No way that's purple: the NYT Connections thread

Because it's just not Wordle

Ha nice title :)

Didn't think today's was "exceptionally tricky" at all. I guess there was crossover but seeing the four categories unlocked what was what

https://i.imgur.com/f80rGy7.png

Got beaten by today’s too. Got purple first, then blue, then crapped out on the synonyms for zest, and missed the palindromes altogether (I think since that kind of connection is usually reserved for purple)

prefixes, lame.

That’s one I saw right away but was afraid to guess because, as you say, lame

Yes, I expected the final description to be more qualified than just that.

I guessed it first but in my head the category title was Latin prepositions. Made an underwhelmed noise out loud when the real one popped up.

(One of them is only an adverb anyway so I guess I should make the underwhelmed noise at myself)

The fuck is a California King?

It's a size of mattress.

ah! I got it, but only just.

Thanks for all the hidden text. I’ve been staring at the 4 purple words off and on all day.

California king I had never come across, whereas super king I had (in two contexts!) so yesterday I was a special snowflake

https://i.imgur.com/kJGlAOw.jpeg

I am from California and the only context I have encountered the term is online shopping for bedding…

I was honestly thinking for a few minutes… did the Sacramento NBA team change their name ? …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhBorPm6JjQ

Never heard of California king in my life.

And so I forgot to just reveal yesterday’s purple and lost my streak.

How are everyone's stats looking? Here are mine

https://i.imgur.com/DwM5Cq9.jpeg

I kind of wonder if the better players (not me!) will start deliberately aiming for higher score achievements like Reverse Rainbow now that the Bot exists? Personally, I just like getting the game right.

i can’t hear “california king” without thinking of chappell roan’s “red wine supernova”

My pal and I aimed for reverse rainbow already – slightly annoyed it's now a thing with a name!

omg i didn't get a single group! i spotted the yellow but whip and pump were also possibles for that, saw three of the blue group but would never have got the green.

I got them all in reverse rainbow order , but the order was a bit of a fluke as I strongly disagree with it. "Fire" only fitting with the other three when "up" is appended made it a ridiculous yellow imo, esp given the "pump" red herring.

And it was made harder by my knowing slides as sliders

funny, i thought today’s was the easiest in a long while.

But Alba, that category was get excited, with “up”, so that seems like a spurious complaint

I made three awful mistakes in a row before going “I’m not awake, don’t do this right now”. I later solved it after having coffee but yeesh

Dan, what I meant was amp, hype, pump and maybe psych all worked as the category without the up, so having to think of the 'up' bit to get that fire also belonged, was tricky! Connections Bot says only 19% of players got it as the first category, which is pretty low for a yellow)

oic, carry on

didn’t we have types of shoes as a category relatively recently?

On August 19 last year

I'd clearly not learned then that sliders can be called slides, as the four shoes were CLOG, PUMP, WEDGE and SLIDE (with MARY JANE as red herring) https://connections.swellgarfo.com/nyt/69

Ooo I didnt know there was an archive for Connexions.

Today’s was fun

Hard! Count myself lucky for only making one mistake (LAD was a clever one)

I managed a perfect score, blue first

i screwed up today. got the disney dog one but not having heard of a sizzle reel screwed up my "reels"

only yellow correct today :( wasted some guesses on green that went wrong

Got it in perfect order today, no mistakes.

Was also a bit thrown by reels, though I insisted on trying to get that one early on, rather than moving on, thus mucking up my score a bit. Got dogs right off the bat.

I managed a perfect score, blue first

High five to another member of today's 96 club.

Oof. Today's (Thurs) purple might trip up some people. I didnt get it, it was just the only category left. Luckily the others were easy. Also lol at the initial placement or row 1.

OF row 1 that should say.

i got purple second, pretty good category imo

I got it perfect reverse rainbow: though Angers isn't a place I know and I didn't know the PBS category, green and yellow were quite easy and Angers was the only likely sounding place that remained so the whole thing only took me 4 mins I think

reverse rainbow too. didn't actually spot the parties - i'm hopeless at the ones where you have to add a word! but i had an inkling about frontline and masterpiece (just as 'some kind of american tv thing') and the other two were by far the most likely to fit.

didn't have a clue about the Blue group but got all of the others easily enough

It got a 5/5 rating on the Connections Bot calculus so ilx has overperformed today

I would have trouble trying to go for reverse rainbow because I can never really see what is meant to distinguish the three easy ones from each other (and I don’t remember the order of the colours). Purple are easy to spot because they tend to be of a few particular types but you could put the others in any order & I’d be like ok sure

Yeah I think it helps that it's the same setter each day as you have to kind of get inside her head. I do quite often get yellow and green in wrong order

I liked that the word choices today started with Champagne Super and Nova. Wonder if the setter is an Oasis fan?

Reunion was in there too

Probably a good way to kick things off for a puzzle-maker, take current headlines and search for double meanings.

i got the PBS one first, then green yellow purp

imo today's purple was the ideal version. some common words that could fit with other categories in the puzzle but also have non-obvious second meaning

I almost submitted the Oasis row as a guess because it made me laugh

Haha yeah thats what I was referring to further up. When I see something like that I have to immediately hit shuffle, otherwise it throws me off.

Nothing distinguishing the colours at all today, purple as straightforward as the rest

I found today very tricky and didn't see purple at all but I seem to be in a minority

No mistakes but took me while before I was confident of ignoring the steaks and I was worried that "way!" or "real!" somehow belonged with blue, so no reverse rainbow

I think a lot of people fell for that today (my gf and I both did)

The misdirections are the most fun things about this puzzle, there was a fake group recently of anagrams of crate. You have to give it the extra few seconds before jumping in

OK the choice of colours in today's was properly screwy. Purple genuinely the easiest and green was leftovers for me that I just could not see. I guess it didn't help that I'm not familiar with this sense of parcel

agree purple easiest today. i had blue as leftovers.

lol I got blue right away. Actually I thought today was pretty easy?

reverse rainbowed today for me

lol I got blue right away. Actually I thought today was pretty easy?

Connections mind meld, I had the same experience (even though purple was the last for me).

Because previous puzzles had categories of cartoon characters , I got that one first, even though it’s one of those things I rarely think about… like golf.

My first RR today!

Phew, today's was a struggle but limped home with one error to spare.

Today (Weds) had some sneaky sames. I also had to googlecheat one of the purple answers because I knew it was "derby" but whoever heard of a baseball derby not me thats who.

Today was certainly an FU to non-Americans. Managed to get it with only one mistake but a lot of guessing

busted. got the yellows and 'one away' for each of the others. never heard of a ??? broil, home run derby rings a bell now maybe. might have got the paint job if I'd been sharper but i don't feel too had as yes, this one was very american.

i got them all, no mistakes, but had to guess at some of them

Got it with one mistake — guessed roller derby instead of home run, which I’d never heard of.

I know Philly cheesesteak and Buffalo wings, but what cities have sprouts and broil?

Brussels and London

We definitely don't, though

you don't what?

oh I think I know what you mean. well, the problem is hd's paraphrase of the category is inaccurate; as stated it's perfectly fine afaict

Drop cloth also not a phrase I've heard over here - we call them dust sheets

I'm not really complaining about the US-centricism btw - let the New York Times be the New York Times. But it does add another dimension to the puzzle!

very US-centric words today. So as US-based player I found this one very easy.

I remember giving up completely on Connections when it turned out that every other clue was "jelly roller" or "nose bagger" or some impenetrable US slang. As you point out it's the New York Times, written in New York for a US audience. But if it was a British thing, would literally every single clue - literally every single clue - be "jolly ha'pence" or "knobbly nappers" or "hampstead hatrack"? No.

Which really raises two possibilities. The first is that the United States has much more slang, and it's more ever-present, than the rest of the English-speaking world, which is nonsense because the country is only two hundred years old. The second is that the writers are only familiar with US slang, except that as far as I know the puzzles are AI-generated, and presumably their dataset includes far more slang-light content than slang-heavy.

