« first day (2262 days earlier)      last day (1676 days later) » 

00:49
hi
hello!
I'm a fan of your answers.
thank you!
What is the role of @Sphinx?
It's the bot that posts all new questions in chat.
00:58
What is the purpose?
So people in chat can be informed about new questions?
181
Q: In the 100 blue eyes problem - why is the oracle necessary?

dwjohnstonThe riddle Randall Munroe (of xkcd fame) has, a bit hidden on his site, a logic puzzle: A group of people with assorted eye colors live on an island. They are all perfect logicians -- if a conclusion can be logically deduced, they will do it instantly. No one knows the color of their eye...

 
1 hour later…
02:14
0
Q: Can you riddle me this?

enigmaticcardQuivering am i, no mortal halts me, thus no words destroy me. Can you tell me what i am?

 
2 hours later…
03:53
0
Q: Are you just repeating?

risky mysteries My suffix is united. My prefix is full. My infix is united. I am pretty full.

 
1 hour later…
05:08
0
Q: For Children, For Teens, For Adults

risky mysteries For children, I am a game. For teens, I am reference. For adults, I am a price. What am I?

CCCC hint: the first letter is T
05:30
hear ye, hear ye: last chance to win 500 internet points by solving With Apologies to Robert Frost... bounty expires tomorrow
at which point, if there are no eligible answers, nobody gets the prize (but i still get the -500)
1
Q: Left-looking organization

jafe Across 7. Fly comes flying around place near North Carolina, showing certain smugness (4-11) 9. ISIS fighters maybe capture one town's leader and, among others, foremost loyal people holding on to land rights (15) 10. Pharmacy can offend extremists... and may finally send help to sister's diseas...

05:47
@Sphinx @jafe dang, I love 13A
thanks :)
06:22
0
Q: Blue eyes riddle: why do all nested hypotheses need to be considered?

Roland Kuhn Note: This is the second try at asking something that has not yet been answered by the excellent answers to the Oracle question or the skip-ahead question. In this answer to my previous attempt at asking this question, there is an expansion of the tower of hypotheses that slowly collapses — one...

0
Q: En-lighting math puzzle

Amruth A1 + 1 =0 2 + 6 =8 3 + 1 =3 4 + 5 =9 5 + 5 =5 6 + 0 =8 7 + 8 =8 8 - 1 =E

 
1 hour later…
07:37
0
Q: I'll give you the instructions, you give me the answer

Kable- perform handshake - install es on both ends - pause process in exce - swap chang.exe - combine previous and modify - terminate communication

 
1 hour later…
08:51
0
Q: Math-stick problem

mathHere are 5 matchsticks. You should rearrange them, to make nothing But you should not waste or get other matchsticks

09:10
oh boy, i don't think i would be able to solve a @jafe -brand crossword again
today i had to let it interfere with another task and in retrospect i shouldn't have
deus streak finna return in the future
09:23
@jafe oh, i thought "passing by" in 16a was extraneous, cuz i interpreted "crosby sings" as ""cros" by "sings"" HAHAH
(and affranchissement seems to have two s's instead of one, and is not an english word?)
hmm, some dictionaries have it with one
writing questions is somewhat less stressful on PSE than writing questions, because when you're writing an answer you're potentially competing with other people who are doing the same thing
optimally you want to get there right after the question is posted
or, at the very least, right before a +500 bounty expires (20 hours, people!)
09:40
0
Q: Maximum amount of the Letter-Number-game

mathThere is a number-game which you play like this: You think of a number eg. $8$. Then think: How many letters does this number have? In our example: $5$ And now do step one with $5$ This goes on recursively till you end up with a number which has the same amount of letters as it's value. And tha...

10:01
@jafe oh
@jafe hahahah
@jafe (i assume you mean "than writing answers" lol)
oof, right heh
10:20
lol
 
1 hour later…
11:49
ahahah, cryptic in today's independent
first clue: "Articles about alcohol leading to chest pain (6)"
four months prior:
in OK's 屋企(home), Mar 19 at 19:40, by jafe
CCCC: Articles about alcohol leading to health problem (6)
:OOO
oh, there are C4's in other chatrooms too? lol
there was... that room's since gone inactive
yeah
the answer's AN+GIN+A... i admit it's a pretty obvious way to clue that word, but i still think it's hilarious how identical those clues ended up being
hahahah
12:00
another possibility, of course, is that the author has been lurking in these rooms to steal our clues... (puts on tinfoil hat)
hmMmmmM
@jafe Should I just tell someone the answer? :-P
I guess you could post an answer yourself. Whether it'll deserve a bounty is another matter :-).
Ha, didn't even think of that. Well, it'd be correct at least ...
then add a comment below your own answer saying "sorry, this isn't what i had in mind"
nice
i'm 17/600 for that one so right behind you
 
