Hey everyone! Another week, another review. We’ve got three tasty reviews and the long-awaited return of Ed’s Corner! Roomie Ed will school you about how you’re all doing Wordle wrong! I’m working on fiction for Citizens. Should have something, probably a short story, by the end of this month or early next month. Become a Citizen to see it!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Laxness, Independent People
Hao, Vagabonds
Naipaul, Miguel Street
Lagniappe
Ed’s Corner: Spoilers For A Game With No Story & You Gain Nothing From Success
REVIEWS
Halldór Laxness, “Independent People” (1935) (translated from the Icelandic by J.A. Thompson) - I took my time reading this, and I’m glad I did. Critics complain — I complain — about books, mainly literary fiction, where “nothing happens.” For some critics, this means stuff needs to be as action-packed as a thriller (or incident-packed as a romance novel) to be worth their time. While I do like a lot of action/incident, it’s not a requirement for me, or rather, I might have a broad understanding of incident. This novel of rural life in early twentieth century Iceland does have a few humdinger scenes, like a man who winds up taking an unplanned reindeer-back ride into a just-barely-above-freezing fjord river, but for the most part, the incidents we see are the quotidian ins and outs of just barely getting by on an Icelandic farm. But it’s riveting all the same. It wasn’t (just) poor time management that had me reading “Independent People” mostly in dozen-page dollops- I wanted to savor this book.
To the extent we think about Iceland much these days, we think of it as a quirky tourist destination, conveniently located on the flight path between the northeastern US and Britain. It’s an extension of Scandinavian civilization way up north and west, complete with a high standard of living, stability, democracy, free sexual mores, etc. Well, it is indeed an extension of Scandinavia, settled by Vikings in the late ninth century AD, but that meant something very different from hot spring tour buses and pricey Reykjavik beers for most of its history. It meant profound isolation and poverty. It means a couple-ten thousand descendants of the Vikings stuck on a small volcanic rock, with only intermittent boats back to the distant metropole in Denmark, trying to scrape a living as the rest of the world mostly passed them by. Shit gets weird in that kind of setting.
There wasn’t really a “native” population when the Vikings got there, but there were a few people, most of them Irish monks and other religious hermits who wanted to be well and truly alone to contemplate their dark, moody Celtic variant on Jehovah. Our story begins with the Viking settlers driving off one of these monks from a particular valley, and over the centuries, they expanded his memory into a hiberno-papist demon, Kolumkilli (presumably named after the great Irish hermit saint Columbkille), who curses the valley and anyone who tries to make a go of it. Is it the curse, or just the fact that scratching a living from volcanic rock, cut off from all the trade routes, is a precarious proposition? Icelanders tend not to think in those terms. People leave Iceland — a fair number go to America once that’s on option, often via work on whaling ships — but once you leave, you’re gone for good, as though you’ve died, at least as far as those who remain when this story begins are concerned. This makes the remainders an odd breed.
And Bjartur, the main character of “Independent People,” is odd, but in a relatable way. When the main action of the novel begins, he’s just gotten done with eighteen years of indentured servitude to a landlord, debt peonage still being a major institution in Iceland at the time. He takes his accumulated savings and buys some land smack dab where Kolumkilli supposedly cursed things. He doesn’t care. He bows before neither ghost, gods, or men. He will go to almost any length to maintain his status as an “independent man.”
It’s not just economic dependence, or even primarily economic dependence, even if he avoids debt like the plague. One of Laxness’s master strokes is depicting an actual pedant- which is to say, someone who makes himself and everyone around him miserable on principle, but who doesn’t actually follow through all the implications of those principles (John Kennedy Toole was another master of this). Bjartur’s farm isn’t an autarchy- that'd be borderline impossible. He sells his wool and sheep to a small port town merchant, who advances him the rye flour, preserved “refuse fish” and minor household goods he needs. There’s no getting ahead. But as far as Bjartur is concerned, it’s the natural order of things. His real independence isn’t economic- it’s in his refusal to accept any connection or obligation other than the bare minimum sanctioned by longstanding Icelandic custom as what a man ought to have. And so you have brilliant scenes of Bjartur grudgingly doling out coffee (coffee and tobacco seem to be the only foreign products these people seem to have) by the bucket to his neighbors when they walk or ride by, snidely insulting them all (and receiving insults) the while in between rounds of quoting epic poetry (almost none of them have books, even bibles) at each other and comparing the rate at which their respective sheep flocks are being decimated by intestinal worms.
Family is an obligation, but not the haven from the world that we think of it as today. Bjartur is married to a woman with whom he escaped indentured servitude. She gets pregnant — possibly with a landlord’s kid — and dies in childbirth because Bjartur would rather chase one lost sheep up into the wilderness during a blizzard than stay at home and listen to her talk. The daughter survives, Bjartur wrangles some hired peons for himself, knocks one of them up a few times, and soon has a small gaggle of kids… both because that’s what happens when you have sex, and because he wants and needs the labor. Bjartur and the other adults around — his peon-wife (this was apparently considered normal at the time), other hired long term laborers — aren’t entirely unsentimental about children. He especially loves his oldest daughter, Asta Sollilja, in a way that only avoids being super creepy through Bjartur’s hard-assed personal qualities. But the absolute best Bjartur is going to offer them is the opportunity to replicate his own life- endless, unremunerative toil, and after he dies, one of them (one of the boys that is) gets to call himself “independent” and keep the cycle going. The girls and the other boys can go screw. “It’s no business of mine,” as Bjartur would put it.
Much of the middle of the book is told from the kids’ perspectives, mostly Asta Sollilja’s and that of the youngest boy, Nonni. Both are dreamy children who want to experience worlds beyond the miserable sod croft — building a house is a distant glimmering dream — they’re stuck in. That’s another element of Scandinavian culture, the imaginative flights of fancy, waking dreams of elves, trolls, ghosts, and what might as well fall into that category for a 1910s Icelandic child, “the counties” - anywhere not Iceland (or, I guess, Denmark, which sends officials and takes money). The imagination can be as active as you please, but utter monotony threatens to starve it. It’s hard to imagine just how monotonous it was, and conveying this is one of the miracles Laxness accomplishes. Obviously, there’s no media beyond oral tradition- even newspapers are a thing only the landlords bother with. There aren’t schools except private religious schools Bjartur only sends one daughter to, for a little polish. Beyond that, there’s an extraordinarily deprived “material culture.” There's just not a lot to work with, considering how poor and isolated the Icelandic countryside is. You see the same shit every day and it’s all the same colors. The natural environment is beautiful, but in a stark (and somewhat predictable) way, with an extremely limited color palate and so few animals that cows are some of the most exciting things you’ll ever see. Nonni, for lack of anything else to imagine, spends hours in bed before rising for his fourteen hour work day to fantasize the small stock of metal goods in the croft — a few pots and pans, a coffee service — talking to each other.
Bjartur (and the circumstances he fights in a never ending doomed war that makes mock of the concept of “independence”) dominates the kids but can’t keep them on the farm forever, especially with the tendency of his wives to die. Nonni gets a relative to send him to America. Asta Sollilja comes back from confirmation school pregnant. Bjartur can’t stand the shame, denounces her as a landlord’s bastard, and casts her out, after which she carries on her own doomed struggle for independent survival as a poor single mother in a small port town.
Laxness also shows what change does to such a situation. Cooperative societies arise, and Bjartur refuses on principle to have anything to do with them, especially because the big shots up the hill who used to employ him as a peon are big coop players. Laxness never gets so lazy as to let either Bjartur or his rivals gain the moral upper hand- the big shots foist a cow on him at one point. The cow changes everyone’s life on the croft with its milk and niceness. Bjartur hates the cow and eventually slaughters it wantonly, and the shock helps kill his second wife. Who’s the asshole? It’s an asshole move to kill your kids one source of food other than rye bread and shitty old fermented fish. But he didn’t want the cow, and in a world where everything runs on debt and clients he (it’s worth noting that some libertarians see the old Icelandic social/political structure as a role model for an “anarchocapitalist” utopia), you can see why he may be leery of his former almost-owners, who are always trying to get him indebted to them, bearing gifts.
