The Stack

I said that I hadn’t done the World’s Most Orneries. I have, however, been attempting them. I think I’ve tried them all by now, mainly because I wanted to confirm that they were World’s Most Orneries — as before, they’re listed only by title, not type. But I’ve only finished two. This is because I keep drowsing off.

Really, you can blame my current schedule more than the puzzles (or the music, which I haven’t even been listening to). A World’s Most Ornery takes takes me about 1-2 hours to get through, which is certainly something I can manage in most circumstance. It’s about the same amount of time that I’d spend on a Battleships set, for one thing. But I haven’t even been trying the Battleships lately, because they require more focus. If start to nod off in the middle of a logic puzzle like Battleships, then drag myself awake and remember “Right, I was in the middle of a puzzle, I should finish that”, I’m basically lost. Puzzles of that sort involve storing information in your head about what implies what. Crosswords don’t. I can go straight from drifting off to looking at a clue with exactly the same level of bafflement that I started with.

I think I’d stay awake better if the game better afforded breaking the monotony by alt-tabbing out to a browser window, if only to start preparing a blog post. It doesn’t prevent you from doing this, but it keeps the screen resolution at 640×480, which is so unsuited to modern use that it hardly seems worth it.