A post for those waiting too anxiously for the next puzzles here; some unexpected and potentially fun puzzles will soon be coming but this public service message on how puzzles and other stimulants may affect your brain seemed more important today.

At SudokuCon, I told a story about how after the WSC2 in Prague the first interview was with a sex advice columnist asking how I use sudoku in a relationship or even in the bedroom. I did not then have examples as I do now of a marriage proposal sudoku, or a witty joke about having too much experience as a “naked single” to know a lot about “naked pairs”. The doku in sudoku comes from dokushin meaning “lonely” or “bachelor” after all. And I got into Sudoku soon after a break-up and have been in a twenty year relationship with Sudoku without being willing to put a ring on it because making puzzles is not my life mission. Anyway, I keep a log of good answers for the future when an unexpected media request comes to me.

The most frequently repeated answer is how does Sudoku connect to my life and/or to my work in science, and that is about problem solving. I am a great problem solver even if you think of me as a great Sudoku solver. In sudoku, all puzzles should have one answer and we should agree on it when we see it. Many different techniques might be taken and it might take an open mind to find something hard when stuck, so stepping away from the problem and coming back with fresh eyes can help. Those problem-solving techniques also apply to science and medicine, but in a space where there may or may not be an answer and we have to use the scientific method to assert a rationale, test it, and advance from there. The problems of science take teams and different perspectives and not just fifteen minutes and a pencil. But being a great problem solver starts from something as simple as figuring out Sudoku, and I enjoy coming back to the places of comfort when the rest of the world feels too difficult to solve so puzzles are also part of my mental health journey.

The newest logged answer comes to the question of what to do if you are “addicted” to sudoku. It was first asked to me by a comedic podcaster who takes unique approaches to solving people’s problems. The remaining words are pure, crystal blue Snyder, and I know I’ll at least come back to these a lot because being an addict and having a bipolar brain is a dangerous mix:

We talk about someone “addicted” to sudoku in quotations as if it is not a drug. I am here, as a huge drug addict from hardcore puzzles, to tell you that you can actually be addicted to sudoku, when you abuse it too much. In a world in which there are a lot of problems and none of them seem solvable, you might first find comfort in a simple number puzzle that you slowly work your way through until there are just ten and then five and then fourthreetwoonedone digits left and it feels good. Dopamine rushing through your brain. You go a little further and get a little better at Sudoku and now you can do even the “hard” ones better and the rush is even higher with the hard grids. You start losing track of time, you forget to eat, you stop being intimate with your partner, your brain is thinking everything is right because all the pleasure neurotransmitters are signaling but they are not firing for the right reasons and you haven’t eaten and your partner has left you and that only makes you want to solve even more.

Sudoku may sometimes be a medicine and make you happy, but too much of it can be an addiction and that is bad. Now Sudoku is weak sauce compared to the drugs the FDA regulates, but it is hitting many if not all of the same processes in the brain at a fundamental level. We don’t live in a world where someone running naked in the streets screaming “Will Shortz” is instantly identified as a crossword addict, and police don’t check for graphite residue on your fingers when they pull you over for driving under the influence. But you do need to do some of the same things an addict might in the more extreme situations to get better because they know best how to treat an addiction. First, detoxify. Stop solving any sudoku puzzle that Thomas Snyder wrote that might activate your brain a lot — go to the uninteresting ones that still look like sudoku but are boring like a computer-generated very easy. Or go to something sudoku-adjacent. Maybe word searches are something that detoxifies you with the letters A-Z over fifteen minutes in a safer way than Sudoku did with 1-9. Find an accountability partner. Have them limit your supply of sudoku so you do not overdose in a day. If still in trouble, seek professional help. As someone smart once said, moderation in all things, even sudoku itself.

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.

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.”

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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.

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*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.

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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.