Thursday 8:34

Kinda lame puzzle. The long down answers are nifty, but the rest are ho-hum and the cluing was totally tame, almost nothing that was tricksy or clever, and on a day when the puzzle is supposed to get that way. The only exception might be 56-across/57-down. xkcd is likely a mystery to some, and the clue that gives you the X is another tech answer with one of the only misdirecting clues "Echo starter". Still everything else is easy, and X becomse the only reasonable letter, even if you don't understand it The theme was whatever enough that I don't feel like explaining it.

It's been awhile since I've updated this blog. Google now has features that use AI to make me more "readable" or something. I won't. I've thought about feeding that elegy to my Dad to ChatGPT to see how it would rewrite it, but I'm not a politician; I don't need speechwriters to project myself to a nation. It's my voice, and it's better that way. I always hated the hourglass essay format.

This blog is public and not invisible, but I don't promote it, so nobody visits. I don't really mind, it's more of an excuse to write. Gotta feed my head, improve my attention span. I should read more too. I have a novel I got last Christmas, and I haven't read more than 20 pages of it, and it's good a good novel by a writer I like.

 Wednesday 6:35 New Wednesday record!

Pretty simple, and I sped through it without really pausing to overthink anything. It's very low on proper nouns aside from well-known people like CURIE and FERMI. A lot of whitespace too, with only a pair of "cheater squares" (blocks in the puzzle that don't change the word count), but they bookend the central clue so it can't be helped.

 Tuesday 9:07

Fair puzzle and a pangram. "Not on my watch" ties the other long clues together. Thei ends are all part of traditonal watch, but the clue is what a smart device owner might say (or a hint to the ends of 20-Across etc.) since a smart watch has none of those things (although what's a "case" is watch terms?) The smart watch seems pretty excessive as a device. Most texts are brief, but not so brief as I would want them in tiny text on my wrist, much less e-mail. I already have a phone, and it can do all that and much more, on a device that's much easier to use. If the watch could totally supplant the phone that would be one thing, but it can't, so you're going to have a phone anyway. A smaller, less useful phone on your wrist is nonsense.

I don't know. I'm far from a technophobe, but I do appreciate a paper book, a real magazine, a real deck of cards, physical software. I can appreciate breakthrough tech, too. The iPod, the iPhone, those literally changed my life. But I doubt a watch ever could. Phones have been supplanting the watch for years. It's as if we've all gone back to carrying pocket watches

Blah, I don't like this little treatise, but I wrote it, and I do have a blog, so whatevs. <clicks Publish>

 Tuesday 5:23 (crusht)

New Tuesday record! The theme (three-hole punch) is a little loose. A logical fallacy could be called a hole, an empty space is kinda a hole, and pigsty is also a little off. Punch works fine, but the other "holes" are a little too metaphorical.

Update: I just realized thid grid is only 14x15, which makes the time a tiny bit less impressive, but I'm counting it.

 Saturday 12:30

Hey, a double-pangram, and a good solve time. That's looks like an above average number of black squares for a Saturday. My time would have been a little faster if I hadn't tried to identify one pangram while solving. Since I finished in the southwest, I got the second Q and C very late, so it wasn't until the end that I discovered it was a double, and with 5 Zs in all. Clean fill, jazzy long answers, "new" things like SMH, POKEBAL, TSWIZZLE. Not much misdirection (23-Across, Made a lap?: SAT is one of very few). Overall very enjoyable, if a little on the easy side.

 Saturday 16:47

Not too tough for a Saturday, and my time bears that out. And a theme, kinda. Locked letters are usually verboten without a good reason. This one is a little thin, but making all the black blocks singlets (the confetti shapes don't appear until you finish) makes sacrifices like this necessary, and they do all connect. Plus there are 6 grid-spanners across and down. There's some nonsense like 50-down, but not too much. Just a Z short of a pangram.

 Monday: 5:10 (crusht, new online record)

Pretty straightforward. When the theme is redundancy, the long clues are easy to induce with just a few letters. There's the possibly problematic crossing of two proper names at 43-Down/60-Across. But most people know at least one, if not the other. 

