@Sciborg your tetrikabe has been constructed surprisingly quickly, and will likely be released tonight or tomorrow after my standard extra checking. It's on the easier side but has a gorgeous clue arrangement.

Working title: "Tetrikabe: Hiding in the Corners"

hey, you're here :D

Hiding in corners is... definitely a thing I would do :p

Hello!

When would be more convenient for you to have time to solve?

I don't have much time this afternoon but I would have plenty of time tonight! :) and it's okay if somebody solves it first, i just want to have fun solving it on my own because it's a puzzle you made for me.

Either today or tomorrow is fine, in other words

Yay! You do remember that you have to pay the price, right? I'll be expecting that shiny +10.

Yup, I will pay the Puzzle Tax

It has some fun back-and-forth between global and local logic (as long as you use the intended elegant solve path, that is)

I'm excited for it :D

yay, mick's here

I'm happy that people like my puzzles, because I used to try to annoy random people into solving them. Here I don't need to.

hahahaha

We love your puzzles, they're always really fun and creative. Even if I suck at them sometimes :p

hey, you discovered the magic of [grid-deduction] from the first Tetrikabe

speaking of puzzles, updates on statyu park?

I've hit a wall on statyu park, it turns out multiple solutions are really hard to design against.

ah

You have to both be good at the genre's deductions and have luck.

Yeah. I'll keep trying though, it's fun to practice making them

so either (a) make the masyu first, then the SP (b) make the SP first, then the masyu. seems to me like (a) would be easier, but idk

I've been just building small Statue Parks to practice making them, will do the masyu part once i get practice at the SP part

alright :)

also, if I get my somehow standard 12 upvotes for Hiding in the Corners, I'll have enough rep to approve tag wiki edits! Then I can see all the bad excerpt edits myself.

"somehow standard"?

I had noticed Stiv commenting on those, but I wasn't sure what he was referring to

see North's answer to the meta post

it has an example of a bad edit

Ahh

The only tag wiki I ever worked on was Writing, so I didn't notice the problem

I can see what they were trying to do, but that is excessive

/(poof|screen)y\?/

any excuse for regex

Currently trying to figure out if I can make Screeny read MathJax, since we had the discussion about it

right

And Poofy is sitting under my Christmas tree at the moment, guarding my ornaments

but like how do you even parse the mathjax and turn that into words??

I assume you already found this? docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/basic/accessibility.html

That's my struggle at the moment :/

There is some accessibility stuff, I've been reading doc

but the problem is having it read out the formulas correctly

"correctly", i.e. ...?

you don't have to support everything. square roots, exponents, fractions, and basic arithmetic should be enough to handle Puzzling.

PSE is certainly not the only website with mathjax

Well, they have MathJax Accessibility extensions, and those are really great. But at the moment it's kind of a separate thing i have to download and stick into my browser separate from the reader, and i'm trying to figure out if i can integrate the two things together i guess

they need to make friends/have a baby?

They must make friends

> have a baby

what- why

I mean, it's totally fine to just have both separate, I'm just seeing if there might be a more elegant way to mix them

Ongoing side project #293

what are the other 292 ongoing side projects?

you would need to have 8 hours to spare for me to answer that :p

hm

I'm one of those people who just has like 99 things going on at any given time, and jumps around between them

is there an update on the kitty-birdy debate?

Kitty-birdy debate is also ongoing :p

The main problem with birds is that they can be very loud, and I don't want to annoy my neighbors. But then cats require a lot of responsibility, expensive vet care, etc.

what about bunnies

if they are indoor bunnies then you don't need vet visits and they can be litterbox trained

or squares? dont you want a pet square?

I love bunnies but i don't know if it would be a good pet for me :(

why not?

it's complicated

okay, that's fine

Like a Tamagotchi? :p

like a square, mick

:p

But Tamagotchis are pet squares :p

ghghghghhghghghgghghghhghghg

You can't fight me if i'm correct

but i can still fight you

slowly pulls out phaser

ice 'em, 'borg!

takes off hat

(wait do they have icers yet?)

what even is an icer

SHIELD version of a phaser

fires phaser

icers are much cooler

don't worry it was only set to stun

Watches in confusion

ey, North!

Ah, hello North :P

Doesn't get either reference

Pikachu, use iron tail!

Aim for the horn

fires at pikachu

noooooooo not pika!

