Just on the redaction point, I did notice one email that looked correctly redacted but when zoomed in you could see some pixels from a few letters had escaped a little. It might be possible to reverse engineer the email just from that.
I had a very similar issue with Chants of Sennaar (another incredible game), where there were exactly 3 words I was missing, I knew what they were, but couldn't find them. I kept going anyway and found one (by a different method than usual), then eventually after scouring the whole map twice had to look it up and there was just a stairs down the edge of one section that I didn't see at all, but which also didn't respond to the "hint" button that normally shows you any direction you can go or thing you can interact with.
Also very glad I looked up the solution for the Obelisk puzzle in Fez as there was no way I was getting that (seemingly incredibly contrived, but apparently not correctly solved yet) solution.
An excellent 3 part video from Elyot Grant [0] introduced me to the term "fiero" for this conquering after a struggle, in contrast to a simple "aha/eureka". The difference being one is transmissible, the other is not. Thought it was a nice distinction. Highly recommend the videos!
Just Connections, Wordle, and Mini for me (in that order), with the occasional Crossword (tend towards a barbell strategy of just doing maybe Mon, Tue, Sun to get the quick hits and a real challenging puzzle).
Also experience the odd difficulty due to Americanisms, but can't really fault a puzzle coming from something called the New York Times for that. I do however think the puzzle setting for Connections is inferior to The Wall from Only Connect, where they got the idea from. If you haven't seen that yet it's definitely worth a watch (it gets harder as as a season progresses).
Fun! If bi-twin chains are those where +1 AND -1 are prime, I wonder what the longest chain is where either +1 OR -1 are prime. And while we're at it, why not XOR too.
If there haven't been any proposals for a friendly name for the 23 bit holdout it looks like a pair of glasses to me. So perhaps "spectacles" would be a nice one, similar to the spectre of recent aperiodic monotile fame.
> with a description reading like it was written by Douglas Adams.
No kidding! From the wikipedia page:
> Consideration was given to listing the bench as a protected structure but was decided against as there could then have been a requirement imposed on the council to destroy the tree to protect the bench
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