metroid, Part 2

You might think that having certain areas locked until you get certain power-ups would lead to a linear game. You can play it that way, but some some people don't have to; some people are REALLY good. Places that are inaccessible due to not being able to jump high enough can be gotten around using bombs and wall jumps; with one technique, you can get Super Missiles without having to face the miniboss who guards them. Not that it's hard, but skipping it saves time.

The skill required to execute these tricks, and the number of times you need to use them, led to Super Metroid being one of the most popular games to speed-run. Watching serious speed-runners tackle this game is unreal. I can pull off a sequence break or two, but these guys are machines. There are 100% runs, but also low% runs, where the runner gets the absolute minimum number items needed to complete the game, which means skipping a number of things a casual run would consider non-optional.

Super Metroid's real innovation was something called the "shine spark." After acquiring the Speed Booster, Samus can run at super-high speed and start flashing. If you tap down while in this state, you will stop but remain flashing. You can then shoot yourself off in any direction, killing enemies or breaking blocks in the way. You "learn" this ability from an alien bird. It's a completely optional trick, and is only needed to get one missile expansion, but it's useful all over (it's a pretty fast way to beat the boss of Maridia). Wall jumping is another optional trick taught by aliens, and is also needed just for one thing, but is really handy.

Super Metroid became so iconic that its sequel, Metroid Fusion (for Game Boy Advance), had almost the exact same power-ups, and they remade the original game as Metroid: Zero Mission (also GBA), which greatly expanded and added Super Metroid's power-ups to the original game. Both games are larger than Super Metroid, with many more hidden items. In Super Metroid, you were almost certain to run into the animals who taught wall jumping and the shine spark while playing, but you always had the ability, even if you avoided them. But for Fusion and ZM, there are no mentions of either ability in the instruction manual, and no animals to teach it. Furthermore, neither ability is needed to win either game. Both ARE needed, however, to find all the items, and there are a LOT of items. I believe the first time I beat Metroid Fusion, I was shocked to find myself at under 50% completion. I had, like, 12 power bombs, but figured there were maybe 20 in all. There are 50. Zero Mission, in particular, has many items that require precise execution in holding a shine spark through multiple rooms. You can use a map and still not be able to get everything (In ZM, if you do manage to get everything, the final boss triples in power).

They recently remade Metroid 2 for the 3DS, but I don't have one of those. From what I've seen, it's very nicely done, with impressive graphics and all sorts of new stuff.

The only downsides to the GBA versions is that they are largely linear. There's a tricky break in Zero Mission, but in Fusion, a computer has a little too much control over the elevators that connect different sections, and you can't explore the whole game at will until the very end (and if you get one step too close to the very end, you'll reach a point of no return). It's especially annoying because you have no choice in this. It's impossible to get everything on your way. However, noticing the popularity of low% runs of Super Metroid, there's a special ending for sub-15% completion in Zero Mission.

I do like that in the 2-D games at least, there is a continuous plot. The lead-in to Super Metroid says that it is Metroid 3, and Metroid Fusion was Metroid 4. Unlike, say, Zelda. They released some book which did some backflips trying to put all the Zelda games into some sort of order, employing stuff like alternate timelines to fit them all together in the same reality, when it was clear Ocarina of Time was essentially trying to restart the whole story, which it accomplished splendidly. The Metroid Prime series has its own thing, and while there's some idea about where it lies in the story of the other games, they don't force the issue. Lots of things in 2D don't translate to the FPS world of Metroid Prime, and that's fine. The exploration aspect is still there. Metroid Prime 4 is due for the Switch sometime this year.

Crosswords
Sunday: 53:13 (1 Google)
Monday: 7:20
Tuesday: 10:35

Sunday was pretty brutal. I didn't really what was going on with the theme until I solved it, which it is too bad, because it's actually kinda neat.

