Bryce Moore's Blog, page 121

Stochastic Terrorism

[image error]I came across a new phrase recently: stochastic terrorism. (My post today is my own reaction to Kottke’s excellent post on the topic.) I’m a fairly well-read individual, so if it’s new to me, I imagine it’s new to a lot of you as well. It’s a term that was coined back in 2011. I think we all know by now what “terrorism” means. “Stochastic” is “having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely.” In other words, it’s something that that can be predicted on a large scale, even if individual instances themselves are random.

To put it in boardgame-speak, think of it like the probability of getting a certain number when you roll two six-sided dice. Sure, each individual roll is random, and might result in anything from a two to a twelve, but you do enough of those random rolls, and you’re going to see sevens get rolled way more often than twelves.

When you apply this concept to terrorism, it gets really disturbing. Think of Osama Bin Laden back in the day, releasing videos to the world that called for violence against Americans. Was Bin Laden personally causing that violence? Well, no. He wasn’t going out there with a bomb or a gun to get it done, but his call for violence resulted in people deciding to become violent.

In other words, make a call for action to enough people, and you can reasonably expect some of those people will follow through on that action.

When this phrase was coined in 2011, it was used to accuse some of the right-wing media of inciting Americans to violence. Bill O’Reilly went on an extended tirade against a doctor named George Tiller, and then an anti-abortionist extremist killed Tiller, for example. To be able to practice stochastic terrorism, you need big enough platform to reach a wide audience, and then you need a call to action, however vague that call might be.

So let’s play the “is this stochastic terrorism” game. In each case, assume the person speaking already has the platform covered. The question, then, is “is this a call to action” that would incite someone to violence?

“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know.”
“If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, OK? Just knock the hell … I promise you I will pay for the legal fees.”
“You know, part of the problem and part of the reason it takes so long is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore, right?”

Has Trump ever come out and said “I hope someone sends mail bombs to my opponents”? Definitely not. Has he said “I hope someone goes to a synagogue and opens fire”? Another obvious no. But I believe you can argue the rhetoric and stance he has taken on numerous issues at numerous times count as “calls to action,” or at the very least could be interpreted as such by people who are already playing with a full deck of cards.

It’s one thing to disagree with people. To call them liars or crooked or whatever. What I really object to is this new trend of opening the door to violence. “Somebody should really do something about ___________,” which might as well be followed with a “Wink wink, nudge nudge.” With great power comes great responsibility, and I’m disappointed that responsibility is being ignored.

I didn’t write anything in the aftermath of the mail bomb incidents. I didn’t write anything after the horrendous synagogue killings. I veered away from both because it’s just too depressing at this point for me to continue to engage with every single event. They’re coming too quickly, too close together. And in my view, the fact that some of our leaders are involved in inciting the violence is unforgivable.

It’s stochastic terrorism.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Holidays as an Adult vs. Holidays as a Kid

[image error]We carved pumpkins and decorated Halloween cookies yesterday as a family. Good times, as always, though (as always) we really had to push to actually get those traditions in. (As I posted last year, I believe: Halloween is a tough holiday. You get no time off for it, but it has almost as many traditions around it these days as Christmas does.)

Some times it can be really tempting to just not worry about cookies for a year. Or to let pumpkins slide. But on the flip side, as I was pondering that reality last night, I also was putting MC to bed. She’s five, and she’s in full on Halloween Excitement mode.

It occurred to me that one or two years of activities totally sets the tone for holidays and traditions at that age. For MC, Halloween has always been about pumpkins and cookies. But if Denisa and I had missed a year or two, she would have no real concept of them as “traditions.”

This isn’t making sense. Maybe an example from my own life will help clarify it.

In my head, I also associate pumpkin stew with Halloween. It’s a fun meal to make, and I remember my family making it “all the time” when I was growing up. (Take some stew, put it in a pumpkin, bake it in the oven. Though now that I think of it, I think a few times it was just “put already baked stew into a pumpkin.”) In any case, I’m not sure how many times my mom actually made that meal around Halloween. It might have been only three or four times total.

But time works differently when you don’t have as many years to compare things to. If Denisa and I skip a year of pumpkin carving, that’s just one year out of a slew of them. Skip one as a kid, and that’s a quarter or a fifth of all the Halloweens you’ve experienced.

Not like any of us needed any more incentives to do those traditions, but there you have it.

