Hi all,

I hope you are enjoying the Thirteen Days of Tango. We’re certainly seeing more solves on the site compared to our Ready Layer One or Twelve Days of Sudoku offerings which were more experimental and/or unexpectedly difficult (as narrow path Sudoku can indeed be tricky compared to usual offerings). We’ll find some other way to re-post those works next Christmas season to maybe get more activity around them.

Today I wanted to share more puzzle design history info on Tango. We’ll have a proper puzzle rules and info page in the sidebar for Tango eventually, but for now …. The style grew out of our work with LinkedIn, as we wanted to explore potential new games after the launch of Queens (1-star Star Battle variation with hand-crafted grids). The broader LinkedIn(+me) brainstorming team raised different ideas and in the list were Binary/Binairo type games. I try to score each idea on approachability, depth, and uniqueness in different ways. While Binary-style puzzles have a mostly approachable rule set because everyone knows Tic-Tac-Toe and the solver just has to forget diagonals like they do when the name Queens confuses them, the genre is very low on my list with fairly limited logic and only computer-design needed (i.e., I have no idea how to make an interesting Binary puzzle with those rules). In particular the style is plagued by one of the worst rules in somewhat common logic puzzles: the “no two rows / columns can be identical” is a negative rule that may make a puzzle unique but it is far from a positive rule that opens up amazing new modes of thinking. I’ve never met a good negative rule, and it had to go as we considered positive replacements. With the agreement we would never mention that rule again, I played with other constraints that might glue a puzzle style together as it did need some multi-row/column connections to be both unique and moderately difficult. I played with regions (any even size box allowed for a drawn region shape, with very good deduction properties and unexpected complexities that I still like), colors/ciphers for fog-of-war-like properties, and edge clues (very good as glue with a few new deductions and visual design possibilities too). The edge clues moved all scores for approachability, depth, and uniqueness to a place the team thought we had something to launch. So collectively with LinkedIn, we evolved ideas from prior puzzle styles into a new game called Tango. LinkedIn’s goals focus more on shorter daily experiences, so some of the harder puzzles and larger puzzles were released back to me to use, as with the 8×8 puzzles in this Thirteen Days of Tango series.

Before you ask, I was not behind the naming of this game nor Queens nor anything else. Very important and highly paid people do that, like the ones who think most drugs should have J’s and Q’s and X’s and Z’s in their names. But I will say the “It Take Two to …” connection is super cool even though they don’t hit enough people on the head with it. And having a NATO alphabet letter for a puzzle I write has other benefits. Now to debut an ALPHA of FOXTROT in NOVEMBER while staying in QUEBEC.

And to keep this post mostly innocuous but reassure people, I wanted to share a Seattle photo as I was taking a walk because …

… I’d promised myself to treat myself and visit a nearby tower …

between pharmacy visits to get refills of important medication, prescribed by my Seattle* area psychiatrist. My old California insurance** used to cover for the medication when in Seattle, but my current Covered California insurance*** considers a Washington Walgreens out of network so it denies it every time. The cost is usually pretty low (25 versus 15 dollars) for lithium carbonate****. So I just pay out of pocket as that is easier than solving health insurance. But I can’t do this in one visit. I have to remind Walgreens every time to try to take my insurance out of their computer system since it is useless in WA, the only place I use Walgreens right now for medication, but I can’t do this insurance change myself and when I log into Walgreens I can see all 8 of my prior insurance plans online still so maybe I should just finally start new with a CVS or ask how a 2009 health plan is worth storing and could they try that one while I buy some lottery tickets to pay for the medication?

I like Walgreens well enough, green is in the name, and that is a nice color, and the pharmacist/assistants at this location right next to where I work are still very helpful even if they look at me funny when I say removing my insurance from the computer is the best choice for them to make. So we do this Tango again today, where after a prescription from Tuesday was bounced in the system, I showed up in person and it started again and then I got to walking for the 20-30 minutes to fill it.

This visit had a special bonus. I also needed a refill on what we’ll call a “rescue medication”, an atypical anti-psychotic***** that is helpful for resetting how dopaminergic neurons and other neurons respond to reward signals like happy thoughts, which get out of control if I have extended periods of restlessness or racing thoughts. One of the things a mental care facility would overdose me with is this drug if I was manic and/or psychotic, but that in smaller, as needed, doses, can help me a bit (we think). At least it helps with sleep and just getting sleep is good to slow my brain and recover. The drug does make me eat too much, so I don’t like using it anywhere in my maintenance therapy regimen, and even in emergencies i am hesitant but I did use some times recently. This drug, in brand name, past patent, of Zyprexa with a glorious Z and X, or generic olanzapine form (still one Z, pretty good I guess) as I call it as a chemist, is more expensive than the simple salt. A little under $500 apparently, and I didn’t know that, and my insurance is still useless, and the cost is still something I can just manage because I really hate thinking about health insurance. But my psychiatrist’s prescription text message had a link to a “free pharma ID” that could be used even without insurance for discounts possibly. These magic letters and numbers I never understood and certainly never paid for were worth ~$300 off. That seems crazy. Somewhere on my walk I wondered if I’d just received welfare. I hope I’m not judged for taking welfare, or olanzapine sometimes.