1 hour later…
13:32
loll
14:11
I suggested an edit here puzzling.stackexchange.com/a/100322/70545, to cover up the spoilers, but it got rejected?
14:48
@bobble you inspired me and i'm going to be posting my own "marching bands" crossword soon :)
@kristinalustig hi
@Randal'Thor @jafe someone has finally took another crack at Robert Frost! Will he finally be the one to obtain the bounty?? :OOOO
@AnnZen that's weird, I don't see anything on the review history. Maybe somehow the software missed it?
15:04
Ah, didn't realize you have a different username
Seems like a reasonable edit to me, not sure why they chose to reject that
@kristinalustig Yay! Just a note, I call the cross-words "Marchers" and literally everyone else calls them "Rows"
:D i called them rows in my puzzle too
TRAITOR
tbf i could change it but i'm too lazy to copy and paste the same word 12 times
15:21
can someone else deal with it?
@Ankoganit it's right there in the message, no? issue with "supposedly" vs "supposed"
@jafe yes, but that's not the "only change", the edit does fix the spoiler blocks
I'd edit the edit instead of rejecting altogether
0
Q: What cryptic code or cipher is this?

Divyansh SinghI have the following binary message: 01100101 00101100 01100011 00101100 01101110 01100110 00101100 01100100 00101100 01100100 00101100 01000011 01111000 01100100 00101100 01001110 01111000 01100100 00101100 01101110 01100110 00101100 01101110 01100011 00101100 01100111 00101100 01100010 01100101...

(plus, I believe "supposedly" isn't really wrong, if you read it as "we have, supposedly, the field of blah". If anything, "we have supposed the field" sounds odd to me)
15:53
0
Q: Rows, circles, wordplay, and semi-obscure cultural references (a crossword)

kristinalustigA "Marching Bands" puzzle has rules and a structure that are distinct from a typical crossword: Rows 1-12 each have two answers, A and B. They can be any length (except rows 6 and 7 which are 5 letters each). Circles A-E start in the cell with the letter (top-left of the circle) and move around ...

@kristinalustig, oof there is no way I'm getting that (I'm terrible with references)
Yeah, the crosswords I tend to make are pretty pop-culture-y, not sure how appropriate that is for this site but figured I'd give it a try
One of my first Cryptic Family Reunions was the Kardashians, and they haven't run me off yet.
:D when do you tend to put those out, btw? I really want to try another one
There's another out right now
16:03
oh!
hooray!!
Yep, just about 10 minute ago. I was doing 2-3 per week a while, but am down to about weekly.
I think one is going to fall pretty quickly.
6
Q: Cryptic Family Reunion: Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown

Jeremy DoverThe answer to this puzzle is a list of ten thematically related words or proper names or phrases. Each of these is clued cryptically, and the theme is to be determined. In this puzzle, the clues are in a specific order which also relates to the theme. Since the definition part of a cryptic clue w...

16:42
1
Q: The sandpiles on the beach

Display mathsWe call a convex polyhedron a sandpile if one of the faces, called base, has a common edge with all the other faces. Furthermore, each vertex is linked with three edges. We consider the sandpiles by vertex translations, rotations and symmetries close. Therefore, there are 3 sandpiles with a hexag...

0
Q: Place of Safety - A North Daniels' Puzzle

OliverIt's not everyday you get a text from a dead friend, especially if you saw them being executed by guillotine, which is why D.S.I North Daniels was a bit sceptical when his ancient Nokia Cityman 1320 recieved a text (ding!) from Jane Stephen's number. Double-checking proved that it was the real de...