The third is that the NYT believes that the US audience wants to read about itself 24/7, and would get nervous and scared if it wasn't bombarded with its own culture all the time. Except that I've always had the impression that in the United States, New York - and by extension the NYT - is perceived as a separate entity, a kind of controlling alien parasite, an ingratiating imitation of the United States, as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers - so why bother? It's as if the NYT is trying to pretend to be a regular guy, but in a really obvious way, "hello fellow kids". And that's what angers me. My own mind! It angers me.

You son of a... I have never in my LIFE heard of one of the terms in the purple category today.

I never made the connection between Brussels the city and Brussels the sprout! Feeling dense.

Still never heard of a London Boil, tho.

orbit, was it soap box?

Haha yes ___ sprouts threw me too because I was thinking "what city is called Bean?" and felt like an idiot when I worked it out.

it was London BROIL iirc, which is even worse as no British person uses the word "broil" and in fact some people even have a deep-seated hatred towards it

got today's ok but it needed a bit of thinking

Quite a Finbarr Saunders set of words today

Even though I got it in 4, I thought today was pretty tricky because 75% of the words seemed particularly vague.

I found the double entendres very distracting, yes. And otherwise vague.

I guess I dont need to spoiler 25th's anymore but I only knew "london broil" thanks to the Simpsons. (PVMIC)

I only know it from Cabin Boy.

A nicely challenging reverse rainbow on what Connections says is my 100th puzzle. Not sure if I lost earlier ones from my phone or whether NYT didn't collect the data before that. 96/100 completed, 74 with no mistakes.

https://i.imgur.com/HaCu1Dt.jpeg

Is there a technique for solving these or do people just let the words settle in their mind until possible answers jump out?

The more challenging versions of these give me that the same panic/anxiety of turning over an exam paper to begin and not being able to answer a single question. The pleasure of these is very much in having completed them.

Just the former, really – I enjoy the first few seconds of letting the words swim before my eyes and see if anything pops out. Usually something does quite quickly and when it doesn't yes a bit of mild panic can set in. My only technique, really, is to not steam in – I take a screenshot of the (shuffled) board on my phone then use the Photos app to mark coloured lines through possible sets, some of which usually overlap, then when I'm confident enough I've got a solution I make my guesses for real. My brain isn't good enough to keep all the things in my head without doing that. Sometimes I can't even see three of the categories so I have to just make a start with the one I'm most confident of.

Just the latter, rather.

I don’t plan too carefully because (as with Wordle), I enjoy messing up and getting out of a fix. That said I totally failed today.

They launched the beta of a sports edition... https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/connections-sports-edition

Lol the time limit is going to drive people away, wonder if they might consider removing that ever.

Not time limit, it's a visible clock.

Oof I failed that miserably

reverse rainbow. never heard of sham

It’s a decorative pillow case that often matches the bedspread

Me neither. I guess because bedding is one of those things people don't talk about a lot, you don't realise how different it can need in different cultures. It wasn't till I lived in the US for a while that I became aware of "comforters" and how they are sort of like duvets but not really as you don't put a cover on them. Actual duvets were quite hard to find! But no, never came across snugs but got today's)

Can be, not can need

Today’s was straightforward enough I tried for reverse rainbow but had no sense of which colors should be which.

I fell for the Golden Girls misdirect

^^^ lol I hadn’t even noticed that!

I noticed it but blanch was spelled incorrectly so I ignored it

Suspect you used the wrong tags there lol.

Oh goddammit

It's OK, it got fixed

Tricky one today. For the longest time purple confused me, even after I finished the puzzle: I was like, but Kyoto ISN'T a capital OR a homophone for keto!

Yeah that was a bit ridiculous

orbit, was it soap box?
― Blitz Primary (tipsy mothra), Thursday, September 26, 2024 1:23 AM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol is that a dig at how often I'm up on my soap box on the internet? Jk also I made and raced a lot of soap box derby cars as a kid in a church youth group who had a gearhead/engineer as a dad. No, I was stymied by HOME RUN DERBY.

You guys know that city is not the homophone for that clue, right?

Alba posting their results has made me take this a little more seriously (not that I'm competitive or anything!). I'm more inclined to walk away/give myself a chance to think. No more jumping in when I get frustrated.

It's Quito, right?

my stats are better

Photos or it didn't happen.

https://i.imgur.com/afST7fX.jpg

I'm not proud of it, but I just said 'phwoar' out loud in my kitchen.

Chinaski: yes I assume so :)

Wins ftw

Damn, I forgot aboutQuito

So wins must have missed a day or else would have a streak of 104. I only have 103 listed but am sure I've not missed one since the very early days of the puzzle. Maybe I played it on a different browser one day

Funny timing with today's purple (which I got first, but after a mistake): I'm pretty sure I've never used a dishwasher before, but since reading that it's better than handwashing in terms of water/energy/cleanliness, I've been cleaning it and getting it fixed.

fun puzzles last couple of days

I honestly couldn't tell which groups would be which colors today.

I just realized yesterday I was confusing blue and green in the complexity progression, mostly because I got a reverse rainbow and was like “wait no, blue and green are reversed…? oh lol at me”

Today was bollocks, friends. Still none the wiser, tbh.

I’m mad because I saw purple first and didn’t guess it because I thought it was a trap

(Still got it with no mistakes; blue/purple/green/yellow)

I thought today's was fairly easy and got purple first (as did most people according to Connections Bot)

couldn't do today's

somehow fluked it, with a couple of errors. skrrt though, wtf

Yeah that threw it all out, not a thing I'm acquainted with, lol

I guess yall don't listen to trap

I refuse to believe there’s a single person on this thread who hasn’t heard “Gossip Folks” by Missy Elliott

lol I have not, but I do have kids.

I had no idea what a skrrrt was tbh. Only got todays by careful eliminations.

Struggled more with today's, mainly because I'm ignorant of "accidental" in this context. . Ended up with this in pursuit of reverse rainbow, which Connections Bot tells me makes me unique among today's players, or the first million of them at least:

Connections
Puzzle #485
🟪🟦🟪🟪
🟪🟦🟦🟦
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟨🟨🟨🟨

Yellow was the leftover category for me today for similar reason

Yep, same exact term tripped me up in that context.

purple green yellow blue for me today

I was lucky and I *did* know what accidental meant and could see the context for that row but there were more than 4 options that fit so I almost bombed!

Today’s was nicely tricky

in the 3% who got music publications as first guess

I completely fell for the PPG red herrings yesterday, several times! And I enjoyed doing it! Good trick.

I think there's...an incongruence in the purple category today. I think FA in solfege is only voiced as FAR in the song from The Sound of Music! Made me get it last, annoyingly.

But that's OK, surely? The category is WORDS IN “DO-RE-MI” and the song is called Do-re-mi

Ahh, didn't realize that. Good catch!

I saw that category first and was like “it’s a trap, don’t do it” so I was a little annoyed to realize it was a legitimate grouping

I absolutely over-thought today's while somehow under-thought it at the same time.

i got purple first today, did get faked out by the slang category tho

I have an excuse to post this video again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOXx9vb-HSU

A von Trapp, if you will.

(sorry sorry)

Today's (#488) seems to be missing a purple. Guess the colours for a reverse rainbow was a crapshoot. Ended up blue, purple, yellow green.

Argh Alba, me too. I may have yelled at my phone when my third guess came up yellow instead of green

I can’t do reverse rainbow partly because my brain refuses to learn the colour coding (is blue the easy one? Yellow?) mainly because I can’t even guess what is supposed to be more difficult between, like, four synonyms for early, four synonyms for meeting, four kinds of a thing. Or whatever. They’re all equally easy most days

Usually the purple one is more cryptic, even if it's not actually the trickiest

The yellow tends to be the most concrete, blue often requires more general knowledge

Or specialist knowledge, I guess, loosely speaking

Oh I can spot purple, I mean between the other three

now that the archive is available, it's surprising how bad connections was at the beginning. it took them a while to include a tricky category in every puzzle.

