been thinking about why zachtronics puzzles hit so hard for me, consistently. and what I've come up with is that they are a specific kind of problem solving I can best summarize as the software equivalent of this part of Apollo 13. and I REALLY FUCKING LOVE this kind of problem-solving. I feel if I sat down and thought about it, I could write a long full blog post about my approach to the multi-disciplinary pile we call "computer science". but this is the short version.
I still think about the last puzzle in the EXAPUNKS campaign, and how what the DSL could do quickly vs what it did slowly at was key to the solution I came up with.

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