Love Letter to Metroid, Part 1

I was watching some marathon speed-runners talking about their introduction to Super Metroid and at least two said they hadn't heard of Samus Aran until Super Smash Bros. I could barely suppress a sob. Born too late to explore the world, too early to explore the universe, born at just the right time to play Metroid games when they were new.

The first Metroid was first released for the NES in America in 1987. There was a sequel for the old Game Boy in 1991. Super Metroid came to the Super Nintendo in 1994. It was a straight sequel to the second game. It was the largest game, memory-wise for the SNES at the time. At 24 megs, it was 6 times as large as Super Mario World. It has frequently been called the best single-player game for the SNES, and it holds up so well, people are still trying to set world records 24 years later.

"I had hardly gone beyond the asteroid belt when I picked up a distress signal! Ceres Station was under attack!!"

So you start with a totally un-powered Samus. They never explain why she doesn't have all those missiles and abilities she acquired in the first two games (most of the sequels fix this plot hole). Ceres has a short linear path, you find dead scientists and the metroid baby missing. You meet up at the end with Ridley, a miniboss from the original game (the creature in Alien was a large influence on the designers of Metroid, and they named Ridley after the movie's director). Technically, if you shoot it enough times, it will run away, but if it almost kills you, it does the same thing, taking the baby metroid with it. You follow them to Zebes, the setting of the first game.

Shigeru Miyamoto, inventor of Donkey Kong, Mario, and Zelda, among many others, was the producer for Super Metroid. He likes to say "You must first show players something they cannot do." Super Metroid is a master class.

After your ship lands, you can try to go right, but will find yourself blocked by a wall. You might be able to get over it, but you can't quite jump high enough. So you go left, and then down. You pass several doors, but most are inaccessible because you can't get fit to get under a barrier, or require missiles to open. At the bottom, you come across a burned out area which leads to a familiar room - it's the same room that you fought the original end boss in the first game! Travelling further along, you come to an elevator. The elevator leads to a place which looks just like the place you started in the first game. Directly to your left, in the same place it was in the first game, is the morphing ball. You can't actually get out of the morphing ball area without using it, and if you had gone right without getting it, you would find yourself unable to proceed. A little further along, you find some missiles and another cute callback with a hidden item in the same location it was in the original game too. But it's too high to reach, as it was in the original. If only you could jump higher... Things you can't do are all over the place. Then you get items, and you can. Returning to the original corridor, lots of new areas are opened up. Yet every time you go somewhere new, you see more things you can't do yet. Someone had a video on YouTube with their unpopular negative opinion of Super Metroid. They complained about the back-tracking. Yes, that's kind of the idea. I wonder if he complains about that in Super Mario 64 because you have to enter the same level 6 times

Crossword
Saturday: under 40:00 (2 Google)

I paused the timer to answer my phone and forgot to restart it. I know I started partway into one episode of Stranger Things and finished before it was over.

Advertisements, Part 2

It was my mom's birthday today, and I completely neglected to call her. This happened last year too, and I feel awful about it. I remembered to call my dad on his.

So, my mom is a true blue democrat. Her parents were pretty staunch republicans, but they grew up when the North was the Republican stronghold and the South had the Democrats, before the script was flipped. She was born a little late to be a hippie, and I think both my parents were out of the country during a lot of the Civil Rights movement, bu they were socially conscious anyway.

In 2004, my mom got involved with (by which I mean she donated to and got email from) moveon.org, one of the earlier all online political action groups. They put together this ad and raised tons of money, intending to run it during the Super Bowl in 2004.



Obviously, CBS wouldn't touch that ad with a 10-foot pole. So instead, they ran it at halftime on CNN during halftime. I was watching the Super Bowl, and my mom made me change the channel at halftime, just so she could see it.

And that's the story of how I missed the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction.

Crosswords:
Thursday: 13:42
Friday: 24:58 (1 Google)

Unpopular opinion: I don't mind TV ads (or whatever you call hulu. Streaming services need a universal acronym. (SS would be a bad choice)).

