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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>How a File Format Led to a Crossword Scandal</title>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<style>
@font-face{
font-family: 'Droid Serif';
font-style: normal;
font-weight: 400;
src: local('Droid Serif Regular'), local('DroidSerif-Regular'), url(fonts/droidserif.woff2) format('woff2');
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</head>
<body>
<textarea id="source">
class: center, middle
.image-70[]
???
- Thank you for having me
- grateful for being able to share this story with you
---
class: middle
## A little while ago on a computer not too far away....
???
- The year was 2016
- a software engineer was playing with some crossword data
- and discovered hundreds of crosswords that were near-duplicates
- of previously published crosswords.
- He showed the evidence to the crossword construction list he was on
---
class: center
.image-tw[]
<blockquote class="titter-tweet tw-align-center" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Had a xword in USA Today 2004. They tweaked it in 2008 w/pseudonym. Then ran it AGAIN in 2015. Seedy business indeed </p>— Ben Tausig (@datageneral) <a href="https://twitter.com/datageneral/status/702973432745615360?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 25, 2016</a></blockquote>
???
- a tweet was posted
- "Had a crossword in USA Today in 2004, They tweaked it in 2008 w/pseudonym. Then ran it AGAIN in 2015. Seedy business indeed."
- that was from the editor of the American Values Club crossword
---
class: center
.image-70[]
???
- soon after, an article was published in 538
- spinning it into a plagiarism scandal
---
class: center, middle
.image-tw[]
<blockquote class="titter-tweet tw-align-center" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">i'm told the Tim Parker/<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/gridgate?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#gridgate</a> crossword scandal will have a segment on <span class="callout">CBS Evening News</span> tonight. <br></p>— Oliver Roeder (@ollie) <a href="https://twitter.com/ollie/status/706562132154908673?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 6, 2016</a></blockquote>
???
- It blew up into hashtag gridgate
- and was in the mainstream news for a cycle.
---
exclude: true
class: center, middle
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">UPDATE: Tim Parker's Wiki page is now protected from his own shameful edit warring. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/gridgate?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#gridgate</a></p>— Maximillian Sherer (@Xmaster8621) <a href="https://twitter.com/Xmaster8621/status/706533219076874240?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 6, 2016</a></blockquote>
???
The accused got into an edit war on Wikipedia.
---
exclude: true
class: center
.image-70[]
---
.image-90[]
.image-90[]
???
- a major crossword editor
- had been engaging in plagiarism
- on a grand scale
- for several years
---
class:center, middle
# Everyone loves a scandal
<br/>
<br/>
## How did this happen to be discovered?
???
- these crosswords had been publicly available
- including historical ones
- since the crosswords were 're'published
- why did this go undiscovered for so long?
---
class:middle
<blockquote>“when you get the data into a <b>nice</b>, <b>clean</b>, <b>dense</b> form, stuff just falls out of it”
</blockquote>
### — me
???
- the 538 article hints at it w/ something I said
- "when you get data into a nice, clean, dense form, stuff just falls out of it"
- I said this off-the-cuff, but it's an accurate statement of the thesis I was testing at the time
- the format and organization were instrumental, maybe essential, to the discovery and end result.
---
class: middle, center
### How a
## File Format
### led to a
## Crossword Scandal
### Saul Pwanson
.footnote[xd.saul.pw]
???
- so this is how a file format
- led to a crossword scandal
---
class: middle, center
.image-100[]
???
- My original motivation for looking into crossword data was benign
- I had tried my hand at crossword construction
- frustrating and tedious
- wanted to get better
- software engineer
- what else would you expect
- thought I would just get some data
- and do some "analysis"
---
class: center
# xwordinfo.com
.image-100[]
???
- there is a site, xwordinfo
- which makes ALL of the NYTimes puzzles available
- over 24,000 puzzles dating back to 1942
- This is thanks to 3 years of work by the Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project
- led by David Steinberg, who was a teenager at the time,
- a group of several hundred crossword enthusiasts, spent 3 years
- digging into microfiche and transcribing every NYT puzzle that had ever been published
- This is a great source of data
- I emailed and asked to download their data in bulk
- I got a very nice reply from Jeff Chen, who runs the site and is very active in the crossword community
- and the reply was very polite, but it said, in essence,
---
class: center
# xwordinfo.com
# "no"
???
