Back in the mid-90s, there was a Superman TV show that ran for several seasons called Lois & Clark. It starred Dean Cain as Clark Kent and Teri Hatcher as Lois Lane. I've always been a (moderate) Superman fan, so I was immediately in on this show. In fact, I got a little obsessed with it.
Looking for similarly obsessed fans, I joined a "listserv" --cutting edge at the time, antique now--where you could send an email to one email address and it would be automatically distributed to everyone on the list. The listserv for Lois & Clark was a bunch of total nerds-- as you would expect with a group of people who cared enough to find it a decade before social media was even an idea-- but they were funny and sometimes smart and I loved it.
Anyway. This is a long story to tell you something that is not even slightly related to today's topic, but I'm in this far so I will finish. Teri Hatcher had the same hairstyle for --oh, the details are hazy, but let's say the first season. At some point, she decided to change it, and you would have thought the world was ending. There were endless outraged emails with the subject line "Teri's hair," and some of them were paragraphs long. Many paragraphs. It went on for weeks, and then would periodically revive whenever her hair changed.
It got to the point that a contingent of us absolutely refused to read any post that had "Teri's hair" in the subject line, because it's just stupid hair, and she can wear it however she wants, for god's sake. Sometimes I would be itching to make some brilliant, witty comment about her latest hairstyle, but I refused, on principle, because no way was I going to fan the flames of what was essentially a boring topic.
And that is the same reason I have so far resisted talking about my obsession with the New York Times word games. I know there are people who post their results daily, and some of them are friends of mine, and I might in my most secret heart of hearts think they're being a little over-the-top, but I bow before their right to post whatever the heck they want on social media (because everyone else sure does).
But I was determined to not be that person myself. Then I arrived at today, and I don't really have anything to tell you this week, besides the (unremarkable) announcement that we are about to leave on a 3-week road trip, and I don't know if that means I will be posting more or less.
So here we are. My starter drug was the Spelling Bee. If you are uninitiated, the New York Times has a games app where they post daily puzzles, including their famous crosswords, a variety of other word games, and a handful of non-word games like Sudoku. There are a couple that are free or have free versions, but I am obsessed enough that I pay for the subscription. (You can also buy "packs" of puzzles without subscribing.)
I found out about the Spelling Bee when I followed Ben Dreyer on then-Twitter, after reading Dreyer's English, a book expressly designed to make word nerds happy. He would occasionally post cryptic messages about a word game he was playing, and based on the enthusiastic responses, it seemed he was not alone. He didn't ever mention the name of the game, but he always included a bee emoji-- enough clues to google "bee word game" and find it.
So that's how I started. The Spelling Bee is run by a kid named Sam--I think he was 25 or 26 at the time--who is just a year or two older than my kid named Sam, so even though there were occasional word choices or exclusions that made me roll my eyes (like the day the pangram was "anklebone")(really?), I mostly thought that its quirkiness made it more interesting and lovable.
Then the shutdown happened, and a bunch of hyper-competitive people were home with nothing to do, and suddenly our weird little #nytsb community got cutthroat. I quit following the discussion, but I still play the game. Every single day. And also Wordle and the Mini Crossword.
My limitation with the NYT word games is the amount of time I'm willing to spend on them. It usually takes me less than 10 minutes to do the Mini, Wordle, and make a start on the Bee. I might do the big crossword on Monday or Tuesday, but around Wednesday or Thursday (they get harder as the week goes by), they get hard enough that I run out of patience and/or time. I'm not great at it-- there are people who can solve a Friday puzzle in 10 minutes, and it takes me 30-50 minutes or more. It's not that I can't do them (she doth protest), I just don't care enough to spend 45 minutes a day on them. Unless I'm bored. Or traveling.
For the record, I quit doing Connections, because I would only get it 3 or 4 times a week and it made me feel stupid. (You can put on my gravestone that DISH is a category, not an item like PLATE or CUP. Thank you.) Same with Letterbox.
So that's my routine. It's often the very first thing I do when I pick up my phone in the morning. I usually only play the Bee until I get to the Amazing level-- really, it isn't all that amazing since it's only half of the available words for the day-- but most days I don't have enough patience to push through to Genius (although I've been getting it more often lately because Doug has started helping). Kinda weird, right? I'm obsessed enough to do it every single day, but not obsessive enough to push through to the end.
And even Genius isn't the absolute end. It's the end they tell you about, but there is another level called Queen Bee that you don't know about unless you suddenly hit it (has only happened to me once). Queen Bee means you've found all the possible words for the day. For those hyper-competitive folks, once they know about it, they're not going to stop until they hit Queen Bee every single day.
If you ask me, that must require cheating, because there are weird words or variant spellings that make it on the list, and unless you know about them, they're not exactly going to occur to you as possibilities. For example: when the letters are there, MAMA, MAMMA, and MOMMA are all accepted. And there are all kinds of ways to get hints or cheat-- just google "Spelling Bee hints," or even the NYT publishes a daily column with clues and spoilers.
My other favorite game, Wordle, was started by a software engineer as a birthday present for his girlfriend. In a matter of weeks it had exploded to several hundred thousand users. NYT bought it a couple of years ago. My Wordle strategey-- and all of us who do it every day have one-- is that I use a different word every day, and I try to use up consonants.
You have six guesses to get a five-letter word. Apparently what most people do is try to use up vowels, so they start with a word like ADIEU. If you're using up consonants, usually by the 4th or 5th guess you're doing a word scramble with four or five letters instead of trying to guess what _A_E_ is.
It takes more guesses-- usually four and five, and the only way I'm going to get it in two is if I start with a totally lucky guess--but it's much more reliable than the vowel method. I think. People have done studies of this stuff, so probably someone knows. My streak was over 300 last fall when I got stuck early in the day and forgot to go back and finish. I was OK with it because I had been thinking about purposely breaking my streak anyway since we were about to go on a vacation and I didn't want to feel pressured to do it if I wasn't in the mood.
Good grief, I am even boring myself. Are you still reading? I guess you must be if you read that.
Anyway. My streaks have been much shorter since then so it's not working as well as it used to, but it's good enough for me. If you really love Wordle, you can try out all the non-NYT variants (easy to find if you google), including Duotrigordle, a super fun version where you are solving for 32 words at once. I did it for awhile but eventually I quit because it takes so much longer.
Enough. Like I said, we are about to leave on a 3-week road trip, and sometimes traveling makes me want to post more often, and sometimes I forget all about having a blog and don't post at all. Have a great weekend, and I'll be back in 3-4 weeks or maybe sooner.