I wouldn't mind if they were a little less frequent, or shorter in duration, but I don't mind that they exist. They allow me to process things and retain information. When I'm binge-watching on Netflix, a lot can fade into the background and bleed together. I got through the latest season of Jessica Jones precisely because I didn't try and watch the whole thing in one weekend, and rarely watched two episodes back-to-back. Technically, I watched Season 2 of Stranger Things, but I can't tell you a single thing about it. I need to go back and do it slowly.

It's a little more ok if it's something I've seen before, like Law & Order or Lost or West Wing, but that's because I've seen those shows 3+ times so I don't need to focus as much to pick up the story (Lost, in particular, was really good at timing its breaks on tiny cliffhangers, pretty much forcing you to watch ads when it was on TV, and it's impressively easy to watch 6 episodes in a row like a zombie when streaming). So anyway, I bring this up because I've been binge-watching ER on hulu for the past month or two (it's a long series). I watch a few shows on hulu, but mostly new stuff, like the latest X-Files or Simpsons. They have ads, but like I said, I don't mind. However, every single ad break is a "Sorry, we're unable to load a message from our sponsors" and it tries to shame you into turning off your ad blocker. Here's the thing. AdBlock IS disabled on hulu. It was messing with functionality, and it wasn't really blocking ads effectively. I'd rather have a lame ad than 1-2 minutes of dead air in any case most of the time. The dead space seems to last infinitely longer, even if ER ads would tend to not be geared towards me (it's Chick TV). Although, they have should me profiled. I'm linked through facebook, so I expect they have my basic info, and I was pretty careful when cultivating my ad preferences when they were doing that. I get video game and movie trailers when I watch X-Files, which is exactly what I want. When I watch SVU (also Chick TV), I get Sephora.

Crosswords
Tuesday: 8:43
Wednesday: 9:51

The worst thing about about living here (or perhaps its the best thing about living in New York) is that things shut down. I'm kinda hungry, but there's nothing I can do about it. No all-night diners here (there's a Denny's in El Cerrito). And of course, the public transportation isn't 24 hours either. Its nt really insomnia. I'm just fucking around too much napping during the day. I should get back to Final Fantasy. It's good to have a project.

Saturday: 29:40 (2 Google)
Sunday: 33:37
Monday: 8:55

I've been having a lot of fun playing Magic recently. By winning. In the last four Friday Night Magic tournaments, I've gone 11-1, including a 3-week streak of winning outright (no splits in the finals). Sure, one week was broken with the Phoenix and Chupacabra, but anther was tribe-less B/G with no synergy (I had sweet rare Champion of Dusk, but I had only 2 other vampires) and U/G with essentially zero awesome Merfolk. Last Friday was A25. I had a sketchy U/W/r deck with some sweetness like Luminarch Ascension and Cloudblazer. Plus Urbis Protector and a Cloudshift for extra nuttiness. I didn't think it was all that good, but Ascension is really good when your opponent gets mana-screwed, and I found myself in the finals against Craig. Craig is a good drafter and a good player. He has shown his deck to various spectators, provoking double-takes and guffaws. He was several seats away from me at the draft, so I didn't know what was up.



Craig had opened this card and first-picked it, of course. He then went full-on cycling. A25 has all the basic landcycling cards. Weak to cast, but obviously insane with Living Death. He then received ANOTHER Living Death something like 3rd-4th pick in the second pack! The card has a lot of text, I guess. Perhaps players unfamiliar with this card didn't read down far enough where the small print says "You win the game." Craig even had 2 Nihil Spellbomb to break the symmetry, Ravenous Chupacabra, and even Hell's Caretaker for more shenanigans. I got possibly my best possible draw game 2, cast Ascension turn 2, got it active turn 6. I could make 3 Angels a turn. The first Living Death was not fatal. The second one was. Who expects the second identical (and it should be an automatic first pick, people!) rare? Despite going a reasonable 2-1 in the end, it felt like I scrubbed out.

