just subscribed to a free trial of some streaming service called "qello concerts by stringray" to watch the stax-volt revue - live in norway 1967...rip steve cropper

my first, fifth, and sixth most streamed songs of the "year" were co-written by steph jones...nothing from man's best friend cracked the top 100

This composition had eluded me for nearly a decade, but yesterday I was finally able to capture it. A train rolled through just as the Duquesne Incline was crossing over the tracks in #Pittsburgh, creating a picture perfect winter scene. It was worth the hours and hours I've waited over the years.

AFAICT there are infinitely many such splits, lying on a line that looks roughly like this: it's reasonably far away from the antipodal points that make the land and water hemispheres, but *not* just a great circle away from it. This notebook tries to find it: observablehq.com/d/db36886905...

solution: https://bigwordbot.val.run/ATESC_EG_BIOSU_R

i cleaned up my boggle bot over the break. among other tweaks, it now uses a bespoke word list, has solutions via a vibe-coded solver, and has a non-default bluesky avatar.

More Marvel Snap funnies coming soon? Maybe. No promises. But enjoy these classics from days of yore.

was googling to see if any of the writers for "a man on the inside" went to a liberal arts college. seems like mostly just harvard.

Happy 40th birthday to Carly Rae Jepsen! No better time to reflect on her works than today.

I think this is pure charting gold from WaPo (credits to Szu Yu Chen, @emmakumer.bsky.social and @jeremybmerrill.com) www.washingtonpost.com/technology/i...

dope dope dope dope dope dope dope dope

i know we all rag on tufte for insisting that joylessness should be a core value of visualization, but we forget about the adorable little "ideas" guy from tvdoqi

I once called her America's best working popular musician-songwriter. Happy birthday to Miranda Lambert. What a discography. humanizingthevacuum.wordpress.com/2023/11/10/r...

made enough progress on coney letters to push to prod loopyletters.val.run/coney like my other "find a big word" games, the words are random uniformly pulled from the wordnik list, which includes a lot of junk. i'm sorry. better on mobile than desktop.

i was considering adding more loops to loopy letters, but ended up filling in the donut instead. wip alexwein--0199cef989287565a4c0a69b4c1e007f.web.val.run

We are live! 🎉 thinkygames.com/even...

new name, new bovid, same great gameplay. Anigrams is now The New Yorker's: SHUFFALO!!!

this is an archive of 1300 examples of string boards in media www.vaultofculture.com/nst

the minis are free forever! you can share them using the quoted post above. i also catalogued them here: www.brookehusic.com/puzzminis/ xoxo 💕

this snocaps album is great. does a cool job bridging some of katie's pre-2020's sound with the saint cloud/tiger's blood stuff. I missed the scuzzy indie guitars.

jenny from let's eat grandma is back with a very satisfying 80s synth anthem

I happen to work with two of my favorite Thinkers About Music: @annkpowers.bsky.social and @artsorority.bsky.social. Lo and behold, they have a new @npr.org podcast together! (This episode's free. The rest will be on NPR Music+, which costs a nice cup of tea/month.) www.npr.org/2025/10/23/n...

whoa bloomberg has a line chart-based word game

boggle

scrabble

i got a new notebook yesterday, but the paper is a little too glossy, so I don't think it's gonna fix my life

phyllis beat me 78-73 in round 3 this month; not as heartbreaking

shit...damn...motherfucker

not enough discussion of charts and graphs

when i started my job, i talked a lot about how valuable good documentation is. but now I have to write good documentation and I do not want to.

fun stuff...although after reading, i am less certain i understand either what a theory is or what a shape is

had to get into some of the nuances of marvel snap's in-game currencies with my therapist this week

i wrote more here: blog.puzzmo.com/posts/2025/1...

This is my first story for @coyotemedia.org and I'm pretty proud of it! I think it will surprise and delight you, even if you don't live in the Bay Area. Plus, it includes a recipe for pie. www.coyotemedia.org/where-did-th...

2 hours and 50 minutes? maybe a few of those battles could have happened concurrently. (the runtime was fine actually, i just needed to get the dumb joke out of my head.)

This was a really fun conversation. I don’t get too many chance to talk about puzzles as independent media, but I really believe in the point and Phil is a pretty brilliant interlocutor.

this morning i discovered that my blog has been down for a month...back up now, but still no new posts since april alex-we.in

i enjoyed the part in one battle after another where junglepussy said "hi, i'm junglepussy" www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQuo...

unironically, i love it every time there's poptimism discourse

I had an idea yesterday about making a word search that, when solved, would be a data visualization. So, I coded it up... and it worked! This shows abundance of three bird species in Brooklyn Bridge Park over a year. It feels like there are some fun possibilities here. 📊🪶

another good debbii dawson single. this one is produced by luka/elvira (who did all of addison) and has a writing credit from max martin (jessie j's "domino")

i was in the snowflake docs a little while back and noticed asof join (added last year), and i now have a load-bearing asof join

📊 Academic papers can be challenging to read, especially for students new to a field. Alyxander Burns shares an activity that uses data comics to help students better understand and engage with academic literature. www.nightingaledvs.com/learning-academic-papers-making-data-comics

What it's all about.

i deserve a prize for keeping my pessimism off social media: a non-participation trophy

We took a month-long break from making daily games to work on a multiplayer competitive word game. Just published a blog post about the design + dev process 👉 blog.puzzmo.com/posts/2025/0...

02. Strong Start?