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My sister introduced me to Jake Bugg years ago but I never properly gave him a chance. This song came up today and I think it's great.

https://youtu.be/_est5zPL6eo

3rd guess today, I’ve actually been having a good run of mostly 3’s lately, after my earlier dismal spell.

I just calculated my average from the 63 games since the cache-deleting incident (when I also stopped calculating my average), and I’m on 3.95. Happy with that.

I’ve had a few more 3’s and 4’s recently so feeling better. In fact, my 3’s bar is longer than my 5’s bar for the first time since The Great Cache-tastrophe.

You may be aware, The Telegraph have a cool new spin. It’s called PlusWord, and it’s basically a mini 5x5 crossword, but some of the squares are shaded green and yellow giving you a little Wordle-esque puzzle to solve on top of the crossword.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/plusword/

Damn, #344 was hard. I got it in 4 goes but I feel like a bit dirty as I had the 2nd and 4th letters and basically had no choice but to brute force it systematically until I came across a potential word, even though I had no idea what it meant. Luckily it was correct.

Similar thing here in Japan at convenience stores.

They sell fried chicken drumsticks which they put in paper bags.

The bags have a perforated tear-off line about two thirds of the way down.

The way it's supposed to work is that you tear off the top of the bag and gnaw on the drumstick while holding the base of the bone wrapped in the smaller part of the bag that is left.

This is the system that is designed so that you never have to touch the actual drumstick and get your fingers greasy.

But 9 times out of 10 the staff puts the drumstick into the bag top first, which means you have to pull it back out and put it back in so that the bone end is in the right place to tear off the bag.

And then the entire reason for the bag is gone.

The worst part is that on the back of the bag there is a diagram showing the buyer how to use the bag properly.

But the staff have never looked at the diagram.

To add to this, they also seal the paper bag with a small piece of tape, except they invariably put the tape over part or the perforated line, making it harder to cleanly rip the bag open.

This kind of thing should be common sense but I’m afraid in Japan common sense is secondary to just literally following the guidelines. There is a piece of paper somewhere telling them to put the chicken in the bag and then to seal the bag with a piece of tape. But I’m guessing the guideline doesn’t specify that they should put the chicken in the right way diwn and to avoid putting the tape over the perforated line. And unfortunately, if it’s not written down then it just won’t occur to many people here.

The Mothman Prophecies?

Nice one. I got #336 in 3 guesses

Spoiler

FRIED > PARTY > SCRAP

[close]

Had more than my fair share of 5s and 6s though lately.

Wordle 329 3/6*

⬛⬛⬛⬛🟨
🟩🟩🟨⬛🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

I got lucky with my 2nd guess. After that, I don’t think there was any other possible answer with the information I had.

Spoiler

SCOPE
MEANT (following cat’s earlier comment about non-infinitive verbs.)
METAL

[close]

It’s been a mixed bag for me. I’ve stopped keeping track of my overall average but it’s well over 4. I’ve had way too many 5s and 6s in the last few weeks.

I was happy with today’s (#328) result though: 3 guesses.

Wordle 328 3/6*

⬛⬛⬛🟩⬛
⬛⬛⬛🟩🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Why do so-called "sing-along" or karaoke videos on YouTube only ever display each line at the point the line begins in the song? This renders it impossible to even try to "sing-along" to the song unless you already know it. But if you already know it, you don't need to see the lyrics in the first place?

Would it hurt them to bring up the next line just a few milliseconds early to give people a chance? Even just the first word of the next line would make a world of difference.

I’ve not played brilliantly since my last post but I did manage to get “heist” in 2 shots.

When I get a chance I need to work out my overall average, combining my pre- and post-cache-reset scores.

Well done for getting below 4, Snarky.

Looking great, Grundi. You’re in the final stretch. All the best.

Ahh unlucky cat.

I got #304 in 4, but I also got #303 in 2.

It’s almost midnight in Japan, so I’ll be able to play #305 shortly.

[Update: #305 - 4 tries]

I’m not sure if this is real but it’s funny if it is:
https://twitter.com/ihaveahat2/status/1514973672120848388?s=20=6W1bTifAGc83x7-D5_ZcaA

It was a tricky one for such a normal word. Or perhaps because it’s such a normal word.

Not until after pasting the below grid did it occur to me that my setting would have reset to easy mode (if someone’s on hard mode, it shows an asterisk).

Spoiler

I thought I’d go with a word with lots of vowels. Turned out to be a bad idea, especially as none of them were ‘E’.

Wordle 300 X/6

⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨 ouija
🟨⬜⬜🟨⬜ after
⬜⬜🟩⬜🟩 plane
⬜🟩🟩🟨🟩 chase
🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩 shade
🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩 shake

By the time I got to the 5th guess, it was just a lucky dip between shade, shave, shake and shame. I had two shots, and missed them both.

[close]

Noooooo. Can it get any worse?

My first game after clearing my cache ended in total disaster and I had my first ever fail. (#300)

I won’t yet post what the grid looked like because it could give something away. I’m pretty gutted right now.

Bad news. I had a panic last night when my phone was on less than 1gb remaining. Went through deleting clearing data, deleting apps and, unfortunately, clearing my Safari cache.

I’m proud to say that after 82 games I still had a 100% record and a fairly decent average, but now I have to start from scratch.

[4.025]

My average took a bit of a hit in the past ten days, but it's not as bad as I was expecting.

No. guesses	No. of times	Points
1	0	0
2	5	10
3	20	60
4	32	128
5	14	70
6	9	54
	Total	322
	/80 days	4.025

That’s a cool bot. It’s a bit buggy on my phone but really clever little tool.

I’m not having a very good week.

Wordle 293 5/6*

⬛⬛🟩🟩🟩
🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩
🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩
🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