Saturday: 35:06 (1 Google, and I was kind of drunk)

I could have sworn, when Zvi Mowshowitz reviewed this card the first time it was printed in Scourge, his exact quote was "WHYYYYYYYYYYYYY?" but I looked it up and I was wrong. (He definitely said that about something, but what? I mean, he has a reputation as something of an alarmist, so it could have been a lot of things, whether they ended up being a problem or not.) Still, when this card was printed, Goblins was already among the best decks, and this was just absurdly over-the-top. Goblin Piledriver was a monster with this card around. Later on, it found a home in Extended, accelerating Goblin Ringleader into more Goblins like Skirk Prosepector, then Seething Song, and Empty the Warrens, turning a normal creature deck into a combo deck on demand. And it returns in Dominaria.

Many of its old friends aren't around anymore, too old even for Modern (Seething Song and Chrome Mox, key cards in the old days, are recent enough but banned). Siege-Gang Commander is back, and that's a very nice combo. Only the rules-tricky cards have been previewed, so I haven't seen much else in the Goblin department, but you don't have this card in the file without a lot of theme to back it up, and I hope it adds up to something good. If you can't appreciate a good Goblin deck in the format, you have no soul. What kind of Magic player are you, anyway?

The only Goblins that see play in Modern right now are Kiki-Jiki and Goblin Guide, but this has a chance to change that. I had completely forgotten that Piledriver got a reprint in Origins, making him legal for Modern Warren Instigator can do really amazing things with the right support, and it's so sad that it never got to do that in any format, considering its inspiration, Goblin Lackey, was good enough to get banned (partly because of Siege-Gang). Modern is fickle, though, and I'm not sure 5C Humans isn't just better (whose existence adds a lot of splash damage to boot).

Thursday: 20:43
Friday: 15:45

If I wanted to do a real data set, I'd have to institute some sort of regimen, same time of day, sobriety level, etc. I'm far too lazy for that, but it is odd to see  Wed-Thu-Fri decreasing in time.

Kibler: "on the list"?
Lauren-: Kibs, let me explain, you are "not" on the list ... but it would be "some fun" if you were
Kibler: what is "the list"?
Lauren-: surely you men have a list?
Kibler: i have many lists.
Kibler: most of them start with "4 llanowar elf"









About a month ago, right after WotC posted their answers to the designer test, I called this card being included in the upcoming Dominaria set. Elvish Mystic has replaced these of late, since Llanowar Forest is a plane-specific site. But Dominaria is that plane. I'm pretty good with Core Set predictions (when Slivers were spoiled for M14, I called Mutavault). WotC also accidentally spoiled the card notes for the set a month early, revealing many of the new cards. Lots of Legends and "Legends matter" cards. There will be much to talk about, but this might actually be the card with the most impact. The only reason this card was even on the list is because they're changing templating, so it's just T: Add G. They're also replacing "he or she" and their adjuncts with the now-acceptable "they." (In other futurism, I had already done this in my custom set almost two years ago.)

One-drop acceleration has not really existed since Innistrad. The first Innistrad! Elvish Mystic was last legal in 2015! There will be many new players who never played in a world with this ability. Lightning Bolt was just a good burn spell; an Elf can change a whole format.

Crossword: 21:28

Oof, pretty brutal.

Crossword 9:12

I was up super late last night, to the point that you could call it this morning. I was doing the Harper's puzzle that I lost. And I actually finished it. Killed my circadian rhythm, but worth it. A good day for other reasons too. I'm a rock in a sea of chaos.

Crossword 7:45

I'm not sure, but I think at the beginning of the week, at least, I would go faster on paper. The way I use the computer to enter is probably slower. With my right hand on the arrow keys to move between boxes, I often end up typing words by pecking with my left instead of typing. Not so much slower when I'm filling out some missing squares, but bad when I know the whole answer. It's the sort of thing I should research, but I'm not going to start buying the paper - that's a habit more expensive than smoking.