Sunday 22:23* 

The time is asterisked because it's when I finished, but not to whatever the Times counts as done. This stuff has happened before in similar puzzles and it tends to break my streak. See, quite a few squares are rebuses, with either a card suit or rank, together making a Texas Hold 'Em Royal Flush (39-Down). However, they are suits going down, and ranks going across (the 1-Down and 8-Down answers are AV(CLUB) and IN(SPADE)S, but 22-Across is (QUEEN)ANNESL(ACE)).

I've tried refilling the puzzle with all ranks, but that hasn't worked to give me the done. All suits didn't either.

As it turns out, I had a wrong letter, and I didn't check, so my streak is broken and it's my own fault. (The clue for 33-Across was "Former MGM rival," and I immediately thought Vegas instead of Hollywood)  Without that errors, it might have even worked on my original mixed fill. Bah. This representation (which only appears after you finish) makes it much clearer what's going on, with 4 hands and 5 community cards in the middle. Sucks to be the guy on the lower left with the full house.

 Monday 5:43

New online Monday record! I could have shaved a handful of seconds without looking at the theme until I was done. 71-Across describes what you can do with the first word of all the four long Across answers (a common thing), so cast a spell, a net, etc. I could have just rushed the fill, since I did the puzzle mostly in order, but I had already solved all the theme answers, and I like to see what the relationship was, so I paused my solving for a few seconds to see. Monday puzzles are posted way earlier than other days of the week (this was up at 3:00 pm Sunday, usually it's 6:00 the evening before).

 Saturday 18:19 (1 Google)

I haven't written about this yet, but my father died two years ago, one day before his 80th birthday.

Obsession

Yeah, so I looked up TWIHARDS (33-Down).

A term for someone solely devoted to just one series seems limiting. What are you really into? Vampires and Werewolves? I think Buffy did it better, I think True Blood did it better. Want books? Bram Stoker did vamps the best, though there are legions of short stories about them, and Stephen King's Cycle of the Werewolf and Salem's Lot are pretty good too. But I'm not a snob about it. You like Twilight, that's fine, as long it's not your only thing. If you're into Philip Pullman, instant crush. 

<aside> Similarly, but not really, "Bernie Bro" really bothered me as a term. Yes, I really like Bernie Sanders, and I supported him in 2016 and 2020. But the whole "Bernie or Bust" attitude was totally misguided. It was clear to me that he would have crushed Trump in the general election, and this seems supported by the fact that once Hillary Clinton won the nomination, a significant number of Bernie supporters switched to Trump. Like Trump, Bernie spoke about how disappointed he was in the country, and that resonated with a lot of people. Even though what they were defining as the problems were wildly divergent, people care less about specific policy proposals than someone with authenticity (Trump lied constantly, but was still considered "authentic"), not a focus group-driven plastic model like Hillary. I don't think she's a bad person, but she completely misidentified the electorate. Bernie and Trump both got it, and it's sad that it seemed as if merely being populist was enough to win, because they really are almost polar opposites.

 <further aside> This sounds petty, but I think it's a microcosm of a larger problem with Hillary. When she moved to New York in 2000, she had to pick a team. She picked the Yankees, of course. I have no problem with that, and it makes political sense too, since they have more fans than the Mets, especially upstate. But when she was campaigning against Obama in New Hampshire, she donned a Red Sox cap. You cannot do that. How can you trust such blatant pandering? Baseball team fandom is about loyalty, where is yours? </further aside>

 </aside>

I kinda have a thing for girls into YA fiction, even if I'm not a giant fan myself. So anyway, I was at a party a while back. There was a pretty cute girl there, and even though we didn't talk much, I could just tell she was into YA fiction. The party got into a game of "I've Never." I'm not easily eliminated in that game because while I've had an interesting life, it isn't quite as debouched that the way the game usually trends. So it got down to just me and this girl, and I came up with the perfect question. "I've never read a book in the Twilight series." She drank, a little sheepishly. I probably could have embarrassed her further, but I didn't want to be that guy.

But it shouldn't be embarrassing to be a 30/40-something person into that sort of thing, although I think variety is key. I like "grown up" books too, Jonathan Franzen, Stephen King, Don DeLillo, etc. They certainly inform me better on the world than Tolkien ever could, even via a metaphor that he himself denies (LotR is sometimes viewed as allegory, with the Ring representing the atomic bomb, but Tolkien, himself more familiar with first World War, wrote it before that (though it attained much its popularity (inside the US at least) mostly in the 50's), and he specifically refutes that interpretation).

