Sudoku Whupping (Plus Zootropolis Watch)

   Shoveled snow for, about an hour? And then went to a birthday party at a different apartment complex entirely from mine, probably the nicest around BYU-I. Played, that one app that's like Charades but you hold it up to your forehead and try to guess? Until a couple of minutes ago, when it turned out it was almost midnight and we needed to hurry back (curfew is midnight, but I'm not sure if that's the rule that you need to be in bed by that time or just in your apartment-- I'm up right now, so...)

   I don't have classes tomorrow, which is today here (though not in Pacific Standard Time which is when this blog goes up, so ha! I'm not late) but I still have things to do, and want to get to bed, so I'll make this quick, and not elaborate on my second day of classes at all (great stuff, though!) I do have enough energy to explain Sudoku to you, though.

   The school paper, The Scroll, apparently runs this Sudoku puzzle at the back of the newspaper, and if you complete it and turn it in on time, they'll randomly select one person who did (and presumably got it right) and that person receives... a prize. Of some sort. I hope it's monetary or at least valuable in nature, because I spent a crapton of investment on that Sudoku puzzle, which just may have been not only the hardest one I've done in my life, but also the hardest puzzle of any sort I've ever done, and heck maybe it's even the hardest single thing I've ever done. Three or four times, I thought to myself that maybe they'd made a mistake, or maybe it was deliberate to see who'd catch on and that was the real puzzle, or maybe they just like trolling people or what.

   But I solved it. And so, no, I guess not, it's not impossible. Though it took me digitizing the puzzle and working it out in a more editable form to do it.

   I wish in retrospect that I'd saved the numerous failures, making notes directly on a Snip of the photo of the puzzle I'd managed to complete before deciding to go higher-tech, but whenever I failed I tore it down and started over, or even just tore it down all the way and needing to take a new Snip when I decided to have a second (or fourth, or fifth) go at it. It would be so nice if I had saved images of those attempts, not only so I could show them to you here but also more pragmatically so that I'd be able to know what I'd already tried. Because, seriously, having to redo that work that I'd already figured out was wrong, that was annoying.

   At some point perhaps 2/3rds of the way through, I figured that the penciled-in notes from the photo I was working off of were too distracting and possibly outdated, and my reliance on them may have been a factor in my constant failure, going from bad assumptions (I did draw fresh number dots as part of my Snips, but I mostly based those off of the dots on the sheet below (some of which had been erased which wasn't as clear from the photo as it was in real life.)) I thus plopped the numbers into an Excel sheet and worked from that.

   This image is from when I realized that I should have been saving my Snips the whole time; it's not actually one of my work Snips but I still find it worth sharing because it's pretty interesting. It delineates the relationships between numbers that would only be able to go in either of two slots, with the remainder of slots proving to be impossibilities for one reason or another:

   The yellow highlights around the edges indicate that I've checked all numbers in that row/box/column, to find any strays that could only have fit one place. The different color inks also mean specific things, with red being experiments and blacks being definitively locked-in numbers. The red scribbles on the left side are "administrative," that is, they deal with me experimenting with my pen tool (the Cisco-like bars are me experimenting with pressure, and that circle gave me a place to rest my cursor so that I'd be able to find that tiny thing again easily.)

   I'd post up my solution images as well, but the contest only closes to applicants Friday at 5:00...

ZOOTROPOLIS WATCH

   So, I know I'm not telling you about my second day of classes yet because I don't have time to get into detail, but I seriously needed to get to how my Art 130 Introduction to Graphic Design professor showed us the sloth trailer of all things. (!)(?)(!). Not as part of the class or anything, just, something about, slow reaction times or something? Only it was the British version of the trailer, exactly the same except "Sorcerer's" Stone-esquely called Zootropolis instead of Zootopia. And my Art 202 History of Art Renaissance-Present professor showed us the London New Year's fireworks, so I guess it's... shoot, actually, it could be a major holiday today in the UK and I wouldn't know it.