16:56
figured you all might want to know about this - I'm helping run a puzzle hunt starting soon!
it's Smogon Puzzle Hunt 2020 - it'll be run over Discord, and I've got several of my own puzzles in there (a few of which can't really be adapted to be shared on PSE)
Hey @Deusovi apologies for the kneejerk response to your feedback, I do actually appreciate it, it's just hard not to read the tone of the feedback as condescending and I didn't assume good intent because being condescended to is definitely a Thing sometimes in crossword-making in my experience.
no, it's fine! I know my feedback comes off as much harsher than I intend sometimes - I try not to come off as condescending but it's difficult to convey tone online
FWIW I am very familiar with crossword conventions, I have published my work elsewhere, I just kind of went a bit weird with it because this isn't the NYT :D
fair enough!
(in case that last message could be misread i haven't published them in NYT, but I did get a personalized rejection letter!)
17:12
oh, and for what it's worth, you don't come off as aggressive there at all - I think your responses were completely reasonable
hah. okay, cool. i've uh. definitely been called brusque before :P
and I apologize if I was too presumptuous! a lot of people do come here not being familiar with any crossword cluing conventions, so I try to give detailed feedback on puzzles if the creator hasn't shared many crosswords here
to just continue the conversation here, I think that B5 is valid as-is because "yeti" is meant to be a reference to "bigfoot" to give you a part of the answer
that's fair enough
raise hand that was me! that was completely me! I learned all my conventions from here.
(and I quite value the feedback I get - I now clue my crosswords with "What would Deusovi think" in the back of my head)
i mentally read A7 as "[It] can be tasteful, or not so much" and D3 as "[You] should probably trip this during a robbery"
17:16
Yetis and Bigfoot are different, no?
I don't think so? I guess I thought they were the same thing, like, both big fake mountain snow monsters
bigfoot's in the forest, not the mountains, IIRC
ah, fair enough.
Does the capitalization of Total in C1 not help?
as for A7/D3, I've never seen clues that implicitly have pronouns like that -- if a clue has a verb phrase without a subject like that, it's cluing a verb in my experience
that capitalization helps - the issue isn't clue difficulty but clue grammar and semantics
I genuinely don't see how A7 could clue a verb
maybe i will make my own crossword format where the clues are riddles. midway between a cryptic and a straight xword. lol
or maybe should have tagged it "lateral thinking"
17:22
A7 could clue something like "WAVERS" or "FLIRTS" -- neither are perfect synonyms, but it lines up grammatically with "Is indecisive" or "Is slightly naughty"
for C1, the word "Total" seems like it doesn't fit - it doesn't make sense to me to call the movie itself "Total". I understand that you wanted to include that because the movie is Total Recall and you're trying to get the word Recall, but it doesn't actually semantically fit in the clue AFAICT
okay, i get both of those.
for 12A, I could have clued better as "historically, an enemy of learning" for sure
anyway. will at least make sure to be more clear when my clues might be a bit more riddle-y than straight clues
and if you haven't seen They Live i highly recommend it
yeah, I think that would be better - I'm not sure I'd go for the historical angle there, but that's just personal preference
I'm not really into horror movies (or movies in general), but thanks for the recommendation!
oh if you're not then i rescind it, hah, it definitely appeals to a certain kind of taste
2
Q: A torus maze™™™™™

MrSiliconGuy Since this is a torus maze, the left side of the maze connects to the right side and the top of the maze connects to the bottom. Corresponding openings in the walls of the maze have been labeled for your convenience. Your goal is to get from the start (top left) to the finish (bottom right). Be ...

"I'm here to chew some bubblegum, and kick some ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." - Roddy Piper, RIP
17:36
ah, i didn't know he died! :(
Been a few years, I think. He was one of my faves.
 
2 hours later…
19:10
1
Q: Can you solve this Rubik's cube from inside of it?

Beastly GerbilYou have woken up to find yourself trapped in what appears to be a giant Rubik's cube. A Rubik's Cage I suppose. Bewildered, you take a look around (better video on imgur). Each of the individual cube faces seems to have a letter transcribed onto it from outside, although it is difficult to read...

19:35
0
Q: Multi-variable hat guessing

IlakHere is a variation of the hat-guessing logicians problem. 100 logicians are given hats. They know that: All the hats are either black or while Each hat may or may not have green stripes on it Each hat may or may not have a pompom on top At least one of them will be wearing a black hat with gree...

 
4 hours later…
23:54
@Sphinx @JeremyDover ugh, I found out what the theme was early on but the Wi-Fi had to be turned off D:
me doing a late night solve? not gonna happen this time hahah

« first day (2262 days earlier)      last day (1676 days later) »