“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." 

—C.S. Lewis 

My father never really learned this, which surprises me a bit, because he was, like me, a giant nerd. His childhood hobbies included coin and stamp collecting. But then he grew up and stopped. A wife and children can get in the way, of course, but I know plenty of gamers who manage to balance it all. I didn't need a father who shared all my passions (and we did have a few in common, like singing), I had a brother and a best friend, and eventually a whole subculture to be a part of, so I never really felt too isolated. Still, since he was once a collector, it always irked me that he never really understood my obsessions. Even though most of my Magic collection in the past few years has been digital (it's more the game, not the collection), collection (in my case, video games, Star Wars toys, baseball cards) is all about obsession, but whatever. I miss you, Dad.

 Tuesday (4/19): 6:26 (online record)

Like I said, I don't really track Tuesdays, but the app does. I did this a day late (happy 4/20), doing Wednesday's puzzle first, so maybe the warm-up helped. PLUSONE as an answer has appeared twice this week.

 Sunday: 16:34 (crusht)

"Cinemagrams"

This best my online record by something like 8 minutes, and it probably beat my previous offline record for Sunday. The theme was pretty easy: clues were apt anagrams of their movie answers, with the movie's year of release in parentheses. Since they're all famous, and 4/6 are precisely my generation, I was able to figure several out with few to no crosses. Nothing else was too tricky, and nothing else more than eight letters. Having both IPASS and PASSTO is a little tacky, but whatever. Crusht it.

 Friday: 13:40

I love triple-stacks, and this one's a pangram too. That's always a nice touch, and the fill doesn't suffer for it at all. Lovely work, and I think even Rex Parker might approve. (EDIT: No, he didn't. Haters gonna hate. Yeah, ENORM is dated, HARKS, IFA, HOTTO are all a little weak, but I actually think all the stack answers are good enough to wince a tiny bit on the crosses. I've seen worse words for less payoff. It's not as if the answers didn't work with their clues.) A touch on the easy side for me at least, as I plunked down 1-Across with no crosses, and 16-Across was a total gimme, the way it was clued "It's 'on a dark desert highway,' in song." An NBA MVP might trip me up at times, but even I know who Steph Curry is. 

 Saturday: 28:46

This doesn't LOOK like a Saturday grid, but my time indicates it played like one. You usually get a little more whitespace in a late week grid. This has more than it might seem, but only 4 clues longer than 9 letters. Nice job shoving Reykjavik in there. Re: 6-Down I've never seem the spelling "durag," I always thought it was do-rag (i.e. a rag that protects your do). Spellcheck also doesn't like it, but we've discussed what a P.O.S. that is. Wikipedia actually says both are acceptable (though the main entry is do-rag), and also offers dew rag and doo rag, with or without hyphen or space. Even among rappers who have sung about the headgear differ on the spelling. Of course, you could have just made the answer be DORAG by making the cross ORAL instead of URAL.

Edit: More about durag. The clue for this, was:

 "Anyone who has ever worn a ___ spells it '___,'" per a 2018 New York Times article.

Rex Parker (sometimes a little high on his "woke" horse) really really liked this clue because apparently, the Times using "do-rag" is somehow an affront, and this clue calls them out. Uh, sure. I mean, it's kinda funny if the Times Style specifies do-rag, yet they also published an article specifically on the spelling, and still don't use it. I wonder if Rex would have been enraged if they used the ORAL cross.

 Friday: 13:08

Chocotaco? Sounds hideous.

It's My Time and I Want It Now!

Call J. G. Wentworth! 877-TIMENOW.

I was asked to join a few Discords today. It's pretty ironic that a social media tool is called Discord, but whatever. I technically have a Discord, but I almost never use it. It starts up automatically when I reboot my PC, but that's like, once a month, and I usually quit right away. Spotify also autoruns on startup, which I almost never use. I know I can fix this in my settings, but I just don't quite have the spoons for that.