- "no".
- So as trivial as crosswords are,
- the collection of historical crossword data is exceedingly non-trivial,
- and even in this case, having the lion's share of the work already done
- concerns about copyright were going to make it unnecessarily difficult for me.
---
class: center
# xwordinfo.com
- I can "just" scrape it
???
- I am not one to be so easily discouraged.
- After all, I can just scrape it
- but scraping is a pain, and I was sick of doing one-off data collections
- it would really be too much work to do it just for my little experiment in crossword construction.
- so I decided to double down
- and do it -- once and for all
---
class: center
# Once and For All
- archival format for analysis
- gift to future scholars
???
- I decided that I wanted to archive this data for posterity
- xwordinfo only has NYTimes crosswords.
- there are many other publications that have their own crosswords
- but that data is scattered across many sites
- and, the data is in many different formats, some of which are quite difficult to parse
- so this would be a gift to future crossword scholars
---
class: center
# Plan
1. High Potential Format
2. ???
3. Profit
???
- I had a thesis which I mentioned in the opening
- get the data into a "High Potential Format"
- and then I don't know what
- and then profit!
---
class: center
# High Potential Format
???
- or HPF as I like to call it
---
class: center
# High Potential Format
</br>
- neat
???
- neat
- tidy, organized
- a place for everything and everything in its place
- remember, it's not hoarding if it's organized
---
class: center
# High Potential Format
- neat
- clean
???
- clean
- properly decoded
- trustworthy as a source
- structurally correct
- ready to be grouped and sorted
---
class: center
# High Potential Format
- neat
- clean
- dense
???
- dense
- exhibits high data locality
- on any axis that data can be sliced, it's reasonably easy to slice it that way
---
class: center
# Existing Standards
- **puz**: binary, proprietary
- **txt**: text with < TAGS >
- **xpf**: XML
- **ipuz**: JSON
???
- like a good engineer
- i looked at existing formats
- the granddaddy of crossword formats
- acrosslite .puz
- ubiquitous, de facto standard
- binary, and proprietary
- acrosslite also has a very old .txt format
- has HTML-like tags
- fragile: clues aren't numbered, don't include answers
- any extra line in the clues will render the puzzle undecipherable
- xpf is a little more modern, but is based on XML (yuck)
- ipuz is fairly new, and based on JSON
- meh
- so like a bad engineer
---
## **nyt1955-01-01**.xd
.em2[
```
Title: New York Times, Saturday, January 1, 1955
Author: Anthony Morse
Editor: Margaret Farrar
Rebus: 1=HEART 2=DIAMOND 3=SPADE 4=CLUB
Date: 1955-01-01
```
.left-column[
```
1ACHE#ADAM#2LIL
BLUER#GULL#MATA
EATIN#APEX#ICER
ATAR#TILE#SNEAK
TEN#MANI#ITE###
##DRUB#CANASTAS
FADED#BAGGY#OIL
ONES#KATES#TUNA
ETA#JOKER#JORUM
SILLABUB#SOON##
###ACE#RUIN#ARK
3WORK#JINX#4MAN
BIRD#WADS#SCENE
ISLE#EDGE#PANEL
DEER#BEET#ARTEL
```
]
.right-column[
```
A1. Sadness. ~ HEARTACHE
A6. Progenitor. ~ ADAM
A10. Mae West stand-by. ~ DIAMONDLIL
A14. Ultramarine plus. ~ BLUER
A15. Sea bird. ~ GULL
A16. ___ Hari. ~ MATA
A17. Stay home for dinner. ~ EATIN
A18. Peak. ~ APEX
A19. Deep freeze. ~ ICER
A20. Ralph Rackstraw, for instance. ~ ATAR
A21. Scrabble adjunct. ~ TILE
A22. A lead from a singleton. ~ SNEAK
A23. Lowest honor. ~ TEN
A24. Peanut: Spanish. ~ MANI
A25. Native of: Suffix. ~ ITE
A26. Administer a sound defeat. ~ DRUB
[...]
```
]
]
???
