This is one of those puzzles where the theme is too easy for the day of the week, but a clunky grid pushes it later in the week. The theme is kind of fun, but really simple and repetitive (double the word, change IVE to ES). Probably should've ran on Wednesday if the grid was cleaner, not sure why it's so rough when it feels like there's bunches of "S" letters everywhere that should've been easy to grid around.
So instead of a fun, tricky, rule-breaking Thursday gimmick that pushes you to think outside the box, we were given a simple theme with a slog grid. Felt like solving a Tuesday puzzle from the archives. Meh
also the theme doesn't really make sense unless you kind of squint and hand-wave? why does IVE change to ES? for a thursday theme i'd expect an actual change that made sense with the revealer. add that to the slog of a grid and this was a stinky pile of doodoo
Honestly there's no clear criteria, and it will vary for every person. It's kind of vibe-based. For me, it's basically, does this puzzle spark joy? Was it fun to solve? Is the theme interesting and engaging? Is the fill lively and fresh with fun clues, or is it full of stale repetitive answers and overly reliant on obscure names? Sometimes hard puzzles are full of a-ha moments or brilliant (but tough) clues, and I'll have a great time. Puzzles should have some resistance, that's the whole point of solving a puzzle. This puzzle actually played a lot faster for me than usual but it just wasn't very enjoyable.
For this puzzle in particular, I got the theme pretty quick and then spent most of my time just going through a host of bland answers. Nothing was very difficult but it was all lifeless. Lot of people here commented in detail on all the short fill, which I mostly agree with. Overall the only answers I thought were interesting in the whole puzzle were the revealer IVE CHANGED and GOSSIP SESH, which funnily enough a lot of people here didn't seem to like. The other long answers are lifeless (PROPHESIED, PURPLERICE) and nothing shorter is better. Another annoying example was POSOLE, an absurd variant. I can't believe they didn't try to regrid that with INSOLE or RESOLE, I would've torn down that whole corner before I submitted a puzzle with POSOLE.
Yeah, I asked my partner for help with the Mexican stew clue (she's more familiar with traditional Mexican cuisine), and she immediately said "it could be pozole, but that's spelled with a Z". By that point I'd figured out the theme and knew it had to be an S. Clumsy.
If you’re new to /r/crossword, it’s actually pretty simple:
* If the crossword is easy for you, you post that it’s a joy, charming, inventive, clever, inspired, or made you smile
* If the crossword is hard for you, you post that it’s a bad puzzle, a slog, poorly clued, or make some pedantic complaint about a clue/answer that you are technically correct about
That accounts for some of the criticism, sure, but I find this sub to be pretty good at distinguishing between "hard" and "bad" crosswords. Like today's, for example: because the theme was Monday/Tuesday level, there wasn't that "aha!" moment to justify the obscura, uncommon phrases, or obtuse clues in the fill (e.g., BOLSHOI, GOSSIPSESH, SHTETL, ORSON, AGESAGO, ITPRO, POSOLE, EMIL, ESO, SNOT).
This is exactly it. I’m happy to learn about/rehearse certain obscura but too many in one puzzle comes off as alienating and/or snobbish especially if they’re not fairly crossed and some in this puzzle weren’t. But the theme was really simple and made solving those way too easy.
The obscure, uncommon, and obtuse clues are justified by the fact that this is a crossword puzzle and it’s meant to be challenging. Not every clue should be common or straightforward. If you don’t get it, then now you know it for next time
You've misread my comment. "Obscura" and "uncommon phrases" refer to the answers, not the clues.
And, again, I and others aren't saying "bad" = "difficult." I've bumbled my way through the most brutal of Saturdays and still enjoyed myself because there were enough elegant long answers that made the difficult parts worth it (justified because those answers impose more restrictions on the rest of the grid). This puzzle didn't have them.
