Drama erupted in the offices of The Stute and here at Off The Press in the past week as both organizations were inundated with a barrage of complaints regarding the crossword and sudoku puzzles. The amount of incoming emails quickly exceeded all the free storage space in our gmail so we started printing them out and deleting the emails so more could come in. Unfortunately, that also meant we rather quickly ran out of ink, but by printing them on black paper, the words showed up in white. We are now hiring extra staff to help us deal with the mountain of complaints that are still coming in, so please go to the office that is currently having paper fly out its chimney if you’re interested in reading complaints about newspaper puzzles all day.
Collaborating with The Stute allowed us to come to conclusions about the issues and what could be done to resolve them. Many of the complaints The Stute received focused on the multiple solutions that were possible in some recent sudokus. We were surprised to learn that having multiple solutions does not in fact make the puzzles easier. Since some of the complaints we received at Off The Press focused on the crossword being too difficult, we agreed with The Stute that making the puzzles easier should have been appreciated. The crossword puzzle that caused the most controversy was from two weeks ago where the RGB codes for crayola colors were listed as clues and the color names were the answers. When Off The Press submitted that puzzle to the Stute we asked if it could be in color as it should make it easier to identify “Fuzzy Wuzzy,” “Boysenberry,” “Skobeloff,” and “Razzmatazz,” but The Stute printing offices did not have access to those colors.
Off The Press has committed to making better crossword puzzles by consulting with experts from the New York Times, but we are also interested in working with The Stute on shorter-term solutions. Issues in the coming weeks will feature large pictures that can be cut out of the page, cut into jigsaw pieces, and then assembled. Square sections of paper will be outlined to be cut out and accompanied by instructions for how to fold them into a functional Rubik’s cube. Off The Press, The Stute, and Milton-Bradley entered into an agreement allowing us to print all the necessary paper money, cards, and board for the popular board game Monopoly. These changes collectively are projected to increase Stute game-player satisfaction by 45% week over week.
Page 10 of The Stute is an area fraught with tension. Every week students turn to that page, some searching for the crossword, some for the sudoku, some for the Roving Reporter, and some because they put it on their desk upside down. It’s the make-or-break point of the entire issue, and Off The Press is proud to be featured there, as well as in the Opinion section where of course we are now. Every week as we manually research and construct our crossword, (The Stute is responsible for the Sudoku so please send complaints on that to them not us) we feel the pressure to succeed from the thousands of dedicated individuals who give our small area a moment of their time. From this we can conclude that there is a force involved, which is equivalent to the pressure times the area.
Off The Press is a satirical Opinion column written and organized by Off Center, often used to joke about current Stevens issues and campus news. It is currently organized by Off Center President, Matthew Brantl.
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