I never really paid for cable much. In my first place in the Bay, (2009) we had some Canadian satellite service that was pretty close to American TV, but I watched the Sopranos by downloading seasons on BitTorrent. We had basic cable as part of a bundle at my second place, and I got through Breaking Bad on that, but we decided to cut it, as Netflix and Hulu were becoming prominent. We ditched the CRT for a cheap flatscreen, and watched some movies via HDMI to laptop through that, and I never really looked back. Other than Breaking Bad or the occasional Jeopardy, it was so liberating to live outside of a schedule. The reason streaming services caught on (before that, Tivo did much of the same thing) was because it freed you from a schedule.

The trouble with cable was that it was never à la carte. I could get by on like 7-8 cable stations: ESPN, TNT, USA, FX, Comedy Central, MSNBC, maybe SYFY, maybe Spike or TBS or something. If I could pay for only those channels for maybe $1 each, I would. But the only option is 200 channels forced on me, most of which I have no interest in ever watching, and pay extra for that "privilege," not to mention you still have to abide by their schedule.

Now, with Twitch, we're back to living on someone else's schedule. Some streamers have VODs posted later, or port them to YouTube, but even then, it's not always "complete." Some of LSV's videos start after the draft, before the games. But watching the draft is the best part, and I could have, if I'd been there at the right time. You can turn on notifications, of course, and get your phone pinged whenever your favorite streamer goes live, and Discord can serve a similar purpose, though those seem like they are more like interactive blog/message boards. But I like my schedule. Even if I spend a lot of time at my computer, I don't want to interrupt my movie just because someone I like decided to stream right then. I made a reddit post this week that got 9000+ upvotes, and I got an e-mail every time someone commented on it. I get what they mean when some big thread has the almost meme-like "Wow, this blew up. RIP my inbox." Please, leave my phone alone. My inbox was already dead.

So anyway (hey, that's the name of the blog!), HBOMAX and Hulu and Netflix are great, because I can watch whatever whenever. Disney+ is also great, although they still do weekly releases of new series (makes sense from business standpoint. As a newer service, you want to attract new subscribers), while Netflix tends to drop the whole thing at once (while I don't like waiting a week for a new episode, but watching 6 episodes in a row, you can really lose focus. Pace yourself, if you actually want to watch the show).

Still, a lot of thongs are fractured. I'm not going to pay for Peacock, or Paramount+, or whatever media giant is trying to do their own thing. Disney, with its acquisition of Fox, has a MASSIVE library to draw on, but so far, they're capping their content at PG-13, and the only Fox stuff is Marvel-aligned (X-Men/F4 movies, but not Logan or Deadpool, or the 2 X-Men movies in which Wolverine says "go fuck yourself" (this is literally the only reason I can think they don't offer First Class and The Wolverine, but everything else is no worse than any other X-Men movie (On my old PC, I downloaded the MCU so I could have access whenever (but I had the R-rated stuff too, and I'd like it if they had the "Rogue Cut" of Days of Future Past))). Oh, and the Simpsons too. But you can't even get Family Guy. HBO at least has South Park. But there are always workarounds if you can't find what you want from a legit site, especially when it comes to movies.

Sheesh, this got long and winding, and ended up being more about TV and time than Discord/social networks. That's the way writing is sometimes, but usually it's bad writing. I honestly hate hate hate the whole thesis statement, hourglass model essay. I initially titled this "Being Social." It started out about Discord but went pretty far afield, and never really got back. The new title doesn't really work either, especially since I don't really get there until the third paragraph, but it tickled me, so I kept it. It's the same sort of problem I've had with the Black Hole essay, which still sits unfinished in a draft form (it's so outdated, I started it shortly after the whole thing with Aziz Ansari (remember that?)), because it keeps drifting, or leading into something else entirely, and I had a point in there somewhere but it gets lost in the weeds.

But as any writing teacher will tell you, it's important to just do the writing, even if it's bad. Because some parts are good. Even individually, the paragraphs aren't bad, they just don't flow that well together. Do I not have the time to get it all down and piece it together? Because I did have a point, but I didn't actually think about what it was before I started writing. I don't know. I waste a lot of time, but it's my time, and I want it now!

 Wednesday: 6:50

This is an online record for Wednesday and even beats my online Tuesday best. It was made super-easy by making all the theme answers Saturday Night Live references, right in my Gen-X wheelhouse. Even some non-Xers will get some of these easily because they've become memes in their own right. Props to the Times for letting Schweddy Balls in there.

