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Showing posts from April, 2020

Puzzle 25 - Cruciverbally Blonde (Guest Themeless #2) by Richard Allen

By Brian Thomas
Another guest puzzle, this time by Richard Allen. I'm gonna let him introduce himself:...and if you scroll waaaay down, some spoilers for the genesis of the puzzle

"I've been constructing crosswords for just over a year. Whenever I get frustrated with my progress, I try to remind myself that the first puzzle I ever made had both two-letter words and unchecked squares and the clues for the second were largely obtained from Anagram Finder."

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I'm gonna keep running guest puzzles on a similar schedule to my own puzzles - one every day that ends in 3, supply permitting. If you've got a puzzle that, well, needs a home, feel free to reach out! You keep all rights (though you won't likely be able to sell it anywhere else), no hate speech, bigotry, etc.

See you on the 28th!


SPOILERS BELOW


















KEEP GOING
















ALMOST THERE


















HERE THAR BE SPOILERS:


The seed entries for this puzzle came from the following exchange on Twitter between two constructors whose work I greatly admire, @TrudeauRoss and @AimeeLucido :



Like many other currently quarantined constructors, I'm constructing more grids these days than I was, say, a month ago, and I happened to have Crossfire open when I read those tweets. I immediately thought:

WHATLIKEITSHARD (15)
FINISHEDPRODUCT (15)

I don't know either Ross or Aimee personally, but I wasn't going to let that stop me from making a dumb joke on Twitter, so a few minutes later I replied with a screenshot of a grid containing two sets of parallel 15s drawn from that brief exchange (unfillable, believe it or not):



And that would have been that... if I hadn't left Crossfire open. At some point later that day I pulled up the window with the joke grid again, started messing with it, and eventually arrived at this themeless with a pair of parallel 15s, which, as Ross and Aimee noted, is not the easiest structure to build a grid around, but I got lucky in this instance.
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Puzzle 24 - Themeless #16

By Brian Thomas
I like all my puzzles, but some of them I really like. This is one of those ones.

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Solution

  • Not often you happen to get one of your potential seed entries in the fill somewhere else, but that's what happened with 1-Across (the actual seed was 61-Across). Somewhere in my gigantic unorganized puzzle file I think there's a stack built with 1-Across, don't think I need it anymore.
  • Speaking of 1-Across, it's probably my favorite Disney song. I love just about everything about it.
  • I feel like I stepped into a little bit of a grey area cluing 15-Across. Came up with the clue on my own, then at some point looking over the puzzle saw that there's one other instance of it in an already published puzzle which uses the same clue. I went back and forth on changing it, but decided to keep it, because a) it's a nice clue, and more importantly b) it's not plagiarism, even though it might look like it. Feel free to tell me if I'm wrong on this one.
  • This is 70 words, which is higher than some of my recent stuff. I have a bunch of jumbled thoughts, and sometime I'll put them into something more coherent together, but I don't really care much/at all about the word count. I just usually start with a lowish word count and add more blocks in as I want/need to make the grid better. This one came out to 70 just because that's the best puzzle I found. Yesterday's NYT also had 70 and it's fantastic.
  • Anyways, hope y'all are staying safe & that you enjoy!
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Puzzle 23 - Guest Themeless #1 (by Matthew Stock)

By Brian Thomas
A few days ago, Matthew reached out asking if I wanted to publish a guest puzzle here & plug his site - which sounded good to me! I've had the pleasure of collaborating on a themeless with Matthew & his gridwork is *chef's kiss*. Go check his puzzles out at https://www.happylittlepuzzles.com/ (looks like there's a new one up today!)

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Solution

It hadn't really occurred to me before, but if anyone else wants to post a puzzle here, you're more than welcome to! Come back in a couple days for a very timely themeless grid!
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Puzzle 22 - Themeless #15

By Brian Thomas
This week has been a mess at the Thomas house. My wife and I are both in healthcare, so daycare's open for us - but ours is on spring break. So we're both juggling two toddlers and working from home. Very much looking forward to things being back to something slightly more resembling normal next week.


  • Google did something to their Drive links, so these aren't auto-downloading - I'll look into it and hopefully have it figured out for next week.
  • We have a book called "Scientist Scientist, Who Do You See?" - it's cute, has a diverse set of scientists featured, two of whom provided the seeds for today's puzzle. Find a place to buy it here (please for all that is holy don't buy through Amazon if you can avoid it).
  • Not normally a fan of two seed entries instead of one, but things worked out nicely enough here.
  • I had half of Monday's NYT (along with the wonderful Andrea Carla-Michaels) - go check it out if you haven't already.
  • Speaking of the NYT, again, you probably already know this, but there's a petition to make a few small changes at the NYT that hopefully go a long way towards addressing some issues there. Happy to have signed it - you can do so too at the link below (scroll all the way through 18 (!) pages of signatures to get to the form).
  • Hope y'all are staying safe and healthy, and that I can provide a few minutes of fun distraction from the chaos everywhere right now.
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