Crossword 30:05

Decent puzzle. A half hour is maybe a little easy for the Goldilocks zone. It might have been easier if I'd picked up the full theme. The first word of each theme answer had an extra letter, turning regular phrases into wacky ones. What I didn't notice, since I finished them out of order, was that it was one word, getting longer one letter at a time: IN-SIN-SING-STING-STRING-STARING-STARTING-STARTLING.

Oh my god, I just realized further interconnectedness!

The first theme answer is "In thought as much," with the N extra. The second is "Sin some small way," with the S. The next is "Sing of omission." But look - The IN of the first actually goes with the second phrase, as SIN goes with the third. This holds through all the theme answers, and isn't forced at all. OK, upgrading to great puzzle. In theory, studying the theme as it unfolded would have made the theme answers even easier, and if I had seen that, I might have gone so fast, I'd be annoyed. But it's very cool to realize in retrospect.

Friday 51:38 (3 Google, numerous mistakes)
Saturday 14:28

Another brutal Friday? At least I was backed up by Rex Parker, who called the puzzle very challenging, Saturday challenging, like double-my-normal-Friday-time challenging. So it's not just me. (Rex Parker is semi-pro. His Friday time was over 10 minutes, and Saturday was just over 6. My ratio was...different). This one was co-authored by Rachel Maddow as part of their celebrity series, which is probably why it showed up on a weekday instead of Saturday, but they could have clued some things a little easier. ASNER got clued as seven-time primetime Emmy award winning actor. The problem is, more than one person has done that, and seven isn't even the record. I had to google quite deep to find that one (also used to find the 1928 Olympics site and a 1965 Michael Caine movie). But god damn, look at that Saturday time. Might be a PB for Saturday, though really, this should have been the Friday puzzle, and Maddow's today. You might say I used Google once. One clue was "Kid with a moving life story?" I had AN _YB_ _T, and immediately thought "oh, the Toy Story kid. What's his last name?" So I looked it up. And it was BOOT, which fit well. But I couldn't get the words around it to work. Eventually, I checked squares. The N was wrong (it was a guess, but seemed educated), and the answer was ARMY BRAT, which is, to be fair, a better answer (nice clue, too). So the Google may have actually hindered me. I had wanted the M for the cross, but that made ANMY, which isn't going anywhere. If I had rechecked and doubted the N, it would have been much easier to see ARMY and I would have saved time (that was the last clue to fall).

I did 3-0 FNM for the second week in a row, and didn't need a broken mythic rare to do it. In fact, my deck had zero synergy other than a good curve and decent (but not overwhelming) removal. Good old Black-Green tribeless. I looked over at the other 6-man draft and there was a guy with two Merfolk Mistbinder and the unblockable 1/1 Merfolk by turn 4. In the 6-man. No Merfolk drafters in my 8-man pod; no Mistbinders, I saw Shapers of Nature 7th pick, a last pick 2/1 that can fly if you have a Merfolk. So sad.

Friday nights stretch long for me. If I didn't do the puzzle Thursday night, it might not get done until tomorrow, which is the reason I've skipped Friday posts the last couple of weeks. Other things to do become unlocked Friday nights, like the Wall Street Journal variety puzzle. I just hope it's not an Acrostic. I don't hate the NY Times Acrostics, but mostly because the Times has a sweet HTML app to do them with. They are tedious as fuck on paper, and harder to edit if you get a clue wrong. I lean pretty heavily on the "check puzzle" button, but I feel ok about it. I also dropped by the library and got the March Harper's puzzle. I was doing reasonably well, but when Magic started, I just flipped it over to keep score with. And then I obviously threw it away, forgetting there was a puzzle on it. Oh well. It's easy enough to reconstruct, as the clues are hard enough to be memorable if you solve them. When I was on a diagramless kick, I did all the ones in the Times archive, dating back to 1997. I did one of those old ones again yesterday, and while some clues rang a bell, I didn't remember anything about the theme or the grid shape (which is the hard part anyway). My recall on cryptic clues is much, much better.