Steak ended today (#490). First I got red herringed by ear parts, then I only knew two of the types of pants and didn't see the roll category

same

Ha I also got red herringed similarly.

i have found that if i can identify one entire grouping, it is best to not do that one first. instead i move onto others in case my instincts are wrong— this helped me today, currently on my longest streak ever (tho tbf it would have been longer, i was just very busy one day about a month ago and didn’t play)

I wasted time on the ear parts too but luckily knew my pants inside out so did those next

in the 3% who got [Hidden text. Tap to view] as first guess

i'm pretty sure they did ear parts not that long ago so i avoided that one. got the roadrunner stuff first after going back and forth on whether coyote should be included. knew only 2 of the kinds of pants so that was the leftover one today

was pretty sure they did that too, but still took the bait.

Oh and thank you for the RAD video. I remember my little brother watching it repeatedly, as he was majorly into freestyle BMX. He pointed out how rare it was to see media that acknowledged your niche interests back then.

I found the RAD soundtrack on vinyl for two bucks last year. Was stoked. Still am.

Is ’pony,’ without the ‘tail,’ actually a legitimate way to wear your hair up, or am I up myself with a GTFO here? I got it eventually, but it just seemed WRONGG

There was a whole song about it

Was momentarily excited by the possibility of a S.E. Hinton connection today.

My wife was mad about the ear parts, because there were four legit answers? Hammer, drum, stirrup, anvil?

TIL about table leaves!

[Hidden text. Tap to view]

(@crypto)

October 15 is especially brutal for non-US folks :(

yeah had to cheat todays. I knew 2 rows were cable channels and football actions but I tried a few combos and blew out all my guesses bar one. Had to semi-cheat so I didnt fail lol.

literally lolled when i saw the answers after crashing and burning. naturally i had discounted the possible category of STARTING WITH THE SAME FUCKING LETTER

I got today's but did fall for the starting with coins red herring

Almost got a reverse rainbow, had I been able to gauge the blue and green. Didn’t even notice the red herring. Nearly makes up for breaking my friggin 280+ Wordle streak, along with something like 45% of players.

thought this one wasn't too bad, as a non-US!

Bust again!!

Not knowing Oxygen channel was what really did me in but yes, the D category was pathetic

it’s not 4 random words that start with D tho, it’s 4 things that the letter D can signify - they could have included Germany in the category, but not dildo. Perfectly cromulent set

where would it be defence? (coming up with an example will not lessen my scorn, if only because it's too transparently obvious)

With two busts in a row and now in the over 60 demographic, I have to worry about losing my grip. Wordle doesn’t provide any comfort: I had 3 letters confirmed in guess 2 and still managed to miss the right answer.

I presume there's a US sports context in which defense is regularly D. 🤷‍♂️

Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword all stinkers today.

tons of team sports; American football, basketball, and hockey come immediately to mind

I got very lucky with the Wordle today because my first three words were STARE LONER PORCH; I never would have found that middle R by brute force

lol what "D" might stand for (a good category idea) was just words starting with "D." Double fake out because it looked too easy esp for purple

I thought it was pretty weak, but they are all things where in some cases people will just say or write D. "Play some D," "D-N.Y.," "3D", and the D on your car shift lever.

Sigh. I've never heard of one of the clown options. There are definitely some holes in my cultural competence.

Guessing it was Homey? I was pretty surprised by that, very niche. It's from In Living Color, early 90s sketch show. That felt like one of those crossword clues or something where someone manages to slip in a personal fav

Indeed :)

In what way was the show that won the Emmy for outstanding variety show and launched the careers of Jim Carrey, Damon Wayans, Marlon Wayans, Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Lopez “very niche”?

yeah honestly it isn’t niche at all? “Homey don’t play like that” was a literal catchphrase all over the country when I was a kid

Ah I guess I meant a generational reference that I would never expect people much younger or older than I to be familiar with. But maybe I am wrong!

I guess it's just me, then--I've never seen it. I missed a lot of pop culture from the 80s and 90s because it wasn't allowed in my house, we didn't have cable, all my friends were from my church youth group, etc.

Oh yeah I forgot to mention I'd never heard of Homey either, meaning I wasted one go guessing Nickelodeon as the fourth clown, thinking the TV stations might be a red herring, which in retrospect was quite dumb

Lol "Homey don't play that" was the first thing that popped in my head when I saw the clue, before I'd started figuring it out. Ubiquitous it was, tho maybe primarily for a slice of Gen X.

in orbit, totally get it as my household was similar, but note that In Living Color was on Fox, so no need for cable— which was how I caught episodes when i was young and also reruns when I was older (born 1984). (I was allowed to watch one hour of tv a week)

Hahaha I got Homey as a clown for entirely the wrong reason - I assumed it meant Homer Simpson! /pvmic

I thought that too Trayce, though it seemed unlikely.

Today's I did in about 2 minutes with reverse rainbow - a nice change after yesterday.

I never saw ILC but I know the reference, and once I tried the “starts with coins” connection, it was the 4th clown name. … My gaps so far tend to be golf, yoga, and 21st century disney shit.

My wife was mad about the ear parts, because there were four legit answers? Hammer, drum, stirrup, anvil?

Well, yeah they do that - there's one in today's: CHEERIO / PEACE / BYE / LATER

It's a bit weird when there's a red herring that only has three fitting it, really. I guess the idea is that people will think they just haven't heard of the fourth one and guess wildly.

It works on me once in a while!

Ha, same I guess.

I totally went for the cheerio/bye red herring today! I mean, it's closer to my cultural knowledge than a cereal called a pebble so...

I wont say anymore, but today's (17th) purple category was effin ridiculous.

I lolled at the top row

xpost

Yes, bust again.as a result

never heard of lemon law. harvard law (school)? very colloquial if so. complete disaster, only spotted two of the films, wasted two guesses on the 'green area' set of five.

Reverse rainbow, even if purple was my leftovers

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_law

I swapped blue and purple otherwise I would also have gotten the reverse rainbow

I lolled at the top row

Me three, and I also did not get that one of the purple (but it was the last group left so all OK).

Blue (the films), Purple, Green, Yellow for me. i often seem to have the most trouble with yellow, as it seems like the "easiest" category is also the most "catch-all", with more false paths than the other clues, which often seem much more cut and dry to me.

Fail on blue and purple today. My mind meld with the puzzle author shorted out

I got purple second! It felt like a stretch though, and I was surprised when it worked.

Blue..., Purple, Green, Yellow for me.

Same! Yellow had a red herring answer, so like table said I got it last bc I had to rule out that 5th possibility.

I lolled at the top row

Today's (#495) is the easiest in ages but also the hardest to predict the colours on. I did get a reverse rainbow but it felt like a bit of a fluke - not much to distinguish yellow, green and blue. Purple was probably the easiest of all because of Kindle being so distinctive but it had to be purple just cause of the format I figured

I got a 99/99 for the first time on #495.

did you spot the red herring? i nearly got rr, yellow then green.

No - is it poker?

yep. texas hold 'em. card (i guess, a bit iffy) then flop, turn, river.

yeah that herring cost me 2 tries cos i was so certain

Yeah I looked at that for a while

RR today!

I suspect there will be a lot of us with reverse rainbows today

yep me too

And a rare five-part red herring!

My first

Almost RR but got yellow before green :(

Lol … i didn’t think it was that… and it wasn’t

today’s was the exception to the trend i noted above— only 2% of people guessed purple first, which is very low. honestly i thought today’s was weirdly difficult, though maybe that’s my covid brain

Purple: my first thought was WTF is a liver pool? Probably one of the few times where being a British player is an advantage.

