Puzzles and Answers magazine

Puzzles and Answers magazine has become an excellent pastime of classicaljunkie and myself. I can recommend it to anyone who enjoys puzzle hunts / extravanganzas, like MIT's mystery hunt or The Fool's Errand - a set of themed puzzles whose answers combine into a meta-puzzle, which itself yields the whole set's ultimate solution.

Each bimonthly issue serves as a standalone extravaganza and costs $5, purchasable online and then downloadable as a PDF. The latest issue, themed around reality TV, seems easier than the last one, or at least closer to my own skill level. After a few hours of leisurely solving today we knocked over two of them and got into "I've filled out the grid; now what" territory with two more. If you're going to try out a single issue, I would recommend this one.

Too much confusion, indeed

It occurs to me that I'd be remiss to overlook this news, given all my previous whining about broadcast television so: three cheers to the Battlestar Galactica producers for taking a risk I've been waiting for someone to try, and announcing the publication of a direct-to-DVD BSG movie later this year. It will be a side-story about another ship in the same universe, and will help take the edge off the long wait until the next season of the main show starts.

I stopped giving BSG Neilsen support when I stopped using my TiVo (and watching any broadcast TV at all) months ago, but I've instead been giving them a buck or so every week via iTMS downloads. I have to imagine that my cold hard dollar is objectively more valuable to them than my watching their hour's TV ads, but I have no idea if their (and their network overlords') popularity-accounting methods weight downloads versus TV-watchings that way. I'd be surprised if they did.

But someone's paying attention, what with all these green lights. I am thrilled at the gutsy move to take a TV show off of the broadcast channel entirely (or have a DVD release that's simultaneous with a broadcast; I'm not really sure yet?), and I applaud the smart toe-dipping maneuver of doing so with a one-shot movie. TV is a medium that wants to subvert itself after 50 years of the same damn paradigm, and I'm thrilled that it's finally found a champion.

Speaking of both classicaljunkie and BSG, she and I finally watched the season finale on Friday (during the precious time in between the week-long business trips she's made recent habit of) ( very tiny barely-spoilers, but I cater to extreme spoilerphobes... )

This is a really dumb userpic for BSG posts.