Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Strands puzzle could be tough. Hope you know your animals! One of them is an animal I had never heard of before. Some of the answers are difficult to unscramble, so if you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story. 

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: Pouch perfect

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Helps to be Australian.

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

• POUR, BALL, LAYS, PAIL, TAIL, RUSK, BAIL

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

• BILBY, KANGAROO, WALLABY, WOMBAT, KOALA, OPOSSUM

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is MARSUPIALS. To find it, start with the M that’s five letters down on the far-left vertical row, and wind up and over.

Climbing up flights of stairs in a bank building full of rooms draped in surrealist art, tunnels with lurking beasts called “skin horses” and exhibits of keepsakes imaginary and real, I find myself looking at an art mural across a domed ceiling that I can explore with instruments next to me. Speaking into a microphone, I see my words scroll across the edges. My hands, thrust into a small chamber, are projected across the ceiling, highlighting parts of the mural. Suddenly, AI-generated descriptions emerge where I’d put my hands.

This is the Ministry of Awe, a new installation experience in Philadelphia that I was lucky enough to visit ahead of its opening, and it’s a welcome East Coast dose of strangeness. Created by Meg Saligman and over 100 other artists, it’s a six-story space that makes me think of Meow Wolf or long-time LA oddity the Museum of Jurassic Technology — or even London’s very real Sir John Soane’s Museum.

Advertisement

The former bank building’s now an immersive art gallery full of hands-on experiences to unravel and a storyline too: messages in drawers, phones that can be dialed or answered, bathrooms that record your “deposits” with audio messages. Everything at the Ministry is an exploration of the meaning of banks and their associated power. But what drew me here just as much was the idea of how tech would fold into a space like this.

Watch this: I Saw the Future of Tech Art in Philly

03:58

Much like Meow Wolf’s explorations of layers of tech into artist installations, something I talked about at SXSW recently, Ministry of Awe is playing with tiny doses of AI — nothing that generates or replaces the work of artists but rather in a way that highlights and possibly enhances. The Ministry of Awe’s signature fifth-floor artwork, The Heavens, is a giant mural work by Saligman that’s projected across the segments of the ceiling. Angled seats let visitors hang around and gaze up, but several “instruments” in the room let you play with the space, too, created by the tech company Spatial Pixel.

Spatial Pixel is focused on “spatial computing for spaces, not faces,” and was founded by Violet Whitney, former director of product and associate director of design at Google Sidewalk Labs, and William Martin, an architect and designer. Both also teach a course in spatial AI at Columbia University. 

Exploring AI through art

The Heavens’ interaction tools and how they’re designed to feel integrated and somewhat invisible are part of Whitney and Martin’s explorations of where AI could work in subtler space-aware ways. This fascinates me because AI, smart glasses in particular, are already trying to solve for this with very mixed success. What I’ve found is that art and entertainment can often be better places to explore ideas of AI in contained ways, with rules deliberately made to respect the work and art.

Whitney and Martin met Saligman in the same Philadelphia neighborhood, which is how they ended up collaborating on the Ministry of Awe’s exhibits. The Heavens experience is run using Spatial Pixel’s open-source platform, called Procession, that blends multiple AI models into a system that works in physical spaces. Whitney and Martin already have an interactive lab space for it at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, but the Ministry of Awe is a public test-bed, working off art that they want to keep sacred. 

“A lot of what we’ve been doing is finding ways of changing the mural, or the way that you see the mural through light. A core way we’ve been trying to allow visitors to interact with it is to pick up on the things that they’re saying in the space,” said Whitney. “We want to take the things they’re saying and change the mural based on their words and what they point at.”

Right now, a lot of the mural interactions are simple and ephemeral: My words disappear, my highlights fade. But the Ministry of Awe’s toying with the theme of banking in personal data, too. And the software being used to run the installation is programmable, so Spatial Pixel aims to keep evolving what happens over time.

