02/02/2026: I can't believe they put a time loop in the crossword today... These mechanics are getting out of hand!
So much of Connections feels like either guesswork or a thing where you need specific Normie Pop Culture Knowledge... It frustrates us a lot, but after enough tries you start seeing patterns. I also notice sometimes the categories are crosswords hints, so I guess there's some benefit to doing the entire evil newspaper game cinematic universe every day?
wordle wracked my brain more than it should have today. it felt like every clue i got confused me more and more. it didn't end up being a crazy word though.
Wordle 1,690 5/6
⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜
⬜🟨⬜⬜🟩
⬜🟨🟩⬜🟩
🟩⬜🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
shaking my fists at connections. maybe my brain is just off today.
02/04/2026: With the excitement of building the new computer, Princess and I forgot to do our newspaper games yesterday. Whoops!
Nothing much remarkable today with the newspaper games. Did you know the crossword gives you a notification if you have done two of the same day of the week two weeks in a row but don't have an ongoing streak? How peculiar!
I think this is partially due to the weekly difficulty curve of the Crosswords. I'm mainly going off of the long-running NYT Crosswords, but this is also true to an extent for crosswords in other newspapers or daily magazines or periodicals - Monday is the easiest day of the week, with Saturday being the hardest. Sundays are curved to the difficulty of a Wednesday puzzle, but they'll usually have some tricky central gimmick to them,. Thursdays through Sundays will likely be a "themed" crossword, that is to say, some answers might follow a specific topic or gimmick centered around a theme - and figuring out the theme becomes part of the puzzle. Sundays and Thursdays can also be Rebus puzzles - puzzles in which one space may have multiple letters at once (A wonderful example of this was weeks back, when all the rebus spaces had PHI in them, and the grid was shaped like the letter PHI).
So it makes sense then that there would be some way to track how you do on individual days - Mondays are themeless and the easiest difficulty, so most people go for their fastest solves on those days. Saturdays are the hardest puzzles of the week, and Sundays are slightly easier but harder to figure out. I wonder if the same applies to the rest of the games?
Anyways, today's Evil Newspaper Games were alright. Unremarkable.
07/02/2026 - Princess got so mad at the connections today. In her own words,
"This is either going to be great or really fucking stupid. [one wrong answer and one right answer later] this is fucking stupid."
I liked it, personally, but I find it endearing how mad she got at it.
We almost did the sunday crossword by mistake after realizing we did the sunday mini by accident[1]. This is on me - I didn't realize how late it'd gotten since I've been stuck playing satisfactory all day @_@ Factory games are scary.
02/08/2026: We almost forgot to do our evil newspaper games since we wanted to go watch Iron Lung in the theater o_o but we were able to finish it on time.
Today's crossword was fun! We didn't feel nearly as stumped as in some others this time around.
02/09/2026: Good old Monday Crosswords. I think this has been the fastest time I've gotten at the full crossword? Which makes sense, Mondays are easiest. It was still fun. Princess blazed through this one, she kept acing all the answers before I had a chance to read them. Perks of being an extremely talented genius I suppose! I love my princess.
Wordle was good also, even though I hate double letter words. Connections felt particularly non-unfair today too.
02/10/2026: Kind of blitzed through the newspaper games today. Incredible. The rare two-guess wordle too! Still not as impressive as the time I got it in one.
That is kind of the intended effect. This is why the reverse rainbow is such a challenging thing to accomplish, since Purple is always the hardest category to guess.[1]
from easiest to hardest, it goes YELLOW-GREEN-BLUE-PURPLE, for the record. ↩︎
02/12/2026: It's Princess' birthday! We were in a bit of a hurry for today's evil newspaper games since I'm taking her out to dinner. I lost to Connections, though, but I maintain any time the Connections require me to Know American Sports I should be entitled to financial compensation.
The Crossword theme today was clever I thought, hard to figure out at first though it gave us quite a laugh in a couple spots. I really hate it when I'm one letter off a full crossword and the temptation to just hit autocheck and wreck my streak looms over me like a ghostly hawk.
