sometimes i worry that i have too many dailies
I've been doing the Connections daily for a while; I've long since fallen off doing Wordle because it's kind of the same game every time, but the Connections at least has some amount of creative input into each puzzle. Also I'm in a group chat where we all do the Connections every day and discuss it, so that helps. I'm probably going to keep doing the Connections because it takes like one minute and is at least kind of interesting, but you know, we are over 800 puzzles in and it really does feel like it. I don't know if it's truly possible for them to run out of ideas, but it's been a while since any puzzle has actually surprised me; it feels like by this point I know all of the techniques they use and it's just a matter of applying them. The one time the blue category was "EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL" might have been the high-water mark of the whole thing. Also, sometimes a category just annoys me: there haven't been as many Americanisms as of late, but some of them just don't work. So I don't know if actually continuing to play it is worth it.
Also isn't the NYT evil for some reason? In any case this game is obviously lifted from the British game show Only Connect.
Catfishing is one of these daily games where you get shown the categories for a Wikipedia article and then attempt to name the article (technically anything that redirects to it). On its own this would not be a very interesting game so you do it 10 times, and only get one shot at each article. It's... pretty good! As with the Connections a lot of the fun is in comparing results with friends (over time you get a general sense of where everyone's knowledge lies, which is cool). I know I just complained about Wordle not having any real creative input when this is basically the same thing - outside of the original article pool selection, the articles used in each day may as well be drawn out of a hat - but there's enough there in the hard work of Wikipedia editors to categorise things to make it interesting. This may not be enough to justify it being a daily game on its own... but the way you do 10 acticles and get a score at the end gives it a sort of gambling energy. Maybe today will be the day you get the legendary, coveted 10/10? Probably not though, my best is still 7/10.
Puzzmo is kind of like the games section of a newspaper except there is no newspaper and it's just the games. I originally joined back when it was this cool, exclusive, mysterious thing by artist game developer Zach Gage, but now I mostly think of it as a good crossword and some other games I don't care about.
The other games are actually behind a paywall now, which is fair enough, you've gotta make money somehow. I am of course unaffected by this.
You rotate the shapes to make them fit. You could treat it as a logic puzzle but there are so few possibilities that you can kinda just put everything into place by looking at it. For a time I believe I was one of the best Flipart players in the world, but I stopped playing it because it takes like 10 seconds and there's nothing there to really grab me. I only bring it up because I wanted to brag.
Puzzmo's crossword is very good and it is definitely my favourite of all the daily games. It's "midi" sized so there's a good amount to do without it being overwhelming, the clues are generally pretty approachable, there are hints available if you get stuck on something, and they just kind of have fun with it. There's a lot of clues that you wouldn't expect to see in, say, the New York Times; references to video games, things from the crossword author's life, stuff that's just kinda silly, clues that are... I want to say "woke" for lack of a better word? Today's crossword16 has "T, E, etc." for MEDS which I think is neat. It used to have a bit of a problem with being America-centric and it still feels that way to an extent, but it's better now. I think if you're looking to get into crosswords then Puzzmo's is a good place to start; it definitely got me into crosswords, anyway.17
At one point Puzzmo ran a series of 30 mini crosswords that each introduce and explain a common crossword mechanic. These were really neat! I think also if you were getting into crosswords you could play these to learn all the little tricks you're expected to pick up sooner or later. Unlike the rest of Puzzmo where you gotta pay to access the archives, you can play them all individually from the list in this Bluesky thread (I don't know why they did it like that).
Oh, they also kept doing mini crosswords after the series was over; the new ones are unthemed. They're good, like the midis, but there's much the same problem here as with the Flipart for me where they're over so quickly it doesn't feel like anything meaningful has happened.
I have five email accounts and the worst part is that I'm considering making another one because I'm not a big fan of the names on any of them.18 You might think I should just set them all to redirect to one email account, but then I'd have five times as many emails all in one bucket. Probably I could set it up with folders or something. In any case the situation is a mess.
I would love to get to stop doing this one but sadly reading email is required to like, participate in society. Emails are good sometimes, though. I do think about the situation where emails are something I have to check, while some other ways of contacting me are delivered as notifications. This means I sometimes miss stuff for a bit, but the alternative would require some careful effort to manage so that I don't drown in notifications about stuff I don't care about. This is the kind of effort I should be putting in anyway but it's just so easy to maintain the status quo.
I'm at a bit of an off-beat timezone so much activity on social media happens while I'm asleep. I've ended up with a daily task of backreading my whole feed; I used to do this on Cohost, and now I do it on (beat)19 Mastodon. I knew that this was terrible when I was doing it on Cohost and now I'm still doing it. It's not that I don't like the posts that I see, broadly I do, which is exactly the problem; there's too much good stuff and I don't want to miss any of it!
The best I can do with the Mastodon web interface seems to be to sort my follows into a set that I should and realistically can backread every post from and one that I will not. Which means making some tough decisions about like, you know, maybe I like your posts but there's just too many of them and I don't want to spend my whole life on this website.20
The perfect alternative Mastodon frontend has not yet revealed itself to me. Phanpy has this neat "catch-up" feature that helps with backreading but if you follow a lot of pages you've still got to click on them all one-by-one to see the posts by each and it's a bit of a chore. In my head I have this vision of a perfect social media algorithm where, when you load your feed, it takes every post you haven't seen yet and orders them in the traditional reverse chronological order, but grouped by whether they're the last/second last/third last/etc unseen post by that author. So the first thing you'll always see is the most recent post by everyone (who posted), followed by the second-most-recent, and so on. Any post that was boosted of course only shows up once (in the first position it could appear in the feed). This system would be perfect because you could do a quick scroll through the first group to check in on everyone and make sure you haven't missed a post by someone who only posts like once a month, and then keep going if you're bored to see stuff from whoever is more talkative.