- i decided to make my own format
- specifically for archival and analysis
- this is the .xd format I designed
- it's really just a carefully constructed text file
- but it's very easy to parse
- the structure and format is self-evident
- id is mnemonic and easy to type--a short and recognizable abbreviation for each publication, along with the date
- here nyt means 'nytimes', and the date is in Y-M-D format, which makes it easily sortable in time
- so overall this id has some good shelving properties
- inside the file, crosswords basically have 3 sections
---
## nyt1955-01-01.xd
.em2[
<b>
```
Title: New York Times, Saturday, January 1, 1955
Author: Anthony Morse
Editor: Margaret Farrar
Rebus: 1=HEART 2=DIAMOND 3=SPADE 4=CLUB
Date: 1955-01-01
```
</b>
.left-column[
```
1ACHE#ADAM#2LIL
BLUER#GULL#MATA
EATIN#APEX#ICER
ATAR#TILE#SNEAK
TEN#MANI#ITE###
##DRUB#CANASTAS
FADED#BAGGY#OIL
ONES#KATES#TUNA
ETA#JOKER#JORUM
SILLABUB#SOON##
###ACE#RUIN#ARK
3WORK#JINX#4MAN
BIRD#WADS#SCENE
ISLE#EDGE#PANEL
DEER#BEET#ARTEL
```
]
.right-column[
```
A1. Sadness. ~ HEARTACHE
A6. Progenitor. ~ ADAM
A10. Mae West stand-by. ~ DIAMONDLIL
A14. Ultramarine plus. ~ BLUER
A15. Sea bird. ~ GULL
A16. ___ Hari. ~ MATA
A17. Stay home for dinner. ~ EATIN
A18. Peak. ~ APEX
A19. Deep freeze. ~ ICER
A20. Ralph Rackstraw, for instance. ~ ATAR
A21. Scrabble adjunct. ~ TILE
A22. A lead from a singleton. ~ SNEAK
A23. Lowest honor. ~ TEN
A24. Peanut: Spanish. ~ MANI
A25. Native of: Suffix. ~ ITE
A26. Administer a sound defeat. ~ DRUB
[...]
```
]
]
???
- 1) metadata, at the top
- key colon value pairs
- standard crossword keys: title, author, editor, date, copyright
- extensible by using other metadata keys, like "Rebus" for puzzles which have grid squares with a symbol or more than one letter in them
---
.em2[
## nyt1955-01-01.xd
```
Title: New York Times, Saturday, January 1, 1955
Author: Anthony Morse
Editor: Margaret Farrar
Rebus: 1=HEART 2=DIAMOND 3=SPADE 4=CLUB
Date: 1955-01-01
```
<b>
.left-column[
```
1ACHE#ADAM#2LIL
BLUER#GULL#MATA
EATIN#APEX#ICER
ATAR#TILE#SNEAK
TEN#MANI#ITE###
##DRUB#CANASTAS
FADED#BAGGY#OIL
ONES#KATES#TUNA
ETA#JOKER#JORUM
SILLABUB#SOON##
###ACE#RUIN#ARK
3WORK#JINX#4MAN
BIRD#WADS#SCENE
ISLE#EDGE#PANEL
DEER#BEET#ARTEL
```
]
</b>
.right-column[
```
A1. Sadness. ~ HEARTACHE
A6. Progenitor. ~ ADAM
A10. Mae West stand-by. ~ DIAMONDLIL
A14. Ultramarine plus. ~ BLUER
A15. Sea bird. ~ GULL
A16. ___ Hari. ~ MATA
A17. Stay home for dinner. ~ EATIN
A18. Peak. ~ APEX
A19. Deep freeze. ~ ICER
A20. Ralph Rackstraw, for instance. ~ ATAR
A21. Scrabble adjunct. ~ TILE
A22. A lead from a singleton. ~ SNEAK
A23. Lowest honor. ~ TEN
A24. Peanut: Spanish. ~ MANI
A25. Native of: Suffix. ~ ITE
A26. Administer a sound defeat. ~ DRUB
[...]
```
]
]
???