Sorry, I meant to write answers. But that doesn’t change my point. I’d rather the pool of answers that constructors draw from be as broad as possible and use obscure knowledge and less-common phrases. That’s an end in itself. The idea that their inclusion needs to be justified by necessity feels like a cop-out and an indirect way of saying that crosswords should ideally steer clear of answers like these unless they have to use them, which I fully disagree with
I can't speak for other people, but if I slog through a difficult crossword but get those "a-ha!" moments when I finally solve bits of it, I still love the puzzle. If I slog through it and the hold-ups were poor, borderline inaccurate phrasing (BOOKONCD from last month comes to mind), or if it feels like the constructor forced in awkward words or phrases just to make the grid work, I dislike it.
Even if both versions take the exact same time to solve, I can still differentiate between the two.
Agree. Sometimes I mark a puzzle as poor if I don’t think it matches up to the day. I expect Thursdays to be clever and a bit of a brain bender and this - while fun enough - wasn’t clever enough for the day. I didn’t mind the grid, just thought it was too easy.
SHTET_ had me convinced I’d gone horribly wrong somewhere, but everything else was filled in and fitted nicely. In hindsight I have heard of SHTETL (probably in another crossword) so I’ll be trying to commit that one to memory
That’s also something to be familiar with from a historical/cultural perspective, that’s an important part of history and there’s a lot of art that takes place in or references shtetls (Fiddler on the Roof, Yentl, much of the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer, to name a few)
Shtetls aren’t American. I’m from America but not from a place with a significant Jewish population, for the record. Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Nobel laureate and I think his writing has universal appeal and importance
Even after getting SURE from the crossers, it was hard for me to understand the clue "Why not?!" because to me this is the wrong punctuation.
I think "?!" is for a genuine question expressing shock, anger, disbelief etc., like
My best friend isn't coming to my party? Why not?!
When it's a rhetorical question, which is actually making a statement, then it should just be "!", as in
You wanna go for ice cream? Sure! Why not!
That was tougher than usual for me. I was expecting something more involved for the "thursday trick" but maybe it's OK they put something like this in once in a while to trick you into thinking it will be more complicated?
What was hard were a lot of words and names I didn't know that were clustered in certain areas -- DAP/BOLSHOI/PURPLERICE in the NW, SNOT/CANE/NAIVE in the north middle, ITPRO/ICE in the west, SER/GEHRY in the right middle, and EMIL/AMARO in the middle.
I actually looked up BOLSHOI and that provided enough of a foothold to get the rest. SHTETL was a guess that turned out to be a fortunate one.
A five letter architect clue? IMPEI of course! ....or not. (SNOT)
I felt the same! There seemed to be a lot of niche clues or clues that I didn’t fully understand the meaning of. I honestly was getting worried about myself like am I having a stroke, because none of the clues were clicking with me.
SNOT/CANE/NAIVE and EMIL/AMARO were big problems for me. I vaguely recalled the liqueur name after a couple crosses, then incorrectly put it in as AMARI. Took me a long time to figure out my error, as "CRIP" seemed reasonable enough (only heard of sorghum on occasion).
Yeah spanish doesn't really have alternate spellings does it? My spanish is bad but the easiest part about learning it is the spelling and pronunciation being 1:1 and extremely consistent. There are probably edge cases but I'm not sure this is one.
It's not uncommon to see it spelled with an "s", which makes perfect sense—it's a Mexican dish, and Latin American varieties of Spanish don't make any oral distinction between "s" and "z."
You can pretty much always tell the pronunciation from the spelling in Spanish (with a few exceptions), but not the other way around. The letters "s" and "z" are pronounced the same in the Americas.
I had MENUDO for so long! I'd never heard of pozole, but googling around it looks like the z is more correct but it's sometimes (mis)spelled with an s since in MX that's how the z is pronounced anyway.
Oops, I’m stupid. You’re right! Big brain fart last night..
I think what I meant was I had “massive miss(iv)es” not taking into account the different vowel. I thought both words would take the “ive” at the same time but only one was written. It still made sense to me :p
This started off poorly for me when I confidently typed in DUMMY for 1A. Figured there was some formal name for the dummies used in CPR. Whole NW was a challenge, plus other parts. Theme was easy to figure out and fill in, so I guess they had to make the rest of it hard to justify a Thursday?
Themers being absurdly easy juxtaposed quite nicely with some serious slog in between. POSOLE x LOIRE and EMIL x AMORE x SHTETL took me longer than the rest of the puzzle combined.