Oh man, I bust again on #499. I think that's three busts in two weeks

Fundamentally undone by never having heard of the game Marco Polo

i've heard of it, doubtless from some american film. almost rr, blue before purple - i thought the sciencey one would be deemed the hardest.

Reverse rainbow, baby

My first three reverse rainbows in the last four days. Red herrings have been quickly visible to me, and purples have been clearly anomalous to the rest of the board.

i found the fake outs today made for a difficult time, still got it but made some errors along the way. (i think my problem is that i have never paid any attention to anything regarding NASA or the space program because fuck NASA and the space program

Surprised to read people not having heard of Liverpool, what with it somewhat famously being the hometown of the Beatles.

Anyway, nice change to the usual Britisher struggles Connections often throws up

lol I couldn't even get a reverse rainbow in Wednesday's puzzle

Same!

Hahahah 23rd's puzzle... as soon as I worked it out it was easy. I doubt they can pull that trick more than once though.

yes, half-asleep I made one error despite seeing the categories but was a surprised to see it come up as 5/5 difficulty on Connections bot.

Yeah same (one tired mistake and surprise at the perceived difficulty)

Enjoyed today's though

liked this. i got purple, blue, green, yellow - is that a rr?

I was convinced it was too obvious. Like. Wtf is yellow journalism, tho?

Old fashioned term for tabloid journalism

Damn, sorry that's a giveaway. Someone delete please

kinder, yes! I didn't get it today - caught green first and then was like duh! when i realised what the rest of the categories were

I'd not heard of that one either Chinaski

rr. I saw blue, then a couple of minutes later green, then the penny dropped. hadn't heard of yellow journalism either.

petition for the thread title to be changed, just for today

lol

I realized what was going on almost immediately; definitely the easiest reverse rainbow I’ve ever gotten

I am loving the most common mistakes, too

TIL that yellow journalism is an American term, which thinking about its origins makes sense. I just thought it was one of our cultural exports.

Also RR for me too.

After getting blue immediately, I then thought for less than a second about what was left over and realized I had just missed the biggest RR gimme that will possibly ever show up in this game

^same

lol I hadn't noticed that till Tom pointed it out.

(24th spoiler) Wasted 2 tries today because I was certain that one answer was "words most commonly used as first guess in Connections".

Bust again with no.501. I’m consoling myself more success in Wordle.

With 501 I did what I'd sort of vowed not to do after recents busts, ie plough in with leftovers I didn't really think was a group, rather than come back to it later. But it worked out fine, except they turned out to be blue not purple. Folded paper had occurred to me earlier but I guess crane had put me off. Wasn't very confident of French words as seemed a bit random and lame to have two that read like English words and two that didn't. So, blue, purple, green, yellow. Wordle starting words didn't occur to me as a red herring but I see it now! Would have been a bit of a pig of a category for non-Wordle obsessives

And green was pretty poor advertorial

Ha yes, it was.

i feel like they've done newspaper sections at least once before. RR today, didn't know what fortune teller was till i googled it (after i completed the puzzle) - i was picturing an actual person!

green I would not have gotten, but it was my leftover category. not too bad today, no mistakes.

same, i got purple first because i became fixated on one of the clues as it looked so out of place with the rest of the puzzle. purple yellow green blue

Exactly the same here. Blue should have been purple today imo

Thread title very apt today. As noted blue and purple colors should have been switched and purple was pretty weak

I never knew that usage for fortune teller. I haven’t thought about one in 50+ years and I don’t remember what we called them.

We used to call them cat's eyes but I was aware of the fortune teller name too

My mom called them cootie catchers, and would draw bugs on one side, and leave the other empty, and use it to "capture" cooties off delighted toddlers

feeling a bit smug that I got purple second today

I got it first. Of course I then completely biffed the reverse rainbow by assuming the yellow category would be blue because I’d never seen tittleas its own word

Yeah tittle is some archaic nonsense!

Incredibly underwhelming purple today.

Ya, I felt like that was something my 10 year old (who sometimes helps) might make up

i've only ever heard of 'please' being called *the* magic word.

Is there a magician whose catchphrase is "thank you"?

I think they should have dropped that one and had 'ta-da' or something

Yesterday I learned decibel is a word with a metric prefix. Never heard of the base unit. Much like until COVID I didn’t realize omicron meant “small o”, in contrast to omega.

quick interlude: when i play this (every day), the colors mean nothing to me. i don't pay attention to them, i don't know what's easiest and hardest ... they could all be white and it wouldn't matter to me. i'm not sure i would've ever known they mean something if my wife hadn't mentioned it months back.

am i the only one? i am sort of slightly taken aback by how much the conversation in this thread revolves around the colors. (not a criticism.)

Same, I also ignore the colors and the idea of trying to find them in a certain order makes no sense to me.

Purple tends to be of a type, slightly lateral thinking — I’m with you on the rest tho they’re indistinguishable. Two are usually four synonyms & one is four kinds of something

One trick that helps me ID purple (and which facilitates getting the RR for me) is when it's a fill-in-the-blank type category -- I think puzzle 500 might be the only one that I've seen where that wasn't strictly the case.

Yeah, the colours don't really mean anything to me either.

the colors only mean something to me in that i can usually identify Purple pretty quickly, as mentioned above...otherwise, meh.

i know purple is supposed to be the hardest but I don't care what order I do them

I also objected to the magic category because Ive never said "whats the magic word" when someone didnt say thanks, and what else would it be instead? Ugh anyway it was my last category so it didnt matter.

On #506 I object to original meaning pristine, and the blue category name is very clumsy

Yes and yes

Walked right into the ”behind the camera” trap today. Would do it again.

Weirdly, I saw the big box stores with one letter changed second, but I couldn’t figure out the 4th one. Still blanking on what the original for Kroner is.

https://www.kroger.com/

Pedantic annoyance the tape is gaff, the person who does the taping is the gaffer, it could be “gaffer’s tape” but not gaffer … I have also heard/seen it called “spike” tape

Yes, hilarious trap and oddly evident purple. Got a RR!

Though the purple is highly regional, even to the US. I think it's pretty easy have moved around the USA a good bit without encountering Kroger

Also it's duck tape not duct tape

ilx "prescriptivism is bullshit"
also ilx: "can't believe the heinously wrong answers in these puzzles"

(gaffer and duct tape are both very common usages!)

Alba - the first major argument I had with my other half was on that matter. One is a brand name and he hadn't heard of the generic term.

I actually thought of the IDEA one but not living in the US had no IDEA about the others

I also objected to the magic category because Ive never said "whats the magic word" when someone didnt say thanks, and what else would it be instead?

Yes this was dumb, magic words are for getting a result, and "thank you" comes after you've already gotten what you wanted.

kinder - I was really just doing a callback to an ILX argument of yore, not quite on a level with "another think coming"/"another thing coming" but less rancourous. I think it started as Duck tape (a brand, as you say) then people misheard it as the plausible duct tape, which then took over

not to be a weirdo but Kroger is the largest grocery chain by revenue in the US, and the fifth largest general retailer— even if you haven’t encountered a Kroger grocery store, you have encountered a grocery store that is actually owned by Kroger

not to be a weirdo but [Hidden text. Tap to view]

KRONER KEEDIS STAPH GROWL

I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMOWL

Kate Bush would tell you the tape is Gaffa obviously.

xxxp I have terrible news, you're not being a weirdo, you're being a dumb american :)

Table was replying to a comment that it was hard even for Americans, Andrew

Enjoyed #508 - the red herring was glowing quite red though. First RR in a few days

Yeah it was clear right away that Halloween was to be soundly ignored :D

That could have been clearer but fair enough, Alba - apologies to table.

The hide tag does make it harder to follow these things sometimes

FPed, what a completely unnecessary insult.

#509, Nov 1 - I had never heard of Cheez Doodles. I don't think they exist in Canada.

