Hello, Hello. It’s me again. H. No, just kidding, it’s Hannelore. I told you this could get confusing! I also told you I wouldn’t do that. I’m sorry.
I can literally hear you thinking when reading the title: “What do you mean?” In the Biebs singing voice. “DIY means Do It Yourself, right? What? What do you mean?” Calm down, my dearest. All will be explained, but first I want to tell you a story. After all, this blog is for our subject Storytelling. Things wouldn’t feel complete without me telling you stories, am I right? Yes, I am.
My grandparents used to own an apartment right at the beach in Ostend. The view was amazing and the colors of the apartment’s walls were the color of the sand that had never been touched by the sea. We were always accompanied by Max, the 
wooden cuckoo clock that would let us know his batteries were still working every 30 minutes. There would hang a huge painting of the Mercator and a poem I can’t seem to remember of a writer I can’t seem to remember. Still, I can remember reading it every time I’d pass it and I can remember how, as I grew older, I was able to understand what he meant. The writer had lost the love of his life and he had put his excruciating pain into a poem. It was beautiful.
The last time I spent a week in the apartment was when I was 9. It was summer and the sun would continuously make us smile. My grandfather and I had the same routines. We would wake up before the sun did and so he would put on my jacket and shoes in the early morning and we would walk on the beach as the sun slowly rose from the sea. Once it was 7.30am we would go to the bakery and get his newspaper, some pain français and croissants for us, my grandmother and whichever brother (I have three) accompanied me at my stay in Ostend.
When we finished breakfast, my grandfather would take his newspaper and read it entirely. From the first letter until the last one. And when he’d get to the last page, there would always be a Sudoku to solve. My grandfather was a mathematician and so these Sudoku’s were a piece of cake to him. He also thought that, because i was already 9 years old, that I, too, should be able to solve them. And so he had spent all week of that summer explaining me what to do and that’s where and when I learned to love to solve Sudokus.
You’d think that, as I’d grow older, I would stop solving them. But I didn’t. It would always take me back to that summer at the beach and I think that is why I love to solve them. But you know, after a couple of years it got less and less exciting. I would solve them in a couple of minutes and that was it. Until one day in the summer of 2007 I wondered how difficult it’d be to make one myself. Turns out it’s peanuts.
If you think I am the only one who would ever do this, you are mistaken. Because first of all, who else would make all these puzzle books? And second of all, if there is anything I learned from 9gag, it is that I am never the only one who does something.
And so what I’d like to do next is explain to you just how to do it. Because in fact it is so simple I can tell you what to do in just, like, 3 sentences. These attributes will come in handy: a piece of paper, a pencil, an eraser, a ruler and a normal functioning brain. Here’s what you need to do:
- You make a big square (9×9) and make the edges very bold. After that, you draw a bold line after 3 rows, both horizontally as vertically. Now you should have 1 big square of 9×9 and 9 squares inside of 3×3. Next to the big square you write the numbers 1 to 9.
- You now need to fill in the numbers from 1 to 9 in the 3×3 squares. You can fill in the numbers randomly, but I advice to first fill in all the ones, followed by the twos and so on. You can place them randomly, but make sure that each number will only appear once in the 3×3 squares, but also in each horizontal ànd vertical line. You’ll notice that when you’re reaching “7”, it’ll get more difficult. That’s what your eraser is for. Switch numbers if it doesn’t fit.
- Once you were able to fill in e.g. all the ones, you cross over “1” in the sidebar. This will keep you more organized. Repeat with each number until 9.
Look at the screenshots I made for you to see what I actually mean. I am very much aware that my explaining skills aren’t on point. One of the many reasons I’d suck at teaching. Also, I very much dislike teenagers and humans under the age of 10 are filled with snot and dirt and that’s just gross.
TADAAA! This is how you make a Sudoku. It took me exactly 16 minutes.
So if you’re in the car, sunbathing or just plainly bored: try it out. It’s a great brain trainer! Perhaps if you make enough you can send them to the Sudoku puzzle booklet maker (is this a thing? Probably not but let’s just go with it) and make some mad $$$ out of it. I think I deserve at least, like, 15% all your $$$ though. No? Yes… Please?
This was my nostalgic Sudoku story. I hope you enjoyed reading it and I hope it gave you some context and perspective to why I love making Sudokus. I wouldn’t want you to think I’m some sort of crazy woman who doesn’t comb her hair. Because I do.
Love always, Hannelore.
Okay, this is awkward… I have to admit something. Hasmik’s time management is on point, which means she was first to upload her guilty pleasure game. When I saw the article, I internally screamed. Loud. For, like, 5 minutes. You guessed it, my guilty pleasure is coincidentally Facebook’s Tetris Battle as well.
Farmville and received countless invitations to play CandyCrush. But I had never ever in my life visited the mysterious Facebook Games pages. It was unknown territory for me and we all know that everything unknown is just very scary and unsafe. So I continued my days by ignoring invitations and just regularly stalked people’s profiles but that was it. Facebook did not reach any further for me.
Tetris. I had played it over a million times when I was even younger than I was back then but it didn’t look like my Tetris. It looked way cooler and faster and more exciting.
Here’s how. At first you need to make a nice construction, as high as you possibly can (see image for example). Once you’re almost at the top, you need to start eliminating them by making lines. The higher you can make your construction, the more lines you can make. Once you were able to make 
2 lines in a row, you will send a line to your opponent. The more lines you can make in a row after the second one, the more lines you can send. These lines start piling up and soon his construction will reach the top of his board. Once he’s reached that top, you’ve “knocked him out.” 
Unfortunately, your opponent can also send lines to you. By placing a block on the radioactive sign, you destroy that line. And just like before, when you’re able to destroy more than 2 lines in a row, there will be a line sent to your opponent. The main goal of the game is to cause as many knock-outs as you can within two minutes. The one with the most knock-outs won the game. As you can see in the last image, I knocked my opponent 4 times out. I won that game. Take that, sucker.
lies, this is the final one. So in a couple of days I’ll be finished with playing this damned game and I can finally go outside again.
In each level, the tiles move in a different way. This is what makes this game more exciting and after a while more difficult. It’s never the same. As I told you, there are twelve levels. In the first level, the tiles just drop down without leaving any spaces in between the horizontal rows. In the second level, the tiles don’t move whatsoever. So if you can make two tiles disappear, two 
holes appear. The remaining tiles don’t move. In the third level, your field of tiles will get spilt up in the middle horizontally. In the fourth level it’s the same but vertically. Level 5 will work the same as level one but instead of dropping down, all the tiles will move to the left side of the screen. Level six works exactly like level two. In level 7 the tiles all move to the top of the screen. Up until level eleven, the way the tiles move have all occured in a way it has before. Level twelve, on the other hand, is a special one. There, all the tiles will move towards the middle. That is the only time it will do so. I must admit I have reached level twelve only a couple times. I wanted to reach there to make screenshots, but I couldn’t and so I got upset and frustrated. So yeah, the game gets on my nerves but I can’t keep myself from playing it… Why, I ask myself?
combination and you will get angry. We’ve all been through this, so don’t feel out of the ordinary for getting to that point. It usually happens at level 6, but don’t give up. You can do this, I believe in you, Hasmik believes in you, the whole world believes in you. And if you fail, just blame Obama. We all do. Thanks, Obama.
head… Good ol’ Joyce, she will always make you laugh. Once, when we were still class mates, she ripped her pants open at a very unfortunate place. This was funny, too. Absolutely unrelated to the story, but I don’t buy the concept of oversharing.