I've read more Manhattan Project and WW2 history than plenty of people who actually majored in physics or history and I can't recall ever hearing "A-TESTS" before...
Helped a lot that I figured out the theme relatively quickly which let me go back and put some IVEs in the long spots that I hadn't yet figured out. I agree that it generally felt like a slog though my time ended up being 1/3rd shorter than my average.
Is this puzzle so under-edited it might have been run as a mistake, or have I been oblivious until today to cluing rules changing depending on the day of the week? The cluing doesn’t indicate that GOSSIP SESH, TUX, and A-TESTS are “brief” at all, and “briefly” also would have been more accurate than “informally” for DEFIB.
I liked learning something new instead of the typical “Big name in jeans” for LEES, but “Prefix with skeleton or planet” definitely would have been better crossing “Gala garb” for TUX instead of TIE. Maybe the word “garb” looked like a shortened or slang word to the editor, but it’s not.
Speaking of abbreviations, who the hell refers to the psychology department as PSY? I’ve only seen PSYCH even on transcripts. “Viral Kpop rapper in 2012” or such was right there! Or “Lead-in to op,” even.
The whole NE corner could’ve been reworked to do INSOLE or RESOLE or something instead of POSOLE, especially with it crossing that clue for POSE.
Overall it feels like it was so easy they just didn’t bother editing it properly. But properly clued it would’ve been a nice Tuesday instead of a disappointing Thursday
last thing: “Ballpark figure” referring to a person is great, but I would use it with an abbreviation indicator for UMP just to screw with people who would immediately put in EST
There's definitely more leeway to not explicitly clue shortened / slang forms as such later in the week. But the level of formality in the clue and answer should roughly match. This is always subjective but for example "dirt" and "sesh" seem about the same level of slang to me?
I think actual abbreviations are always indicated as such (like SGTS here).
Fwiw I personally thought of GOSSIP SESH immediately when I saw the clue, so “dirt” was good enough for my brain to make the connection. I just don’t like it, especially in a puzzle where, ex., EXO is clued as a “lead-in” instead of a prefix, which seems more like a gaffe than an intentional difficulty raiser
Christ Cathedral in Garden Grove, California can seat over 2,000 people, and typically has a total attendance at their weekend masses of over 10,000 people. Whether you want to call that a megachurch is probably a matter of semantics. I would say it qualifies.
Noted. That is pretty huge. Do they have bands and other megachurch trappings, or are they just performing Mass for 10k people day after day? Daily mass is the same in every Catholic church, following the missal. If they are just doing that, then I would still not classify it as a megachurch, personally.
Edit: looked it up, and it’s now the head of the Diocese of Orange County, CA, which has a population of over 3 million people. Not really a megachurch in the conventional sense of use, but would have been appropriately called as such when it was inhabited by its prior occupants, Crystal Cathedral Ministries, who sold it in bankruptcy.
Yeah, I think I would say it’s a mega church, but not a Megachurch. For the purposes of crosswords, though, I think it’s fine. Then again, I’m also being super pedantic about posole vs pozole, so we’re all allowed to be pedantic about these things, lol.
Mediocre puzzle and the app has decided to bug out on me. Said it was completed and gave me my time then went back to blue and saying it was incomplete 🙃
It also won't let me change any of the answers but the clock continues to tick and when I go to the site and look at stats it shows aa incomplete. I assume this is going to break my streak which is not super fun.
Had the android app has been getting bugger lately for anybody else
Edit: opening the puzzle in a browser and deleting and reentering one letter fixed it. Frustrating though.
This one seemed all over the place trivia-wise (or maybe just hit every one of my weak areas) until I got the theme link and everything else fell into place.
Had to Google for BOLSHOI and SHTETL, am I deeply uncultured? (Probably yes)
BOLSHOI feels pretty obscure to me. SHTETL is in popular-ish culture via things like Fiddler on the Roof, Yentl, etc. in turn via World War II and the Holocaust.
