#usatoday puzzles

[vanessa-m-lounsbury]

online word search

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[breadboylovin]

@saturn-scribbles ok heres the story of how i became a hivemind fan through being addicted to crossoword puzzles (making my own post about this bc i think its funny)

feb 2022 i was a Word Game Wacko bc everyone was doing wordle so i would play literally anything i could find and so i did a ton of crossword puzzles every day. usually i would do the new york times, washington post, dictionary.com and usatoday. anyway on feb 19 2022 (i remember the date because i scoured the archive to see if i could find the exact puzzle LOL) one of the clues on the usatoday one was this

i saw this and i was like what the hell. why are we putting tweets in crossword puzzles what is this. who is this guy. so i looked him up on twitter and saw that ro ramdin (who i was already watching) followed him and i was like okayyyyy...

then i saw his bio linked to another twitter (the official hivemind account). clicked on that and they had just uploaded the first weird lyrics video and i was intrigued. watched that and the first best tweets video and thought they were funny. was a casual fan and then in summer 2023 i got an evil brainworm that made me obsessed with them and now im here

[primepaginequotidiani]

PRIMA PAGINA Usa Today di Oggi venerdì, 25 ottobre 2024

[transmutationisms]

hey! i saw all the crossword stuff and wanted to ask if there are any other crosswords you like besides nyt/new yorker. thanks!

hi! so, the closest you'll get to nyt is the washington post and wall street journal puzzles; these are generally drawing from roughly the same knowledge base, though i find their clueing tends to be a bit straighter and less creative (new yorker's knowledge base skews a little more toward arts and academic theory, though this depends heavily on who the constructor is on any given day). the usatoday puzzle tends easy (meaning lots of straight clues; usually about the difficulty of an nyt monday) but it's also become much more interesting since erik agard took over as their puzzle editor: he's really pushed to move beyond the usual stodgy newspaper knowledge base, so although that puzzle doesn't scratch the same itch as, like, an nyt saturday, i do still really like it. i also love the black crossword, which is a free daily mini that places emphasis on terms and clues from across the black diaspora, and there are some free online puzzles that are pretty good: brendan emmett quigley posts a themeless one on mondays and a themed one on thursdays, and there's merl reagle's archive, which posts a sunday puzzle once a week.

but! puzzle preferences are highly individual so it's always worth poking around to see what you like. this is a good list of puzzles you can try out; you might also find that you really like certain constructors, and just follow their work (i love erik agard and anna shechtman, eg).

[waveypedia]

if you're on a connections withdrawl, try connections stacked - it's exactly the same as regular connections except each category has a different amount of words!

i like the latimes crossword (because i don't pay for nyt and therefore cannot play the big crossword). they have a mini and a sudoku if you play the nyt's, and a wordsearch to scratch the strands itch. lots of other newspapers have free online crosswords - i've also played usatoday and seattle times

there are also a lot of other daily puzzle games out there that aren't related to nyt games! my personal favorite is murdle - it's a clue-style murder mystery puzzle with a daily mini and full. all of the descriptor cards are delightfully written

tl;dr don't cross the picket line: play another online daily puzzle instead!

(Source)

"The Tech Guild is asking readers to honor the digital picket line and not play popular NYT Games such as Wordle and Connections as well as not use the NYT Cooking app."

[usatodayopinion]

— Trevor Noah, Best of Late Night

[daisydumpstaire]

ok I keep forgetting to make this post but last week (p sure it was August 20) I was playing some online crosswords and in usatoday one of the clues was "Brennan __ Mulligan of Fantasy High" or something and I want to find it again to show a screenshot but they have a weird thing where you have to have an account to see past puzzles but like. I don't know how that kinda shit works but does he know??? that he's a clue?? did they have to get his permission? I feel like it would feel so cool to learn you're a crossword puzzle clue if you didn't know already I'd tweet it at him but I don't have a usatoday account and don't use twitter but like now the question of if he knows just won't leave my brain

[laliberty]

Trends can change at any time, of course. But for now, the data points toward a continued overall trend toward less homicide in the United States.

Nor is this trend just limited to homicides. This is important to note because sometimes observers of homicide data suggest homicides have only lessened because medical science means fewer assaults result in death.

But we can also see that violent crime in general — including aggravated assaults — are down considerably from earlier peaks.

Violent crime overall was at 382.9 per 100,000 during 2017, near a 45 year low. ...

In spite of all this, journalists and pundits who focus on mass shootings might say "well, the homicide rate would improve more if mass shootings weren't such a problem."

That may be so. But how much of the homicide puzzle are mass shootings? It turns out: very small.