“Our goal is eventually to record what the people are contributing, with the right consent. But then maybe those ideas become like this bank. It is a bank, after all, to store these ideas, and then Meg can use them and review them and use it to evolve the painting and physical space. And so it becomes this sort of perpetual dialogue with the muralist,” said Martin.

It’s part of the thinking that Spatial Pixel wants artists to play with, as opposed to tech companies. 

“What if you could actually talk to a painting? What if you could actually interact with a work of art and then explore it in new ways? We realized,” said Martin, “that accessing these tangible computing techniques, like being able to recognize gesture, move objects around — there’s certainly a lot of academic groups that are discussing this, but it’s still really inaccessible to the actual designers that want to make experiences in that way.”

The idea echoes experimental AI art I saw in Austin at SXSW just days after my Ministry of Awe visit — questions about agency and ownership, where boundaries between AI and personal work get drawn. And as I toured the Ministry space with Meta’s smart glasses on my face, it made me think about how smart glasses — and most AI tools — right now have almost no consideration for this delicate line. 

But they’ll need to. And maybe art spaces are the places to begin to think it out, with no glasses or personal wearable tech needed at all.

Before it’s publicly available later this year, the Irish government is trialing its Government Digital Wallet, which includes a way to verify a user’s age to access social media platforms. In its press release, the government’s Department of Public Expediture, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation said people can store digital versions of their birth certificates, driving licenses, European health cards and more.

Frank Feighan, the department’s minister, said that this testing phase would help inform the development of the digital wallet and ensure it was user friendly. The government hasn’t laid out when the Government Digital Wallet graduates beyond the testing phase, but Ireland is required to create a digital wallet by the end of 2026 as part of a European Union regulation.

“It will be able to facilitate secure age verification capability as set out in Digital Ireland and the implementation of the Online Safety Code, under which designated platforms must have age verification measures in place to help protect, in particular, children and young people from online harm,” Feighan said of Ireland’s digital wallet.

The pilot phase will be done on an opt-in basis and the government has a short survey available for comments and concerns. Along with Ireland, many other European Union member states are working on their own age verification methods. Earlier this year, Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sanchez announced a law to ban social media for anyone under 16.

KPop Demon Hunters fans, get to McDonald’s fast. For a limited time, you can nab a meal that might seem like an April Fool’s Day joke, but isn’t. Participating McDonald’s restaurants are offering both the HUNTR/X meal, named for the girl group from Netflix’s Oscar-winning animated film, KPop Demon Hunters, and the Saja Boys Breakfast Meal, named for the movie’s boy band.

I beat a path to McDonald’s on Tuesday, the first day the new meals were out, so I could try everything.

Advertisement

And the KPop Demon Hunters items are surprisingly pretty good! Be warned: Once word gets around, they might be hard to get. The McDonald’s holiday Grinch Meal sold out quickly at some locations (too bad if you wanted a pair of the adorable Grinch-themed socks that came with it), so don’t wait on this limited-edition menu.

Shake up the fries, skip the Demon sauce

The HUNTR/X Meal, named for the K-pop girl group in KPop Demon Hunters, is a 10-piece chicken McNuggets meal that includes a medium drink and three special menu items. 

Advertisement

Ramyeon McShaker fries come with a small bag of soy, garlic, sesame and spice seasoning, along with regular McDonald’s fries. You sprinkle the seasoning into the provided bag, dump in the fries, shake it all up and eat. 

My take: McDonald’s fries are legendary, and honestly, I didn’t want to season them and risk wrecking the taste. Here’s the shocker: I loved it. They give you a ton of seasoning, and the fries become thickly coated, which I thought would be a nightmare. But they were a salty, tasty delight. There’s no meat in the seasoning, but it reminded me of a fried-chicken coating — tasty and rich. 

