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I like to do a number of different puzzles every day, for fun and in the hopes that it staves off zombification. Some not so often, depending on how I'm feeling. Kakuro I might do several of to keep my hands busy while watching a video; whereas I tend to skip Geogrid if I'm a bit drained. In no particular order, then: Wordy ones If you like Wordle four times as much as a healthy person ought to, there's Quordle, with Sequence and Rescue modes for variety. Try Octordle if you're not ready to admit you have a problem. Categories is basically Connections, where you sort 16 words into 4 groups, but with fewer prompts to pay for the death of journalism. I don't play Reunion very often, as I find the "puzzle" aspect to be a bit arbitrary in a way similar to wordsearches, but the vibe is pretty cozy. Mathy ones Kakuro is my jam. Maybe not my favourite overall, but definitely my most played, as grinding through 11x17 expert puzzles keeps the antsiness at bay during long video essays. Nerdle is, as the name suggests, Wordle for math equations. There're a few different modes, and the makers expanded the site with a number (get it?) of different puzzles. MaffDoku is one of those, and a fun combination of sudoku and kakuro, compressed into one 3x3 square. They also have Crossnerdle which is a crossword which doesn't require memorising trivia, just the order of operations. I also enjoy another of theirs, Targets, though I don't play it much anymore Sumplete is a neat game, purportedly designed by ChatGPT. The daily 7x7 offers a decent challenge, but the site can generate smaller or larger layouts. Geographical ones Wordle is a great way of improving your geography knowledge. I can now identify the outlines of even some obscure island nations thanks to this game. The bonus rounds cover a good range of different aspects of each country. Flagle is similar, but more flag-focussed (of course), and with fewer bonus round topics. Geoconnections is basically Connections/Categories, but with more flags and such. Geogrid is a game I have learned to not worry about being bad at. As a try-hard, I aim for a better score, but being able to retain, recall, and cross-compare that much geography trivia is a major challenge. Once Worldle has helped you memorise all the country shapes, you can put them into context with Travle. The weekly challenges add twists and spins that make for a satisfying head-scratcher. These are all games offered by teuteuf.fr, which has a few others worth checking out. The only other one I play is Thursday Thirty, a weekly quiz gauntlet which is slowly helping me with Geogrid. Others Revealed is a fun test of memory and context reading, though its material is surprisingly US-centric for something hosted by Encylopædia Britannica. Emovi is a good puzzle if you want to see how well you know movies and emoji-speak. I'm still sorta on the fence with The Loop. It's a neat format, but is obviously AI-generated, so the connections can be a bit tangential sometimes and the clip-art has that odd wax-dummy-of-a-drawing quality about it. I recently started playing Star Battle, which is a sudoku-like good for spatial reasoning. No daily updates, but worth including in my bookmarks and here.
Building this website has been a long process, one which has been mostly spent learning the finer points of CSS and trying to get everything to behave itself. HTML, too, and a bit of Javascript, but mostly CSS. Here are some resources I've found helpful in that journey. I started looking things up on W3Schools, as I was familiar with them from trying to learn HTML years ago. The interactive tutorials are nice if you want to do a bit of sandboxing, though I find the depth of information can be a bit lacking. For further elucidation, I like to use Mozilla's MDN site, which has extensive reference material on web design. More focused on that than tutorials, but good for digging deeper into how things work. I found a nice tool for working out colours, which not only gives previews, but also lets you know how well different colours contrast one another (the text/background preview is very handy!), and makes suggestions for themes. I haven't used it much yet, but I'll include the WWW Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative site. As I've mentioned in some updates in the "Today" section, I want to make this site as accessible as I can, as it's an aspect of web design I'm coming to realise is woefully overlooked. For those of you who are into that sort of thing, Neocities has a guide on RSS implementation. As few humans still use the internet, far fewer still use RSS, but it's a helpful tool for that one person who still checks their feeds. Who knows? Maybe it'll make a comeback. My thanks go out to the designers of the custom typefaces I use on this site. I hope you find them as pleasing and readable as I do. I've done my best to track down the closest thing to an originating webpage for each. The headers are presented in Platypi by David Sargent and Emma Marichal. I find it suitably imposing for header work, while still a bit whimsical. It is published under the Open Font License. For general text, I use "Hibiscus" by Hannabie Creative. I chose it for its casually cute form and distinct shapes. It is free to use for personal use. I needed a monospace typeface for the "Tunes" section, and found Fira Mono by Carrois Type Design. I like that it doesn't look too blocky or plain, despite being sorta intended to be both. It is also published under the Open Font License
Do you also think too much about numbers and all the weird and wacky stuff they're getting up to? Check out Number Empire's "number properties" tool. Is it prime? Is it in the Fibonacci sequence? What's its cosine? What is it in base 7? Learn all this, and much, much more. And more, later, perhaps...?