Woke up early to do the OAPC (Turkish) online competition for January, the first in a series preceding the WPC. Things went rather well, if rather well means finishing all the 40.1 problems in 2 hours, and then after checking and finding 2 entry mistakes, getting the optimum on the optimizer with 3 minutes left. So I think its a perfect score with maybe an entry error in one place. The score is not as important as the fact these were really fun puzzles, and really friendly with my solving style, so I'll be excited to see these types at the WPC if some reappear. My favorite new puzzles were probably Tapa, the Japanese Sums/Battleships combo, and the Sigma Snake (the fourth one was awesome!). I also loved the Tetroscope. Normally, these tile-fitting tetromino/pentomino puzzles are very unfriendly to me, but these were very solvable, and while the fourth one was tough, I loved the way it worked out at the end. Probably my favorite puzzle in the set. The optimizer was the kind I like - a puzzle with an absolutely best answer, but with many close but wrong answers on the way to it. I got progressively better but eventually saw the way. There were 2 questionable borders in the Quicksort (#2 and #3 had a wall of intermediate thickness). This is similar to the star battle problem we had in bulgaria, but I was fairly confident the intermediate thickness walls were real walls because of uniqueness issues.

Outside of puzzles, I've become absolutely fascinated with the BBC4 series Only Connect after I stumbled on it when heading to Buzzerblog after an lj friend linked there. The two parts I've seen so far of the championship finals represent a rather unseen puzzle-type (lateral thinking to make connections of things) for a game show, with a phenomenal contestant team that inspires with their brilliance. Check it out; I know I'll have to find a way to download other episodes of this series which would never work in the states.