To make art, topless isn't incorrect. (5)

PAINT (to make art) - P (topless) = AIN'T (isn't incorrect)

I solved this backwards, of course. Getting to "paint" from just "to make art" is very hard, but the "isn't incorrect" is a sometimes crossword clue, often "Isn't wrong?" I've also seen "Ain't right?" for ISN'T. Question marks help those clues, to tip off the reader to something a little off about the clue, but in cryptics, you just sort of assume it's there all the time.

Wednesday: 11:07
Thursday: 21:52 (but distracted by X-Files)

Last night's X-Files was a fun one. Reminded me quite a bit of Black Mirror, but with a more humorous spin. Mulder and Scully are tormented by their smart phones/homes/cars and an army of drones after declining a tip at an automated sushi place.  The interesting thing is that there is almost zero dialogue. Mulder and Scully are apart for much of the episode. As that makes the show very visual, it distracted me from the crossword. But there's a deeper subtext too. That our technology, which promises to keep us connected, actually alienates us from each other. You can learn and grow so much more from a conversation than another BuzzFeed listicle.

Crossword: 8:19

Beat Monday's time.

So I'm running the sidequests in FF4. I rush into the Odin fight, forgetting that I took Steal off of Edge earlier, and I need to steal the Darkness Augment from Odin, so I just suicide myself to start the scene over so I can equip Steal. I do so and start the fight. And then I FUCKING FORGET TO STEAL. This is why we get a New Game +.

Crossword: 9:05

Eh, weak time, but I wasn't gunning it.

Spent most of today playing FF4, and I'm only about 2 hours behind the first quest I aborted, so I guess that was time well spent? The Namingway sidequest is a real drag. You get to a certain point and he wants Rainbow Pudding. I've run into a few enemies that can have it, but drop it at a 0.4% rate. Once I have access to the moon, I can buy Sirens, and those can force an encounter in a certain place with 3 Flan Princess. They drop Rainbow Pudding at a whopping 1% rate. Like, fucking hooray, but what you really want from them is a Pink Tail, so you can get the best armor. You can only get it from them, and the rate is 0.4% again. Full completion is an absurd goal. On the other hand, people used to grind for hours to get all their Sirens because you could only steal them from Seekers in the Giant of Babil, so at least I'm not stuck doing that. I did something kind of foolish, spending 100,000 gil on a special club members card. It gets you another augment, but it's available any time, and I probably should have waited. On the other hand, the walkthrough guiding me in my augmenting has been super-helpful, and there are some way out-of-the-way places I NEVER would have thought to visit. There's one that Odin carries that you have to steal? Geez...

Crossword: 29:29

Not a bad time, and no google. The theme was a little like the Beehive puzzle the Times puts out on Sundays, where they give you 7 letters and you have to make as many 5+ letter words using only those letters (one particular letter has to be in every word, but you can repeat letters as much as you want). This has crossing words that can be spelled with each others' letters and can be clued the same way, like Pistachios and Potato Chips, Outstanding and Astounding. It's cute, although I pretty much solved them independently. I suppose if you solve SCHMEAR first, CREAM CHEESE might be easier to get, but when the clue is "bagel topping," you didn't need the help, and when the words get longer, it's much less helpful.

I'm going to talk a little about cryptic puzzles. Occasionally, I'll be doing a cryptic, and people will offer to help, or ask for a clue because they like to show off their smarts. I can sympathize. It sounds horribly pretentious, but the most accurate response is "you wouldn't understand." Here is a cryptic clue:

Circle newspaper piece about Russia's premier. (5)

The answer is ORBIT. Obvious, right?

