Every day (well, almost every day), I do the daily Wordle — and often I have ✨thoughts✨ afterward that I want to share: an observation, a joke, a humblebrag about exactly how I figured it out, or whatever. But obviously I don’t want to spoil that day’s Wordle (because I’m not a monster), so I typically can’t just tweet out whatever inconsequential thing I want to say. And then, by the next day, that moment’s gone, and I don’t care enough to say it anymore (if I even remember it).
Nevertheless, I keep taking screenshots of my Wordles — a bit of digital hoarding that was rewarded when Wordlebot debuted, with the ability to analyze screenshots of old Worldes! — and I keep thinking: I should, like, make a Wordle blog or something.
So today, in the wake of my 69th (nice) Wordle, I’ve finally decided to do just that. Well, not an entire Wordle blog, but a Wordle category within my otherwise mostly dormant Living Room Times blog.
Mind you, I’m not under the illusion that anyone in the known universe gives a crap what I have to say about Wordle. LOL, nope. Dear Reader, I’m not doing this for you. I’m doing it for me!
More specifically, I’m doing it for two reasons: (1) it will give me somewhere to say (with appropriate spoiler warnings) the near-daily Thing I Want To Say About Wordle™, get it out of my system, and then move on with my day; and (2) my ADHD brain is making a heroic last stand of procrastination this morning, in rebellion against a work task that I really need to start.
Which I will.
Any minute now.
But first: A BLOG ABOUT WORDLE! 😉
Anyway… in addition to new Wordle posts going forward, I’m also planning — because this old LRT blog is relatively devoid of 2022 content — to backfill the Wordle category with some posts that are back-dated to the day of the Wordle in question.
For example, here’s the first such post: Wordle #220 (January 25, 2022).
God knows how long I’ll stick with this project/idea. I mean, remember my Pandemic Lockdown series, which was going to proceed on two tracks? It was supposed to contain “some contemporaneous…posts,” and “other posts that are more retrospective,” with the goal that “eventually the twain shall meet, and I’ll have a post for each day (or block of days), albeit published in a jumbled and out-of-order fashion.” Welp. I ended up doing the following posts: Day 0, Day 0.5, Days 1-3, Day 4, and also Day 25, Day 26, Day 27, Day 28, and Days 29-30. Never did the twain meet. And it’s entirely possible that this Wordle blogging idea will meet the same fate.
But if it does, so be it. I refuse to be completionist about this, which turns it into “homework” (the ultimate doom for any ADHD brain). Instead, I’ll just blog about Wordles, past and/or present, whenever I feel like it.
Speaking of which, here are my guesses for today’s Wordle. SPOILER ALERT!!!
There was no particular rhyme or reason to my starting word today. I do a different word each day, often with some sort of theme, like “MARCH” on the first day of March Madness, “UPSET” in honor of St. Peter’s, “TIMES” on the day after the NYT bought Wordle, etc. But today, I just randomly thought of the word “CATER,” then decided to switch it around to “CRATE”:
The third guess was fun and a bit tricky: I knew I had quite a bit of information after the second guess, but it was a little hard to keep it all in my head. (“Okay, if ‘A’ is here, then ‘D’ must be either here or here, which means ‘S’ can only be…” etc.) After a couple minutes of trying to puzzle it out, I eventually turned to my trusty favorite Microsoft program, Excel, to map out what I knew on a spreadsheet & run through the possibilities:
I could have kept going; there were, I believe, 11 permutations in all (three starting with A, three starting with S, three starting with D, and two starting with an unknown letter). But when I saw the sixth permutation, S _ U A D, the answer immediately jumped out at me. SQUAD. And sure enough, that’s what it was.
Only after getting it right did I remember @mccook2002’s hint, which I’d seen in passing last night:
Heh.
P.S. Here’s my Wordle record to date:
Using the @JohnEzekowitz / @AndyGlockner golf-based Wordle scoring method, that comes to an overall score of 9 under par: