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

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

Irrationally upset that fronton isn't accepted today. The cultural fading of jai alai continues apace.

got the pangram today easily as with most of the puzzles, but with so many words it was hard to get them all - rotini, croci and tortoni (my nemesis, that horrible dessert) were all beyond me - but it burns me that I got friction, the pangram, but not fiction

tricot and tricorn came to me for some reason when I was thinking about tri- words, but I just made a guess with triton

not accepting PENTANGLE (a pangram!) is a halloween season outrage

As a fan of the band, I too was disappointed!

haha! that would-be pangram was one of the first words that jumped out at me

I got one of today's pangrams easily, but not the other, I couldn't think of any words that started with egg

Got genius today thanks to the thread title

I missed that one!