Thoughts
Man.
Okay.
So I can't bring myself to send Alex's puzzle, because it doesn't fit. It's not good. It's like using a Lamborghini as decoration
in your living room. It just doesn't belong.
I was flicking through xkcd earlier today, as I do often, and I was thinking about how Randall has put out a lot of comics very consistently, and obviously thinking about this in the context of the Linoleum Club. A lot of the xkcd's are bad, and I think my realization was that, to use the same words as I was using earlier, a lot of the comics don't fit or didn't fit before they were published. And it's obviously easy to look back at XKCD and view it as a comprehensive work, and see that every comic fits because it's there. But some of them I could imagine myself refusing to publish if I was in Randell's shoes because they were too different from the 2,000 comic mean. There are a lot of repetitive sex jokes. #594 is just a single really bad pun. And there are some really good classic comics in that section of XKCD history but I think that's what makes it more brutal. My point is that I would have skipped a day in there. I would have said, "we can't publish #544" because what is it talking about. But Randall didn't, and I don't criticize him for that because on average XKCD is good.
So I'm going to shove Alex's puzzle into the Club wholesale, and it's going to be fine, because we can't miss more days and big-picture I'm okay with other people writing puzzles that don't match the tone or difficulty that I would use.