Coops get big anyway, with or without Bjartur. Then World War One rolls around and all of a sudden people want Icelandic wool for uniforms and mutton tallow for greasing rounds. Even Bjartur starts to make money. In a pretty classic “stubborn asshole” move he suddenly decides he wants in on the Coop, and it’s lending capacity, to finally build a house (among other things, it might get Asta Sollilja to come back home, not that he’ll admit it). But of course, somewhere between Bjartur’s asshole, standard capitalist bad luck, and living in the valley cursed by Kolumkilli, his house sucks, and the war ends, and the market collapses, and he has to sell out and start all over again, and he’s down to the one “practical” son, who wants to go to America but then falls in love with a rich neighbor girl who hates him.
This is positional economic, social, and existential warfare, and I love it. You’d figure depictions of futility would bother me, given everything, but when they’re honest and well-done, I like them better than almost anything. I was a little cautious coming in, used as I am to sentimental American literary portrayals of rural people by urbanites who shower multiple times a day. Especially because I knew Laxness was a pretty big lefty, and some of the worst excesses of American rural sentimentalizing come from American “popular front” type writers… but no, Laxness neither sentimentalizes, or goes in for Faulkner-style (or the many cheaper kinds on the market) of rural gothic. All in all, a great read, one worth savoring. *****
Hao Jingfang, “Vagabonds” (translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu) (read by Emily Woo Zeller) - Here’s the thing with Ursula Le Guin: she didn’t go on for six hundred-odd pages at a pop. I know, I know, Saint Ursula could do no wrong and if she did write about the feelings of scifi people for six hundred pages we’d all eat it up and ask for seconds, but, the point stands. We should not neglect something that differentiates genre fiction from literary fiction, historically: a keen awareness of the reader’s patience. True, many a SFF classic strains that patience, but it usually does so with worldbuilding and action sequences, and a lot less with attempts to plumb the depths of character.
Critics sometimes compare Chinese scifi writer Hao Jingfang with Le Guin, which is where this opening gambit comes from. But even leaving aside the fact that Hao’s freshman effort weighs in at a robust 624 pages, the comparison shows the weak chops of a lot of genre criticism these days. You don’t need to hate “Vagabonds” to see the differences- I didn’t love it, I didn’t hate it, I’m confident in saying Hao is no Le Guin (which she doesn’t claim to be, as far as I know). “A woman writing scifi that’s not about space battles and has characters with inner lives and social commentary, must be a second coming of Le Guin!” is just dumb even if you think Hao has the chops to merit the comparison on quality grounds.
“Vagabonds” is about a small group of kids raised on a Martian republic in the 23rd century or so, who go visit Earth for a few years, and then come back. Hao depicts Mars as a sort of technocratic utopia; Earth, meanwhile, is its capitalistic, nationalistic self. You don’t see much of the trip, except as flashbacks narrated by the main character, Luo Ying. What you see is their homecoming. Most of them went out when they were thirteen and came back eighteen. And now they’ve got feelings and opinions about the comparative merits of Mars’ system versus that of Earth!
Given that this is a writer from China, it’s pretty impossible to avoid seeing some overlay of comparisons between China and “the west” here. Ken Liu, the translator and a big SFF writer himself, downplays these comparisons in an essay somewhere, but it came off pretty literal-minded. The strict technocracy of Mars — everyone lives in one big (glass! Lot of sand on Mars) city, everyone’s basic material needs are met, everyone joins an “atelier” workshop when they graduate and they’re all coordinated according to master plans established by engineers and scientists — does not strongly resemble China’s current system. But it kind of does seem like the symbolic relationship between the two systems does rather resemble that of contemporary China and contemporary US/Western Europe. Hao represents Mars as serious, planned, aimed towards high values, but also authoritarian (though not notably violent) and conformist. She depicts Earth as free, fun, valuing the individual, but also corrupt and shallow.
