Seeking Ferret

This weekend I went up to Boston. It was a really fun trip!

The original impetus for the trip was the Boswords crossword tournament Sunday afternoon, but after last year's crazed one day trip I wanted to give myself more time, so I took off the Friday before and the Monday after. And then proceeded to make the weekend even more manically over-stuffed than last year. Eventually the trip ended up with three main impetii: crosswords, seeing CTY friends, and meeting someone I was set up with a few weeks ago.

I'm not going to say much about the shiduch, we spent Friday afternoon together in downtown Boston and then spent most of Shabbos together, and I had a really good time.

Sunday morning I went to Cambridge to meet up with Tal and bike around Cambridge and Somerville. Then we got ice cream. Then I went to West Roxbury to see Rivka and family, we caught up for a while and I admired her new house. Then six hours of puzzles. Then I had dinner with Diana in Allston. So it was a lot of running all over Boston, but Boston is great and all the people I saw were great and I don't see them often enough.

Puzzles were very good. I sat next to two Hunt teammates who are both faster than me, but while one of them solidly beat me as expected, the other one made a mistake that erased nearly all of his lead on me and he only pipped me by 5 points. I finished in 39th place out of about 80 contestants, roughly the same percentile as last year. I'll take it. Importantly, I didn't make a single mistake over the 5 puzzles, some of which were bruisingly difficult, and I'm very proud of that. I also enjoyed hanging out with other crossworders in between puzzles. I thanked Steve Mossberg for his Chanukah cryptic crossword set and we got into a conversation about other kinds of Jewish cryptic content people should make.

Monday morning I drove home, I was in no rush so I didn't check traffic or anything, and just drove the most brainless route I knew... and ended up stuck on I-95 in Connecticut for three hours because of construction related delays. All told the expected four hour drive took eight hours. Grah.

Last night I went into New York for Puzzled Pint, which was held outdoors in Central Park. It was my first time in NYC in a year and a half, my first time riding a train in a year and a half, my first time seeing thirdblindmouse and another friend in a year and a half. Lots of new experiences.

Trains were less crowded than I remember, and the trip was very easy. I have sort of forgotten how to do New York, though. I took wrong subways (Got on the E instead of the C and almost ended up in Queens). I got disoriented and forgot what street I was on. It's weird, I have prided myself on being able to navigate the City really well, even long after I moved away, and I'm definitely not at tourist level clueless but I felt out of place there. The city is also different, of course, because the City is always changing. Ebikes were everywhere, even more than they used to be, and getting a sense of how to look out for them at intersections was a new challenge. Penn Station and other places have been reoriented for social distancing in ways that were confusing to me. It was all a lot of adjustment.

The puzzles were fine, but I would say that the story and theme were better than the enigma content. My teammates did more solving than I did, but I brought extra puzzles so after we finished the puzzle set I did a variety cryptic while my friend sat next to me solving the WSJ crossword, asking each other for help when we got stuck. It was really pleasant to sit on a bench in Central Park on a lovely summer evening and solve puzzles as the sun went down. Sadly, the organizers did a poor job of advertising, and we were one of only two or three teams to show up, but it was a start at returning to a favorite monthly ritual. Hopefully more teams will come next month.

I finished the Boswords fall crossword league in 219th place, out of 310 competitors in the hardest division. That sounds more impressive than it actually is: Many of the lowest scoring competitors on the chart missed a bunch of weeks so weren't really in the full league. And in fact there are people ahead of me on the table who skipped a week and still outscored me. My fastest time on a weekly puzzle was 13:23; my best ranking on a weekly puzzle was 151st. But the reality is that I was one of the slowest competitors in the division. I was quite extremely outclassed. Nonetheless it has been a lot of fun, and I don't regret doing it.

The championship puzzle will be tomorrow night at 9PM Eastern, and after giving everyone a shot to solve the championship puzzle on their own, they'll stream video of the top three solvers, Dan Feyer, Paolo Pasco, and Tyler Hinman, somewhere after 9:30. If you want to see brilliant people solve a brutally difficult crossword puzzle in an absurdly fast time (The worst time any of those three solvers have recorded in this whole league was 5:29, which is, you know, better than twice as fast as my fastest time, and four or five times faster than my typical times), it's worth tuning in for. Feyer has won the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament 8 times, Hinman was won it five, and finished as runner up to Feyer multiple times. These are the best of the best in our little hobby.

Boswords' Twitch Page

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.

A Mystery Hunt teammate wrote a set of Social Distancing Puzzles, available for a donation to Feeding America.

The gimmick is that the puzzles are designed to be solved with a partner, either remotely or in the same room (I solved them with a friend over Google Meet). Each partner gets a different version of the puzzles with only some of the information required to solve the puzzles, so you have to share information in order to solve them. There are ten puzzles, and then the answers to the ten puzzles form clues to a nice meta-puzzle with a satisfyingly thematic answer.


It was a really nice way to spend an evening with a friend and I highly recommend checking them out if you have a person you like solving word puzzles with.

My local puzzle hunting team met again this past week. One friend joined me last Wednesday, three others joined me Sunday, to work on the July issue of Panda Magazine. I solved the meta last night, and then backsolved the remaining puzzle. I haven't told the rest of the team yet about the backsolve, I'm seeing if they can solve the puzzle on their own.

My team was more productive as a team this time. Three other teammates solved a puzzle, and they did all but the final extraction on several more- I then jumped in and helped find the final answers. So I only solved about half the puzzles completely on my own. That was to some degree the result of strategic choices on my part, like with the choice not to tell them about the final backsolve. In one case, I spotted a final answer 45 minutes before my teammate finally got it, but I let her keep working because she seemed on track to figure it out on her own. I'm trying to give everyone more space to work on puzzles and not trample over them by just working at my own speed. That way they'll get more comfortable with what this sort of puzzle looks like and how to approach them. I also spent time teaching solving tools- introducing people to nutrimatic and Onelook and qat, as well as some more specialized tools that I learned about from Palindrome (and in some cases were developed by people on Palindrome).

I really enjoy having local puzzle friends.

Last month I got together a local team to compete in the Galactic Puzzle Hunt, an online puzzle hunt run by a team that competes in the Mystery Hunt. It was a lot of fun, and it was really nice to be able to puzzle socially without having to travel. I suggested afterward that we keep up the fun by meeting up to work on the bimonthly Panda Magazine puzzle set, and everyone agreed, so we're doing that a week from Sunday.

But I got overexcited and bought the magazine subscription early, and accidentally got access to the March Panda, so I've been working on it by myself when I have bits of time. I've solved all but two of the puzzles over the past week, and just cracked the meta a few minutes ago. They have been really satisfying puzzles to solve. Foggy has a great aesthetic sense for how to design enjoyable puzzles.


EDIT AND... with the meta solved, was able to backsolve the last two puzzles in ten minutes. :D Yay, first solo solve of a Panda!

I have been trying to shove my sleep pattern earlier, mostly with positive results. I've woken up most days this week more cheerfully than usual. Some bumpiness... a few nights where I wake up at 3 in the morning, read for a little bit before I can go back to sleep. But mostly it's been good. And then last night I got home from work at 8PM and was in bed by 9PM, because damn was it a long day at work.

Tuesday night was Puzzled Pint. Mostly the puzzles were eh, but there was one word puzzle that I thought was really elegant. There were strings of letters that were 'double encrypted'... First you figured out the encoding mechanisms the first time, and you decoded to get a series of clues that clued short words. Then you applied the associated encoding mechanism to the clue words to get a new word, all of which were part of a common, thematic dataset. I'll try to remember to link it when it's been posted online.

Tomorrow morning I'm flying with my family to Arizona for a cousin's wedding, which will either be really fun or a giant mess. :P Yay family. I know none of the details of the event because I never actually got an invitation- word passed through family backchannels that no slight was intended. :P My parents took care of the travel logistics so all I know is that I will show up tonight at their home, sleep over, we'll go to the airport tomorrow, and at some point in the weekend there will be a wedding and then I'll be home Monday.

Hopefully I will be recovered enough by Tuesday because I'm seeing the Met's Rigoletto again with ghost_lingering. And I've been thinking of trying to go see Andy Statman's Thursday show next week because I haven't seen him play in a while.