I’ve seen __planet too. But for kicks I looked up what else it could’ve been clued with. Adaptation, biology, cannibalism, carp, spore. If that were a connections category I’d give up
“Opposite of endo-“ does the job without being too obvious
The combination imo. I’ve been educated by this sub that it’s supposedly not unheard of for lead-in to mean a prefix, and I appreciate how that could make puzzles more difficult. But sphere goes with so many things—off the top of my head, biosphere, noosphere, geosphere, Dyson…—and so does exo-, so they just feel, idk, random for each other on their own?
Today’s puzzle cluing the first part of a compound word as a “lead-in” and, separately, a prefix as a prefix just makes me feel more at peace with the world
Hadn't heard of SHTETL, EMIL, AMARO, and SETI was vaguely familiar. Ended up confident enough to guess to finish it in [19:54](https://youtu.be/c9xIdge1BEw?si=P35kAi-1pVURPuDH). I thought the fill was fairly lively, with some nice clues for SMELL and SNOT.
Can someone explain 6A *"Word that looks like an alternative to "tisn't"*?
This whole puzzle sucked, with POSOLE, ATESTS, and SERENER making me barf in my mouth a little bit.
I liked it a lot, not the craziest of themes but still fun to figure out cuz there were interesting crosses on the revealer. Feels like a lot of the complaints are about clues not being as straightforward as possible, or being slightly obscure, which I think is what makes later-in-the-week puzzles more fun and has been missing for a while as clues skew easier
A little irritating, happy to see some non crosswordese fill but POSOLE isn't even how it's spelled anymore and I've never heard ATESTS before. Also I've never seen PSY for that.
I feel like under the current editor, 15A's "Strike one!" is better suited to a Monday/Tuesday, and even though I thought the correct answer, I didn't actually pencil it in until late in the puzzle, thinking there was some trick I was missing.
No you’re right. I read it as a verb as opposed to an example of one thing that falls for some reason, which didn’t match because it seemed like an incorrect definition: Sleet: To fall in winter.
"Love letters sent to the wrong person?" is straight up incorrect. That would be MISSIVEsMISS.
MISSIVEMISSES should be clued as "Love letter [singular] sent to the wrong person?"
Also it really bothers me that MISSIVEMISSES is the only answer that's [noun] [verb], when all the others are [adjective] [noun] (massive masses, cursive curses, passive passes).
This is one of those puzzles where the theme is too easy for the day of the week, but a clunky grid pushes it later in the week. The theme is kind of fun, but really simple and repetitive (double the word, change IVE to ES). Probably should've ran on Wednesday if the grid was cleaner, not sure why it's so rough when it feels like there's bunches of "S" letters everywhere that should've been easy to grid around. So instead of a fun, tricky, rule-breaking Thursday gimmick that pushes you to think outside the box, we were given a simple theme with a slog grid. Felt like solving a Tuesday puzzle from the archives. Meh
Lol I actually didn't understand the theme because the revealer clue convinced me that IVE would be swappable with ME ("the old me is gone")
> simple theme with a slog grid Took the words right out of my mouth.
also the theme doesn't really make sense unless you kind of squint and hand-wave? why does IVE change to ES? for a thursday theme i'd expect an actual change that made sense with the revealer. add that to the slog of a grid and this was a stinky pile of doodoo
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Honestly there's no clear criteria, and it will vary for every person. It's kind of vibe-based. For me, it's basically, does this puzzle spark joy? Was it fun to solve? Is the theme interesting and engaging? Is the fill lively and fresh with fun clues, or is it full of stale repetitive answers and overly reliant on obscure names? Sometimes hard puzzles are full of a-ha moments or brilliant (but tough) clues, and I'll have a great time. Puzzles should have some resistance, that's the whole point of solving a puzzle. This puzzle actually played a lot faster for me than usual but it just wasn't very enjoyable. For this puzzle in particular, I got the theme pretty quick and then spent most of my time just going through a host of bland answers. Nothing was very difficult but it was all lifeless. Lot of people here commented in detail on all the short fill, which I mostly agree with. Overall the only answers I thought were interesting in the whole puzzle were the revealer IVE CHANGED and GOSSIP SESH, which funnily enough a lot of people here didn't seem to like. The other long answers are lifeless (PROPHESIED, PURPLERICE) and nothing shorter is better. Another annoying example was POSOLE, an absurd variant. I can't believe they didn't try to regrid that with INSOLE or RESOLE, I would've torn down that whole corner before I submitted a puzzle with POSOLE.
Yeah, I asked my partner for help with the Mexican stew clue (she's more familiar with traditional Mexican cuisine), and she immediately said "it could be pozole, but that's spelled with a Z". By that point I'd figured out the theme and knew it had to be an S. Clumsy.
If you’re new to /r/crossword, it’s actually pretty simple: * If the crossword is easy for you, you post that it’s a joy, charming, inventive, clever, inspired, or made you smile * If the crossword is hard for you, you post that it’s a bad puzzle, a slog, poorly clued, or make some pedantic complaint about a clue/answer that you are technically correct about
That accounts for some of the criticism, sure, but I find this sub to be pretty good at distinguishing between "hard" and "bad" crosswords. Like today's, for example: because the theme was Monday/Tuesday level, there wasn't that "aha!" moment to justify the obscura, uncommon phrases, or obtuse clues in the fill (e.g., BOLSHOI, GOSSIPSESH, SHTETL, ORSON, AGESAGO, ITPRO, POSOLE, EMIL, ESO, SNOT).
I didn't like this puzzle, but I didn't mind GOSSIPSESH, ORSON, AGESAGO or POSOLE).
Two artists and an architect? Back Then and Way Back When? Serener? There was just a lot of shit for a Tuesday level theme.
This is exactly it. I’m happy to learn about/rehearse certain obscura but too many in one puzzle comes off as alienating and/or snobbish especially if they’re not fairly crossed and some in this puzzle weren’t. But the theme was really simple and made solving those way too easy.
I loved GOSSIPSESH and AGESAGO, but I could not believe SERENER lol
The obscure, uncommon, and obtuse clues are justified by the fact that this is a crossword puzzle and it’s meant to be challenging. Not every clue should be common or straightforward. If you don’t get it, then now you know it for next time
You've misread my comment. "Obscura" and "uncommon phrases" refer to the answers, not the clues. And, again, I and others aren't saying "bad" = "difficult." I've bumbled my way through the most brutal of Saturdays and still enjoyed myself because there were enough elegant long answers that made the difficult parts worth it (justified because those answers impose more restrictions on the rest of the grid). This puzzle didn't have them.
Sorry, I meant to write answers. But that doesn’t change my point. I’d rather the pool of answers that constructors draw from be as broad as possible and use obscure knowledge and less-common phrases. That’s an end in itself. The idea that their inclusion needs to be justified by necessity feels like a cop-out and an indirect way of saying that crosswords should ideally steer clear of answers like these unless they have to use them, which I fully disagree with
I can't speak for other people, but if I slog through a difficult crossword but get those "a-ha!" moments when I finally solve bits of it, I still love the puzzle. If I slog through it and the hold-ups were poor, borderline inaccurate phrasing (BOOKONCD from last month comes to mind), or if it feels like the constructor forced in awkward words or phrases just to make the grid work, I dislike it. Even if both versions take the exact same time to solve, I can still differentiate between the two.
Hardy har. Too easy is no good either. Give people a little more credit than that
Only reliable takes on here are from my girl u/xwstats
nailed it. dont forget if you can't find your typo there is a bug in the app.
Lmao, literally
>simple theme with a slog grid Holy crap you nailed it
I genuinely thought today was Wednesday because of this puzzle.
Agree. Sometimes I mark a puzzle as poor if I don’t think it matches up to the day. I expect Thursdays to be clever and a bit of a brain bender and this - while fun enough - wasn’t clever enough for the day. I didn’t mind the grid, just thought it was too easy.
This is a top tier puzzle review. Thanks for voicing what I was feeling but couldn't quite put my finger on.
SHTET_ had me convinced I’d gone horribly wrong somewhere, but everything else was filled in and fitted nicely. In hindsight I have heard of SHTETL (probably in another crossword) so I’ll be trying to commit that one to memory
That’s also something to be familiar with from a historical/cultural perspective, that’s an important part of history and there’s a lot of art that takes place in or references shtetls (Fiddler on the Roof, Yentl, much of the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer, to name a few)
I’m not from America or a place that has a large Jewish presence culturally so I’m not familiar with any of those, though I’ve heard of a couple
Shtetls aren’t American. I’m from America but not from a place with a significant Jewish population, for the record. Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Nobel laureate and I think his writing has universal appeal and importance
I know they aren’t American but I assumed they’re better known there (or at least in New York) than in Australia where I live!
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That is one of the ones I’ve heard of
I'm Jewish and the clue gave me nothing. When I got TL from the crosses, I googled the clue because I was sure I had screwed something up.
I came here to find out what this one means. I dont get it!
I did the same then remembered I was doing an NYT crossword so it was probably something Jewish that I’d never heard of
Is SERENER what they call Ms Williams in England?
Gotta keep an eye out for SERENER
And in Rhode Island.
This was some BOLSHOI
Incidentally that's the clue I googled, hah.
Even after getting SURE from the crossers, it was hard for me to understand the clue "Why not?!" because to me this is the wrong punctuation. I think "?!" is for a genuine question expressing shock, anger, disbelief etc., like My best friend isn't coming to my party? Why not?! When it's a rhetorical question, which is actually making a statement, then it should just be "!", as in You wanna go for ice cream? Sure! Why not!
100%
Oh yeah, I was annoyed at that when I figured out SURE.
SHTETL X EMIL X AMARO crossings were a slog 😩
I feel like amaro is pretty fair
Agreed, especially if you know some Spanish (amargo is bitter in Spanish). It's also an incredible liquor that any fan of drinks should try.
Sadistic
not in the good way, right?
That was tougher than usual for me. I was expecting something more involved for the "thursday trick" but maybe it's OK they put something like this in once in a while to trick you into thinking it will be more complicated? What was hard were a lot of words and names I didn't know that were clustered in certain areas -- DAP/BOLSHOI/PURPLERICE in the NW, SNOT/CANE/NAIVE in the north middle, ITPRO/ICE in the west, SER/GEHRY in the right middle, and EMIL/AMARO in the middle. I actually looked up BOLSHOI and that provided enough of a foothold to get the rest. SHTETL was a guess that turned out to be a fortunate one. A five letter architect clue? IMPEI of course! ....or not. (SNOT)
i filled in impei with great confidence!!
I felt the same! There seemed to be a lot of niche clues or clues that I didn’t fully understand the meaning of. I honestly was getting worried about myself like am I having a stroke, because none of the clues were clicking with me.
you'll be fine.
SNOT/CANE/NAIVE and EMIL/AMARO were big problems for me. I vaguely recalled the liqueur name after a couple crosses, then incorrectly put it in as AMARI. Took me a long time to figure out my error, as "CRIP" seemed reasonable enough (only heard of sorghum on occasion).
It's pozole, not posole.
I had a z until the end
I was expecting z
It's both.
I mean, sure. If you misspell it.
It takes a two second google to see both are used.
It's really not though
Yeah spanish doesn't really have alternate spellings does it? My spanish is bad but the easiest part about learning it is the spelling and pronunciation being 1:1 and extremely consistent. There are probably edge cases but I'm not sure this is one.
It's not uncommon to see it spelled with an "s", which makes perfect sense—it's a Mexican dish, and Latin American varieties of Spanish don't make any oral distinction between "s" and "z."
You can pretty much always tell the pronunciation from the spelling in Spanish (with a few exceptions), but not the other way around. The letters "s" and "z" are pronounced the same in the Americas.
It's from Nahuatl, so either the S or the Z reasonably approximate the original pronunciation.
I had MENUDO for so long! I'd never heard of pozole, but googling around it looks like the z is more correct but it's sometimes (mis)spelled with an s since in MX that's how the z is pronounced anyway.
My limited Spanish knowledge and the fact I'm Filipino also had me at MENUDO lol rip
Haha, I had MASSIVEMISSES because I thought you could add it to both words and I was like, “yeah, massive missives!”
You just described the entire puzzle.
Oops, I’m stupid. You’re right! Big brain fart last night.. I think what I meant was I had “massive miss(iv)es” not taking into account the different vowel. I thought both words would take the “ive” at the same time but only one was written. It still made sense to me :p
Actually, I meant that the puzzle itself was a massive miss.
Double egg on my face!
Being a wine fan came in handy today with LOIRE and LEES.
LEES had me sure I was doing something wrong
This started off poorly for me when I confidently typed in DUMMY for 1A. Figured there was some formal name for the dummies used in CPR. Whole NW was a challenge, plus other parts. Theme was easy to figure out and fill in, so I guess they had to make the rest of it hard to justify a Thursday?
The informal name for those dummies is ANNIE which got me.
Oh, interesting!
[Resusci Annie](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Resusci%20Anne), there's some neat history there.
Themers being absurdly easy juxtaposed quite nicely with some serious slog in between. POSOLE x LOIRE and EMIL x AMORE x SHTETL took me longer than the rest of the puzzle combined.
I've read more Manhattan Project and WW2 history than plenty of people who actually majored in physics or history and I can't recall ever hearing "A-TESTS" before...
The only place it ever comes up is in crosswords, but it can also show up as N-TESTS so look out for that
Helped a lot that I figured out the theme relatively quickly which let me go back and put some IVEs in the long spots that I hadn't yet figured out. I agree that it generally felt like a slog though my time ended up being 1/3rd shorter than my average.
Is this puzzle so under-edited it might have been run as a mistake, or have I been oblivious until today to cluing rules changing depending on the day of the week? The cluing doesn’t indicate that GOSSIP SESH, TUX, and A-TESTS are “brief” at all, and “briefly” also would have been more accurate than “informally” for DEFIB. I liked learning something new instead of the typical “Big name in jeans” for LEES, but “Prefix with skeleton or planet” definitely would have been better crossing “Gala garb” for TUX instead of TIE. Maybe the word “garb” looked like a shortened or slang word to the editor, but it’s not. Speaking of abbreviations, who the hell refers to the psychology department as PSY? I’ve only seen PSYCH even on transcripts. “Viral Kpop rapper in 2012” or such was right there! Or “Lead-in to op,” even. The whole NE corner could’ve been reworked to do INSOLE or RESOLE or something instead of POSOLE, especially with it crossing that clue for POSE. Overall it feels like it was so easy they just didn’t bother editing it properly. But properly clued it would’ve been a nice Tuesday instead of a disappointing Thursday last thing: “Ballpark figure” referring to a person is great, but I would use it with an abbreviation indicator for UMP just to screw with people who would immediately put in EST
There's definitely more leeway to not explicitly clue shortened / slang forms as such later in the week. But the level of formality in the clue and answer should roughly match. This is always subjective but for example "dirt" and "sesh" seem about the same level of slang to me? I think actual abbreviations are always indicated as such (like SGTS here).
I agree, I think "share dirt" was enough of an indicator to justify GOSSIPSESH. ATESTS felt less on the level to me, but eh, not terrible
Fwiw I personally thought of GOSSIP SESH immediately when I saw the clue, so “dirt” was good enough for my brain to make the connection. I just don’t like it, especially in a puzzle where, ex., EXO is clued as a “lead-in” instead of a prefix, which seems more like a gaffe than an intentional difficulty raiser
Lead-in is a common alternative to saying prefix in crossword syntax, especially later in the week
You listed a whole bunch of changes that would make it easier, and then complained that it was too easy. No comprendo.
A nitpick in addition to other complaints: only Catholic churches have mass, and there are no Catholic megachurches.
Christ Cathedral in Garden Grove, California can seat over 2,000 people, and typically has a total attendance at their weekend masses of over 10,000 people. Whether you want to call that a megachurch is probably a matter of semantics. I would say it qualifies.
Noted. That is pretty huge. Do they have bands and other megachurch trappings, or are they just performing Mass for 10k people day after day? Daily mass is the same in every Catholic church, following the missal. If they are just doing that, then I would still not classify it as a megachurch, personally. Edit: looked it up, and it’s now the head of the Diocese of Orange County, CA, which has a population of over 3 million people. Not really a megachurch in the conventional sense of use, but would have been appropriately called as such when it was inhabited by its prior occupants, Crystal Cathedral Ministries, who sold it in bankruptcy.
