Puzzle 29 - Themeless #20

Howdy! There's a lot of nifty stuff after the puzzle so be sure to scroll down! If this is your first time here, I post puzzles 3 times a month - on the 8th, 18th, and 28th. Mostly themelesses, and you can click the Past Puzzles link to get to all of them. Feel free to say hi below, and I hope you stick around! For the regulars, I have the Saturday NYT (you should do it, it's pretty good imo) and threw a link to here up in the constructor notes. Anyways...

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• You can watch the entire grid-building process for this puzzle on Twitch! I live-streamed making it (and got a bit of help a few times) - go check it out here. Takes about 15 minutes before we actually get into constructing, so you might want to skip ahead. No idea how entertaining it actually is, because I'm too self-conscious to go back and watch myself blabber on for a couple hours.
• Sometime in the next few weeks, I'm going to do that again - when it does, swing by!
• Speaking of Twitch, I have really enjoyed watching folks streaming their crossword solving. Aaron Paulsen streams most weekday afternoons, and Chris Adams does a bunch of indies Saturday nights. Great entertainment always, but especially when we're all quarantined.
• If you want to play a nifty game of hexagonal battle Boggle, check out Hexicon! Feel free to add & challenge me in game (briant).
• Have a great week! See y'all in June!

Puzzle 28 - Themeless #19

I can't quite believe how quickly the grid came together for this. Had the seed Friday, spent Friday trying to come up with a theme around it, but couldn't. So, Saturday while we were watching Sleeping Beauty, I knocked out the grid. Real happy with how it turned out - hope y'all are too!

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• If you read one article today, make it this NYT article about lessons from 15-Down and today.
• Speaking of Sleeping Beauty, the three Good Fairies are named Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather - def will be using that as a cluing angle sometime.
• I love Sleeping Beauty. It has this weird unpolished (in a good way) feeling that just hits me right. The humor still holds up too - would absolutely watch a spinoff of the Fairies just existing.
• Also Maleficent is awesome. No messing around. "Oh, you didn't invite me to the party? Your daughter will die when she turns 16." Prisoner escapes? Immediately surround the castle with giant thorns and turn into a dragon to defend it.
• The final fight scene takes 3 minutes instead of 30, which is absolutely a win in my book.
• Anyways, you should look up footage of the seed entry sometime. Absolutely awe-inspiring. And if you're ever in the area, it's well worth a trip.
• This NYT from 2014 is a nifty take on this idea, and is way cooler than any theme I dreamt up.
• This puzzle's coming out 32 minutes late, because the 40th anniversary is precisely at 8:32 AM PDT.

Puzzle 27 - Themeless #18

One of the nice things about an indie site is not having to worry about the awkwardness of 14 letter seeds - I can just make the grid 14x16, like today!


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• I made a silly midi called "Cheeky lil puz" - you can find it here.
• Running late cause I stayed up last night playing poker online w/ my coworkers instead of finishing cluing. Oh well! Have a good weekend!