I got purple first today! Don't think Ive managed that often.

me too!

Never would have guessed blue today. Good thing it was the leftover category

Blue was last for me too, and I haven't heard of one of its items before. Really difficult puzzle overall, too.

FPed, what a completely unnecessary insult.

Yeah, that's fair. I want to be clear that I'm not saying that something being a joke excuses anything, but the humour (inside my head) was because you are a weirdo (and proudly so, and rightly so) and you're definitely not a dumb American.

appreciated, thanks.

Xd out today

I got two mistakes even after getting all the categories

Yeah I'm not that familiar with either of the last two categories - I guessed blue but hadn't heard of two of them and thought it was CRUNCH / PLANK / DROP / ??? no idea about purple, crashed out.

despite being very familiar with the rest of the category, I didn't know what boat was

Yup, no idea of half the terminology for the two hard ones. Fail

Boat is the name of a yoga pose, it's also called a V sit or V hold.

My first guess was pieces of wood used in construction but after that was wrong I got purple easily

I had no clue about the blue and purple categories, asked my partner for help, and we ruined the streak anyway.

boat = fail for me today

I wasted one turn trying to guess the exercises then spotted the earrings category, where I was sure of two, pretty sure of one more and the chandelier just seemed like the other one that could fit

45 day streak ruined. i got blue first because i am a jock but purple and yellow had so many that could have gone either way, i ran out of guesses. really pissed off about it frankly

Tbf we all have much more important things to be really pissed off about that not knowing enough about yesterday’s purples and blues

okay CIA enjoyer El Tomboto

“This is bullshit because I didn’t get it” is dweeb stuff and so is caring about your streak tbf. I’ve never lost or had 4 wrong guesses & doubt I ever will unless this takes a major swerve into being a difficult puzzle but if it happens I won’t throw a fit, wgaf

It's certainly evident from your posts that you don't care about it.

I honestly think the inclusion of stats on this app is p baleful if canny

“This is bullshit because I didn’t get it” is dweeb stuff and so is caring about your streak tbf. I’ve never lost or had 4 wrong guesses & doubt I ever will unless this takes a major swerve into being a difficult puzzle but if it happens I won’t throw a fit, wgaf

― the homeliness of the soi-disant stunner (wins), Sunday, November 3, 2024 12:27 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

you’re a piece of shit! <3

I guess this is what I get for thinking “a lot of stress going around, gonna relax on the Connections thread for a bit”

Tensions are high!

Suggesting this is a deranged thing to throw a fit about is also a deranged thing to throw a fit about

I don’t think anyone is really throwing a fit?

I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.

aren’t you supposed to be ending your streak anyway?

It's official, @NYTGuildTech is on ULP strike! No Games or Cooking until the strike ends! Break your streak! https://t.co/Q9f0n6kZTM

— Annie Shields (@anastasiakeeley) November 4, 2024

https://i.imgur.com/Ul9cS6g.jpeg

https://connections.swellgarfo.com/game/-OAxFXBC7_oBhEe710ej

Cancelled my NYT subscription today. Was going to do it this month anyway because that’s when my cheap online sub runs out (altho they offered me a 1Y extension on it on the way out, which I declined). Typed “guild” into Wordle as a first guess (I figure it makes a bigger statement than simply “forgetting” to play) but ugh, I’m done. Deleted the app. I don’t necessarily think Kamala would have won if the NYT & other mainstream outlets hadn’t sanewashed the fascists all year, but it didn’t help. Fuck these people forever.

I feel like they treated it like a tv series … keeping up the dramatic tension

Yeah I've avoided subscribing or using the app - now I will be boycotting the games indefinitely. Not sure I'll be back when the strike is resolved.

I mentioned above but I setup a home server that hosts the OG Wordle (downloaded the web page which is a fully static JS driven implementation a while ago when it was clear the NY Times was going to take over) and will continue to play that happily. If anyone is interested in doing this I can help assist, but it's a fairly technical process (running a docker container with nginx hosting the static site, basically the OG HTML, CSS and JS on a dedicated server). Cookies still work with it and I can see my historical results.

vote ILXORDLE += 1!

some alternatives:
https://lex.games
https://www.puzzgrid.com

Damn octobeard! You are a true mensch

I too have cancelled my sub. I had a 700+ streak in the XW, too.

I would not have gotten today’s purple in a million years.

They're back (though I have no real read on whether it was a "success")

https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/11/24294023/new-york-times-tech-workers-strike-end

yeah i have never been clear on what the bone of contention is. what isn’t fair about their current contract? i’ve never seen this spelled out - and i’ve looked!

btw i tried connections again today and it’s still trash

https://www.nyguild.org/post/new-york-times-tech-guild-votes-yes-to-strike

ty!

Today's Connections includes the words Union and Guild, which feels like gloating on the part of the NYT unless there is something I am missing?

Alternatively a nod to the colleagues who went on strike. I mean, the puzzle is set by Wyna Liu, not the management

That makes sense! Thanks for giving me a better perspective.

lol at today’s puzzle

Also, my second consecutive reverse rainbow

i hate-play this, it's still trash

Well I got one category in 0.3 seconds today

Was that the electronic music genres one?

Lol yep

same

I thought it might be a trick so I held off until I got another one

never have i looked more blankly at a screen than after getting today's purple (last of all)

idk why i hid that

lol sometimes when I feel they are outrageously dumb i share them with select friends, and I definitely shared this one (honestly the crackers line was also pretty tricky for non-US markets)

I'm still none the wiser xp

And yeah, I thought it might be crackers because of Animal and Ritz but had never heard of Goldfish or Club ones

I got that line but by guesswork, theyre none of them a "thing" down here.

I got it with no mistakes but missed a RR with green and yellow wrong way around Thankfully my spell in the US made me aware of Goldfish crackers and Club seemed the most likely last one. Never heard of Eloise - that was just leftovers

Someone posted this to Bluesky. Seems accurate

https://i.imgur.com/TqNbvGR.jpeg

Stared at purple forever before something in the dim recesses of my memory recalled Eloise and then I googled. I never read the books so the other three words were meaningless to me.

lmao Alba

lool

Haunted 401k Ride making me laugh a lot

You probably need to be at least 50 and from the New York City area to have a chance on the purple.

Seriously. I've read those books, albeit ~25 years ago, and would have connected only "Eloise" and "Plaza." I kind of blundered into it by figuring "Eloise" and "Turtle" were both prominent children's book characters, and maybe "Pug" would be from some other book I didn't know, etc. It's a particular kind of NYT/New Yorker household for whom Eloise is not just a somewhat popular series of midcentury picture books, but an iconic cultural touchstone.

I’m just like “who the fuck is Eloise”

I was trying to work out what Damned songs contained those items lol

I didn’t think today’s was hard at all? But I also grew up in the mid-Atlantic and read all the Eloise books in grad school for a presentation on kids books and queerness.

I read one as a kid … in the 1970s, but I think it involved France and that’s all I remember, or am I confused with Madeleine? … And there was another recent urbane girl movie for kids with a name that wasn’t Eloise or Madeleine and all I know about it is it had a charming song about growing up.

So after months of playing this game, I have determined my categorical blind spots to be:
Yoga
Golf
Kids movies made in the last 30 years

I think Eloise was my first ever category that I've never even heard of.

(It's OK to skip hidden text once the given puzzle's day is over, right?)

Sarahell - Madeline was France, Eloise lived in the Plaza Hotel in NYC. I wonder if my Mom still has the book? If so, I'm going to reread it tomorrow.

A few days ago, but the Yang one took me straight out, largely because I decided that land / sea must be one of the dualities.

Pretty much once a week, there will be some US-only category that throws me - brands of crackers, sports teams etc. Never heard of Eloise either...

eloise was a jeopardy answer today.

Wtf are 'giving' and 'fat' Tuesday?

