Month: December 2025

The Default

When your attention is committed and a task still needs to be done, how do you approach it? When you’re too tired for the challenging and still looking for something fun, where do you look first?

I play a lot of games when I’m not thinking; the ones with which I’m so familiar that it’s more pattern recognition than active thought. (I play a lot of games when I’m thinking, too, about anything else. Strategy games make good fidgets.) At the moment, my most in use and so most easy-to-default-to game is Yi Xian.

My most default of kitchen processes, meanwhile, is definitely the hummus wrap. When in doubt, grab four ready-to-use ingredients, chop a sweet pepper, and roll. Nice system, right? It’s certainly practical. I’m curious about the patterns, more so – the way that I fall into a normal, and stay there awhile, and then wander to something new and adventurous, and then stay there, and so on. Is that universal? I expect that it would be, and you know what they say about assume.

If it is – how do you address the normal-that-was? I used to write whole essays to the backdrop of Hearthstone Battlegrounds. I used to bake chicken like clockwork. As a very small child, I could recite by heart most if not all of my Mo Willem’s books.

How do you go about carrying what something meant when you’re not actively holding it?

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Enter To Win: The Sequel

I don’t usually come back to topics on this blog, which is… absurd, considering how often one comes back to topics in life. And one of the topics I’ve come back to recently is sweepstakes.

It’s lost some of its novelty since the last time I wrote about it – I’m definitely less excited about free paper towels – but it’s still neat to peruse. I’ve been using a different aggregator, too, Sweepstakes Fanatics, which is laid out so that it’s way easier to tell what each giveaway is for, at a glance, and it marks the items that have been added in the last day. (They take weekends off, so there won’t be any of those right now.) The added convenience has definitely been helpful, as someone who prefers to casually scroll through sweepstakes when I bored.

Casual or not, I continue to have opinions. Last time, I talked about website experiences and travel daydreams, which are still my preferred subset of the bunch, and recently I’ve been thinking more about the actual mechanics of each of them. Some companies exclusively offer the cruise – you’re on the hook for actually getting to it, shore excursions, etc. etc. Some offer the cruise, the airfare, a hotel room the night before embarking, ground transfers… And they all have their own terms and conditions for by when the trip should be. Of course, the targeted trips are way more specific – there’s not a lot of flexibility when it comes to music festivals or sports.

“What does it look like to believe you can win?” was my topic last time. The delight of raw possibility. “What does it look like to win?” I’d like to ask. Do you want to spend a week in the Caribbean enough to pay for airfare? Do you want to spend two nights in California, where just about everything is covered and your itinerary is pre-planned? Do you want to spend specifically February 12-15 in Milan, Italy, to watch hockey? The options are pretty endless.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Do You Recognize This Bird(le)?

I was playing Metazooa recently – a taxonomy game – and excited about the different species at our bird feeder, and I figured, “There has to be a bird identification game out there, right?” And, shock of shocks, there is that!

Birdle is, as the name would imply, Wordle-esque, in that there’s a daily target and six guesses for the user, with indicators for partial success. Of course, Birdle has slightly different objectives than Wordle, being an identification game – that is to say, each daily bird comes with photos of it and possibly a range map. Your goal is to guess its name – its common name – with a dropdown to help, so if you type in “yellow” it will offer you every bird with “yellow” in its name, applicable to that area.

Area-applicable is, of course, only important because of another feature – not only is there a bird-of-the-day for the world, but there are also birds for each of the continents! Excepting Antarctica, because Antarctica, but including Central America and, as a treat, the contiguous US. I have a guess as to where most of their user base is.

Once you’ve guessed, the screen will display that bird’s order, family, genus, and species, grey for wrong and green for the ones that you’ve gotten correct. For some birds this is more useful than others – songbirds are now the bane of my existence, even though I love them and they’re adorable – but in all cases, after your third guess, it will offer to tell you what the correct family is, and then after the next guess the genus, and after guess five it will offer you the first three letters of the bird’s common name. Depending on how expansive the genus is – and whether or not you’re using Wikipedia – this can still leave some room for error, but its clear that the true objective is for you to learn. And check out some gorgeous bird photography. And if nine birds-of-the-day aren’t for either of those enough, there’s also a practice function, where you can plug in geography and/or family of birds and get photos with multiple choice!

The pictures are from eBird and the range maps are from Birds of the World, both of which are comprehensive. And the game aspect adds a certain motive-to-process, as it were. Why else would I remember that some ducks are called pintails? (And why are some hummingbirds called hermits?)

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail