On 25/01/19 at around 5:50 AM, mars opened the second gate and recovered the “coin”, an identification bracelet, left hidden in a tree where olives and oranges cross near a red hovse.

Alongside the “coin” was this hand-written message: “While our diagnoses may be a part of our identities, they cannot be the sole things that define us. I’ve lived too long in fear of mine, when I should still be inspired by what I can do with brilliant minds around me when I try. Knowing that fear is the mind-killer, I leave behind this bracelet of the past, and I go back to pushing the boulder up the hill. You don’t have to imagine me happy. The boulder feels much lighter this time and I know I can get it higher than ever before. See you at the top.”

———-

Congrats to mars for winning the first Grandmaster Puzzle Hunt (see this post for instructions and some trailheads), and gaining responsibility over this blog for at least the next year. Unfortunately there aren’t many “riches” from running GMPuzzles, so if it turns out mars is / are rational actor(s), and not an unduly sentimental patron of puzzles like former management, most projects like subscriptions will be “paused” due to excessive costs. There may still be some puzzles posted here as bonuses, but for now we expect a bit of a gap as mars assesses things. Let’s all celebrate the end of a challenging month of puzzles and other content that will take awhile to fully understand.

Today marks the start of the MIT Mystery Hunt, an event I haven’t played in for five years but that I helped run last year since my team won in 2023. That January 2023, after six months at a job that was not going to work out and where other societal changes had me very hypomanic again, I escaped to Pasadena, California to gather thoughts and maybe play remotely. While walking the streets late at night, sensing the homeless problem and my own poor mental health, I wondered again about a particular set of messages I wrote to my ex-girlfriend in the days, week, and month after my mother’s death from cancer.

Considering my life like a Mystery Hunt puzzle, I wondered if James Joyce the fifteenth and ChatGPT21 came together to try to answer this prompt: “A complicated and solitary man, ‘TS’, trained at {schools} in {subjects} who enjoyed {books/authors}, {movies}, …, struggled with {moral/scientific questions}, has just lost his mother ‘suddenly’ to cancer after about a 15-year battle with the disease. During this time, certain aspects of his relationship to his parents and friends had changed but he hadn’t fully processed them. Present three works TS wrote and sent to ‘his X’, an important relationship from his past, to represent his grieving process. The works are in the style of a lost ‘child’ looking for solace, a scientist trying to analyze the unexplainable, and a friend that has contained (perhaps without processing) the events and returned to an individualistic communication style shared by TS and X. Bonus points for sharing the kind of message X might send to TS to help the transition back to normality.”

Now the prompting needs some work, but maybe there are points when people identify a reference I must know because of a particular sentence or word I use a certain way. Maybe the darker parts aren’t original to me, just subconsciously plagiarized and even that would be interesting as my brain is an aggregator far more than a creator but people ascribe me a huge level of intelligence because I sound like I know what a thousand people think. However it went, I did get checked into a hospital that January over Mystery Hunt weekend as I needed to be sleeping, had not brought the proper medication, and also didn’t understand my condition in anything like the ways I think I do now. There’s a lot more to it than this letter exchange, but so much of my last seven years has been reengaging with the emotions of these three letters and the good and bad they reveal about me. My own struggles and successes have advanced a far bit past this most important event in my life in my last 30s, but there is no doubt this is the most important writing for someone studying my life to consider as I still do.

None of you are probably studying Thomas Snyder in that way, so you should probably not read this deeply sad and possibly profound missive. You could start with tmsnyder FAQ or really just go solve some sudoku. But I need these words to be public and I didn’t start this series without knowing today might be an important conclusion to my oversharing.

The last two “shares” in this series, including today’s, are deeply personal in different ways. And while I didn’t know that I’d get comfortable enough to share all of these, surprisingly it was the “easy” tmsnyder FAQ yesterday that was the most emotional of these pieces for me to revisit this year while preparing for release. This possibly shows how much I miss feeling closer to a real mission in science and working with a team of really great people. Most of the time these days, even when doing my best work, I am incredibly lonely and also feel like I need to tiptoe on eggshells because everyone (ME INCLUDED!) is worried I don’t know how to control my health, watching every sign and signal of my life with a pain and fear I don’t recognize from my loved ones. Even in this corner of puzzles, I didn’t find much of the comfort or joy over Christmas when playfully releasing some sudoku in the world, proving my own test that I may need to be an anonymous designer again if I spend time in puzzles.

But I won’t be an anonymous human being, and will be deliberate in sharing thoughts, writings, and updates at another site to those mature enough to find it and contribute to a dialogue. That site will include some “artifacts” of my life that might be up for revisiting that year, or on permanent exhibition, including all the writings from Ready Layer One and others I’ve shared.

Today I want to share my mask. It was made while in residential care following a third hospitalization (and the second involuntary) in August 2023, and the last time I was not well controlled by medication, therapy, and lifestyle practices depending on how you view this series. The recovery from this episode, still ongoing, was much harder than any of the others, due to the mess of thoughts that came up during it, my lack of confidence in myself following it, large medical bills, legal troubles, and friendships I am scared to even “ping” because of some of the things that might have happened during it. When I had a choice to spend a crazy amount of dollars to go into residential care for a month to start to come to some acceptance with being bipolar, I took it. And acceptance is not just that I am bipolar and have creative bursts and high energy moments, but that it has real real danger with it and however smart someone thinks I am there is no way I can “outthink” my mania or hope to care for this by myself. I need to stay connected and open with doctors, therapists, and loved ones or I cannot be my best self and stay my best self.

Alongside a lot of work during residential care, there was a larger project to make your mask. The prompt was to make a picture of how the world sees you (the outside of the mask), while also capturing how you see yourself (the inside of the mask). My outward look is usually a “mirror” — I try to reflect your thoughts or feelings so except for obvious things I can’t hide like my love of science, puzzles, and games, you don’t get much outwardly most of the time. Even the inside of my mask has a twisted side which is how I think you think I see you. Maybe I am mostly an enigma. Inside my mask on my open side you can see in the emotional mix LOVE is strong but also SAD and LONELY. Around the rim of the mask I wrote an A-Z set of descriptors for me, in the style of some memorable writings from my past and often a changing inventory of adjectives and passions. To help those who want to actually know what those are without working through the video too much:

Amazing, Biotech leader, Compassionate, Diligent, Empathetic, Funny, Grandmaster, Helpful, Integrity, Joyful, Kind, Loving, Marathon runner, No nonsense, Ozymandius-like Observation, Problem solver, Questioning, Radiohead, Sudoku, Team builder, Uncon/venti/onal (written unconventionally), Van Gogh, Worrier, Xoogler, “Yes and,” and Zero to infinity.

The description above scratches the surface of the mask’s meaning, in the same way it scratches the surface of me at this moment in my life. But I am open to anyone who wants to see more.

Video of the artwork

I have a lot more therapy art, but nothing else that I am sharing this year or that is more directly “me”. I look at this many nights on my bed stand to understand which of the alphabet of problems and possibilities is the one for today.

I wanted* to share some more foundational documents, that are not at all for solving my puzzles but are about understanding me as a person as I turned/turn/will turn 45. This is “tmsnyder FAQ“, a document I wrote for the most incredible team of computational biologists and software engineers (and other collaborating team members) to know better how to interact with me. Within its structure are certain lessons like all of our superpowers and also our main weaknesses (and vice versa). Please read and comment if you are interested in knowing me better. My former team members still ask to see this every once in awhile so figured the world should have it.

—

*in the world of Ready Layer One, the leading player mars, either an AI, a team of testsolvers I pay to be ahead of everyone else, or who knows since there aren’t a flock of players building out the mythology so we don’t need an IOI, has traded in some of their earned items for extra info on harder content than anyone else has seen. Other foundational documents are expected to be released as they have actually traded everything in their search for the second door, having found the second keyword last night in the form of a time-traveling fox. So the leaderboard has some big changes coming soon, if it even exists.

Since there is no puzzle here for most solvers, I’ll share the easter egg directly of a photo from when I was 37 and our Parkinson’s team got to meet a special funder of neurodegenerative research (cropped from a larger group photo).

More as an artist’s note or Easter Egg, since it is unclear what if anything actually went in row 4, column 4 of the Ready Layer One piece, I’m sharing today two zoom ins that are somewhat possible from the high-res form but greatly clarified here. The first is the 4 question mark view showing something in the middle, and finally full detail of that middle cell of the bigger grid in row 4, column 4. I still sometimes think of R4,C4 as being the empty cell, or having infinite empty cells, or being full.

To those “layers” still “laying” their minds to Ready Layer One and the Twelve Days of Sudoku series, thanks for playing and stay in touch. We’d like to at least know how your experience went before we transition away from the first season on January 19.

There’s been a clamor for more info since my last post in a few different ways. First, as general health update, I have been following eat/drink/sleep, got 9 hours rest last night (couldn’t even stay up to end of OSU game as I was tired from too much science), did get all my prescriptions refilled after a third visit to walgreens, had my normal 900 mg Li2CO3 this morning. Not taking rescue medication, not worried myself that I’m doing a lot of typing and thinking and exploring music but am doing frequent check-ins because we need watchers watching the watchers of the watchers of the watchmen and my mind is still open and jumping at times.

