Streaks

This is my 626th post on this blog. This blog’s been around for twelve years and I’ve almost never missed a Saturday (even if they are copouts now and then). At this point, this streak is a long one and like many streaks, I don’t want to break it.

My current streak on the New York Times crossword is 164 days. My last longest one was 424 days and I’m not sure why I broke it, what life thing cropped up that prevented me from finding the time to solve a grid. I’m a little salty about it, because I want a higher streak to show off how consistent I am at solving the New York Times crossword the day each puzzle comes out.

Ultimately though, it doesn’t make a difference whether I solve the Sunday puzzle on Sunday or on Monday. All that happens is I get a little gold box on the app. The streak, like many streaks, is meaningless. 

But why do I still chase it? 

For one thing, I do legitimately really enjoy crosswords — most of the time, sometimes the grid has some crappy fills and those don’t feel great. Solving the crossword is fun, and maybe that streak is a way of quantifying that fun. Which, actually, sounds weird. Because why should fun have to be quantified? And it’s not like I’m having more fun the higher the streak goes. Maybe it’s the meta-gamification of it all, where keeping that streak going becomes a game unto itself.

You see this in all sorts of things, from Duolingo to the 2017 Battlefront 2, where each day there’s a bonus to logging in. It’s… not always a good thing and the gamification of everyday life is annoying at best (shoot, I spent the day hiking and nowhere near a PokéStop, there goes my Pokémon Go streak) to outright insidious (hello, casinos and gambling apps). Maybe the NYT Games app tracking my crossword solves isn’t that bad in the grand scheme of things.

Meanwhile, this blog now has 626 different ramblings. There’s no real bonus for me to keep this streak up, but the habit of sitting down and writing something once a week is a good thing, I suppose. It’s not as fun as the crossword, though.