- 2) then there's the **grid**
- the actual solution to the puzzle
- one character per grid square
- and an octothorpe to indicate black squares
---
.em2[
## nyt1955-01-01.xd
```
Title: New York Times, Saturday, January 1, 1955
Author: Anthony Morse
Editor: Margaret Farrar
Rebus: 1=HEART 2=DIAMOND 3=SPADE 4=CLUB
Date: 1955-01-01
```
.left-column[
```
1ACHE#ADAM#2LIL
BLUER#GULL#MATA
EATIN#APEX#ICER
ATAR#TILE#SNEAK
TEN#MANI#ITE###
##DRUB#CANASTAS
FADED#BAGGY#OIL
ONES#KATES#TUNA
ETA#JOKER#JORUM
SILLABUB#SOON##
###ACE#RUIN#ARK
3WORK#JINX#4MAN
BIRD#WADS#SCENE
ISLE#EDGE#PANEL
DEER#BEET#ARTEL
```
]
<b>
.right-column[
```
A1. Sadness. ~ HEARTACHE
A6. Progenitor. ~ ADAM
A10. Mae West stand-by. ~ DIAMONDLIL
A14. Ultramarine plus. ~ BLUER
A15. Sea bird. ~ GULL
A16. ___ Hari. ~ MATA
A17. Stay home for dinner. ~ EATIN
A18. Peak. ~ APEX
A19. Deep freeze. ~ ICER
A20. Ralph Rackstraw, for instance. ~ ATAR
A21. Scrabble adjunct. ~ TILE
A22. A lead from a singleton. ~ SNEAK
A23. Lowest honor. ~ TEN
A24. Peanut: Spanish. ~ MANI
A25. Native of: Suffix. ~ ITE
A26. Administer a sound defeat. ~ DRUB
[...]
```
</b>
]
]
???
- 3) finally, there are the clues
- here, unlike in other formats
- clues are self-contained, one per line
- including the dir/number
- and the ANSWER, after a ~ tilde
- this format is 'stable'
- if multiple people 'litzed' the same crossword from the same source,
- they should get identical .xd files, and shelved under an identical id
- this format is also robust to hand-editing
- if a structural mistake is discovered, the original puzzle should be able to be reconstructed
---
class: center
# Scraping Montage
* 24,400 NY Times
* 3,650 USA Today
* 3,650 Universal uClick
* 300 Chronicle of Higher Ed.
* 180 LA Times
## (2 months)
???
- so then I put the format into action
- if they made a movie about this, this is where the montage would go
- (i don't know what song they would use though)
- made a janky pipeline to scrape, convert, and shelve crosswords
- I got the 24,000 puzzles from xwordinfo
- i found other public crossword sites and scraped them
- most crossword sites only go back 6 months or a year;
- and there are many syndicated sites to wade through
- the same puzzles published on a staggered schedule
- but, I found a site that had the past 10 years of USA Today puzzles
- and then found a site that had crosswords going back 10 years from universal uClick (a major crossword syndication)
- this took about 2 months of regular work in the evenings and on weekends
---
exclude: true
class: center
# Shoutout to ETL
- Extract then Transform
- always save raw source data
- reproducible pipeline
???
- separate Extract from Transform
- save the scraped data in its raw format
- always start transform from raw source data
- because transform will require many iterations
- and have a reproducible pipeline
---
class: center
# gxd
- 30,000 crosswords
- organized on filesystem
- .xd text format
- :D
???
- so now I had the start of God's own crossword corpus
- 30,000 crosswords
- organized on the filesystem
- in a simple text format of my own design
- this is all I wanted in the first place
- so I should be happy, right?
---
class: middle,center
# But am I ever happy?
???
- but instead, I was tired
- things had started getting busy at work
- bored with the project
- I kind of wanted someone else to take up the analysis
---
## Reddit (r/datasets)
<blockquote>
"I'd like to share it with <b>people who can do better analysis than I can</b>."
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
"Here they are, <b>organized and cleaned and reduced to their utter essence, in a carefully designed bulk text format</b>."
</blockquote>
???
- so i posted a link to the data to reddit in r/datasets
- "to share it with people who can do better analysis than I can"
- they are "organized and cleaned and reduced to their utter essence, in a carefully designed bulk text format"
- i was proud of the work I had done
- i just didn't have the energy to do anything more with it
---
class: middle, center
# Sometimes I play chicken with myself
???