I've always been a puzzle person, and I've been poking at the New York Times crossword since I was ten years old sitting next to my grandmother at her kitchen table messing around with the Sunday puzzle. I wasn't particularly helpful to her, but that wasn't exactly the point. In high school, my quiz bowl team used to sit around with a photocopy of the Friday puzzle from the school library and wrestle with it after practice- we could usually nail it in less than half an hour.

For the uninitiated, the New York Times crosswords from Monday to Thursday are progressively more difficult themed puzzles. Then Friday is a rather challenging themeless and Saturday is a more challenging themeless. Sunday is generally designed to be roughly of the same difficulty as Thursday, but in a larger puzzle format.

About three years ago, I got the NYTimes crossword iPad app and started doing the puzzle daily. The app keeps track of times and some other statistics. And I have seen my best times on the app creep down slowly since then. When I started doing the puzzle daily, I was doing Sunday puzzles in about forty five minutes. A couple months ago, I solved one in a little over sixteen. A few weeks before that, I got a Friday time down to less than eight minutes.

These are not, in an absolute sense, great times. It was a general rule of thumb three years ago that the fastest crossword solvers in the world would solve a puzzle about four times as fast as me- it's now down to about twice as fast. Still, I am proud of the improvement.

And then something happened and my times for the past month were often ten minutes slower than my recent norms. I wasn't really sure what had happened, I worried that something was wrong with me. But I'm back! Solved this Sunday puzzle in seventeen minutes, solved Monday in 4:41 (just ten seconds off my personal Monday best), solved Saturday in about eleven minutes.



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The other thing I want to say about crosswords is that I've been watching Grey's Anatomy and Grey's has weird ideas about crosswords. People on Grey's report crossword times worse than mine and brag about them. Maggie Pierce demonstrates that she's a wunderkind by bragging that her personal best on a Friday New York Times puzzle is 11 minutes. I solved this Friday's in nine and change and it's a good time for me, but a few minutes off my personal best. (Meanwhile over at Dan Feyer's blog, many time ACPT champion Feyer reports solving it in less than three minutes)

Still, Pierce's Friday 11 is better than some other places on Grey's, where solving in pen is the mark of mastery (general consensus in the crossword community is that assholes who refuse to admit their fallibility solve in pen- everyone makes mistakes on tricky crosswords, no matter how brilliant they are) and handling the Sunday puzzle is held up as proof of being able to handle the hardest crosswordland is capable of offering (it's not, as noted above). On Brooklyn 9-9, a show much more attuned to the nuances of crossword geekery, Amy Santiago has a favorite Saturday crossword constructor, not a Sunday constructor. (That episode was so much fun for me. Random Willz cameo!)

I suppose the fanwank is that these misunderstandings about crosswords are a deliberate character choice- the arrogant surgeons on Grey's have mediocre solving times and think that they are, of course, brilliant cruciverbalists because they are *the best* at everything they touch. That is of course too subtle to be the real reason, but I can accept it because it amuses me. Derek Shepherd strutting around thinking he's such a great puzzle solver because he's never met any ACPT competitors. That makes me laugh a lot.


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All that said, I should say that though I'm pleased and proud my times have gone down, I'm not exactly obsessively training or anything. There's a cohort in the crossword community for whom the Sunday Times puzzle is a thing you do over a cup of coffee with breakfast, and you luxuriate in it. If it takes less than half an hour, they reason, you're doing it wrong. There's nothing wrong with this logic. It's fun to take puzzles slow enough to catch all the little details. I got through the Tuesday puzzle so quickly this week I didn't even register the theme until I was done. Which was okay, it was kind of a cute theme (Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury co-created it as part of the Times's recent run of celebrity co-constructed puzzles, so it had a bunch of hidden comic strip names), but it wasn't a brilliant theme that greatly enhanced the puzzle.

But anyway, there is pleasure in slow-solving, and there are things I could do to get faster if I really cared, but I'm nonetheless pleased with my improvement.

I have signed up for this year's Black Letter Game, a puzzle thingamajig where they mail you four physical objects, which have puzzles contained within them. It's on the expensive side, because they promise pretty damn high production values, so it remains to be seen whether I have wasted a good deal of money. But I thought I should mention it any case anyone is interested and/or in case anyone is interested in teaming up with me.

http://www.blacklettergame.com