Curses! A Conversation with Parker Higgins
Since the pandemic started last year, the crossword world has gravitated to Twitch for group solving, constructing, and community-building. One of the most entertaining crossword Twitch streams is Cursewords Live, hosted by Parker Higgins and Ross Trudeau. Cursewords also happens to be the name of the charmingly retro crossword-solving interface that Parker created using Linux, as featured on the stream. I caught up with Parker, a Brooklyn-based artist and activist, to explore the wonderful world of Cursewords.
AK: First, the obvious question: Millions of people solve crosswords every day. Very few people feel compelled to create their own interface on which to do them. So what inspired you to create Cursewords?
PH: It is funny, right? It’s like [saying] “I’ve got to get to work somehow,” and building a car.
The most straightforward answer, which is also the most boring, is that I use Linux, and there weren’t, as far as I could tell, good Linux options available to me a couple years ago. I have since revised that. I think that I was just wrong, I didn’t know where to look. But Across Lite didn’t run there, and that was enough.
I’m kind of a hobbyist programmer, and I did the classic programmer thing: “this should be pretty easy! I’ll do it all in the terminal.” I did it all very fast and now I look at the code and I don’t know how I could have written that. That is more advanced than I’m capable of.
When I first did [Cursewords], I was solving some crosswords. And now that I solve so much more, it is nice to feel like I really have set up the environment that I spend so much time in.
AK: Do you solve more because of Cursewords?
PH: Almost definitely. For a long time I didn’t solve anywhere else. Now I’ll occasionally do an Amuse Labs.
AK: Solving puzzles in Cursewords must make you notice other interfaces so much, and highlight their pros and cons.
PH: I am, I would say, a reasonably fast solver, in that I go to the tournaments, and I finish in the middle of them. I’m not unreasonably fast. So when I’m solving, I want to have all of the movement readily available to me. And there are ways of moving the cursor that I can do in Cursewords that Amuse Labs just doesn’t have. Now I feel like I’ve got a professional interest in it. I’ll check out how you move around squares and how you move around [the solving interface]. And there are a few things where I made a different decision, and that’s the decision that is hard-wired into my brain.
A very simple example is: if you use the arrow keys and you’re highlighting a word that’s going down, and you hit the right arrow — should you then be highlighting the same square, but now highlighting the across word? Or should you be doing the next down over?
AK: That drives me crazy.
PH: Yeah! And it would also drive me crazy, and I get to pull every string. In a lot of these places, you can customize, but it’s hard to describe it.
I started solving crosswords before doing anything else with them. Then, around the same time, I started constructing and building an interface. And I think that each of those activities deepened my solving experience. They all kind of inform one another. I co-construct, especially with Ross [Trudeau]. And we talk a lot about, for example, what order the themers should go in. And I think about grid movement– someone who’s solving, they move through the grid square by square. As a constructor, when you share a finished grid, all the letters are in there. But you think about, how is [the solver] going to put these letters in?
This is maybe a trivial question, but: is someone likely to do all of the acrosses in a row? Or 1-across, and then do the downs from it? That affects whether they’re operating with checked squares or not. And it affects how often they’re going to be correcting low-confidence mistakes that they put in.
I don’t know that I’ve got any firm lessons that I learned from building an interface that you couldn’t learn another way, but I do think that it’s all in conversation. And I feel like it deepened my experience. I don’t think everyone has to build an interface.
AK: How long have you been solving crosswords, and how long have you been constructing?
PH: Someone asked me this the other day, and I realized I have no idea! I have kind of always solved crosswords, in that my dad does every day, and I’ve known the rules forever. I’ve known, like, Bobby Orr and Mel Ott for my whole life. But I only started solving crosswords in earnest three or four years ago. That’s probably about when I got a Times subscription. And then, I really did make Cursewords entirely in about a month of nights and weekends.
AK: That’s a pretty quick turnaround between starting to solve crosswords and creating your own crossword solving program.
PH: Actually, when I set out to do Cursewords, the first thing I wanted — again, I’m a hobbyist programmer, you know, I’m very bad in a lot of ways — the first thing I asked was, can I display a grid on the screen? That was my low target. That took about a weekend. And then I wanted to make construction software. I realized that the along-the-way steps to construction software [were] probably, roughly, solving software. You need to put letters in a grid, and you need to move around the grid to say where you want to put the letters, and you need to see the clues. I was like, okay, first I’m going to make this solve, but eventually it will solve and construct. And then it was actually really hard to just get it to solve! So I stopped there.
AK: Would you be interested in developing construction capabilities for Cursewords?
PH: I am interested in people using it. I built this mostly for me, but I like that people can use it, and I like that people can see it, if it’s the right tool for people. I’ve heard that for some people who work in crossword editorial flows, it’s a good way of just displaying a .puz file, if you’re already on the terminal. So I want it to be useful. And now that I’ve done more construction and I think about what would be useful from a construction software perspective, I have different thoughts. And it’s not what I would have built two and a half years ago. I’m kind of glad that I didn’t put a ton of effort into that two and a half years ago.
AK: How has your thinking changed on what would make good construction software, versus what you were originally thinking?
PH: I was talking recently about character counts in clues. For mainstream publications, you actually have to keep that in mind. They’ve got to have a certain number of words if it’s going to go to print. So, in CrossFire, can you get it to show the character count of the clues as you’re going? And I realized: I have started to bifurcate grid-making and cluing, logistically. I realized I don’t need those to be in the same software. That’s a specific example, but I do think I would have made some assumptions about what you want out of construction software when I started that now I would make differently.