Well… the kids have feelings about it. There’s an interesting bit early on where Luo Ying interacts with a film director from Earth. The director is starting to dislike Earth’s shallow consumerism as Luo Ying starts to disdain Mars’ authoritarianism, they pass like ships in the night, both idealizing the systems the others are trying to escape. Time goes by and Luo Ying and her peers grow more and more restless with a life of assigned workshops and such. They act out by doing stuff like “borrowing” planes and flying around Mars’ valleys and so on without permission. They get angst, make plans. Luo Ying finds out terrible things about her parents, who were also dissenters, and her grandparents, who helped engineer the Mars system and possibly her parents demise.
It’s not bad, but it’s also not great. There’s a lot of characters, and most of them are hard to distinguish, especially the rebel Martian kids. Hao does a lot more telling than showing when she wants to get across the heightened emotional states of her characters, and you gotta figure translation isn’t helping. But also, like… no one seriously addresses a serious believablity question. A fragile ecology in a place where the atmosphere and temperature could kill you — Mars has not been terraformed, in this story — easily seems kinda like not the place to complain about “authoritarianism”? Especially when said system isn’t that violently repressive and mostly sticks to managing the technical systems keeping everyone alive? I get that these are kids and kids complain and act up. And they don’t really overturn anything- that would be besides the point, which seems to be, every system has it’s good and bad points but people need to express themselves etc etc. All well and good but it kind of seems impertinent when the wolf (or radical decompression) is at the door, and isn’t an interesting enough idea to really rocket the book past it’s sleepy pace and uninteresting characters… or to Le Guin comparisons, though Hao is young yet. ***
V.S. Naipaul, “Miguel Street” (1959) - This is one of Naipaul’s earlier novels, depicting life on the titular slum street in Port of Spain, capital of his native Trinidad. Slum life depictions can get real dicey, real fast, between catastrophizing and sentimentalizing and tortured oscillations between the two. Naipaul, even that early in his career, craftily avoids both. In what I suspect is a riposte to left-leaning “social” writers, he makes an apostrophe early on against those who depicts areas like Miguel Street as “just slums,” just poverty and degradation, but he doesn’t make the lives of its inhabitants out to be constant sunshine and roses. It is a fairly typical Naipaul world, perhaps a little more honest than most in that few really pretend to believe the lies everyone tells, more for amusement than for anything else. People are self-serving, but insufficiently consistent to be called truly selfish much of the time. They pursue drives that make sense in context but probably aren’t “the right play” according to someone sitting in an easy chair in London or America. They’re human, but not in the grottily sentimental way of most humanists (or the equally silly nihilistic way of most anti-humanists).
Most of “Miguel Street” is made up of little vignettes about specific inhabitants. Most of them are about dreams they have to put away, or that blow up in their faces- in the case of a man who dreams of making a living making fireworks displays, literally. They dream of glory, borrowed from afar- boxing championships, American wives, lotteries, passing exams and going away to London (which the viewpoint character, like Naipaul himself, eventually does). When the dreams collapse, as they generally do, they find themselves back with the gang on Miguel Street, not starving or in fear but poor and not doing much, or else they disappear to another island to work in obscurity. Even Hat, who serves as the voice of the neighborhood and something of a Greek chorus, commenting on all of the stories, has his moment where he comes close to going mad when he feels he’s being cheated at gambling, winds up going to jail, and when he’s gone the narrator knows it’s time to make his way out.
Here’s something I found interesting: there’s not a lot of talk about race. Trinidad is a racially divided society. Naipaul is descended from Indians brought to the islands to provide labor post-abolition, most of the rest of the population is descended from black slaves, and there’s a small remainder of white (sometimes “off-white,” like Portuguese or Middle Eastern) people with disproportionate control over resources. Other inhabitants of Miguel Street are referred to as Indian or black or Portuguese or whatever when it’s important to the story- but a lot of the time, it’s not. I’m used to narrators in slum stories informing the reader of the race of every introduced character, unless it’s assumed that most people in a given space they’re describing are one race or another. They do this because it’s central to the dynamics of the interactions. Hell, I’m reading one memoirs set in Chicago in the thirties where the narrator reports the skin shade of every black person who he comes across- and it’s germane to the story, not (or not just) a private fixation of the author. I wonder, was Trinidad just less race-obsessed than the US? I do know Naipaul deeply resented the black power movement that came to Trinidad in the sixties. Anyway! This is a good little book, well worth reading. ****’
LAGNIAPPE
Ed’s Corner: Spoilers For A Game With No Story & You Gain Nothing From Success
I have a confession, readers of Melendy Ave. Review. That villain that you thought was real and couldn’t put a face too, the shadowy visage you lived in terror of for lo these last few weeks: it was actually me all along. Yes, I confess I’m a horrible and loathsome creature who has done you great harm from a distance, casting judgment on many of you, and often finding you wanting. Yes, I am that brute, that beast, that fiend: I’m the guy who’s been judging you for your Wordle scores, every single one of you, and we need to have a talk about it. And before you ask, yes, I’m serious.
Wordle, for those of you who don’t know, describes itself as a simple word game. Every day a new five letter word is chosen, and each player has six guesses to figure out what the word might be. You start by typing in any five letter word, and then Wordle will give you back a grid based on your guess. Letters that appear in the word but not in the space you guessed being marked as yellow, and letters that appear in the word in the spot you placed them being marked in green. Based on this information, the player then can refine their guesses as to what the word is, with each guess providing a new row in the grid to show your most recent guess in the same yellow and green scheme as earlier described. In the end the game provides a link for you to copy over your grid in emoji format, so you can paste it to your Twitter or your Facebook or whatever. There’s no score or anything, just the grid, how many attempts you made to guess the word, and whether or not you ultimately succeeded.
It’s kind of cute seeing how everyone did in the end. You can see how people came along with their guesses. Getting a stray yellow or green in the first guess. Getting a few more in the second or third guess, and then either putting the finishing touches on it in guesses four and five, or getting really close, but being one letter off until you get to the make or break sixth guess. Most people do end up getting it in the end, but there’s always the possibility you could miss it, if Wordle decides to be cruel that day and uses an obscure word containing infrequently used letters, or a word that shares many letters with several other common words. Everyone seems a bit sheepish when posting their scores, most adding comments after their grids along the lines of “darn, it took me four guesses, just kind of blanked for a bit there,” or “got it in two, guess I got lucky.” It’s meant to be endearing, but that’s not how I feel reading these kinds of comments, especially after seeing how their grids played out. Based on these grids I see there’s good reason for them to be defensive. They’re playing Wordle wrong, and I, for one, am fed up with it.
Before we continue, I feel I should make two things clear. First, before someone rightfully decides to start throwing bricks at me for laying into the sore subject of their Wordle insecurity, I’m just going to come out and say I’m playing up a heel persona here, and I don’t really think you lack mental acuity based on your Wordle results. But as we’ll get to in a moment, I do think the similarities I see across wide swathes of posted Wordle grids does suggest a common strain of thought that’s leading many people into a mental trap in how they view and pursue the concept of success. Secondly, I guess I should clear up my credentials. Who am I to tell you how to play Wordle? Am I some genius who’s guessing it right on the first try every time? Impossible! And not just because such a result is exceptionally unlikely, but because, like many things I review in this column, I’ve never actually experienced the game first hand. But why would I need to solve any individual daily Wordle, when I’ve already solved every Wordle possible.