Fat Tuesday = Mardi Gras. I did not like that category.

of course! Gawd, what a dumbass. I'll see myself out.

well it's never called that afaik!

It is!

giving tuesday came about after Cyber Monday came about after Black Friday… Giving Tuesday is for nonprofits soliciting charitable donations online. I had that category last as remnants and was idgi as well. My only real awareness of Taco Tuesday is … a lyric from Party Time by the Northern Boys

I got purple right away, it jumped out at me

interview with Wyna Liu, The Designer: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2024/11/connections-wyna-liu-puzzles-controversial/680811/?gift=9fqQ22FG8StfaGx0XnWzw64FyFV5QyLvvJ7rlPXtqg8&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

i like that but htf do they not mention Only Connect which has been running for many years?

i thought the purple category was "_ bowl"

OK I had no idea about this, from that article:
Purple is the wordplay category. The four words in that group are not defined by their literal meanings. It’s words that end with ___ or homophones or something. Blue is trivia that is maybe a bit more specialized, not just definitions. Maybe it’s all movies or certain bands. Sometimes that’s the hardest one. Yellow and green are other category types: They might be four things you bring to the beach, or sometimes they’re all synonyms for the same word.

I had no idea there was specific categorical rules like this - it'll make puzzle solving a bit easier I reckon.

And yeah the way that story reads makes it sound like some NYT schmuck came up with the idea!

Today's puzzle breaks with that - blue is in no way a trivia category. But yeah, usually that's the way it goes

It might be in the sense its current slang, I guess?

It's my special day! Let's see if I can solve it clean.

for me the hardest part is when you have only 4 words left and are desperately trying to find any connection whatsoever

wtf i was lead astray today by my half remembered knowledge of weird al’s buy me a condo lyrics

Crashed out for first time in a while. Fell for the red herring then got purple and green but don't know Sesame Street very well and Snuffy was news to me. Should have spotted the Sopranos category though - I did watch a couple of seasons

I went for the red herring just because why the heck not--it doesn't always have all 4, sometimes it only has 3, so I thought there was a chance. I think they took some liberties with blue tbh.

feel like this one was designed to get people to break their streaks

Ah that's better. Nothing like a Connections classed as "extremely difficult" that you solve with reverse rainbow in 2 minutes to get you over a bust the day before

You gotta be kidding me with the purple category today

My wife and I share one subscription; she currently has dibs on Connections, Wordle, and the Bee while I get the crosswords.

But ha-hah, Connections has opened its archive so I'm having fun going back to last year. And I can do several a day, at least for a while.

You can play the games without being a subscriber

Missed opportunity today for some lolz with johnson in the list.

Immature LOL @ today's purple

i got purple first today, apparently rare— it just jumped out at me

Yet again the remainder category involved one of my 3 blind spots — kid movies

i just hail mary'd that blue and purple category

purple category made me smile

also got purple first

There's no distinction as far as I can tell between how Curse relates to the Green clues and how Baffle relates to the Yellow clues - unless it's that one's a noun and one a verb?

The curses are spells cast upon a victim by a magical person; the bafflements are just about being confused. I am baffled by a tough question; I can only be hexed by a sorceress who wishes me ill. Is how I read it. I suspect you're meant to be misled by her and vex being similar words.

Plus rex - the joke is that each ends up in a different foursome

Yeah no, I do understand what Curse and Baffle mean. What I was trying to get at, was that there was talk above about all of the colours having different vibes, that they were different 'kinds' of grouping, but those two seem to be the same kind of grouping to me.

Yeah yellow and green she's never said are really different in kind, really, so it just comes down to which one she judges to be easier. I used to think yellow tended to be more concrete and green more abstract but it's not even that

I crashed out on today's after getting yellow and green quite easily. Fucking US sports, man

The solve rate is only 35% today though maybe that will improve as Americans wake up

ditto. there seems to be one like that almost daily

I got it but it took longer and i made more mistakes than usual.

Up to 44% solve rate now.

Managed to get this without mistakes, but it was definitely hard. Funny thing about the blue group is that one of the words immediately made me think of the category but I didn't seriously consider applying it to any other words.

Surprised the solve rate is so low this is one of the few I found easy

Annoying. That was annoying. Blue is just specialized knowledge--I allowed myself to google bc I figured out the theme--but purple is tenuous imo.

I never allow myself to Google. It's funny the way we all make our own rules

True! What gives me the most enjoyment is grappling with the concepts, which I can't do if I fail out because I don't participate in a specific socio-cultural thing. Similarly with Worldle I don't care if I get it in the fewest tries anymore...it's fun to be doing the puzzle, and actually if it takes longer that's more fun.

I'm ok with googling to see if a word fits in a specific category. For today's puzzle I knew 3 of the 4 WNBA teams and googled for the 4th. US sports knowledge is crucial for maybe 10-20% of the puzzles. If you are outside the US, unlikely you even know the WNBA is a thing

These have felt increasingly impenetrable lately. I usually have SOME quick/initial guesses but now I'm just staring blankly.

Okay okay I just had to give it a minute.

knocked green and yellow out immediately and then completely overthought blue and purple.

Green stood out first then the other 3 were all obvious simultaneously

Seoul seemed pretty obviously like it was going to be phonetic but needed a moment to figure out what it went with

got blue right away, surprised it was blue, then purple, then very briefly stared at the remnants because I am not that smart.

Today (monday) was stupidly simple. do they do these like crosswords with the hardest ones on the weekends? Which like no fair. I'm always hung over on a saturday and can't brain.

I didn't find today's that easy, mainly because I'm not familiar with X Games. Made two mistakes: guessing the final X wrongly and also thinking the consideration category was thoughts you put under for scrutiny so had microscope in there

Things, not thoughts

Anyone figure out purple category today? Some good misdirection

got it first but only by a process of elimination. no reverse rainbow, the other colours seemed totally arbitrary.

Today’s was a complete shitshow and I only got purple through elimination- I can’t stand categories like that.

yeah my brain don't work like that, even when it was down to just those 4 I could not figure it out

When I saw the category name I burst out laughing

I had to look up what else fit the category:

HAD
MAN
PAIN
AUDI ARABIA
APE VERDE

I actually figured out purple, while blue was the last one that I had and only got because it was the last group.

the difficulty levels on these never make any sense. today's was 1/5, but it was the hardest in a while imho.

lol this was utter trash

I did not get a single one today

I am absolutely furious at today’s puzzle

portmanteau my balls, motherfuckers

Actually don’t, ow

It's a little presumptuous that we're expected to know Japanese portmanteaux, but somehow that's the first category I got.

what the hell is ketchum

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash_Ketchum

It’s misdirections all the way down with words that aren’t really words

I almost had "things you shake" with Magic 8 Ball and Snow Globe but I've never shaken hairspray and there's only one kind of salad dressing I can think of that needs to be shaken

It's a little presumptuous that we're expected to know [Hidden text. Tap to view], but somehow that's the first category I got.

I thought Ketchum was the cartoonist, Hank

I got it with zero mistakes but purple was a mystery until the reveal

Only got yellow today :(

Got today through sheer luck tbh. Hat tip to the Citizen Kane red herring.

as someone in the southern hemisphere, I think I am in all of your Connections future?

anyway, v.interested in responses to the newest one!

(and fully agree with outrage re the Pokemon edition)

I barely got today's, was on my last guess before I got purple, and then blue was whatever was left. I had thought it was words made of other words, but did not know Pokemon counted as that.

D'oh sorry, totally meant to hide that text!

Just don't read the italics lol

Hhahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa OMG at todays one. Can't wait til you all get to it.
I got it, but by sheer chance flailing - got 2 categories myself, one by accident, which eliminated the rest. Holy heck.

BTW re yesterdays, I confused ketchum with jenkem for some reason so you can imagine my horrified confusion.

yeah the latest one set me back on my heels for a minute - I do wordle and connections with my morning coffee ie 15 mins after waking - and I am often keenly aware of how good a night's sleep I have had - and how that affects my cognitive abilities!

