It has been awhile since messages here, but I’m working on a lot of things in life as I rebuild to achieve a larger mission. My jigsaw is slowly being assembled, and I think the last 100 pieces came together when I met 100 new friendly faces at SudokuCon in Boston. People to whom I can tell the truth about Snyder Notation, not “Snyder Notation”. Where I even shared stories of solving a puzzle in a playoff that included Tetsuya Nishio, someone who sometimes thinks as far as his head can with a contradiction before placing a sure number down into the grid. The same way I do. But not at all “Nishio logic”, which has a reputation as guessing in the sudoku community when I won a playoff puzzle that also eliminated Tetsuya Nishio because he never guessed. Sometimes our intuitions are the smartest and fastest ways to do things but they cannot be distilled into rules and that is how both “Nishio chains” and “Snyder notation” and whatever are named after two great sudokumasters and have some of the bits right but not the essence of what their namesakes did or do.

So more experimentation incoming with Sudoku. In new ways a person who paints in Sudoku might tell his autobiography, but also a person who might have a brain like Van Gogh when self-asylumed at those moments of painting too. I also stopped at the MFA for the Roulin family portrait show this week, and the letters from Roulin to Van Gogh’s relatives after his hospitalization for cutting off the ear are the things that stuck with me the most and kept me grounded through an overstimulatory weekend.

I recognize outside the Classic Sudoku that most of the more experimental late 2024 “Twelve Days of Sudoku”/”Ready Layer One” work looks uninterpretable without me; at SudokuCon I was overjoyed to have a first solve of a younger life photo collage puzzle (one of the Motivational Posters) by watching people try and sometimes answering questions and giving light nudges. I also led a group play of an improved Just One Cell Sudoku from that period of my “dangerous” art making and other brainstorming with a storming brain.

This puzzle can be graded on a 0 out of 5 scale, and that is how a group with shared ideas was able to get all the way to the perfect answer by going one point at a time. I hope it shows that there is more than one way to do something interesting with Sudoku, and I don’t have to write down any rules for this puzzle for a viewer of any age, even if I would score the answers from a child and an adult and a SudokuCon member differently.

So to my new friends from SudokuCon, join our Discord (link in a lot of other obvious places) and slowly find my threads if you want to be a part of this conversation. Bring me something interesting with legos, for example, that only an intellectually adult person should see.