I do not believe this system already exists because I just invented it. There's nothing technically stopping me from producing this myself aside from the fact that I have genuinely no idea how and too many other things to do. You know, like, backreading my whole feed.
I don't know if this should count as a daily because I do check it throughout the day for some reason. (Ignore the fact that I obviously also do this for Mastodon). What I actually should be doing is checking the front page once per day to see what the recommendation algorithm knows I will obviously want to see, maybe check in on SiIvagunner once a week to see if they uploaded anything from a game I recognise, and that's it. Beyond that point the recommendations get pretty bad, it's all, "are you sure you don't want to watch a Game Changer short? Maybe rewatch a Danny Gonzalez video"? And usually it's actually right and I will watch them but I don't think I need to be spending time on that.
Even if I was to only check it once per day this would still be a dangerous one to keep around. Probably it can be cleared in half an hour but there's always a risk that hbomberguy uploads and then I'm not getting anything done that day. I think I'm willing to accept this risk.
This is another one that shouldn't qualify because it's more of a continuous than a daily, but the real reason it's struck through here is that I actually stopped checking it entirely. This is something I had been meaning to do almost the entire time I was on that website. And all I had to do was sign out of it on my phone.
I didn't even sign out on my desktop computer where I spent like half my time on reddit! I'll admit I'm having trouble working out what's going on here; it seems a contradiction, that I would so frequently bemoan my use of this website and yet for so long never actually meaningfully attempt to get off it. We talk about being "addicted" to social media, but I never had the desire to go back, which isn't how addiction is supposed to work, right?
It did feel as though reddit had been getting worse for a while. Or perhaps I was just maturing around it. The trouble, I find, with following communities rather than people is that you can't just follow pages that make exclusively good posts.21 So if a community you're interested in is full of complaining, or people who don't know what they're talking about, or is moderated poorly, what do you do? Maybe there'll be a nicer subreddit with the same subject matter, but that kind of split usually happens because of weird moderator drama, so probably not.
Okay now I'm kind of just complaining. I don't know, the system does have benefits in other ways - there's no feeling obligated to attract followers or construct a personal brand. My point, I think, is that these annoyances built up to a point where I decided I was happy to sign out of the website and never look back. Instead of trying to just use it "less", which never worked.
Maybe one of these days they will invent the perfect social media. Maybe it can't exist (or can't exist forever, RIP Cohost). Maybe it's Schlaugh. I'd sign up for that website but I already have too many things to check every day.
comment from PawSense
ty for sharing the puzzmo mini crosswords!! i haven't really checked in on the site in a while (blocked by my workplace where i usually do my own dailies...) but i'm excited to do them :3
for an email provider recommendation, i've been using tutamail for months now and haven't experienced any issues! i've honstly been extremely tempted to upgrade to a paid tier for multiple addresses and aliases, but if you're already managing separate accounts you can just do the same there without spending anything
feeling like i'm in the same boat for youtube... i've been toying with the idea of setting up an rss reader specifically for youtube channels i really care about to avoid falling into the algorithm, but i never got around to it
reply to the comment from PawSense from Two
I shall have to consider tutamail... the dream really is that I can have one inbox from within which I can sort and filter through all my mail so I don't have to check too many accounts. So I'd probably have to go with the paid tier... there is much to think about... somewhat worryingly, your email went to spam at first for me, but that could just be gmail being broadly distrusting of other email services, or something to do with the ridiculous comment email form thing (I have got to actually set up something more normal lol)
With Youtube as well there are things to consider; I know a lot of people recommend using the "subscriptions" feed to just get a simple feed of the channels you subscribe to, but I've got an old youtube account with a lot of subscriptions I don't watch and a lot of channels I watch but aren't subscribed to. Cleaning that up would itself take time, but it might be interesting to do. I didn't even realise youtube had rss feeds for channels though! So I could leverage Fraidycat for this...
anyway glad you're excited about the mini crosswords, they're fun :>
comment from Élana
Hi!
About the social media issue, I think Aria is close enough. When you open it, you can ask it to scroll to the last seen post, and then you can scroll up to catch up. We& haven't used this feature a lot though, and Aria only works for Misskey and forks.
Alternatively, have you tried using lists? They'd be way less convenient than what you describe, though.
reply to the comment from Élana from Two
Ah, I've been vaguely meaning to try out the critter.cafe sister instance critters.gay that runs a Misskey fork, but it mostly just seems like a lot of hassle. Going bottom-up through posts may be an improvement, but the main issue is really that of filtering I guess? Somehow juggling the desire to see everything that I don't want to miss without being overwhelmed by stuff that I would like to see but cannot possibly find time to see all of. I am actually using lists for this; I have one for pages that post a lot that takes their posts out of my main feed, and one for pages that post only rarely that doesn't. It's a good approximation of what I want but, yeah, it does require a bit of manual work to decide who gets put in each list.
Thank you for the suggestion, in any case :>