One of the main reasons I do these things with my family is because I remember doing them and loving them as a kid myself. One of the big perks as a parent is being able to pass on fun memories of your childhood to your kids, in the hopes that they’ll enjoy those same things. Sometimes that works. Other times it backfires. But when it involves fun and games and candy, experience has led me to believe it almost always goes fine.

In any case, another round of pumpkins are in the books! For reference, Tomas did a Rubiks cube, DC did an owl design she came up with on her own, MC and Denisa did an owl they found online, and I did a Cheshire Cat I saw a picture of online as well.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

A Review of Saints: The New Church-Authorized Latter-day Saint History

[image error]On September 4, 2018, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released a new history: Saints, volume 1. (The whole history is planned to be 4 volumes in all.) The printed it in paper and electronically, and they even added it to the Gospel Library app that’s freely available on almost all electronic devices. You can read the entirety online, as well.

I started reading it when it was published, and I’ve been plugging away at it since then, only recently finishing it. Reading through it prompted a number of thoughts, and I wanted to try and get those down in one form or another. This post may get a bit rambly. Apologies in advance.

First, I have to say I wish the Church would use this text as the basis for its Sunday School lessons for a year. I know that would be a big departure from the tried and true method of “one book of scripture per year” approach that’s been used since I can remember, but I feel having the entire church body study this history together would do a lot of good. Why?

For one thing, it would address a problem that’s becoming more and more pervasive. Opponents to the church love to play gotcha with church members, looking for items in the church’s history that aren’t regularly highlighted, and then trotting those items out, telling members, “See? The church is hiding this from you!” This would include things including seer stones, multiple accounts of the First Vision, Joseph Smith’s plural wives, freemasonry, and more.

And in many ways, the detractors have a point. These elements are not highlighted in church lessons or church talks. They have been addressed now and then over the years, but it isn’t surprising that many or most church members haven’t heard of them.

When members finally do encounter them, they turn to the most logical resource to find out more: Google. And (speaking as a trained librarian), Google can really do nothing but let them down. Its algorithms focus on site popularity and search engine optimization. It doesn’t discern between “accurate” and “inaccurate”. What’s worse, the church detractors argue “You can’t listen to what the Church has said about it. They’re just going to lie to you.” And so questioners wander off into the only other sites that pop up when you Google Latter-day Saint history: sites largely created by people seeking to tear the church down.

It would make so much more sense to have church members go through those tough topics together and discuss them as a group. Pull the bandaid off once and for all, and bring it all out into the open. I’ve never been one to shy away from the more sensitive topics, confident that truth is truth, and I’ve always come through each challenge stronger than before it. Of course, it also helps that I’ve never been one to believe our leaders our infallible. I think we generally fumble along as best we can, and that applied to the early days just as it applies to today.

Another problem with the church’s approach of publishing these things online and in apps is that it’s too easy for them to be ignored. For example, the church published its Gospel Topics essays, including an important one on racism in the church. It has this important quote:

Today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects unrighteous actions in a premortal life; that mixed-race marriages are a sin; or that blacks or people of any other race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else. Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form.

But despite this publication, I still occasionally hear of members who cling to past explanations for the priesthood ban, and who refuse to believe anything that goes against those beliefs. When pointed to the online articles, the articles are dismissed because they’re “hidden away online somewhere.”

It’s time to stop hiding. And while publishing those essays and this history are laudable, it’ll take more to get membership as a whole to actually pay attention. And I don’t believe this history works as a “read this if you encounter questions” fix. If members are upset about what they’ve heard about Joseph Smith, they’re not going to turn to a 500+ page book. They’re going to Google. But if they read the book first, the end result might be quite different.

Don’t get me wrong. Saints doesn’t paint church history in an always favorable light. It doesn’t shy away from problematic areas, and that’s one of the reasons I liked it. Of course, detractors will no doubt continue to claim that it’s making things too tidy, but I think it’s done an admirable job of trying to piece history together into a narrative you can make some sense out of. Better yet, it provides references and footnotes for everything. (Yay!)

The Church has had detractors since it began, and many were willing to write just about anything to discredit the religion. Simply citing something because it’s contemporary to the church history doesn’t give it any more likelihood of being true compared to something else written at the same time. The fact that Saints includes both the good and the bad makes its account that much more believable.

Really, my sole complaint was that the writing itself was overly simplistic, but I’m sure that was done on purpose. The church wants this account to be easily understood by everyone at all levels, and so they made it very approachable. Sometimes that means it comes across a bit like an “easy reader,” but it doesn’t discount the facts laid out in it at all.

