It’s also the way I walk.

I wrote about Warren Zevon's "Carmelita" for Spin's Deep Cut Friday column this week: www.spin.com/2026/02/deep...

i guess adoption of the AI feature on app dot snowflake was low, because they added a terribly annoying hypocycloid in the margin that follows your cursor

me on a zoom call this morning: what your asking sounds very difficult maybe literally impossible. me 5 minutes after the call ends: here's a 10-line sql definition that should be work as a robust solution.

thrilled to announce i’m doing a mini-crossword residency at @puzzmo.com all month! 28 tiny crosswords, one each day of february. i’ll thread them here, first up is CROSSOVER EVENT www.puzzmo.com/puzzle/2026-...

would it surprise you to learn that the first thing i tried to make when learning javascript in 2017 was a word game? alexsfirstwordgamewasbad.val.run

an hour into this video, i learned that Glenn Jones, who leads the marvel snap design team, made a little word game: letterperk.com

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

I'm starting a newsletter for The Daily Spell! It'll have weekly updates plus bonus puzzles with some extra lore. Interested in TDS, but the daily pace doesn't work for you? Subscribe to solve puzzles and discover the story weekly instead. Go to About the Game to subscribe: www.the-daily-spell.com

new CollectEdNY blog pot from Mark Trushkowsky! www.collectedny.org/2026/01/slow... #iTeachMath ♾️ see posts below ⬇️

hilary duff doing carlycore

Heavy Rhyme Experience was a Delicious Vinyl artist showcase with the Heavies as the MG's and we used to be a real country. Acid-jazz rap www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8JZ...

tove styrke's first new song since 2022 is more of sonic departure than I maybe wanted, but it's growing on me. i'm still pulling for tove as this year's zara larsson

i've decided to revisit my least fun word game. for some reason. observablehq.com/@a-lexwein/a...

📊 In her latest review, Nicole Mark (@nicoledesignsdata.com) explores how Desiree Abbott's "Everyday Data Visualization" offers seasoned practitioners a refreshing return to the scientific rigor behind color theory, accessibility, and project management. nightingaledvs.com/review-every...

reading some academic papers on graph layout: macwright.com/2026/01/11/g...

Rhea and I have been tracking our @nytimes.com word games (Wordle, Connections and the Mini) for the past two years. I decided to analyze our 4,200 gameplays with #rstats to determine a winner and made some festively embroidered charts with ggplot. Have a read. #dataviz aman.bh/blog/2025/tw...

📢📢📢 It's happ3ning! 📢📢📢 Westwords III Sunday, June 14 Berkeley, CA Individual and pairs solvers welcome If you haven't competed previously, you can sign up for email updates at our website. See you in June! westwordsbestwords.com

on tuesday night i held several of the world's greatest filmmakers hostage for a 15-minute speech about what critics & artists owe to each other in the age of rapid enshittification. i'm not entirely sure why i did that. anyway you can read it here if you want to: www.indiewire.com/criticism/mo...

@mjskay.com @matthew.wiki he needs some theory shapes. standard iceberg? hybrid network/iceberg? arxiv.org/abs/2510.01382

does anybody remember how to do my job?

my brain just kinda short-circuits when I try to think about What's About to Happen, so instead i will think about boggle this weekend

best beverage songs of 2025: Lemonade by Maren Morris, Elderberry Wine by Wednesday, and Soda Pop by Saja Boys

the best addison song of 2025 was "i want you" by debbii dawson observablehq.com/@a-lexwein/f...

2025 saw the release of two data visualization centric digital games that are both worth your time: Pocket Boss and Alphadots. alex-we.in/posts/2025-1...

last minute channuka gift to myself

really dug yesterday's @morayati.bsky.social puzz www.puzzmo.com/puzzle/2025-...

Perozzo rides again! See it in action at charts.infowetrust.com

i concur alex-we.in/posts/2025-0...

despite having curated the wordlist, this one stumped me for a bit

uh oh. the awesome service i use for my hobby coding projects is trying to find product market fit.

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!!!