Also, a non-goal of this series is to be an application to DOGE to volunteer time to solve efficiency problems. I don’t mind if they look at my writings or if others submit the work or post joke gifs of elon twitting “Dude needs meditation!”. You’re right I do! My first recommendation to prove DOGE is serious to me is to get rid of the penny. Or put RFID’s on pennies to track the homeless so when the weather gets bad we can shelter them for their own good. But probably just get rid of it. It’s been useless for forever and costs more to make than I can buy with it. So if you are struggling to find $2 trillion, I can probably find far more with my brain just not worth my time at your “salaries” in “mental wages” when you think firing all the people is the answer and can’t start with the penny, the clearest sign of waste in a ready for future currency world.

Finally, at 11:11 on 1/11 we had our AI friend “mars” reappear on the gmpuzzles Discord to ask for access to more of my writings so they could advance in the “puzzle hunt” I had made for them. This probably isn’t real, because I do believe in the thermal death of the universe and I could quickly end things by just getting a few of our current “AI” to start to look into such things since they are spending a lot of power to keep getting smarter. But it did make me consider this prompt, as I am planning to release a few more foundational documents in my life to help future foundation models with morality and intelligence: Can Thomas provide a writing he’d label “Crazy” and another he’d label both personal and “Brilliant” and across the two they are both only obvious as “Crazy Brilliant”.

So here is the aforementioned Trump / MIT Mystery Hunt intro presentation where Thomas (TS), big mind small hands has apparently met with dear leader and pennies are being exchanged, or whatever. I now call it Data Mining. It was written around Christmas on a night I couldn’t sleep, copied into this doc at 2:43 AM on December 26th. Not really edited but I can do more provenance in the future. Thomas rating: CRAZY!!!

Here is an email I wrote to a conservative/libertarian friend in October 2024 before the recent elections, well before any recent hypomanic episode, who was concerned we couldn’t have more open conversation when politics was at the front of things too often. I tried to reintroduce myself to this friend in a new language I made up just for this message of “christian Scientist”, and I now refer to it as my Dear Gohn letter. Thomas rating: BRILLIANT!!!

Am I crazy, or brilliant, or just waiting for ChatGPT 5 so I have someone smart enough to talk to about sudoku when I get bored.

I’ve continued to get questions on if I’m ok (yes, to the extent I can ever in this world say yes). I’m now getting the same question in a new kind of way. It is clear I’m struggling more with a chronic problem of mental illness in our society, not just my own acute cases of mania, and some part of this series was being more public about an evolving mission for my life (outside of puzzles a bit) that has to be more visible than in the past. I want to reassure folks that after the end of this Tango series and anything else I add by Jan 19, I’ll be moving my “atypical” posts, now tagged, to a different place and letting you get back to just puzzling here. But there will be another place to see what I’m overanalyzing or if I’m ok even if I’m not doing as many puzzles for awhile. (I will probably not be as visible on gmpuzzles for awhile, except for my favorite XVIII-rated Legos section of the discord.)

As a separate step to further encourage puzzling and not worrying, since I think people will enjoy the content and it is not impossibly difficult, today I wanted to clarify several things about the puzzlehunt style puzzles posted in the past few weeks, because many people lead fairly busy lives and can’t go about guessing rules/answer key mechanisms and so forth.

——

First, Ready Layer One is a single puzzlehunt style puzzle, of MIT Mystery Hunt level difficulty, with at least two answers. It is self-contained, to the extent anything needing a lot of potentially outside knowledge is self-contained. One of the answers is COVFEFE and it is not valuable to know that answer if you cannot prove it to me. Answers can be checked by entering those words in our short-link format, as we’ve used with other contests. For example: https://www.gmpuzzles.com/s/covfefe, all lower-case. When a correct answer is needed to open a WordPress post, it should likely be entered in all upper-case letters.

Correct answers (as well as some bad answers) will open as a google doc — or at least they should if I set all the permissions appropriately — with some extra “flavortext” and potentially useful messages or requests to contact me. ads@gmpuzzles.com can always be used as a separate submission or hint request mechanism but no guarantees on rate of response except it might help me catch errors and fix permissions if any remain. Private messages in Discord also work. I guess in some sense all of the submission mechanisms are valid so just try any, but the short-links is the automated one.