What did I think, after reading the book as a whole? I came away with a new appreciation for just how difficult those early years of the church were. How much struggling there was to find their way. There seems to be a tendency in many religious people to assume people who lived in an earlier era had more access to God, whether through angels or revelation or through direct appearances by a Supreme Being. And while there is some record of that in the early church, for the vast majority of it, they’re getting by the same way we get by today: by making decisions that seem good at the time, but prove to be far more problematic.

It was a reminder to me that it’s a mistake to assume earlier members had it easier. That somehow revelation was more direct back then. Instead, they tried multiple solutions to different problems. Some went well, some were disastrous. Members were flawed. They caused almost as many problems for themselves as others did.

Kind of like today.

Overall, I found it illuminating and well executed. There were even some things that I hadn’t encountered before, and the narrative is well pieced together. I strongly recommend members and non-members alike to read it if they’d like a fuller view of the history of the church. 8/10

When Hobbies Attack

[image error]I collect Magic the Gathering cards. Any long-time reader knows this. In fact, I collect quite a few of them. In January 2017, I bought around 100,000 of the things with plans to go through them, add a few to my collection, and sell the rest at a profit. I bought another 35,000 or so with the same plan. And in the intervening time, I chipped away at the collection, organizing it by set and by color and then alphabetically.

In many ways, I’ve enjoyed it. I find organizing things relaxing, strangely enough. (Probably one of the reasons I’m a librarian.) And it was a lot of fun to find cards stuffed away in that collection that were worth money. You come across seven $10 cards at once, and it feels kind of like you were mining for gold and it paid off.

But at the same time, 135,000 cards take up a lot of floor space, and Denisa’s patience is not infinite. I finally decided it was time to try to sell some of the cards and free up space. It takes time to go through organized cards and pick out the valuable ones, however. Hours later, I had my package all ready: $400 of cards in one batch, and $150 in another, going to a different vendor.

For the first bit, I felt inordinately pleased with myself. I was, after all, selling the cards for more than I’d paid for them, and that’s even after having taken out a bunch for my own collection. Mission successful! My card catalog is nicely stocked, and I did it all while turning a profit.

But then I did a bit of math. 1.5 years of work. Say an average of . . . 3 hours a week on it? That’s 234 hours. I “made” $550 for 234 hours’ of work. That’s an hourly rate of $2.35.

Let’s just say that I make significantly more than $2.35/hour at my current job.

Basically, I realized that I’ve still been approaching my hobby as if I’m a starving college student. Don’t get me wrong: I still enjoy going through cards and organizing them. But after doing all of this, I’m just not convinced the approach I was taking is the one I want to be taking long-term. I’m only through half the collection, and I think I’ll just skim through the rest to find any cards I need, and then sell it off quickly, just to clear the extra cards out of my house.

Space is worth money too, after all. Right?

In any case, it’s a new lesson learned. Any hobbies you’ve discovered changing your approach to as time goes by?

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Heavy Meta #17: Politics with Jim Melcher

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In this episode, Kelly and I sit down with Jim Melcher, Professor of Political Science at UMF. Jim’s done more interviews with more people than I can possibly list, from local to national news. He runs a yearly Preview and Review of the Supreme Court cases that are most important (check out the latest here), and I’ve really enjoyed going to those each year.

We go over everything from Supreme Court appointments to how a political science professor chooses their news sources. Give it a listen!

Right click to download audio file.

Writing Update

[image error]It’s been a while since I’ve checked in with all of you to fill you in on how the writing’s going. Today seemed as good a day as any to do that, so here we go.

I took most of August off while I was gallivanting around Europe, but other than that, I’ve been plodding away steadily at my typical 1,000 words/day rate. I’ve got several projects up in the air at the moment, all of them in different stages of development.

