Connections getting weird again

Oh great, another day of pretending Connections is some kind of intellectual workout. It's just word association with a fancy coat of paint. The NYT acts like this is Mensa-level stuff when it's really just "which of these four words feels slightly more like a category?" The hints today are as useless as ever. "One category relates to things you find in a kitchen." No shit. They spoon-feed you the obvious while pretending they're being cryptic. The real challenge is ignoring how the categories are often arbitrary or rely on obscure secondary meanings. And the colors? Yellow is easy, purple is hard. That's not a puzzle mechanic, that's just labeling difficulty. The NYT gamified their word list and called it innovation. If you need hints for this, maybe just stick to Wordle. At least that one doesn't pretend to be deep.