The meal includes two new sauces for the fries and nuggets. Hunter sauce is a sweet chili sauce mixing notes of chili, garlic and pepper. If you’re familiar with McDonald’s longtime sweet-and-sour sauce, this reminded me of that, with just a touch of heat.

The other new sauce is Demon sauce, a mustard sauce with some heat and a bold purple color. There’s just not enough dark purple food out there. But while the color was cool, I ended up scraping the Hunter sauce cup almost empty, leaving most of the purple Demon sauce behind. I appreciated the almost-but-not-quite wasabi flavor of the mustard, but I wouldn’t order this sauce again.

You can try both sauces without an extra charge. I ordered via the app and just selected one of each of the two new sauces.

There’s also a new dessert, the Derpy McFlurry, which blends creamy vanilla soft serve with berry-flavored popping boba pearls and a swirl of wild berry sauce. McDonald’s named it for the supernatural feline, Derpy Tiger, from the KPop Demon Hunters movie.

You know all the jokes about how McDonald’s ice-cream machine is always broken? I tried to order the Derpy McFlurry at my local McDonald’s, but the app said it wasn’t available. I don’t know if that location’s ice cream machine was actually broken or if they didn’t get their shipment of popping pearls, but this is America: There was another McDonald’s less than a mile away that had the dessert.

And I’m glad they did! Although I’m not a berries-in-ice-cream fan, the thick soft-serve and wildberry sauce (blueberry? raspberry? both? I couldn’t tell) were a smooth, sweet mash-up. The boba pearls were fun to pop inside my mouth, too, though beware, they kind of leave behind a little… boba skin?

Advertisement

If breakfast is your bag, the new morning meal is the Saja Boys Breakfast Meal.

It includes a Spicy Saja McMuffin sandwich, which is a sausage McMuffin with egg and a spicy Saja sauce, hash browns and a small drink. I hadn’t had the chance to tell my husband what was in the sandwich when he swooped through the kitchen while talking on a work call and nabbed a bite. He widened his eyes and waved at his mouth in the universal signal for “HOT!” 

At first, I thought he was exaggerating, but then I had a second bite, and the orangish, peppery sauce is hot. It’s also too sweet for my taste, and I wouldn’t reorder this. Without the sauce, the breakfast is just an Egg McMuffin.

Both meals come with a photocard for one of the bands and a Derpy card. My breakfast meal included a photo card of Jinu, and my lunch meal featured one of Zoey. Each meal also had a Derpy card with a picture of Derpy Tiger and a QR code that, for some reason, I found incredibly difficult to scan. When I finally did, it took me to the McDonald’s app on my phone and asked for the code on the card. Then it didn’t really do anything.

A McDonald’s rep told me that’s by design: Entering the code means I will unlock content that won’t appear until April 26 and will reveal “the winner of McDonald’s ultimate battle for the fans.” So, I got that goin’ for me.

The full KPop Demon Hunters menu should be available at participating McDonald’s locations now, and while I nudged McDonald’s reps for an exact ending date, it’s just “while supplies last.”

Advertisement

My final take: KPop Demon Hunters fans will get a kick out of the meals, though if they are kids, they may wish for a smaller Happy Meal-style option. Ten McNuggets and fries are a lot, and a spicy Egg McMuffin probably isn’t for everybody. I tried to order a mini version of the Derpy McFlurry, but it was grayed out in my app, and the regular one was enormous.

If you do want to try the meals, I highly recommend the fries with the Ramyeon seasoning, the Hunter sauce and the Derpy McFlurry with its satisfying popping boba (share it with a friend if you have a small appetite or if, like me, you’re slogging through the full KPop Demon Hunter menu). I’d give a pass to the Demon sauce and the Spicy Saja McMuffin.

It’s also a bit of a bummer that the only extras in the meals (besides the colorful themed Happy Meal-style boxes) were glittery holographic photo cards and a code for online content that’s still a month away. No collectible figurines or even patterned socks a la the Grinch? That hit a bit of a sour note in this musical munch-fest.