Pete's Log: Just a quick update on unimportant things

Entry #2164, (Random Crap, Word Games and Puzzles)
(posted when I was 44 years old.)

Well, I made it through the first weekend, but no further on Advent of Code. Monday came along and reminded me in no uncertain terms that work days plus kiddo does not leave much time for anything else. So that's four days of AoC I managed so far this year, which is one day more than last year. And we had company this weekend so no chance to catch up there. Maybe next year.

I managed my first one-guess Wordle score a couple days ago. The past few months I've been using a different starting word every day, so it was entertaining to see one "hit." Even if it's pure luck.

Several-day-old Wordle Spoiler

The word in question was "naive"

I've been enjoying Redactle lately. You get a heavily redacted Wikipedia article and guess words until you get the title. Each word you guess gets un-redacted (assuming it's in the article).

Lately I've managed a few "perfect" games in which my number of guesses is equal to the number of redacted words in the title. It's incredibly satisfying.

Redactle Spoilers

My recent "perfect" games:

  • Age of the Universe
    Started "In [8] [9], the [3] of the [8] is the [4] [7] since the [3] [4]." The "since" made me think the 3-letter word had a good chance of being "age" so that was my first guess. That was correct and the rest of the article had a "sciency" feel to it. So I thought maybe "the [3] [4]" might be "the big bang" and guessed "universe" next. That all turned out correct. Took me a minute and a half.
  • James Bond
    I got this one in 15 seconds and I'm still not sure how. Saw some redacted italics that just "felt" like James Bond movie titles. I'll probably never beat this time.
  • Frankfurt
    Took me 12 minutes of analyzing the article, but felt real good to get. It "felt" like a place and there were a bunch of Euro-symbols in the article. The first sentence was something like "[9], [10] [9] [2] [4] ([6]: (); [7]: [9] [2] [3], [3] "[5] [4] on the [4]") is the [4] [8] [4] in the [6] [5] of [5]." Since this felt like a "European place" I decided that "[4] in the [6] [5] of [5]" must be "city in the [6] state of [5]" and then thinking through countries and states I decided it might be "city in the German state of Hesse." And that's when I noticed the [9] [2] [4], which matches the full name of "Frankfurt am Main." Success!

Anyway, today's Redactle took me 133 guesses, so they're not all so easy.

Next, I shall attempt an update on important things.