Random thing you love right now that doesn't deserve its own thread

Well I got forced to do standby for work on my son's 10 birthday. But I was never called in so I actually got a weekend. Yeah.

A guy knocked on my door this morning to return my wallet that I had apparently dropped at the gas station down the street. Restoring my faith in humanity just a bit.

Snow!

It's been a couple years since we had a decent amount. Older kid doesn't even remember. So now both kids are out playing in it.

Our dogs went for their morning walk in the wet snow and 30mph winds. One was trying to escape it, the other was zooming and spinning and just going crazy loving it.

Rain, wash all that snow and ice away. Nearly fell multiple times on sheets of ice. Now it is almost all gone. Thank you Storm, best leader of the X-men.

Stele wrote:

Snow!

It's been a couple years since we had a decent amount. Older kid doesn't even remember. So now both kids are out playing in it.

Same in the greater DC metro area. Baby's first snow!

Kiri wrote:
Happy Dave wrote:

Thank you. I gotta say, having a story out there on the internet that people enjoy is tough to beat for a slow drip-feed of nice comments. It's been fantastic seeing how people react to it.

I like your story very much Please write more.

Thank you, I shall!

Hobear wrote:

Cross posting here as this thread gets traction. I just wrapped up The Last Guardian on PS5 and I can only say wow what an experience. If you have it in the PS collection or it's been a while definitely take your time to work through the game. Like all games from Team ICO it's worth every drop you can get out of the experience.

Just started this, glad to hear some love for it! I just have to deal with the fact that I started it with my kids around and now they don't want to miss any of it...

benign1 wrote:
Hobear wrote:

Cross posting here as this thread gets traction. I just wrapped up The Last Guardian on PS5 and I can only say wow what an experience. If you have it in the PS collection or it's been a while definitely take your time to work through the game. Like all games from Team ICO it's worth every drop you can get out of the experience.

Just started this, glad to hear some love for it! I just have to deal with the fact that I started it with my kids around and now they don't want to miss any of it...

I did the same thing and had to play slow with many curious questions when I couldn't figure out a puzzle or why Trico or I didn't just do something. Exercise in patience.

I'd caution that when you near the end you may want to have them sit it out and show a youtube later if you think they can handle it.

Greg Miller’s return from paternity leave.

Greg looks banged up in that thumbnail. New dad = checks out

He definitely has a, ‘Me? Tired?’ Look about him.

Anyone playing Wordle?

This was my first time playing!

IMAGE(https://i.ibb.co/myrSmrZ/wordle.png)

I think I should just quit now.

PaladinTom wrote:

Anyone playing Wordle?

This was my first time playing!

IMAGE(https://i.ibb.co/myrSmrZ/wordle.png)

I think I should just quit now.

I see it in the Discord chat, but have no idea what this means.

Mixolyde wrote:
PaladinTom wrote:

Anyone playing Wordle?

This was my first time playing!

IMAGE(https://i.ibb.co/myrSmrZ/wordle.png)

I think I should just quit now.

I see it in the Discord chat, but have no idea what this means.

https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/

You have six tries to guess a word. Green is correct letter in the correct spot. Yellow is correct letter in the wrong spot.

I guessed the word in three of six tries.

It's basically "Mastermind", but constructing a word instead of building a pattern of colors.

Mixolyde wrote:
PaladinTom wrote:

Anyone playing Wordle?

This was my first time playing!

IMAGE(https://i.ibb.co/myrSmrZ/wordle.png)

I think I should just quit now.

I see it in the Discord chat, but have no idea what this means.

Yep, there’s a thread in the #puzzles channel for bragging and raging alternatively.

The worst thing about Wordle is that you can only do one a day and I haven't found a suitable knockoff. They need to let me do the first 190-ish from before I started playing.

Here's a knockoff: http://foldr.moe/hello-wordl/

PaladinTom wrote:

Anyone playing Wordle?

This was my first time playing!

IMAGE(https://i.ibb.co/myrSmrZ/wordle.png)

I think I should just quit now.

Was your first guess TABLE?

I think it was

I usually go Aspen and then Right if I don’t get a good clue. I also got that day in 3 but the day before took 6 for me (tricksy double letter).

I've only missed one out of the first ~10 I've tried. One of them ended up being "jeans" but I was dead set on "deans". Thank fully I switched to "jeans" at the last minute

I like Leaping's tactics. I am going to give them a whirl. Though I haven't struggle much and have gotten 2-3 with 2 guesses left.

Ranger Rick wrote:

Here's a knockoff: http://foldr.moe/hello-wordl/

Nice. I like that you can vary the word length but no stats is a bummer. Still spent about an hour at "work" playing it.

I might have to actually figure out how discord works.

If you're playing the numbers the first guess should be RATES (or an anagram of it) and then HOUND or LOGIN or something if that's all grey. I find the repeated letters tricky to pick up, since you need to try other new letters a bit first.

I've been looking for ideal letter combinations to try and get it narrowed down as efficiently as possible. I started with the conventional RSTLNE trick from Wheel of Fortune, and wanted to find some words that would get those in as quickly as possible. In order to be as efficient as possible too, I wanted to try to get all the vowels in, so really I was going for RSTLNAEIOU.

Just in case you don't want an analytical approach to figuring these puzzles out, I've spoilered my research into this below. Be warned: this is potentially a game-ruining list for approaching solves of this game.

(Or maybe not. I've done some testing with the knockoff, and even when using this strategy, if you use all five of the words below to get an idea of what you need, you squeeze out all possibility of trying to land yellow letters into correct slots. So you could end up with all of the letters after using those five words, but have no idea where they belong. This sort-of happened to me, where I came up with the word "tucks" but it was my sixth guess. Every letter was yellow. "Stuck" was the final word, but if I had tried to narrow down my options sooner, rather than brute force it, I might have landed on "tucks" anyway, and had one or two more chances to correctly arrange the letters. So, use this approach with caution.)

Spoiler:

Turns out "Arose" and "Until" serve just fine. Then, I got nerdy. I looked up letter frequency in English and found a list that put everything in order based on taking basically an entire dictionary in and counting each letter. Although there are some repeats in here, I landed on a set of five words that should get you through the absolute most common letters in English to try to formulate your guess, in order of most used. Those are:

  • Arose
  • Until
  • Caped
  • Might
  • Beefy

Purely by coincidence, the reused letters all end up in different spots than they were used the first time, so if you land on a correct letter in the wrong spot with one of those, you at least get to try them out in other slots. If you can't get it from using those six, the remaining letters in order of frequency are: WKVXZJQ.

DudleySmith wrote:
PaladinTom wrote:

Anyone playing Wordle?

This was my first time playing!

IMAGE(https://i.ibb.co/myrSmrZ/wordle.png)

I think I should just quit now.

Was your first guess TABLE?

That could be a spin off game. Guessing people’s first words from their Wordle thumbnail.

When you make stock from a chicken carcass and the liquid you extracted jellifies and wobbles pleasingly in the pan.

I don't know how to get that image out of the website. I got it in 3 today:
XXXXY
GYXXY
GGGGG

I tried Wordle for the second time today, and I got it in 6 (after failing to get it yesterday).

In my defense, English is a second language, and my vocabulary is probably not as extensive as other people's.

I failed on my first day, yesterday, because I didn't realize the same letter might be used more than once! Good fun, though. Can see myself bookmarking it and going back daily.