#puzzlelife

I have joked a lot that over the past months, puzzles have replaced a social life. It is not actually entirely a joke.

Puzzle stuff in my life:

- Puzzled Pint, virtually, every month, though we've pretty much adopted the policy that if the puzzle requires us to print out and cut things up, we skip the puzzle. So we didn't solve the meta this month.

- Matt Gaffney's Weekly Meta Crossword Contest and sometimes the WSJ Friday Crossword Contest, which are a fun twist on crosswords where once you solve the crossword you have to find the hidden answer somehow clued in the puzzle's clues or answers. I really, really like the MGWCC, it's a strikingly satisfying experience to solve them and for whatever reason my brain is fine with it if I don't solve the hard ones.

-The NYTimes crossword basically every day, even when it annoys me. Maybe I should stop that. The Inkubator biweekly crossword, which almost never annoys me. I've been co-solving crosswords online with a bunch of people, using squares.io, which is awesome for group crossword solving.

- Cryptic crosswords with primeideal and liv, mostly from the Enigma. I'm still bad at them but I seem to be getting a little better. primeideal and I somehow solved this ridiculous puzzle where half the clues were cluing French and Spanish words.

- The Boswords crossword puzzle tournament is having an online crossword solving league this fall, with weekly puzzles to solve every Monday night. I placed in very nearly 50th percentile in the Boswords virtual tournament, so I do not expect to do well in the league, but it should be fun. If you like crosswords and have a half hour to spare every week, I recommend this. You don't need to be super-good at crosswords, there are three divisions with variable difficulty in the clues.

I am going to be doing badly in the league, because I technically meet the level for the A division, but just barely, so I signed up for the A division and fully expect to be at the bottom of the pack.

-Tuesday, ghost_lingering and I played with National Puzzlers' League flats, this ridiculous 19th century puzzle style where complicated wordplay is clued with doggerel poetry. Sometimes really well done doggerel, though! I've just started solving flats over the past couple months and I don't understand a lot of the base types yet but we had fun picking through the easier ones, which were still often very brainstretchy.

-Mystery Hunt has gone virtual and my team has been having conversations about how we're expecting to coordinate a hundred people co-solving puzzles virtually, which is exciting and scary.

Vidrec Thursday

Last week I recced my favorite West Wing vid, this is my second favorite.

Handlebars by chaila


This vid is wonderful. "Handlebars" was a thread that ran through fanvidding fandom for a few years about a decade ago, its goofiness somehow works incredibly well for deconstructing the idea of power fantasy in superhero stories. The song shifts from the relatively mundane and harmless boasts "I can ride my bike with no handlebars" to cover on the other end "And I can end the planet in a holocaust ", and it thus gives the vidder tools for contrasting the relative lightness in the storytelling of traditional superhero fiction against the weightiness of their moral responsibility in the world as people with an unusual ability to impact the world. And so there was a year when VVC saw multiple "Handlebars" vids, to minor controversy, but in general all the people making "Handlebars" vids were aware of the vids that came before and building a sort of communal story about superhero responsibility in fiction together.

And then out comes chaila saying "My megalomaniac superhero > yours." In other words, making explicit the reason for telling this kind of story about superheroes. Because in the real world we have invested real people with too much power, and they might be basically decent people trying to do their best (Bartlett) or they might not be (Welcome to 2020), but it doesn't entirely matter, this kind of power is too much of a burden for a mere mortal, and it is incredible to see someone trying to grapple with it anyway. That's why we imagine superheroes, we are trying to imagine a person who can wrestle with all that the world throws at us and still comes out standing up. And the so-called Sorkinian fantasy that is the West Wing is about imagining a president who actually can struggle morally with the challenges presented to an American president and remain on the side of the light.

Bartlett is just sooo intensely Bartlett here, both funny and charming and by the end, an awful lot terrifying.

Watch on YouTube