SIGNALS

I know, I know, you are pretty darn busy. With Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Wordle, you hardly have any free time for things like – you know – work. Nevertheless, today I have for you another supremely excellent way to fritter away even more of your valuable time.

Yes, I will be the first to admit that I squander boatloads of time. But, overall, I am a lightweight time-waster. For example, I had to check on the spelling of TikTok (I had initially written it as TicToc). And, I don't play video games. As a result, my eye-hand coordination is pathetic. For that reason, the Air Force recently turned down my application to be a fighter pilot. Well, among other reasons.

You are probably well familiar with Wordle, a game in which you are given six guesses to discover a five-letter word. If you have an even higher threshold of frustration, you can try your hand at Absurdle, Dordle, Quordle, Octordle, Sedordle; there is also Star-Wars themed SWordle. Do mental gymnastics games like this help ward off dementia and other plagues? If so, the world is becoming a better place, one puzzle at a time.

Which brings us to yet another time-waster/medical-miracle. It's called Heardle, a Spotify game. As you have undoubtedly already guessed, it's like Wordle, except instead of guessing a word, you have to guess an artist and song title. You listen to a snippet of the intro of a song and enter your guess. If you are right, you are awesome! If you guess wrong, the snippet repeats, but this time the snippet is a little longer. This repeats until you answer correctly, or the game ends after six tries. Because we all want to share every minute detail of our private lives, you can share your Heardle emojis with others.

With Wordle, a wrong guess usually deletes or confirms some letters, bringing you closer to the solution. When you are guessing a song, a wrong guess doesn't really help you much. So, Heardle provides some assistance by giving you a list of artist/title suggestions to choose from. In addition, each additional snippet lasts progressively longer than the previous one. You can also skip a guess to get right to a longer snippet.

As with Wordle, there is a new Heardle game every day. Songs are picked randomly from the most streamed songs in the past decade. The mystery song tends toward something newly-released, but oldies can pop up if they are still popularly streamed.

As it turns out, I am absolutely terrible at Heardle. I lead a very sheltered life and frankly have never listened to much popular music. Since Heardle leans heavily into pop music, I suck at it. I could guess until there's gated communities on the dark side of the moon, and I would still never name that tune.

That's okay. I'll figure out some other ways to waste my time – um, I mean, practice my fighter-pilot skills.