MEMORY THIEF 2: Yes, this is still happening. No, I don’t have anything else I can tell you about it at the moment. The movie adaptation of the original is still moving forward, but I don’t have any updates on that either, alas. Some of it is due to Fox being acquired by Disney, but that’s all I’ve got for you at the moment. Sorry. The book is done, though there might be a bit more polishing that happens as soon as the publication date is set.
MURDER CASTLE: I’m actually working on this at the moment. I got the latest feedback from my agent last week, and I’m busy incorporating those changes. It’s not a huge rewrite. I hope to be done with it in a couple of weeks, at which point it’s likely the book will be ready to go out on submission. (Yay!) Reading it through again as I go, I’m really excited for this one, and very hopeful you get to see it published.
UTOPIA: Is with my agent at the moment. I believe it’s my . . . third draft? Something like that.
INCIDENT AT OAK CREEK: Is a short story that I just signed a contract for last week! It’s the Latter-day Shaolin work: steampunk alternative history adventure horror. The usual. It’s actually quite long for a short story. 11,000 words or so, which makes it technically a novelette, I believe. Not sure when the anthology will be published, but rest assured I’ll let you know when it is.
SILVERADO: This is the codename I’m giving my YA steampunk book that I was working on right before I transitioned over to edits on MURDER CASTLE. It’s actually a sequel of sorts to INCIDENT AT OAK CREEK. It shares a few characters and the world/history, but it’s a different point of view and main character, which makes a huge difference. I’m 40,000 words into it. I’d guess it’ll end up being around 60,000 words, but we’ll see how long the action sequences take. I was just getting to the good stuff when I had to set it aside. I’m excited for the book.

That about sums up where I am with current projects. After SILVERADO is done, I’m not sure what I’ll work on next, as far as novels go. But for now, I’m probably set until at least the end of the year.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

How Are You Doing?

[image error]“How are you doing?”

It’s a question we’re asked multiple times each day. And each time I’m asked it, my default answer has been to say something kind of self deprecating or unexpected. “Awake.” “Here.” “Ooooookay.” I don’t know how I fell into the habit, but it’s just what kind of developed on its own.

And today, I decided to switch things up. To start answering “good” or “great” or “excellent” to the question. Why? Because I wondered if in all my “awake” answers, I wasn’t subconsciously convincing myself that I was just okay and not great.

Things are going well for me, for the most part. (I always feel the need to add that disclaimer, as if that will ward off anything bad happening as a result of stating publicly things are good.) If I can’t respond “great” to the question “how are you doing?” right now, when can I?

Some of my response might come from having lived in Germany for two years, where they take the question very literally. (Seriously. Never ask a German Oma how she’s doing unless you want detailed descriptions of her health and bowel movements.) But I think there’s some power to be found in positive thinking and positive self-affirmation.

In other words, if I tell people I’m just okay all day, every day, I think it might make me start to believe it. So if I tell people I’m great all day every day, I want to see if the same thing works in reverse.

Will this make my life magically even more awesome? Probably not. But maybe it’ll help me appreciate the good in my life a bit more, and help me be more upbeat.

We shall see . . .

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Got Skis?

[image error]Hello local skiers! I am not an avid skier myself. I go a few times a year, and I have a fun time focusing on not falling down, not running into anything, and not getting run into by anyone else. However, my family are ski fanatics. Denisa’s personal goal each year is to go skiing as many times in the season as humanly possible. Last year I think she got something like 342 days in somehow, though it might have been closer to 30. It’s hard to keep track.

In any case, I have been told that each year it’s advisable to wax your skis and sharpen their edges. Waxing (I’m led to believe) is for people who want to go even faster down the hill, no doubt to enable them to slam into me at a higher velocity, thereby increasing their fun quotient somehow. (Am I getting this right?) And skis need sharper edges (clearly) to make sure other skiers can slash out at everyone else on the hill, hopefully hamstringing someone as they speed by on their freshly waxed skis. (Skiing is a lot like Mario Kart, just with less bananas.)

Ski shops charge you a hefty sum of money to wax and sharpen skis. Something in the realm of $50, which leads me to believe they’re doing more than just rubbing candles on the ski bottoms. If you’ve got a family of skiers, $50 a pop adds up really quickly. Soon you’re paying about as much for the ski service as you are for a season lift ticket. (To a small mountain. Not one of them fancy pants resorts.)

Tomas, being the young entrepreneur that he’s always been, is able to recognize a high price when he sees one. He and a friend did a bit of back-of-the-napkin calculation, discovering that the cost of wax and sharpening tools is about as much as it takes to keep a hamster living in luxury for a month. (Which ain’t much. Hamsters have very frugal tastes, even when they’re allowed to run wild.) So they invested in those tools and set up a business to provide waxing and sharpening services to the public at large. It’s name? Wicked Waxers. They’ve even got a Facebook page up and running. They stand ready to get you waxier than an ogre’s ear canal, and sharper than my razor wit.

Which is just to say that if you’re looking to get your skis serviced this season, I know of a place that can do an excellent job for not $40, not $30, but $20 (that’s t-w-e-n-t-y) for the whole package. Although they have limited availability, since they can just do it once a week or so. That’s why they’re starting early this year. If you want your skis wicked shaaahp, then click on over to the Wicked Waxers.