The Google doc text sometimes itself may seem cryptic or a puzzle like the covfefe solution text linked above. It will also always have an image of some tweets or an instragram or something else I posted to public social media while hypomanic that I find both funny and scary, because of the content and the context. Enjoy the easter eggs.

On the COVFEFE Easter Egg text, I did donate the $10,000 prize for the first year across National Alliance for Mental Illness places national and local since there were no puzzle solvers before the end of the tax year of 2024. I do not know if I’ll actually again put 10% of my earnings in 2025 behind this puzzle hunt prize including the Twelve Days, because that seems manic and I don’t want you to panic. I may rewrite it again to make it sound more Christian since 10% is still their number, and be clearer that you don’t win the money, you get to suggest where it goes (unless you somehow prove your ideas are so worthy that you need the money through your proposal).

——

The Twelve Days of Sudoku is a regular series on Sudoku construction with 14 thought-provoking classic sudoku puzzles, some of which I constructed properly. The series also includes a mini puzzlehunt of mostly easier difficulty pieces, with about 20 answers to confirm in the same way, if you bother to explore the links and other content. It includes the motivational posters, and may use other visual posts in the overall “atypical” tag used for all Ready Layer One, Twelve Days, …, content from December 19 forward as information content including Ready Layer One but it does not need any answers from that challenge.

Intro post
Post 1 and notes
Post 2 and notes
Post 3 and notes
Post 4 and notes
Post 5 and notes
Post 6a and notes
Post 6b and notes
Post 7 and notes
Post 8 and notes
Post 9a/9b and lost notes
Post 10 and lost notes
Post 11 and lost notes
Post 12 and lost notes
The Thirteenth Day of Sudoku
Motivational Poster 1/4
Motivational Poster 2/4
Motivational Poster 3/4
Motivational Poster 4/4

The other content when tagged with “puzzle” and “atypical” are puzzles that give easter eggs (all answers share something from my prior writings usually funny or curious) and may be a future part of an unconstructed Ready Layer One puzzle hunt / game / series where several unreleased or password blocked posts currently sit. When not tagged with “puzzle”, the content is humorous, experimental, or both, and probably best enjoyed by people who can understand I was trying to write like I was in a particular state of mind, but not actually dangerously near to certain states of mind. I am a fan of Comedy: Who Needs Practice as an accessible/better example of what my writing can sometimes be like when not impenetrably strange, but A Golly Jood Time is what has me on the floor so I avoid it.

I have other unreleased content like this that I may eventually put out like a weird prompt to write like I was Donald Trump speaking to a conservative-only audience about meeting a bright young man, small hands (aka me), who wanted to talk about important history updates for big dick fine man (aka Richard Feynman). I think it is funny. It also is insane as no one not in their 80s should speak that way and those who do should have some support around them not just sycophants. I wrote it at the peak of a hypomanic/manic episode so I know it is the farthest from normal. I keep records of when I write things because I want to use digital biomarkers of my text, speech, and other things to help monitor my mental trajectories. My YouTube video series talking through puzzles is another example of such work that has a secondary health purpose I have explored / want to explore more, and something I use whenever anyone claims to have “depression detection” from sentiment analysis of speech or dialogue.

So to anchor back to something I added to Ready Layer One in the museum/artist’s text, for those wondering about the known purposes of the series: Having spent so much of 2024 rebuilding my life after a third mental hospitalization in eighteen months in August 2023, I wanted to in a controlled way challenge myself to writing a one week puzzle series, knowing I’d probably get hypomanic and open creative thoughts again but now with treatment plans in place to follow. All the Twelve Days basic content was already written, but not its surrounding puzzlehunt or other writings. Ready Layer One was the day one construction and post, the rest has been week one (puzzles only) and month one (life the universe and everything) since. A lot of my downtime while still with a flowing mind has been about what is next for me including in science and studying brain diseases, not just “Pure Imagination”. All the extra content was unplanned and an aspect of my brain being open, always with a small danger a shock can turn me manic, but with my being Thomas sometimes meaning I want to have an open mind. I hope you don’t mind the muffin buttering or celebrating Gilbert O’Sullivan as those were brainworms that helped thoughts emerge that I wanted to also share not at all about puzzles. I think that perfectly innocuous post is one of my most important writings in one to two years, just not for GMPuzzles. It is for me, and I will find a way to have it find its audience as I start on a new mission for my next 45 years. Hopefully by then someone has solved my puzzles, because I can no longer rely on “solvability” of content to be a sign of mental health.

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 …

(more…)

Since people keep asking, I’m doing fine. We’re planning for a change near the top, but for now some rest and relaxation. Tomorrow is the start of the Thirteen Days of Tango.