I had a perfect score but some of them were absolutely lucky swings (eg the fuckin' FUDGE arrow - like, c'mon!!!)

the thing with Pokemon is I think anyone who was ever into it knows it means pocket monsters but that would be like the 14th 'fact' you associate with the word

Ems: ha yes I looked at that for ages and was like "chocolate? sauce? sundae?". Fckn "fudge" did not even occur to me.

Lol wtf

I enjoyed today's, it took a little more working out with pen & paper than usual but I found it quite satisfying to solve.

I got it with 3 mistakes… I did not know what the triangle was supposed to be … “sighed”? … also mouths have teeth

Like emsworth … morning coffee, 15 minutes after waking up

I'm laid up in bed with a headache and gastroenteritis so did not particularly appreciate today's. But got there in the end with two mistakes. I saw all the categories before the end but my Greek alphabet/maths ignorance caught me out again and yeah I just didn't think of fudge

got it with no mistakes, a bit lucky - i thought it was mice, didn't think of fudge - strawberry sauce? - and didn't figure out the delta but river strawberry sauce, river nuts, river mice, and river gs are not things.

Wtf did I just wake up to?!

Ok. That wasn’t actually too hard. once I got the first one, my brain seemed to snap into it pretty quick. No mistakes

HOLY FUCK

IF A CATEGORY IS "OBJECTS WITH TEETH" AND ONE OF THE PICTURES HAS A GODDAMN OPEN MOUTH WHY WOULDN'T YOU CHOOSE THAT?!

SORRY

haha i didn't even think of that. good red herring!

lets retry this. managed to get this on the last try but i was convinced the purple category was "places you put your money" - which gave me mouth, bed/mattress and bank but not the fourth!

I put Delta in with the river categories but only because I thought the picture meant Side as one of the sides of the triangle was bolder than the others

I put [Hidden text. Tap to view]

Yeah this was a good one, I got one mistake cause I too fell for what was pretty obvious misdirection in retrospect, immediate forehead slap

I find connections in general the most fun of the little puzzles because it has a bit of the lateral thinking you sometimes get in the xword as opposed to the other ones that you just sort of bash out

It’s funny tho, I had made a routine of doing the xword, connections, strands & wordle every day on the bus to work. Then I stopped because of the strike and it sort of broke the spell and now I don’t bother as much, I do connections most days, the other ones some days if I feel like it and only do the crossword from thurs on

Another clean sheet, but I only managed to avoid the teeth/mouth red herring because I'd already gotten the river category by then.

also with the pictures the mouth is making the "tee" sound. glad i didn't notice that until i solved the puzzle.

what tripped me up this time was the music note, I automatically thought the next in line from 'do' was 're', I didn't parse that it was way up the scale

I found the picture one not too bad. But same as groovypanda re the triangle one and same as Trayce re the ice cream one

Enjoyed that one. Fuckin fudge though

never heard of three of the sodas. the red herring meant that the yellow was in no way the easiest.

ah fuck sorry.

SPOILERS ABOVE

i hated the picture one immediately and refused to do it. i like these puzzles for their language tricks ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But it kind of had language tricks too, just another layer before you could get to them

Yeah, I really enjoy when they do ones like that. I did the GCHQ puzzle the day before so I was quite attuned to lateral thinking

Todays seemed pretty easy to compensate

GTFO with Starry, which apparently only came out last year.

I was trying to fit SEA ___ for SQUIRT, DRAGON and maybe SPRITE (but turns out that last one is purely mythological).

if you watch the NBA you see commercials for that constantly, I've never actually had it though

Bald-faced advertising in the puzz today.

Yeronner I object

Starry replaced Sierra Mist when that was discontinued. It tastes like the midpoint between 7-Up and Sprite.

That seems like … quite a narrow space

I googled, because I had a feeling they were gonna be US candies or drinks,and thanks to SEO they were the first hits which helped lol

imho the picture ones suck and aren’t a real example of this puzzle, but obv ymmv

Never heard of diva cup

Nor me, I don't think, though I've heard of the equivalent Mooncup. Didn't know Solo Cup either, so purple seemed like an unlikely set of leftovers to me once I'd worked the other three out. No mistakes, but no RR either

As of today Connections Bot joins Wordle Bot in not being available to non-subscribers, bah

never heard of tang being a kind of fish but got everything else easily enough

You can still get the Bots to work if you don't subscribe, you just have to refresh the page a couple of times xp

I have never seen a connections bot - but in the past I think these features have been available to US users before the rest of us

You can still get the Bots to work if you don't subscribe, you just have to refresh the page a couple of times xp

Emsworth I don't think it's a US thing. For a while it was sort of obscure to find but now there's a link on the "share your results" page, or at least there is here in the UK. But the bot s now covered for me with a subscriptions overlay that doesn't disappear no matter how many times I refresh

The direct link is here:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/upshot/connections-bot.html

Anyway, today was very easy but I mistapped one row

Aw that is great - thanks Alba - not as interesting as the Wordle one but I got a perfect score today, it will probably be better value when I have had a rotten one and am looking for some solace

I see - it it is available thru the browser version but I still can’t find a link from the NYT app (which I mainly use)

Got all of em but the purple today and just stared at those four words unable to figure out …does anyone’s brain actually work that way??

Mine doesn’t, apparently. I’m in the same boat.

Mine does apparently, or at least I have played Connections enough to learn some of the patterns they use, because I actually managed a reverse rainbow today.

The tip-off for me was Mar, because it wasn't a word yet, so I tried adding things to it and then seeing if they could be added to any of the other words.

Er, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mar

oh whoops. I blame my migraine.

Not sure what my brain was doing there; I guess I was just focused on nouns so much that it didn't register to me as a word.

I get it, I spent a lot of time going ”riffle is not a word, what is this” and had to google it, at which point I felt very dumm

Like my entire life I have read that word as rifle and didn’t notice until today

OED has riffle: verb 1: turn over something, especially pages, quickly and casually but also rifle(2) verb: search through something hurriedly in order to find or steal something which like DJP is the one I knew.

So I didn't know they were different words, but they'd both do here - I assumed the one in the puzzle was an American variation of the one I knew.

I did get a reverse rainbow, but like 100% of the ones I get, it was "I guess these other words are something" rather than something more intentional.

I struggle with the ones where it's (given words) (other word) so no chance with today's purple.

Like my entire life I have read that word as [Hidden text. Tap to view] and didn’t notice until today

YAY

lol at Monday's puzzle - wth is a hoho or a ding-dong or a yodel or a devil dog?

Yes I think that's the biggest get the fuck outta here if you're not from this country yet. Got the other three categories though so no mistakes but my reverse rainbow was spoiled by guessing that the mystery one was purple

Connections is no longer letting me play for free unless I log out of my (unsubscribed) account, which seems a bit perverse.

somehow fluked that one - i couldn't tell you any specifics but ding-dong yodel and hoho did ring a very faint bell as some kind of (american only) food. one mistake, i put 'bar' in as one of the fights.

plot twist: rifle and riffle are actually different words with different meanings - which the OED helpfully delineates, sorry to disappoint

a secondary meaning of "riffle" is similar to "ruffle" and "shuffle" - to use your thumb or finger to bend back the edge or corner of a deck of cards and then release them in rapid sequence so that they make a very satisfying whirr eg "i'm going to riffle the deck - tell me where to stop and that'll be your card"

But I think you could riffle or rifle through records in shop, for example, depending on how vigorous your search was

Indeed - the former is relaxed almost offhand, the latter with alacrity and intent

so is it considered cheating to look up words while you're doing this? a few days ago "currency" was one of the categories, I looked up a couple words that I suspected were currencies but didn't know for sure, similar situation today with devil dog

I think you make your own rules. I never look anything up as I find it more satisfying that way but whatever works

Also, so many people are Googling Connections words nowadays that the first results are often specific puzzle spoilers.