Cryptic clues are split into two parts, the definition and the wordplay. In this case, the definition is "Circle." Russia's Premier? That's the letter "R." the "premier" (first letter) of Russia. The newspaper piece in this case is OBIT.* Put OBIT "about" R, and you get ORBIT, i.e. Circle. Other clues can involve homophones, anagrams, double-meanings, hidden words, and combinations therein (the ORBIT clue is known as a "container" clue - one thing inside another).

When I explain how clues work (and this would be considered a fairly simplistic example), people look at me weird and mentally back away slowly, so "you wouldn't understand" is almost always the truth. Even if they do understand, it takes time to get proficient. Furthermore, many cryptic puzzles are something more than just a typical crossword. Sometimes locations or answer lengths are withheld. Or you need to modify clues before you entered them. One particularly devious puzzle had clues grouped in fours, except the 4th clue was 3 blanks. In each of the other 3 clues, one word from each was extraneous to solving the clue, and those 3 extraneous words could combine to make a 4th clue.

I'm certainly not some savant. Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon do the bi-weekly Acrostic for the Times, but also a monthly cryptic in the Wall Street Journal and I can usually manage. Richard Maltby does a monthly puzzle for Harper's, and I savagely cheat. His puzzles are real bears. It's a monthly magazine, and they might very well take the whole month. When I was worse and the WSJ puzzle was new, I'd hop on their forums where other clueless people fish for hints, and usually someone was stuck on the same clue as me. But Harper's forums are locked to non-subscribers. Sometimes I get how to solve a clue but I suck at finding PTERODACTYL from POTTERY CLAD, so I use a Scrabble cheat tool (sucks when I'm looking for a proper name). But when I'm truly stuck, but I have a few letters, I go to onelook.com. You can put in strings of letters with ?s for unknown letters and it will bring up all the words that fit, and you can sort them by commonness. You can't do this with too many blanks, and it's super-cheaty, but like most crossworders, I'm obsessed with completion, and sometimes it's all you can do.

*How do you get OBIT? Newspaper piece could mean anything! You usually don't solve clues by taking apart the whole thing and putting it together piece by piece unless it's just a straight anagram. I just thought about words that meant circle and fit into the grid and happened upon ORBIT, which fit the clue. A lot of clues are solved by retroactive justification. When I'm cheating, sometimes just a thesaurus is enough. Also, it's sort of assumed that anyone doing cryptics is well-versed in crosswordese, and you'll see some words that are more uncommon outside a crossword, like ARID, figure into cryptic puzzles too.

Thursday: 16:16
Friday: 27:20
Saturday: 42:26 (1 Google)

Saturday was notable in that I got the 13-letter BINGEWATCHING with only the first G in place, but clearly the rest of the puzzle was not so easy. Super-low word count. Nothing horribly obscure, but unfamiliar, like CANTILEVERS.

Crushed Friday Night Magic 3-0 with a little help from Rekindling Phoenix.

That card is good.


I'm missing blog entries for a few reasons, but the biggest one is getting hooked on Link to the Past Randomizer tournaments on YouTube. I can't stop watching and I've often found myself up past 3 watching them.

Video game races can be exciting at times. One of the most thrilling I've seen was a 4-way Super Metroid race where three players all finished within one minute of each other. One misstep by any could have swung the race. Except pro Super Metroid players don't screw up too often, that's why the race was so close. They ALL got the various sequence breaks, and although one guy unfortunately died, it was more like a game of chess, where one when two players are of equal skill, it's essentially the first blunder that decides the game.

A Link to the Past is many people's favorite Zelda game. While for me, that title still goes to Ocarina of Time, LttP has a lot going for it. The games which came later owe a lot to this game. Primarily, it's that each dungeon has an item which is needed either to beat that dungeon, and/or that dungeon's boss. It doesn't always hold true in the game. Sometimes the dungeon item is the Blue or Red Mail, which is never critical to anything, or the Moon Pearl, which you need to progress later on, but has nothing to do in the dungeon. But in later games, it really holds fast. You NEED to find the bow in the Forest Temple to beat the Forest Temple, etc. If there are any other necessary items, they'll give you a separate quest for that.