Let me explain. I might not be a genius who can intuit the solution to any given Wordle in one guess, but I am someone with a degree in Game Design. As such, I’m coming on to a game of Wordle in a bit of a different way than perhaps your average player would. You might think to yourself, “a degree in game design. Must’ve been fun, getting to play games in class all day and all,” and in truth, it was, at the time. But that’s the problem, I’ve seen behind the curtain and now my brain doesn’t engage with games the same way. I’m no longer testing my wits, or skill against the game itself, or my opponent, but rather the designer of the game. There’s an optimal strategy in there somewhere, a way to stack the odds in your favor, often overwhelmingly. I’d probably do pretty well at a poker table by breaking down the game like this, but I’d be miserable to play against, as the optimal strategy is to play hyper-conservatively and pick on the other players when they’re down chips without a shred of mercy.
It’s not that I can’t appreciate any game anymore, but I’ll never get that visceral, “Wow that was a really close match, how exciting!” or even things like wondering how they had a big boss monster break through a wall to kick off an epic confrontation. I know exactly how all the magic tricks are done, and generally it’s not a lot of fun to play games with me. To give one example, in a game a non-game designer friend was playing, the enemies would call out when they were flanking the players position, like they were coordinating with one another, and my friend said, “Wow! Ed, you know how they make games, something like that has gotta be a lot of programming under the hood to pull off something that complicated, right?” To which I sighed and said, “No, it’s just that the game sometimes checks the output of the basic A* pathing algorithm and if it ever finds that two enemies are going in opposite directions the check outputs a gameplay bark about flanking, it’s maybe ten lines of code at most.” I much the same way, it only took me a few hours of turning over Wordle in my mind to break it down in pretty much exactly the same way, and in doing so found a strategy to solve it in nearly every case without fail.
Now I realize it’s no fun for me to spoil the fun for other people. It’s fine to play Wordle without any further thought, and just enjoy the distraction in your day. The solution I have, which I’ll detail in full below, will ensure you never miss a Wordle, but it’ll suck the usual sort of fun out of the game in much the way I often experience being cursed with the terrible knowledge of game design. In its place I can only offer that you’ll appreciate games in a different way, their craftsmanship, the clever solutions for making mechanics work within the rules and limitations of play. There’s a different sense of enjoyment in one magician seeing another do a trick particularly well, appreciating the craft of the thing. Incidentally, Wordle is very well crafted, there are very deliberate reasons for every part of its rule set, which sort of plays into the solution I have below.
But if you’d rather not know now is the time to get off this ride. This is officially a SPOILER WARNING for Wordle, a game that has no story. Beyond this point you’ll know too much to enjoy it as it was intended:
Now you’re thinking, “Oh great, Ed’s going to tell us things we already know. I’ve seen Wheel of Fortune, I know I should prioritize RSTLNE. Throw in ‘adieu’ to cover most of the vowels and I’m set, baby.” Well, you’re wrong. You should never guess “adieu,” that’s just setting yourself up for failure. In fact the words you should be guessing are incredibly obscure, with one or at most two vowels apiece. You should guess the same five words for your first five guesses every time, that’s the path to success.
So the reason why I’m judging all of you for your Wordle grids is not because you’re using too many guesses to get your word, but too few. Wordle essentially gives you all of the information you need to figure out how to solve it algorithmically by its very rules. To begin, Wordle has a “hard mode” where it locks you in to using letters that appear in the word that match up with your guesses, (and as such, anyone actually playing on hard mode, this solution doesn’t actually work for you, and I can’t actually judge you for your grids, but I’m getting to that). Well, why is that hard mode? If you look at people’s grids, that’s generally how they play the game anyways. They get a green square and then they try to build the word out around that, like anyone would, right? Well, let’s look a bit deeper at the rules.