I guess I’ll say in my inexperience health insurance is as complex as health care, and even being a privileged, some say “brilliant” mind, I gave up on the puzzle long ago in my life and pay out of pocket for small inefficiency taxes because I don’t want to navigate a phone tree to fix for my care when I have things I’d rather be doing.

Maybe I’m more focused on the green land in front of me, where things can grow, where unexpected value can be found if the rest of the world seems to be blowing up or warming up or both and the thing at the top of the map might be the north star worth looking at. Not sure if Greenland is that green land yet, but maybe the name is part of an almost octogenarian’s interest?

Probably I’m more concerned that there are more minds broken in the world that can’t be mended, left unattended. What do we do? What do we do?

Second photo, as I go back to being alone with my thoughts again, naturally.

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* I have struggled in the past to get a doctor in the Bay Area in California, particularly “in network”, when they don’t respond to web forms or claim multi month wait lists, and I’d prefer someone with specialization in creatives with bipolar brains. So I didn’t bother updating to a CA doctor in 2024 when I mostly moved back to the Bay Area as I had found one up in Seattle that was working well for me and I consult in science for a Seattle place so coming up once a month seemed fine (no ability to do remote remote visits (i.e., telehealth from California) as doctor not licensed in my state, but I can do remote visits (i.e., telehealth from a hotel or Starbucks or wherever in Washington).

** Strictly speaking, an 18-month COBRA extension of an employer-provided plan that included an HSA and some network of doctors determined by “Cigna” to be significant and that I didn’t really choose except for having been employed by that particular poor choice of a place that itself had made choices that might have been good or poor.

*** An Anthem silver EPO plan with a big picture of a blue cross and not a blue shield that uses an app called Sydney Health that I think is a Blue Cross plan sometimes and might work in Australia?

**** A miracle drug when you consider element number three on its own, “Lithium”, does something in the brain possibly by nudging cation transfer pumps in only certain neurons and we can’t fully describe why or even test to know it is useful in everyone clinically.# For sure lithium is toxic, so the dosing of this is carefully controlled and why you can’t just get it from an online telehealth company as you can dozens of antidepressants even without a formal diagnosis I think in some places. Bipolar people need a licensed in-state psychiatrist so I have one (in WA state) and somewhat regular blood testing (so I do that too). I also got a great California-based therapist through the online route, from Southern California area not the Bay Area but phenomenal in helping me when I’m in state or on video and not admitting to being out of state or in text form anywhere because words don’t matter maybe if not billable? But again I can’t officially interact with the therapist today as I’m not in California because I’m threading a ______ needle.

*****These words sound worse than they are. First, atypical means unlike the dopamine-targeting agents of the past, like the very distant past when Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were in grade school, not when Barack Obama was in grade school. They are not unusual in a “bad” or “you need the special special drug because you are super super diseased” sense but as a patient that is where my head goes. The first drugs called antipsychotics worked one way and had some undesirable side effects and then starting in the 1970s a second class was made available with fewer of those side effects (not actually fully true) and some other kinds of side effects and also cognitive improvements and all that was “atypical” and the name has stuck for 50+ years because I don’t know? English units, tranquilizers, change is hard? And then antipsychotic is for treating a range of symptoms, not just used in psychotics or with psychosis. Do you really know what psychosis is if you haven’t deeply questioned the meaning of reality or of your reality? Do you wonder if olanzapine is a red pill or a blue pill? The real answer is it comes in many forms including quick dissolving under the tongue because you want to be sure a patient got it so the color is not really pertinent, but sometimes having a spoon to force it in is. Anyway, probably don’t put a stigma on an antipsychotic drug that is sometimes mostly about a dopamine or serotonin thing anyway at the level you / we even understand neurotransmission. I’m a possibly typical bipolar person that just manages to have enough self-income to be able to run a money-losing puzzle company and not go crazy on the phone to get $300 off my medications, probably because I’m good at science and don’t actually use phones that ring.

****** unreferenced footnote: They didn’t have enough of either of my meds to complete the prescription, just 22% and 50% that they did give me, so I’ll be back later next week. I might tell them then that I passed 2 other Walgreens while on my Seattle area walk and would be happy to courier to help, or I could just go there directly if they could remove my insurance from the computer system so the new prescription would go straight to the pill filling part and not the computer part that will say I have invalid insurance and why I never transfer prescriptions between Walgreens because the one I have has no line at the pharmacy counter and responds to human interactions however inefficient.

# Some papers from top medical schools, maybe 5-10 years old, have shown induced pluripotent stem cells grown into neurons from people who are judged lithium-responsive and lithium-nonresponsive are different in vitro. I don’t know which I am and I certainly was hypomanic in December so my therapist is very interested in checking my lithium levels which are always in range but on the low end. Maybe if there is a research level test to convince me that lithium is doing something for me but not yet at the magic dose that won’t ruin my kidneys too fast that would be super. If at HMS or other places, …. I have skin or blood to share, can leave behind an unused coffee cup I licked or touched at my therapy Starbucks. But don’t get me started on the complexity of volunteering oneself for medical study. Dead brains, there is a route for that. Volunteering a live brain? That mostly gets you committed (and not really for study). I’m committed to not being imprisoned in an emergency mental care ward again. So, you know, footnote of footnote no one but GPT will read, this is a joke, I will consider meditation, thanks, never thought of that, and please enjoy the Tangos.