Anyway, because of the way the game is somewhat linearly built, a Zelda race wouldn't have much drama. It would be almost entirely proficiency-based, and unless you're doing something like 100% completion, luck would play almost no role (or else it would play too much of a role, like in the Agahnim fights). People are amazing though, and hacked the game. First, it takes all the items (I mean ALL), and randomly distributes them among all the chests and hidden areas. There's logic in place to make sure you get enough keys in the right places to complete dungeons, and you won't find the hammer in a dungeon you need the hammer to enter, for example, but that's the only limitation. You can take the long road to Zora's domain, pay 500 rupees, which would normally get you the (needed for completion) flippers, and get 10 arrows instead, or find the hookshot in the first chest. Heart containers are in normal chests too, and a boss usually gives you something else. Bomb and Arrow capacity upgrades count as items too, so there are some extra chests in some rooms, and all the dialog is cut (it's the Japanese version of the game anyway). So in a race you play the same seed. but there are many different routes to take. Some players go the "normal" route to the dungeon after your uncle. Others wander further afield in hopes of getting a few bombs and raiding all the chests those give you access to in Kakariko. There's always a sense of excitement when you open a chest, so the game stays fresh.

Additionally, Zelda isn't as "solved" as Super Metroid. That game nearly defined the speedrun scene for a decade. The first speedrun I saw of any game was Super Metroid at a site called metroid2k2 (which should give you an idea of how long ago this was, though the site is still around.) It contained a video of a 100% 1:00 in-game time, unprecedented at the time, and even segmented. The 100% world record, single segment, is currently 43 minutes in-game. And all the professionals are really close to that every time they play. Super Metroid has been so thoroughly dominated that for the first time ever, the multi-day Awesome Games Done Quick speedrun marathon for charity didn't even include it. The Zelda tournaments are a little less cutthroat. Some people are better at abusing bomb jumps or dash-hovering (speedrun argot) but routing and gambles are generally more important than execution. People make mistakes, accidentally die, etc. They're obviously very good, but not exactly as machine-like as the Metroid pros.

It also removes most of the random elements. The Agahnim fights are guaranteed to have the same number of returnable shots in both games, the digging mini game takes the same number of digs, you always "win" the chest game on the first try.

What dungeons contain what crystals/pendant is also random, although you can see which is which on your map. If Turtle Rock contains a pendant instead of crystal, it's possible the Ice Rod isn't needed to win. But if some needed item is at the Master Sword pedestal (yes, the swords are in random chests too, but you get them in progression (i.e. you get the level 1 sword first regardless or where you found it)) you need the pendants. Or you need just the green one, so Sahasrahla will give you an item (In the true game, it's the Pegasus Boots. Finding that item before the other guy is fantastic, though not necessarily needed to win the game, depending on the item in the library and a few other locations). Sometimes the races are runaways. One player might take a gamble spending extra time to get all the chests in a dungeon for no gain, while another just goes straight to the boss. Sometimes the guy who goes straight to the boss gets screwed and find himself having to backtrack later. But sometimes they're extremely close. In one race, Player 1 was pretty much ahead the whole time. He found some better items earlier, and was, it seemed, a whole dungeon ahead of Player 2. But Player 2 took a gamble, seeing what was missing, and without even sidetracking to check the pedestal, beat the pendant dungeons and got something crucial from the pedestal. Still, Player 1 had figured out that he needed to do that as well not long after, but he had already cleared Turtle Rock, while Player 2 had that dungeon to do last. Although Player 1 got his last crystal a couple of minutes before Player 2, because Player 2 finished at Turtle Rock, he was ready to go much closer to Ganon's Tower and eventually narrowly won.