- or so I thought
- because when I sent it out into the world
- that apparently inspired me enough to play with the data just a little
- clean dataset makes for easy exploration
- like nerd-sniping; i kind of nerd-sniped myself
- and decided I could look for an hour or two
---
class: center
# First question
- any patterns in grid fill?
???
- the first question I had
- are they any patterns in grid fill?
- maybe identical corners or sections?
- then I thought, hey
- it would be really easy with this format to find if there are any duplicate full rows
---
# Identical rows?
```shell
grep -rh '#' gxd/
| sort
| uniq -c
| sort -nr
```
???
- so i used my trusty unix utilities, grep, sort, uniq
- which come standard on any linux or os/x system
- and work great with simple text
- and I wrote a "query" against my "database"
---
# Identical rows?
13 #FLASHINTHEPAN#
12 MERRYGOROUND###
12 #CREAMOFTHECROP
12 AROUNDTHECLOCK#
12 #ANIMALCRACKERS
12 #ABRAHAMLINCOLN
11 #WHITEELEPHANT#
11 TOOTHANDNAIL###
11 ROMEOANDJULIET#
11 ###PERFECTPITCH
11 #KARENCARPENTER
11 ###HASTYPUDDING
[...]
???
- which took less than 5 seconds to run
- and this is literal output from that command
- these are theme answers
- themes are like the backbone of most crossword puzzles
- the punny grammatical overreaches that make people groan
- they're an interesting slice of culture
- you can see some familiar idioms here, FLASH IN THE PAN, TOOTH AND NAIL
- so i looked into some of these duplications..
- it looked like themes are reused more often than you might think
---
# Identical non-theme rows?
```shell
grep -rh '.+#.+#.+' gxd/
| sort
| uniq -c
| sort -nr
```
???
- okay, how about identical non-theme rows?
- changed the query slightly
- this took another few seconds to complete
---
# Identical non-theme rows?
5 ##UTILE#FOUR###
5 TRAIN##ADA#ATIP
5 SLAP#MATTE#NORA
5 SLAM#AMONG#ODIE
5 SIRES##ALES#GEO
5 SINGE#LONE#AMEN
5 PYRE#CLOSES#DNA
5 PTAS#ABIES#PEAS
5 ONUSES#LSTS#ERE
5 ODES#CLIENT#NAT
5 OATH#AMOCO#ISEE
5 NAY#RECYCLE#SAM
[...]
???
- turned out that many lines had duplicates in other puzzles
- so i used another standard tool, diff, to compare the .xd files
- and that showed that were not actually reprints; only some of the puzzle was changed
- even more, the attributions for the puzzles were different
- so i pulled on that thread, which kept me going
- led to another, and another
- (that weekend is kind of a blur)
- by the end I had found many interesting 'anomalies'
---
.image-110[]
???
- for instance, this was the largest timespan difference
- originally published in the NYTimes in 1955 and credited to Jack Luzzato
- a nearly identical grid was published in the NYT in 1984, 29 years later, credited to Daniel Girardi
- in this diff, colors indicate changes
- only two letters in the grid have changed
- but nearly every clue in the entire puzzle was rewritten
---
class: middle, center
## 2 lines of Python
```python
hd = difflib.HtmlDiff()
hd.make_table(xd1, xd2)
```
???
- This diff output, btw, was made with just two lines of python code using difflib
- this was enabled by having the data in a the presentable text format in the first place
- it's not the prettiest, but it is completely functional
- and it's accessible to everyone, including non-technical people
---
.image-110[]
???
- here is another "anomaly" that I was very curious about
- it turned that many of the duplicated puzzles had something in common
---
.image-110[]
???
- edited by a "Timothy Parker"
- who was the editor of both Universal uClick and USA Today crosswords
- at the time, I knew nothing about the crossword industry
- so I thought might be a fake name, a pseudonym for a syndicate of constructors
- until I found his Wikipedia entry and his claim of a Guinness record for "most syndicated constructor"
- I spent more than a few brain cycles trying to come up with reasons why his puzzles might be legitimately re-attributed
- this puzzle was the real clincher though
- The puzzle on the right is from USA Today, 2013
- by "Elizabeth Gorski", a prolific constructor
- well-known and well-loved in the crossword community.
