So, I've mentioned having a huge backlog that I haven't started posting yet. What gives? What, exactly, have I been up to? Well, hypothetical reader, those are great questions that I'm happy to get into a bit here.
So firstly, my laptop charging port was broken a couple weeks ago. This put me largely out of commission for most hobby things I wanted to do with that time, let alone things I committed to doing - more on that in a bit. I did get things fixed a couple days ago but I'm still catching up so haven't had time to prepare posts. However, one of the things I did do during that time was transcribe ALL my unused IOI puzzles worth posting into penpa or puzzlink links. All of them - there are nearly 80 puzzles in this category, so there's a lot. I still need to go through these again to pick out the order to post them, and actually write the posts/prep the images/etc. so this will have to wait until I have a bit of unbroken time. This will most likely be sometime in November / early December as the bulk of my free time will need to go towards Speedromizer prep during November. Obviously, being out a laptop for 3 weeks meant I was out a computer to practice two games for 3 weeks - when there were only 12 weeks to learn in the first place! Not good.
I've also been making a few new things - aside from the obvious work, I wrote some puzzles for another Logic Showcase, and have also been working on a themed set that I'll probably put up in a single PDF or something. And speaking of PDFs and IOI puzzles, I've decided the way I'll share some of my highlights from the game is going to be a printer-friendly PDF, sorted roughly in the order the puzzles would appear in-game, with some thoughts on each puzzle and how they fit into the game. Basically like a typical blog post, but 150+ times and without a solving link (due to the contributor agreement I signed when I joined the project). Unfortunately I don't have access to the internal puzzle database any more, so I can't check for fun anecdotes in the comments field or easily verify a difficulty, and it's also not easy to check exactly which location in-game a certain puzzle is, but I do at least know what enclave something is in and have my enclave/sidequest puzzles separate from the sandbox pile. Man, am I glad I kept a local copy of everything from early on...
Also, X_Sheep has been maintaining a fork of puzzlink with new genres and recently added Slitherlink with Sheep and Wolves, a variant I previously used in Puzzle Zodiac in this post. As I've been doing with new genres or new features, I've added puzzlink links for the new genre to that post and also to this one. If you've already solved these puzzles: great! If you haven't, or maybe haven't heard of that set before - these were the lead puzzles in the set and so the blog publications started with Aries, so let this be an opportunity to try them out. I'm quite happy with both of the contest puzzles here.
So yeah. Lot going on, still recovering from an unexpected productivity loss at a time I really, really didn't need one.