You have six guesses to figure out the five letter word, but why six? Very early on, I said that Wordle is a game that describes itself as a word game. I phrased it like that because I now want to make the point that Wordle isn’t exactly only a word game, but actually mostly a math game. There are a few places where you need to get clever with words, but often not in the way you’d expect. There are no points, the only thing that matters is whether you get the word or not, it doesn’t matter how many guesses you might make so long as you get it. The only guess that actually matters is the sixth one, you can do whatever you like with the other five, and what we’re going to do with those first five guesses is hack the English language so that it’ll tell us exactly which letters are in the final word without fail.
So we have five guesses to set ourselves up for the all important sixth guess. That’s five guesses at five letters each. Here’s where the math comes in: There are twenty-six letters in the English language, and we have enough open letters to guess twenty-five letters with the five guesses before the sixth guess. If it weren’t for the fact that the guesses have to be dictionary legal words, you could just put in:
ABCDE
FGHIJ
KLMNO
PQRST
UVWXY
With your first five guesses, and with just that you’d know all of the letters that appeared in the Wordle (you could determine if Z was in that day’s Wordle by process of elimination, if it wasn’t any of the other letters, as it’s the only remaining option). Unfortunately because the guesses need to be dictionary words, you can’t do that, but you can get pretty darn close. Now unless the Wordle word list is exceptionally tolerant of some really obscure slang, you can’t actually make a list of 5 words that use every letter except one exactly once, at least not with the five or so hours I’ve spent trying to work it out with a Scrabble legal word finder. But the quirks of the English language come to your assistance here.
Anyone who’s been through kindergarten knows Q is highly dependent on U, so you can probably deduce if Q fits into your puzzle by the presence of U’s (although my system might fail the one day they throw “Iraqi” at you). Knowing this, you definitely can find a series of five words that use at least 24 of the letters, without using Q’s and one other letter of your choice, where you can use one letter twice amongst all of your five guesses. It takes some doing, and you’re going to have to dig up some pretty obscure words, but there are a few ways to make exactly that kind of list of words. There are a few other tricks based on some boring combinatorics about how to account for the same letter appearing in the Wordle answer twice, but given how there are only so many configurations of words in English you’ll generally be able to figure it out once you’ve figured out which letters are in the puzzle based on that master list of words you produced earlier, or at least at a much higher rate than trying to build out from correctly guessed letters. Congratulations, you’ve just now reduced Wordle to a word jumble with extra steps. All of this was entirely intentional from the beginning, the game was trying to tell you how to play itself through its rules, but you weren’t listening.
Now that we know the solution, we can finally answer the question of why I was judging you for your Wordle grids before. I wasn’t mad that you weren’t getting the word quicker, I was disappointed you weren’t making the most of the resources provided to you by the structure of the game. It’s simply a waste of potential resources to have the same green square repeat from one guess to the next. This is why hard mode locks you in to guessing letters you’ve already solved, because it legitimately makes the game harder by restricting your resources. Even in hard mode there’s a way to game the system by guessing words with infrequently used letters first so they can be safely eliminated, leaving you with more open letters to eliminate other letters with your guesses, but this is a simple overview, not an in depth discussion.
The trap that the repeating green squares represent is chasing after a success that’s already been secured. You’ve already gotten all the information you’re going to need from any given letter by simply having it appear as yellow, let alone green. Seeing a green square repeat across nearly the entire Wordle grid represents so much wasted potential. Wrong letters are so much more valuable to solving any given Wordle than correctly placed letters. Wrong letters provide so much more information, they eliminate other potential words, whereas correct letters confuse the process by reinforcing the likelihood that it’s any number of similar words. Once you’ve secured a success, be confident in the information it imparts upon you, but leave it behind until you really need it, as true of Wordle as it is of life. Being a slave to past success is the trap built into Wordle, and one you should see yourself clear of, lest you continue to suffer my distant judgement of your Wordle grid.
Dang! Even Mithra is blown away by Ed’s game analysis and needs to sit down for a bit.