Judging a Book by its Cover

I'm not going to waste time talking about why I haven't updated this blog for a while, since it doesn't really matter. Actually, I hadn't even thought much about this blog until last weekend I published a new crossword puzzle (and there are more on the way!) and it occurred to me that my profile directs people to this website.

So it occurred to me that I might as well give them something to look at, eh? So here's a new visual puzzle. I've taken the covers of 20 classic works of literature and clumsily removed the title and author's name using some free photoshop clone from the Chrome store. Some of these are famous covers. Many are not, but well read and observant puzzle solvers should get most of them. How many can you figure out? I'll post the answers on Friday.

P.S. - Click here if you want to see a larger version of the puzzle.

Crypto-Crossword

My interests in crosswords is somewhat recent, compared to my general love of puzzles. When I was a kid, I got a subscription to Games Magazine and even though I loved the puzzles, I would pretty much entirely avoid the crosswords. Logic puzzles? Check. General word puzzles? Check. I liked those, because they involved less of having to know bits of trivia, and more on being able to see a pattern. And my favorite puzzles were cryptograms, those puzzles where you have a passage or a list, except each letter of the alphabet has been substituted with a different letter. If you'd like a literary example check out one of my favorite Sherlock Holmes stories: The Adventure of the Dancing Men.

So it's really no surprise that my first attempts at crosswords were with "Coded Crosswords", crosswords that didn't have any clues, but where each little white square had a random number between one and twenty-six, and each number corresponded with a letter of the alphabet. They're basically cryptograms crosswords. And I love them. They're still among my favorite puzzles to solve, though, if you're pretty good at cryptograms like I am, they can be a bit too easy.

Anyway, here's a small little cryptogram crossword that I whipped up. I've given you two letters to start out with. Have fun! I'll post the solution sometime soon...ish!

A New Day, A New Blog

Hello! And welcome all to my new blog: "Foul Deformity", which I think is a pretty concise description of myself and my interests. Among those interests will be interactive fiction, cooking, politics, etc. I'm going to try to post some of my crossword puzzles here too, if I can figure out how to post them interactively. I've published quite a few over here, but I have to wait almost ten days for them to publish my puzzles, so I'm thinking of publishing them here instead.


Also, I'm planning on reviewing the upcoming batch of entries from the IF Comp.This will be of interest to the, oh, maybe fifteen people on the planet who are interested in Interactive Fiction. A third of those people are Italian. Why have an interest in an impossibly obscure and some-might-argue obsolete entertainment? Because Interactive Fiction or "IF" for the savvy/nerdy appeals to that strange subsection of literary minds and puzzle solvers. If James Joyce were alive today, you can bet he'd be writing IF. Lengthy byzantine IF. Impossible to read or play, IF. What I'm saying is that Finnegan's Wake is impossible to read and shouldn't be tried by anyone.


Anyway, on the with the show. I might be back later to see if I can publish a crossword or two. Oh, and if you're interesting in playing some IF written by yours truly, you can do so over here.