According to Mother Jones magazine — a publication that's hardly a right-wing stooge for the NRA — there were 117 deaths resulting from mass shootings in 2017. Given that there were 17,284 homicides reported during 2017, mass shootings made up 0.7 percent off all homicides.

In 2018, there were 80 deaths from mass shootings. We don't have full-year 2018 data yet, but since the first half of the year already shows a 6.7 percent decrease, let's assume a slight decrease for the year, down to 17,000 homicides. If this turns out to be the case, that means mass shooting deaths will make up about 0.5 percent of all homicides.

Those wounded in mass shootings are an even smaller percentage of those who survive serious assaults nationwide. Indeed, because aggravated assaults are so numerous, the non-homicide victims of mass shootings barely register as a percentage of total assaults. For example, in 2017, there were more than 810,000 aggravated assaults in the US. Even if we count the shockingly large number of wounded (i.e., 546 people) from the Las Vegas shooting that year, the total comes to 0.07 percent of all aggravated assaults.

Meanwhile, USAToday reports, 41% of Americans fear random mass shootings.

It remains unclear, however, why USAToday should label such concerns as "not an unreasonable fear." True, it makes sense to not discount the risk of mass shootings entirely, and to be aware that the risk exists. Even if very small.

However, for all the air time and public discussion devoted to mass shootings in the US, nearly all people murdered in America this year will be murdered the "old fashioned" way. They'll be murdered by a family member or a jilted lover or by some street thug looking to score some cash to pay for a drug fix. Most Americans murdered this year will victims of the sort we see in Baltimore where ordinary murders of the non-mass-shooting variety continue to wreak havoc on the local population. These murders won't be any less tragic than murders from mass shootings. But you won't hear nearly as much about them as you'll hear about the mass shootings.

Of course, from a public policy perspective, it's easy to see why pundits and politicians and media journalists would push the mass-shooting angle so hard. The seeming randomness of the shootings allows nearly the entire population to imagine that it could be a victim of a mass shooting at any time. After all, these shootings occur in churches and in schools and at county fairs. These are places where ordinary, middle class Americans go. More importantly, these are places voters go. It's easy to look at street crime in a big city and dismiss it as simply a problem for people who live in "slums." Thus, by focusing on mass shootings, its easier to create the impression that violence has exploded across the US, as mass shootings get ever more air time and discussion in social media.

Yes, it may very well be that trends reverse themselves, and we enter another cycle of rising crime in coming years. For now, however, most Americans' estimates that crime is "getting worse" in the US appears to be unfounded.

[buddaimond]

Robert Pattinson’s words in his interview with USAToday 04.04.2019 (excerpts):

When he first read the script for “High Life”:

"I was like, 'Wait a second? What is this?' " he says with a laugh. "I was fascinated. I knew it was going to spark a conversation."

About the Fuckbox:

In reality, the room constructed on the set "sort of looked like a public toilet with a dildo chair," he adds. "I was like, 'Claire, this is quite a literal interpretation of a sex box.' The art department spent a lot of time in sex shops getting various objects for it."

About why he was drawn to the story:

because "it presented itself as a puzzle," he says. "You had to sort of feel your way through it without really knowing what the exact rules of the script were."

Before he met Claire, "I read the Wikipedia on 'string theory' and tried to (rationalize) some reason why this character would not age because of spacetime," ...”She hadn't heard that before and she loves romanticizing these kinds of ideas in physics. So it was my one card I had to play, and I was like, 'Wow, that actually worked.' "

About his singing:

"I used to play gigs all the time and have always said I'd love to again... But there's a strange stigma with actors trying to do music, and it is something quite frightening to me. I've learned how to deal with criticism in film, but I’m very vulnerable to it in music. I don’t know whether I’m willing to take the hits – I prefer to have an audience of one or two (friends)."                                                    

About his “sworn to secrecy” blockbuster project with Christopher Nolan:

"I got locked in a room to read the script – I don't have it myself... I've been a little wary of doing big movies for years and years, but there's just something about Chris Nolan's stuff. He seems like the only director now who can do what is essentially a very personal, independent movie that has huge scale. I read the script and it's unreal."

[lynsaysands]

More great news about my latest release, The Trouble With Vampires… It hit #5 on the New York Times BestSeller’s list and #10 on the USA Today Bestseller’s list ! 😲🎉 Thank you my awesome readers as YOU made this happen!👏🏻

And as clearly shown in this pic I have started working on the Sci-Fi ad jigsaw puzzle and it hasn’t been easy.😆 Fun but tough!

