Current musical mood: Cephalo.
Sharing my own results today rather than a screenshot of anyone else’s material but in doing so realized I hit 777 Connections with a 44 streak and that seems fun.
I’ve thought about commenting on this topic for a while and today feels like as good as any for it but one of the fascinating things I have found as a longish-term player of NYTimes’ Connections puzzle is that there is a long-running community “hidden” in the comments section. A comment section I doubt many even really see.
Obviously, it’s not really hidden or I wouldn’t say jack about it. It’s just a group of folks who mostly share feedback on puzzles and the art given in the hints section but every once in a while it bubbles up into something interesting and unique.
Today is 11 September so quite a few of the posts are talking about 2001. In the past, though, I have seen a college student calling out for help due to homesickness and depression — with older folks giving actually helpful advice — and I have seen people talking news good and bad. There are some people who post stuff pretty much every day or weekly. Very nearly a blog with fans who follow and comment along.
Today I scrolled down and found there’s someone doing a kind of music puzzler thing with folks playing along. In a place “meant” to talk about solving a specific puzzle for a specific day.
It’s fascinating. And it takes me back to a period of time before we were all shunted into the Mass Approved Social Network Places™ and phrases like “subreddit” and “Facebook Community” became algorithmically controlled and billionaire spawning short-hand substitutes for events which have been happening since prior to the broad-release of the World Wide Web.
Back when you might hang out on an author’s website, a product forum, or a city page a few dozen people were active. Usenet groups, IRC channels, and mailing lists about all sorts of topics. Local BBSes about a music scene. The varieties were endless.
Never really private — though sometimes a bit invite-only (I was in some 90s RPG writer groups more locked down) — and how toxic vs nice they were was entirely down to whatever handful of members settled first. With plenty of members who hated the off-topic chatter while the boring silence without it was deafening.
These little fragile bespoke communities under constant assault from spambots, in-fighting, and the eventual heat-death of their tiny universe when whatever admin running it retired or had to retire the software due to security issues.
In that in-between living like dandelions growing out of sidewalk cracks: all down to the auspices of wind and rain.
Subreddits and Discord Servers try to emulate this but are something else. Built to allow it rather than simply watching it grow. With mods and multiple bullet-point lists for rules.
Flowers planted in a field rather than finding purchase in an empty lot.