(I tried to negotiate a cut of all their proceeds generated from this ad. They were not amused. I tried to finagle at least a payment for the plug. I was turned down. So I decided to write it anyway out of the goodness of my heart.)

Ski fast! (Just not into me. I’ll be the slow moving, lumbering hulk out there on the mountain, teetering on the edge of my kind of sharp skis, praying that I don’t hit anything in the next few seconds.)

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

By the Power of Procrastination!

[image error]I’m a big fan of lists. You already know that. Whenever I’m feeling overwhelmed, one of the first things I do is sit down and make a list of every little thing I have to do, no matter how small. A comprehensive list lets me see all my troubles at once so that I have a complete picture. Once that’s set, it’s just a matter of going down the list and crossing things off. (That’s one of the reasons I even put down the easily done tasks like “eat breakfast” or “write my journal.” Once I have that master list, every single item on there appears to have equal weight. They each get one line. So when I cross something off, I feel like I’ve made significant progress. Much of my problems with feeling overwhelmed usually stem from inertia. I get feeling like I’m swamped, and so I do nothing. Start overcoming that inertia, and it all begins moving again.)

Anyway, one thing you begin to see when you make lots of lists from day to day is that there are certain items on those lists that never seem to get crossed off. I’m talking about big, overarching goals. They’re usually the ones on my work list, and they get passed off from day to day. Bitter items that won’t go anywhere until they’re addressed. But sometimes they’re tasks around the house I need to get done, and other times they’re just things I don’t feel like doing right away.

That’s where the lovely principle of procrastination comes in.

I don’t mean simply putting off those tasks until later. Rather, my experience has led me to understand that I like to procrastinate the things I least want to do. And that when I’m procrastinating, almost anything else becomes preferable to whatever that thing is I don’t want to do. I remember on my mission having a conversation with an Elder once who was frustrated. His companion never wanted to go outside and do missionary work. Instead, he’d come up with a whole slew of things they needed to do instead. My favorite that I remember was, “We can’t go outside yet! We haven’t cleaned the oven!”

That story has stuck with me, and it’s given me the key to one of my approaches to getting the few last items off my list. It’s a principle I use in writing, as well. Whenever you want an unlikable character to be more relatable, all you need to do is surround him or her with characters that are even more unlikable. Voila! They seem like little darlings in comparison. (Seriously. Look for this any time you’re watching a movie with a criminal as a protagonist. They do bad things, but as long as there’s a villain who does even worse things, you don’t mind.)

How does this apply to lists? When I want to finally get something done that I’ve been pushing off, I add something worse to my To Do list. Seriously. “Clean the garage.” “Organize the recycling.” There’s always a few chores I’d really never want to do. If I stick those on my list, suddenly the thing I’ve been procrastinating seems far preferable than the new thing.

Inertia overcome.

Of course, this also means I eventually have to clean the garage, but such is my lot in life as a person who sometimes likes to procrastinate . . .

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Crosswords: To Cheat, or Not to Cheat?

[image error]I’ve always loved word puzzles. Recently I finally broke down and got a subscription to the New York Times crossword. I really enjoy working through the puzzles each day, from the easy Mondays all the way up to the slog fest of Sunday. But as I’ve talked to some other crossword aficionados, I’ve discovered a fairly wide range in what we all think of as “acceptable crossword behavior.” So I thought I’d widen my net and see what the rest of you think.

Here’s my approach: I refuse to look at the daily crossword blog, as that gives away too many answers. I also refuse to cheat and just look at the answer key, no matter what. My goal is to get a “gold star” on each puzzle, which means you never had to check the puzzle and got all the answers cleanly. However, I also view the crossword as an excellent exercise in Google-fu. I like to research things, and some of the questions require a bit of work to phrase correctly to have Google help you out. (It doesn’t help that there are a slew of crossword puzzle answering services that flood the interwebs with chaff around specific searches.)

So I’ll merrily Google anything I don’t know, but that’s where I draw the line. Others say that’s completely verboten. Perhaps some of it is simply a matter of how long you’ve been doing crosswords?  Maybe if I were even more experienced, I wouldn’t need to Google as much. But I have no idea how I’d get through some of those puzzles on Friday and Saturday without it. I use easily searchable things like actor names and location names to give me signposts for the harder clues.

How about you? Do you do the daily crossword? Where do you draw the line for what you’ll let yourself do and what you won’t?

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.