I use, and am largely pretty happy with, CrossFire. That took a lot of the pressure off of adding any construction stuff [to Cursewords]. But even with as much or as little programming knowledge as I have, it is tempting to look at problems with software as opportunities for new software. I look at examples like that, and I think, maybe I can do something about this. Maybe I can make this better for myself. So, to loop back to the first question, the reason I made [Cursewords] is, I was scratching a personal itch. And I do hope it’s useful, but it’s something where I see [an issue] and I think, can I make software about this?
AK: When I talked to Malaika Handa a few months ago, I asked how her background in tech tessellates with her work as a crossword constructor, and she said much the same thing: that it’s the itch to solve problems or dive into interesting what-ifs that defines people who program.
PH: I thought that was a great perspective. And I think it’s actually not that uncommon among people who do some programming. I’ve also heard Malaika say that if you come from a background of coders and you see people do this kind of coding all the time, it’s not that surprising. Over here in Crossword-land, there’s not the same density of coders doing these kinds of wacky projects. And I so appreciate being able to contribute a wacky project and seeing what else people are doing like that. And I like to think that 7xwords and Cursewords, conceptually, are in a conversation.
AK: There’s definitely a kind of kinship in terms of expanding what you can do, creatively, with crosswords, besides just… writing crosswords.
PH: It’s a really flexible format, and I’ve been thinking lately about various variety puzzles and puzzles that cross, so to speak, the crossword form with other puzzles. It’s, by some measures, such a trivial pursuit. You know, we’re just putting letters in squares! But I think that there is also something deeper there — I sound very Californian right now, I apologize! — the incremental discovery of parts of words through checked squares and clues. It’s a deep fun form, and I think that depth is better appreciated if it’s not just in the four corners of the newsprint box that it’s always lived in. I do like seeing it look different! It’s a small thing, but I like that when I do [puzzles] in Cursewords, it’s got this fun, weird, early nineties PC aesthetic. It reminds me that there’s something in common between the crossword that I’m doing and the crossword that everyone else is doing, but also, there’s something personal to it, and something deeper to it.
AK: The blurb for “Cursewords Live,” your weekly Twitch stream with Ross Trudeau, describes Cursewords as a “beautifully janky interface.” Can you talk a little bit about the aesthetic appeal of the terminal interface, or even the functional appeal, the ideological appeal?
PH: One thing I love about Cursewords is that it uses — this is going to sound funny to say, but it uses modern technology. It’s Python 3, which is the newest version. So this wouldn’t run on an old computer. When I say “old” I mean, like, 20 years old.
The name is a pun: it’s based on [the programming library] curses, and it uses a library on top of curses, but it looks like a curses application. It looks like it’s from the nineties. And it is: under the hood, it is using the same curses library. But I love that it implies a world where .puz files, or something similar, were being distributed over 56k modems. It’s like an artifact from a timeline where we distributed puzzles differently much earlier on. I think that’s very fun.
An example of this that I love is, someone determined that the ancient Greeks could have made a car with the technology they had. Which is silly, and they didn’t have roads for cars, and there’s a lot of reasons they wouldn’t have done it, but someone did this as a project, and that’s aesthetically what I’m shooting for — that artifact from a different timeline. I want it to be kind of aesthetically faithful to something on the screen in a nineties hacker movie where the New York Times was FTP-ing their puzzles to a server every day, before the web.
AK: Are punchcard crosswords next? Go through even earlier iterations [of computing]?
PH: A thing that it’s almost capable of, but not quite, is taking a .puz file and rendering the grid as a text file. Because what’s displayed on the terminal interface is just text. Then I realized once you do that, you could print Cursewords that would look like all unicode characters. And then I realized you could actually do this, literally, on perforated paper tape, and you could work backwards into this universe where we were printing out crosswords in our computer labs in 1992.
AK: When you’re not doing crosswords, you work a lot in the world of information security, copyright, and digital freedom. Are there issues in that world that affect the world of wordplay, either directly or indirectly?
PH: I’ve spent a lot of my life focused on digital copyright policy, so whenever we get to questions of copyright around crosswords — and it doesn’t come up that often — I’m all ears. Cursewords is free software. I don’t charge for it, and it is licensed in such a way that you can make changes and you can run it yourself. People make very funny mods. And in the free-culture world, people have been using public licenses for works for a long time. A funny gap is that no one really talks about the license under which blog puzzles are released. And if we were just a little more coder-dense, this would have come up. But it doesn’t, and that’s fine.
In InfoSec, people compile what are effectively wordlists to test, to try to crack passwords. They create these huge dictionary files of hundreds of millions of entries to run against leaked password databases. So it’s an InfoSec tool in that way. People come up with ways of combining them: you can combine words from a set wordlist to generate passphrases, so there is a standard wordlist for that. I have two directories on my computer for wordlists: one is crossword wordlists and one is InfoSec-type wordlists. And in some cases, they’ve overlapped! If you look at the big dictionary files online, the largest wordlist of English words was compiled by a cypherpunk guy in the nineties for cryptography reasons. This is another thing that informs my worldview, but I don’t know if there’s a specific lesson that I’ve gotten from it.
AK: I can’t let you leave without asking about “ardbo-ardbo.” I don’t know what there is to ask about that, but for the Beyond Wordplay team that’s your greatest hit.
PH: I found that with Python! I had an idea for a theme where the first half and the second half of words were similar, and I wrote a little bit of code to show where the first half and second half of words vary by a little bit. “Cardboard box” came up and I was like, “that doesn’t sound right…” and then I was like, “Oh my God.” And that was my proudest moment.
AK: It’s really a great insight.
PH: I don’t want to start the interview over, but I feel like maybe we should have talked about that instead of Cursewords.
AK: They are certainly achievements of equal magnitude.
You can follow Parker on Twitter at @xor and get the latest updates on the Cursewords Twitch stream at @CursewordsLive.