@ArgeneauSeries @TroubleWithVampires @NYTimes @USAToday

[boycritter]

whoever made the usatoday crossword puzzle for today is gay as hell

[primepaginequotidiani]

PRIMA PAGINA Usa Today di Oggi venerdì, 11 ottobre 2024

[fagimator]

Im so pissed about this still my ritual of burning through the crosswords offered by puzzle society dot com and then going to new yorker on private tab to do the full suite has been fucking ruined by paywalls. Now I have to open a private tab for usatoday , then do puzzle society, then open another private tab for newyorker. They fucked with my little crossword ritual im going to shit

Fuck you fuck fyou fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fcuk you go suck cock and balls give me my fucking crossword back

[transmutationisms]

sudoku classism is so interesting to me because in my country crosswords are a thing grandma does on a train station and sudokos are a little more respected (because grandmas usually dont know the rules and you dont need to know rules to do crosswords). also usually our crosswords are easy idk ive tried doing english crosswords and it’s some c2 language proficiency stuff😭

yeah there's certainly no actual grounding to sudoku being any 'easier'---it's just a different skillset that's required. a sudoku designed to be challenging requires complex logic, whereas a crossword can look sort of hacky in comparison if it comes down to, like, how many actors' names you know lol. and like i said, in america a lot of the disdain for sudoku is racialised and also coming from a specific segment of like, nyt intelligentsia who wants to culturally differentiate themselves from some imagined technocrat class 😭

the difficulty of a crossword puzzle depends both on its fill (the letters in the grid) and on its clueing. a puzzle clued 'straight' (definitions of words, direct trivia) will be a lot easier than one clued with a lot of wordplay, clues that cross-reference one another, or a particularly complicated theme or metapuzzle. so within the crosswording world there's also a lot of internal hierarchy lol. like, people who religiously do the saturday in the new york times look down on people who only do the sunday in the washington post, or god forbid just do usatoday. new yorker is more erudite. and construction-wise, grids with a higher percentage of shaded squares or 3-letter answers are easier and therefore legacy media submission guidelines usually limit these things lol.

anyway my point is just that american crosswords are made exclusive and highbrow on purpose, and people who think solving crosswords makes them smart usually don't realise how much they're just using "smart" to mean "part of the narrow reader demographic being targeted by this publication." also there are tricks you pick up by doing a lot of crosswords, and certain words that show up in crosswords and nowhere else (smee). down with crossword superiority complexes or whatever

[nahoo883]

'Fierce, focused and fearless': Fiona Hill emerges as a principled voice in impeachment inquiry

Responding to the question of whether she is a "Never Trumper," Fiona Hill called it a "puzzling term" for nonpartisan officials.

       from USATODAY - News Top Stories https://ift.tt/2KJsyMu via IFTTT from Blogger https://ift.tt/2KG1tcP via IFTTT

[carlsbad-homes-for-sale]

We often discuss the  difference in family wealth  between homeowner households and renter households. Much of that difference is the result of the  equity buildup  that homeowners experience over the time that they own their home. In a report recently released by the nonpartisan  Employee Benefit Research Institute  (EBRI), they reveal how valuable equity can be in retirement planning.    Craig Copeland,  Senior Research Associate  at  EBRI,  recently authored a report,   Importance of Individual Account Retirement Plans and Home Equity in Family Total Wealth   ,  in which he reveals:    “Individual account retirement plan assets, plus home equity, represent almost all of what families have to use for retirement expenses outside of Social Security and traditional pensions. Those families without individual account assets typically have very low overall assets, so they have almost nothing to draw from for retirement expenses.”    The report echoed the findings of a working paper,   Home Equity Patterns among Older American Households  , authored by Barbara Butrica and Stipica Mudrazija of  Urban Institute.   Fannie Mae  highlighted these findings for their blog  The Home Story  this past winter, quoting Butrica and Mudrazija:     “For most adults near traditional retirement age, a home is their most valuable asset — dwarfing retirement accounts, other financial assets, and other nonfinancial assets. Although relatively few retirees tap into their home equity, having it provides financial security… In fact, many retirement security experts argue that the conventional three-legged stool of retirement resources — Social Security, pensions, and savings — is incomplete because it ignores the home.”     USAToday  interviewed two area experts to comment on the EBRI report. Randy Bruns, a private wealth adviser with  HighPoint Planning Partners,  agreed with the findings:    “Social Security and home equity are major pieces of the retirement puzzle.”    Wade Pfau,  Professor of Retirement Income  at  The American College of Financial Services  and author of  “ Reverse Mortgages: How to use Reverse Mortgages to Secure Your Retirement, ”  said having the equity without a plan to use it won’t help:    “Home equity is a very important asset for American retirees, and so it is important to think about how to make best use of home equity in retirement planning.”     Bottom Line   Whether you use the equity in your home through a reverse mortgage or by selling and downsizing to a less expensive home, it should be a crucial piece of your retirement planning.