 Thursday: 9:19

9:19 isn't a record, but it's pretty darn fast (PB is 8:59), and the best I've done since the crossword moved to exclusively online. The Times records my averages and best times. I hope I can get some actual records on there so I don't have to keep refinding that one post where I list my best times, but I'm not too hopeful on getting a sub-10:02 Saturday any time soon), On the other hand, the averages can get skewed if I'm multitasking, or early on, my Mom would try and solve a little (c'mon, Mom, you get the paper version!) and balloon my time (and a lot of her answers were wrong and misleading).

We do team up on the Spelling Bee puzzle, though, and we make a pretty good pair, although I jump in right at midnight and sometimes solve the whole thing by myself in one go. But it usually takes another look, and a second pair of eyes can really help. Even though most of the words are somewhat common, you can't always see the obvious.

Perhaps a bigger post in the near future. My life, personal shit, Grateful Dead, I don't know.

 Friday: 11:03

New Friday record! (Since last updated, the Times has stopped letting you download the puzzle to play offline. The online app is almost as good. One nice feature is that it will save my stats. It will also record a streak, but games only count if you get all the right answers and never check for errors (Only if you specifically check which. The game will tell you once all the boxes are filled if you're correct, but not what's wrong, so that doesn't count against you. (I might have been ~10 seconds faster if I had checked. I had some messiness in the northeast that I didn't notice because I was going so fast.) My current streak is 21 days)). I got 1-Across right off the bat, even though I initially guessed ASKEW for 1-Down. Gettin' all hip with KEGSTANDS and SEXTOY. Lots of alcohol-related things: MARTINI, TANKARD, WINE SNOB, DOS (clued as ___ Equis), and the opposition, MADD.

Wednesday: 12:05
Thursday: 13:04
Friday: 13:17

Gotta give it up for 40-Across "Cheap cab, perhaps." I saw "House Red," but couldn't square it with the clue. Is there some word "housered" that I don't know? Ah, cabernet. I'm more a white wine guy.

So I found something more fun than Zelda Randomizer: Final Fantasy 3(6) Randomizer! You star with 2 random characters and the airship with access to the World of Ruin, as well as 3 Moogle Charms modified to equip to anyone. All enemies and bosses (except final Kefka) are randomized, as is every item in every chest. Also random are the spells that epsers teach (and at what rate). Innate skills, such as Steal, are assigned randomly, as is the gear each character can use. In one seed, I got Terra with General Leo's Shock Ability! Enemies give jacked up Exp and AP. Basically each battle nets a minimum of 3-5 AP regardless of difficulty, but a Legendary Dragon gives you 50!

You really can find almost ANYTHING in a chest, and obtain items they only expect you get rarely or not at all, like Economizer or the Ilumina (Lightbringer) Sword (normally only obtained by betting the unique Ragnorak Sword at the Colisseum, which you almost never do because you generally take the Ragnorak esper instead of the sword). The combo of Fixed Dice and Offering are well known, but if you get TWO Fixed Dice? The current seed I'm on has this nonsense, but I never found an esper that teaches Ultima, Flare, or Life 2. I also never got a Ribbon so I can't easily uncurse my shield (though the Cursed Shield is faster to uncurse in this hack, the Paladin Shield doesn't necessarily teach Ultima). I expect I can still win, but I do feel a little naked without Ultima.

Monday: 6:46

Wednesday: 13:04

Thursday: ??? Forgot to save it. A print version would have worked faster, since there was some grid weirdness which didn't translate to digital very well.

Friday: 17:13 
Saturday: 10:03 (new record, crusht)

Wow, was this an easy one. Totally wrecked my previous Saturday record (and is still a couple of minutes faster than my Friday best). This is especially nice, because I hated that my prior Saturday record was on a non-standard 15x16 grid (technically, that should take longer with more squares, but it beat my previous 15x15 time, (not mention that my Friday best was in between those two Saturday  times, so there were asterisks in a record list. Now everything is clean.)). I had a small error with OVERSTATES instead of OVERSHARES (Clue: Says too much), but that happens when you're moving so fast. I was fortunate to know all three proper names in the grid (21-, 41-, 42-Across) but none of them are obscure at all. My large coffee might have helped, but like I said, very very easy.