I've divided my completion into three separate, but closely related archives. They are each dedicated to an existing or yet-to-be group.


Archive 1: Physical Dedicated to LEWL, should it ever come to exist.

Crossword puzzles. Specifically, for the sake of the archive being interesting and requiring work on my part, completed or attempted crossword puzzles.

I've seen estimates of the mean age of solvers at 50, 55, and higher. Either way, I'm more than a few decades younger than most crossword solvers. It's amazing the animosity I encountered from my peers while completing this task, much of which was done in public. I've duly noted that solving crossword puzzles isn't exactly the best way to impress women, although I think I'd kind of dig the girl who would be interested in someone solving crossword puzzles. One of the more interesting comments I received while solving in public was, "You must be so bored." What? I must be so bored doing the crossword puzzle, because they're boring? Then why the hell would I be doing it? Or is it that I have been driven to do a crossword puzzle because I was already so bored? In that case, what's wrong with me find a good solution to my boredom? In any event, some people seemed at the very least neutral, and willing to give help on clues from time to time.

The current count of completed or attempted crosswords in physical form is: 146
Much of that is in books, not newspaper... but collecting completed newspaper puzzles began to take up a lot of room and possibly posed a fire hazard.

The puzzles include:

-New York Times, Monday-Sunday
-New York Sun, Monday, Tuesday
-Some crappy computer-generated crosswords that I did before I knew better (I know better now!)
-The Onion Crossword (Probably the 'hippest' crossword out there. Check it out, you might be surprised)



Obviously, this archive will continue to expand and I plan to update with numbers as they increase.


Archive 2: Temporal Dedicated to Chrononautic Exxon

One thing I thought I would do to make this praxis a little more interesting is to log the times for some of the crosswords I did. Specifically, Monday NY Sun puzzles. For those of you who don't know, Peter Gordon is the editor of the NY Sun, and the puzzles he produces are on par with the New York Times. And for Monday, at least, they're pretty comparable in difficulty. So, no, these are not difficult crosswords. But there is still a skill to being able to complete them more quickly.



As you can see, as I began logging my times, I was on the cusp of making some pretty big progress. I think, before I started to record times, that my average solving time for a Monday puzzle was probably somewhere around 15-20 minutes. Within about 20 puzzles or so, my times had dropped to sub-10 minutes, and even though it's a bit harder to see, my times continued to drop, though not as clearly because there are always going to be certain puzzles that just take a lot longer to do. I pushed down by minimum time to under 6 minutes, which from what I can tell isn't half bad.

Archive 3: Mental Dedicated to EquivalenZ


I didn't even expect to be collecting for this archive, but all along, I was.


Stored somewhere in the firing neurons that make up my conscious, there is an archive... an archive that tells me:

Be, for many (3) is ARE
Poet's 'fore (3) is ERE
Anger (3) is IRE
A miner's haul (3) is ORE
A cookie (4) is OREO
A measurement (4) is AREA
A song (4) is ARIA
Name of a canal and a lake (4) is ERIE
Spooky (5) is EERIE
Lusty look (4) is LEER
Shakespearean king (4) is LEAR
Rip (4) is TEAR
Oolong and chai (4) is TEAS
Meadows (4) is LEAS

You get the point.

This archive is, in all likelihood, fairly large. Just starting a random NY Sun crossword and going across, "Litter cries" is MEWS, "Windows predecessor" is MSDOS, and "Move like glue" is OOZE. Access speed is another very important aspect of this archive that improves only with practice. You only need to look at the Temporal archive to see how that's improved.

This members of this archive, apparently, get together and conspire to come up with hypothetical clues for answers that I haven't even seen before. A "Bit of work for a singer" is an ARIA, while a "Bit of work for a Singer" is a STITCH.

You see how this task has twisted my mind, SF0? You see what lengths I've gone to, what I've subjected myself to in the sake of the drive for score? Dear lord. One day I may submit a praxis with a puzzle of my own. Just you wait.

Check out the videos. The first is an examination of what makes a good vs. a bad crossword, and is reasonably interesting. The second is me paging through the timed Sun puzzles, and is less so.