Blog
I Drank Every Cocktail
The International Bartenders Association, or IBA, maintains a list of official cocktails, ones they deem to be “the most requested recipes” at bars all around the world. It’s the closest thing the bartending industry has to a canonical list of cocktails, akin to the American Kennel Club’s registry of dog breeds or a jazz musician’s Real Book of standards.
Square Theory
The story starts in Crosscord, the crossword Discord server. Over 5,000 users strong, the server has emerged as a central hub for the online crossword community, a buzzing, sometimes overwhelming, sometimes delightful town square where total noobs, veteran constructors, and champion solvers alike come together to talk about words that cross each other.
Crossword Calendar
Ever heard of the Tetris effect? It’s where you play so much Tetris that the game starts to seep into your thoughts, your dreams, your half-waking hallucinations, and pretty much every part of your reality that has nothing to do with Tetris. Well, I do a lot of crosswords—by “do” I mean both “solve” and “make”—and it turns out the “crossword effect” is also a very real thing.
Sidle
One of my favorite idea-having times is when I’m in bed, with my eyes closed, not quite asleep but not quite awake, in the hypnagogic state where the mind starts to make connections and realizations that it wouldn’t normally make during the day. Oftentimes these thoughts aren’t worth remembering, but sometimes I get out of bed and write them down, and sometimes they turn into yearlong side projects.
What's the Name of This University?
Amid the cornfields of central eastern Illinois lies a public land-grant research university. What’s it called? For most universities, this question is simple, but in this case, its answer has perplexed students, alumni, and Wikipedia editors for decades.