This is interesting and pertinent to the riffle/rifle discourse:

A door blows open in your mind when you learn about the suffix -le, it explains so much. People used to add it to verbs to mean ‘more than once’ or continuously—so originally, to ramble is to ‘roam’ on, to jostle is to joust repeatedly, and to sparkle is to emit lots of sparks. pic.twitter.com/85oefNHMfa

— Wylfċen (@wylfcen) April 10, 2024

I think you make your own rules. I never look anything up as I find it more satisfying that way but whatever works

Also, so many people are Googling Connections words nowadays that the first results are often specific puzzle spoilers.

― Hideous Lump, Monday, December 16, 2024 7:54 AM (thirty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

haha yes when looking up the one I mentioned it autocompleted which I figured meant a ton of people were looking it up

i got today's eventually but fuckin regional snack cakes, man. the other categories only made sense once i figured out the joke one.

wonder if today's Strands was a nod towards one of last week's Connections. i had never heard of Zorse or Athleisure until today.

This is interesting and pertinent to the riffle/rifle discourse:

This is great! I saw a very similar analysis of the wr- combo, I think yesterday--that wr- always indicates twisting or rotational motion of some kind.

Wring--twisting water out
Wrestle--twisting & turning bodies
Wrap/wrapper--twisting and turning a covering around an object
wreath--material twisted in a circle

Etc! Good fun.

Hmm, I think some of these (wreck, wretch) are a little lost in translation

wrinkle is when you twist your ankle. am i doing this right?

write = just regular twisting, aight?

Hmm, I think some of these (wreck, wretch) are a little lost in translation

― DJP, Monday, December 16, 2024 3:42 PM (twenty-six seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

Ach aye. You might be wright.

wrinkle is when you twist your ankle. am i doing this right?

nice

Busted today. :(

Annoyingly I did try the Twinkie cakes first - Snowball, Hoho (I know about this because it was in an episode of Damages about 20 years ago), Dingdong... then guessed 'bar' or 'yodel' and lost. Never heard of a Devil Dog, which I also thought might be some cartoon animal along with Snowball.

so is it considered cheating to look up words while you're doing this?

categorically yes :D

Puzzle #555 (Tuesday): Carpet is a type of tennis court? This is a new one to me.

yeah I spotted the theme but guessed grit before carpet

i thought i had this one in the bag but very quickly threw on being focused on paper because i'd never heard of wax paper (parchment, yes) and while it seemed an obvious choice i went with grit because sandpaper is sold by grit value

I got purple early but thought it was ground surfaces in homes and then yellow was a problem because there were five that fit: grit, nerve, drive, pluck and heart

The bot didn’t create a category for one of my unique guesses lol … it was Main ___ : artery, nerve, drive, drag

finished perfect today for first time

The bot didn’t create a category for one of my unique guesses lol … it was [Hidden text. Tap to view]

i got zero for four today lollll

lol the next time I don't know a sports or culture reference I don't want to get any flack from people who have never heard of wax(ed) paper.

yeah i thought today’s was pretty easy tho i did get blue-green-yellow-purple

Purple was pretty blueish

anyone that caught today's purple before anything else, salute.

Well I played it first, as leftovers, but no I would have have got that in a million years, not having heard of two of them and the other two being very far from front of mind

in 30 years of paying attention to tennis (not obsessively, but i can explain how scoring works, name the top players, etc.) i have never heard of carpet as a court surface.

i got that category anyway, but still...

They did away with them in most professional tournaments for safety reasons but the season finals used to be played on it

The Paris Masters tournament also used to be held on carpet until the mid-2000s

I got purple first today but only after I came down to my last mistake. Extremely difficult one today, especially because I bit hard on the "I'm a little teapot" red herring, and I knew what the blue category was generally looking for but there were 5 that applied to it and I kept guessing with the wrong one in,

The feck is a teapot dome? Or an onion dome, tbf.

Onion dome = what the Kremlin has. Teapot Dome is the name of an American scandal.

Sorry! Not the Kremlin, but e.g. St. Basil's Cathedral.

I got purple second but I knew Onion Dome was a term, though I didn’t know what it referred to … I figured non-US Ilx would be aggravated by Teapot Dome … it basically was a political corruption scandal that is considered to be what led to the end of The Gilded Age, an era that contemporary American society is often compared to esp. w/r/t Trump

Oops it was later than i thought …

spotted potential dome words with teapot and capitol but didn't see any other obvious to me choices so purple became the leftover category and i was pleased to see i was on the right track. so idiosyncratic what is easy and what's hard. thought this one was easy peasy

I thought this was one of the easier ones, got a reverse rainbow

don't think i would've thought of the purple category in a million years. i don't know most of them.

another perfect, no misses tho the teapot etc was more generic guess than specific tbf

No. 557
saw 4 related to donkey kong, but I thought, no way is that a category. a really hard one with all that furniture and woodwork.

apparently table means the exact opposite in uk/us english.

thanks to that and other red herrings, i failed.

xxp i almost started that one but as a different category - construction related items! gorilla glue/tape, hammer, ladder, etc.

I was just doing the May 15 puzzle and got the first three groups figured out with little fuss.

The last four standing were AURA BUCK DOGE HODA. Absolutely could not get a handle on that group. I could have clicked submit and moved on with my life, but really needed to know and I wanted to have figured it out myself.

AURA BUCK DOGE HODA.

It was car companies minus one letter

I haven’t clicked on the spoiler text but I think I remember this one: car brands minus a letter?

Absolutely the worst type of category, should be stomped in the gonads repeatedly

i got purple category first today 557 - realised there wouldn't be keg and barrel in the same category.

thank god you said that Ledge - I spent all of today thinking I'd misunderstood what that meant.

> apparently table means the exact opposite in uk/us english.

I have no idea what colleagues mean when the they say stuff like “let’s push back the meeting and table the proposal”. There’s double contradictory definitions there.

I would think they mean, “lets delay the meeting and come back to this proposal later”

Yes the ambiguity of "table" in a transatlantic context requires one to simply ask. "Excuse me, Jane, but just to clarify, do you mean that we should discuss this now, or at another time?"

A tricky one is "moot," which can mean both "debatable" and "not worth debating."

everyone's going to love Saturday...I got it in the end but then went straight to Google

Saturday was one of my worst ever- although partly because I overlooked an easy one - I was convinced they were playing 4D chess!

worst result ever, only got one group!

Wasn't too bad? Except I initially put 'O' in the wrong group. I don't know what some of those things are but two of them were obvious and the O I suppose is sort of a thing.

It’s from this: https://militaryalphabet.net/

That was easy … but I am American

Ohh yes thanks DJP - I was thinking it's the O in EGOT, but that still applies to the statuette. EGOTS on my mind after them appearing in two quizzes this week! Had no idea about the baloney though, but was left with that

got it but it took awhile, mostly because i’ve never heard of a sleigh bed, and also the Oscar-baloney connection took me some time to remember

Gotta admit baloney took me a bit as well, and I even remember the song parodies and the wienermobile jokes; O I assumed was also a reference to the award, like in the trendy acronyms where E equals Emmy, T equals Tony, and G equals Grammy; a bougier GAPDY lol

That was easy … but I am American

Ditto. Blue first today

Yeah, bollocksed it up today.

For the non-Americans: https://www.oscarmayer.com/

It’s hard to describe exactly how much of a cultural phenomenon this brand was for several decades, to the point where they’re now just embedded into the American psyche (I don’t remember seeing any of their commercials in the past 10 years)

It was the chuffing Murphy and Sleigh beds that did for me, tbh.

would understand "table" as putting up for discussion xps

would understand moot as _both_ debatable and not worth debating, the point being that moot surely centres the "not worth" as the point

theres a thread in this stuff he said nudging the ilxors