Tomtit in the tilth -- the NY TIMES SPELLING BEE thread

I'M SUPPOSED TO FIND 49 WORDS IN THIS MESS HOW???

Im at 46 but its been a hard slog

Second pangram and at 47 i really am tapped out

at least so far there are no crazy words like dugong

I at least got that one. Came home today from a long day of errands without enough time to focus. Think I got like 27 or so before I had to go do other stuff. I look forward to feeling stupid tomorrow.

I've only had experience with this recently but today's was the most brutal

haven't encountered one of these yet that has had only 4 four-letter words. that's what I usually go for first, expecting to get a lot of them

i got really into the two no touch puzzles and recommend them
https://krazydad.com/play/starbattle/

Ooohh I just jammed through a few of those and it’s fun! Thanks, forks!

yer welcome! i find them obsessive and challenging to specific parts of my brain that aren't especially elastic.

(for non-subscribers, NYT runs two of those every day in the print edition)

Whoops I got to #7 and I have the first occurrence of not being able to deduce the next star and having to make a strategic guess. Hmm. I think.

with the harder ones, you have to actually game out some six or seven moves ahead when you get a 50/50. it's difficult to do in ink!

Does that no-touch game indicate if you've successfully solved a particular puzzle?

it does

or rather the electronic version does

The krazydad thing is amazing and now I can’t sleep

I just broke into Book 2. :|

still don't think I understand it

I didn't either (hence my confusion on why I hadn't solved a puzzle) but it's a little like sudoku in that every row and column and region has to have exactly X stars, with the added difficulty of stars not being adjacent to each other.

i can attest that over time you will start to get better at the two no touch but I fuck up every third one in a way that requires me to start over from scratch.

I should mention that there's an app: Star Battle Go. $9 gets you 3000 puzzles, basically set for life. I'm recommending it.

app also has tutorials which i have yet to try.

loved today’s spelling bee with only one point five vowels

I liked the one from today too

yesterday’s was interesting, there were not that many words and there were a lot of words that were hard to think of - curium, tritium, tatami, cacti, circuit, tutti

today’s was also hard and with not that many words, but I was able to think of more

surprised it didn't accept WHINGE

I was surprised by that too

Whinge is British

but seems universal

i get not having british words like COLOUR where there's a one-to-one american equivalent but it's not like whinge is the british spelling of whine, cause brits also have whine. it's just a different word. and americans occasionally use it. e.g. here's a maureen o'dowd column from 2014 where she uses it https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/30/opinion/dowd-is-barry-whiffing.html

I may have played too much star battle in the past 48 hours

what hath I wrought

same!! totally addictive

The whole hand-curated thing just opens Sam up to so much griping.

star battle is a problem, yes. did you guys get the app?

today I couldn’t think of ambit, beige, baggie, biggie or gimme. those last few remind me to try colIoquial words. I got iamb, but iambi seems exceptionally esoteric

well that’s the thing with this puzzle. usually you’ll get a sense of the editor’s boundaries, but with this it too often feels random. some dog breeds but not a labrador? etc

It's a miniature of every prescriptive / descriptive lexicographical / usage dispute ever. Why this and not that?

But focused on one individual and his particular idiosyncratic segment of the elephant.

If you or I were to curate the Bee, there would be just as many "Why this and not that?" gripes. Just different ones.

Many years ago I was a magazine copyeditor and in a moment of rashness I decided that "disk" was a shape and "disc" was a computer storage medium. Or maybe it was the other way around. I forget. But it's probably still out there in a disused style guide somewhere. My secret shame.

it’s the other way around and that’s pretty standard now i think? from tiny acorns…

i disagree that anyone else’s would be as arbitrary but i know what you mean. in any case you do kind of get a feeling for the personality of any editor. ezersky’s does not beguile me. for instance, this is a guy who says WOOT

it’s the other way around and that’s pretty standard now i think?

Okay but what is this then?

https://toppng.com/public/uploads/preview/parental-advisory-png-white-115522471060relexpojy.png

dead media

it’s a shape

compact discs i.e. redbook CD format media, are not a computer storage medium.

just go with the shifting plurals in that sentence alright

I had a dreamed about the SB last night, and what's more, S was one of the letters.

today's pangram seemed esoteric to me, I would never have gotten gunport

I like having tried to solve the low word count puzzles of the last few days though

TFW when you're at 43/170 but have accepted that you're not going to get the last 4-letter word.

I haven't encountered a puzzle with that many words yet, I try hardest to get every 4-letter word, it seems just

I stop at Genius and feel like a loser when two or three of my friends get to Queen Bee

Like, how tf