I know 'borg gets that joke :P

(hi msh210, just a bunch of nerds taking over the Lair for a sec)

:P

We've summoned msh and Avi

aims for mick

I am a pure summer child, you would never

ah, but it is winter

what does that mean to you? it means someone really wanted our initials to spell out "SHIELD".

hm??

@bobble n- no. The Lair is always a bunch of nerds.

Heh :p

I mean, you're not wrong.

@bobble oy

someone noticed the pun

ohhhhh i didnt even see it

Whoops

I subscribe to a weekly e-mail "Mind-Benders for the Quarantined!" from the Museum of Math in New York. This week's: "A two-party Zoom meeting in the continental U.S. is made from a west coast state to an east coast state, and it's the same time of day at both ends of the call. How is this possible?"

One is in a state that doesn't use daylight savings.

hawaii / arizona

hawaii i guess is on the west coast?

it's off the coast

ghghghg

hm

A later e-mail message clarified that it's not, for example, the east and west coasts if the Florida peninsula (my first thought).

hmm...

@matt it's not in the "continental U.S."

facepalm

@Sciborg the only two are HI and AZ, I think, and neither is in the continental U.S. on the coast. But the call can be during the switch, when the coasts are only two hours apart instead of three.

Yeah.

I have no idea, then

Wait, unless.... does Tennessee qualify as an East Coast state? It's split down the middle to be half Central, half Eastern.

Nor I. (There's no prize or anything.)

@Sciborg it has no coastline

Maybe one person is in Arizona during the switch and the other person is in the part of Tennessee that's on Central time.

Oh, never mind

i was thinking maybe "east coast" could just mean eastern states

ugh power outages

voldy!!

matt !!

I don't think any coastal state is also in Central or Mountain... but that's a good idea @Sciborg, I should make sure

native american reservations can declare their own times - I know that some disagree on Daylight Savings with the surrounding state

casein point: arizona

Ooh! That could be it too!

Maybe there's a reservation on one of the coasts that decided to use the opposite time zone

Checked a map. Apparently part of FL is on Central and part of Oregon is on Mountain. So if they chat during the DST switch, they can have the same time.

Success!!!! :D

Thanks for your help!

If the Tom Scott video on timezone craziness taught me anything, it's to always look for timezone splits in weird places.

this?

Yup

Timezones are insane

agreed

What would you replace them with? Also timezones but fewer? UCT all the way through?

utc everywhere

The world is too complicated to offer a good solution to it, i exist only to put my head in my hands and complain about having to import timezone libraries

import timezone # ahhhhhh

We can always go back to 13x28 and if the calendar runs out before the equinox happens, add an extra month

infiniteundo.com/post/25509354022/…

> you'll never have to parse P12Y34M56DT78H90M12.345S

what even is that

a date/time format

well yes

what does it mean though

looks to me like P [year] Y [month] M [date] D T [hour] H [minute] M [second].[millsecond] S

but what's the P for?

I have no idea, I'm not familiar with that format

hm

P = date (somehow), T = time

otherwise there is [number] followed by what that number is

maybe the P is period?

idk

hey mith!

\o

Did you write that Meta post yet

-

not yet

You're gonna get sniped 👀

Quick clarification: @Sciborg, how many hours away is "tonight" for you?

@bobble It's 5:12 PM where I am, so like a couple hours :)

3-ish hours from now, or 5-ish hours from now? Or >5-ish hours? (I have dinner in-between)

>5-ish is fine :)

Man, I've been briefly reading through Quora and

I'm glad we have moderators here

I always choose the SE link over the Quora link in a Google search

I'm not sure Quora has a strict moderation system in place, it looks more like "OP decides what to do"

Thus you can sometimes get away with pretty rude comments- also it's formed more like a forum then anything else

Apparently, answerers have to ask for people to "be nice" and not curse at them

@bobble mhm, every time

hey gerbil!

Quora has kind of devolved into Yahoo Answers in some respects

Tetrikabe question is written up and ready to go later. First line:

> This puzzle is dedicated to Sciborg. Copying the dear gentleperson, some of the 4s are hiding in the corners.

Awww <3

That's adorable, thank you

Great, I was worried you might want me to take it out.

It's completely accurate

oh btw mick, you forgot about the 3am internal monologue you were going to do :P

I was too sleepy, i'll do it later :p