I love falling into stuff, not literally that’s painful, but metaphorically, I love falling into stuff.

Your Daily Lex.

It just occurred to me, I really am curious what percentage of listeners to this podcast sing along with the theme song.

And I consider the dun, dun, dun, dun, I consider the instrumentation, let’s say, part of the lyrics.

I think you can’t just say Your Daily Lex, I think you have to say the dun, dun, dun.

So I’m just curious though, what percentage of people sing along.

So if you happen to be a singer, a longer, as we say in the biz, let me know wherever you feel like it on the internet.

Let’s see.

Oh, so I was saying, I like when I fall into things.

Yeah.

So I was working at a series of startups in my career and it went well.

And eventually I took a job writing full-time for Macworld, which was great.

I loved that job.

And so, uh, when I realized that it was my first real nine to five job, because I wasn’t working at a startup that wanted you to work 800 hours a day, that’s when I started podcasting and starting podcasting with that show Unprofessional that I used to do, um, that really led to a whole career, which turned out pretty well for me.

So yay for that.

But then, um, you know, now it’s years later and, uh, I’ve gotten into consulting, which was a very intentional, focused thing that I chose to do, but then I started playing that New York times puzzle, um, you know, the connections puzzle each day.

And I was like, man, I like these.

I want to try to make my own.

And really actually the way it happened was I wanted to play the old New York times connections because they didn’t have the archives built into the app.

So when I was Googling around, I found a site that had made its own copies of all the old connections puzzles from the New York times and had the ability to make your own.

So I was like, well, that sounds fun.

Let me make my own.

I liked the way my brain has to work to do that.

And then I had mistakes in some of my connections puzzles and I wanted to change them.

And the site that I was using to make them didn’t let you do that.

So I’m like, you know what, I’m going to make my own connections puzzle site so that I can edit my puzzles.

And then I started posting some and I was like, Hey, what if I posted one every single day?

And I started doing that.

And then I was like, what if I started playing or posting other games, making other games, which is what I did, as you know, most likely.

But I liked that.

I kind of fell into it.

I am really proud of the work that I’ve done, particularly on the crossword side of things because crosswords are hard to make.

I think connections puzzles are also very hard to make, by the way.

The other puzzles that I’m making, lexicogs and pyval, those are challenging, but different connections and crossword puzzles.

Those take some time to put together, but I’m really proud of the work that I’ve done on the crossword puzzle side because I wasn’t happy with the interface.

Like it was okay, but it was not great.

And eventually I reached out on Mastodon and asked, Hey, are there any JavaScript people out there who can help me out?

I will pay.

And somebody reached out and helped me with just a couple lines of code, really, or a couple of tweaks, get things a lot better.

And I could have spent, I did spend days working on exactly those things.

And I was even thinking, if you’re a JavaScript slash CSS slash HTML nerd, I was considering changing the fundamentals of how my crossword puzzles worked, both the minis that I’m doing every day for everybody and the full-size crosswords that I’m currently doing weekly for paying subscribers.

We’ll see where that goes.

But I was currently all those crossword puzzles are input fields, right?

Like they’re normal HTML input fields that are stylized.

I like doing it that way because it’s pretty accessible for users with various accessibility needs.

I was strongly considering changing it though, because it made iOS navigation of the crossword puzzle annoying.

And then this JavaScript guru who was working with me helped me not have to change that.

So I was happy.

Anyway, if you haven’t yet tried the cross and yes, this is hours after I recorded the first part.

If you haven’t yet tried my crosswords do the mini crosswords are fun.

I did get a complaint from somebody today because one of the answers in today’s mini on Wednesday, March 27th requires that you use a grammatical error of sorts, but it’s so common that I decided it was okay.

And then I’m doing full-size crosswords and hopefully, hopefully I can start doing those more, but we’ll see.

Anyway, wow.

I’m also hard at work on a new word game and it’s bizarre when you’re making up the rules of a thing, because you got to figure out what the game is like, what is the hook?

What’s the right way to do it?

And I don’t know if you want to beta test a new game and give me some feedback.

It’s not ready for you yet, but it will be.

The fun thing about arbitrary rules is that everybody has an opinion, even if you don’t realize you have an opinion, right?

You play a thing, you’re like, oh, I should have gotten more points for that, or it should work differently.

But it’s my game.

You want to control the rules, you make your own game.

Anyway, happy Wednesday.

Goodbye.

Bye.