About those pictures…
NOTE: This post was edited Jan 2nd, to reflect a modification to the settings.
If you are doing the interactive puzzles on the puzzle website, you have probably noticed that when you complete a puzzle, instead of getting a pithy quote, you get an illustration (often, but not always, of a hedgehog, sometimes a kitty with wings, sometimes a lady driving a chariot pulled by cats, sometimes a forest, that kind of thing). I made all the illustrations using a fun tool called Midjourney that allows me to imagine things and make pictures of them. There are currently some five dozen pictures, and I’ll be adding more periodically.
If you miss the pithy quotes, and you hate the pictures of hedgehogs and trees, you can go back to the old system. Just select the setting icon (the gear) below the puzzle, and turn on “Quotes” instead of “Pics”, as shown to the right. You can also use the “Both” setting, which will randomly alternate between quotes and pictures (using a simple coin-flip).
Why did I switch to pictures, you ask? Well there are two reasons. #1 The pictures are kinda cool. #2 I have occasionally been asked to turn the quotes off, especially by school teachers. The problem is that my quote database is very large, consisting of some 30,000 quotes I’ve acquired from various public-domain sources over the years. Unfortunately, a small handful of the quotes are a little too spicy for school kids. There are also a few downright misogynist (or otherwise problematic) quotes in there as well that date from the 80s and 90s (back when many of these quotes were compiled by computer nerds). When I hear about them, I remove them, but my attention-deficit disorder prevents me from reading every single quote, and I simply don’t know what’s in there!