- On the left, published by Universal uClick in 2006 (7 years earlier)
- attributed to someone named "Tim Burr"
- what was going on?
- why would a major newspaper republish an old crossword attributed to an obvious pseudonym,
- and then change the attribution to someone who really existed?
---
### xd.saul.pw/diffs
----
.image-100[]
???
- I wrote a grid comparator and ran it over all the puzzles
- I threw this list together to enumerate the "anomalies"
- comprehensive, but minimum effort
- sorted simply by grid similarity
- and I put it up on my website
- linking to those scrappy diffs that we just saw
---
### email to cruciverb-l
### (3 days after r/datasets)
<blockquote>
"I found some <b>pairs of crosswords that are strikingly similar</b>...
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
I wonder if <b>"Timothy Parker" might be a little loose with attribution</b>...
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<b>I present this as a curiosity</b>... Please also pardon the 'interface'.
</blockquote>
???
- so three whole days after I posted to reddit/datsaets, I sent this to the crossword list
- I pulled out 3 examples, the 2 we saw and one other
- and said "I found some pairs of crosswords that are strikingly similar"
- I wondered if "Timothy Parker might be a little loose with attribution"
- and "I present this as a curiosity"
- was careful not to use the P-word
- crosswords may be trivial, but the crossword community takes them very seriously
---
class: middle, center
# People took a interest
???
- well, suffice to say, "people took a interest"
- The first response was "You may be onto something here"
- there was much discussion on the list and off
- this is where Ben Tausig got his information, and posted to twitter as we saw in the intro
- As the hubbub grew louder
- I took advantage of peoples' interest in my work.
- Someone on the crossword list publishes a huge clue/answer database once a quarter
- so I asked him for the collection of puzzles I knew he must have
- he would not have given it to me before #gridgate blew up
- but since it had, he "asked his source for permission", and then did give it to me
- again, it's a shame that this data does exist but is so difficult to obtain
- anyway, I got the dataset
---
class: center
# The motherlode
- 80,000 crosswords in .puz
- Thanks to Barry Haldiman
???
- holy forking shirtballs
- I thought 30,000 crosswords was a lot
- This collection had almost 80,000 puzzles in it
- a shoutout to Barry Haldiman,
- who collected crosswords diligently for over 20 years
- and saved everything in the source .puz format!
---
class: middle, center
# (5 days after r/datasets)
???
- I spent the next week, before the 538 article was published
- ingesting 1000s more crosswords with my janky pipeline
- discovering what directories and filenames meant in the motherlode
- shelving crosswords properly in the xd corpus
- figuring out the overlap between this collection and mine
- which was substantial but not total.
- I compared grids exhaustively, night and day
- I would start a batch before going to sleep, and another before going to work
- I discovered that week that managing 50,000 of anything is pretty challenging
- esp under time pressure
---
class: center
## Take 2: xd.saul.pw/xdiffs
.image-70[]
### (10 days since r/datasets)
???
- this is the second iteration of results that I pushed online
- now there were 50k crosswords
- in this version
- you can click through to each publisher
- and this is what was linked from 538 article
- (all these old urls are still available, btw, because I take my responsbility as a data nerd seriously)
- now at this point, it had been 10 days since I posted to reddit/datasets trying not to do the analysis work.
- and for my failure in that regard, i got my 15 seconds of fame.
---
class: center
# 15 seconds of fame
???
- stressful
- time consuming
- many reporters contacted me, looking for a choice quote from me to put in their summary of the 538 article
- beecause everyone loves a scandal, and the narrative had been set
- so they weren't interested in the process, nor the nuanced facts.
- I wasn't prepared for the onslaught.
- I don't have many regrets,
- but i do kind of regret that i
- didn't have something to sell
- i don't mean merchandise, stickers, or anything to hasten my retirement
- i mean my own career and story
- the local NPR station figured out that I lived in seattle, and asked me to come on one of their radio programmes
- but at this point, having seen a bit behind the curtain, I had become very distrustful of the media
- wasn't comfortable w/ attention
- hadn't groomed my online persona in quite awhile
- and by the time it happens it's too late
- advice, be ready for the stampede
- have a website, with a coherent presentation, and some way for people to engage on your terms.
- even if it's just "sign up for my newsletter"
- so after that news cycle died down