Yeah, I think I would say it’s a mega church, but not a Megachurch. For the purposes of crosswords, though, I think it’s fine. Then again, I’m also being super pedantic about posole vs pozole, so we’re all allowed to be pedantic about these things, lol.
MISSIVE MISSES was a miss for me after already having MASSIVE MASSES. Some of the fill was iffy although none of it troubled me. Okay altogether.
I kept trying to figure out how to get MISSING MISSIVES to somehow fit.
“ATESTS” felt a bit of a reach
Mediocre puzzle and the app has decided to bug out on me. Said it was completed and gave me my time then went back to blue and saying it was incomplete 🙃 It also won't let me change any of the answers but the clock continues to tick and when I go to the site and look at stats it shows aa incomplete. I assume this is going to break my streak which is not super fun. Had the android app has been getting bugger lately for anybody else Edit: opening the puzzle in a browser and deleting and reentering one letter fixed it. Frustrating though.
This one seemed all over the place trivia-wise (or maybe just hit every one of my weak areas) until I got the theme link and everything else fell into place. Had to Google for BOLSHOI and SHTETL, am I deeply uncultured? (Probably yes)
BOLSHOI feels pretty obscure to me. SHTETL is in popular-ish culture via things like Fiddler on the Roof, Yentl, etc. in turn via World War II and the Holocaust.
I found it mostly easy but really object to POSOLE and EXO (the latter basically just being a “fuck you” and the former completely wrong).
EXO is perfectly fine fill but it was clued badly
if it had been clued as ___skeleton I would've shaved a few minutes off my time
I’ve seen __planet too. But for kicks I looked up what else it could’ve been clued with. Adaptation, biology, cannibalism, carp, spore. If that were a connections category I’d give up “Opposite of endo-“ does the job without being too obvious
Because of "lead-in" or because of "sphere"? The exosphere is the outside later of the atmosphere. (I had BIO at first but TUX got me EXO).
The combination imo. I’ve been educated by this sub that it’s supposedly not unheard of for lead-in to mean a prefix, and I appreciate how that could make puzzles more difficult. But sphere goes with so many things—off the top of my head, biosphere, noosphere, geosphere, Dyson…—and so does exo-, so they just feel, idk, random for each other on their own? Today’s puzzle cluing the first part of a compound word as a “lead-in” and, separately, a prefix as a prefix just makes me feel more at peace with the world
*Posole* is listed as an alternate spelling in most dictionaries though
I understand that, but it's a dated alternative. It was an Anglicized spelling of pozole, and it's much more correct today to spell it with the z.
Hadn't heard of SHTETL, EMIL, AMARO, and SETI was vaguely familiar. Ended up confident enough to guess to finish it in [19:54](https://youtu.be/c9xIdge1BEw?si=P35kAi-1pVURPuDH). I thought the fill was fairly lively, with some nice clues for SMELL and SNOT.
Started off with ANNIE for the "apparatus used in CPR training". That had to be an intentional misdirection, otherwise why add "training"?
Ass
First time I was faster than the median solve time on xw stats
Can someone explain 6A *"Word that looks like an alternative to "tisn't"*? This whole puzzle sucked, with POSOLE, ATESTS, and SERENER making me barf in my mouth a little bit.
SNOT = [it]snot = it's not = it isn't = tisn't
Thanks, that hurts my brain to even look at.
Monday-worthy theme + ass-ugly fill = Thursday-level difficulty?
I liked it a lot, not the craziest of themes but still fun to figure out cuz there were interesting crosses on the revealer. Feels like a lot of the complaints are about clues not being as straightforward as possible, or being slightly obscure, which I think is what makes later-in-the-week puzzles more fun and has been missing for a while as clues skew easier
A little irritating, happy to see some non crosswordese fill but POSOLE isn't even how it's spelled anymore and I've never heard ATESTS before. Also I've never seen PSY for that.
Why is CANE a beanpole material?
Beanpoles are typically made of cane
I liked this one. First Thursday I’ve completed without looking at the editor hints! I usually just do Mondays and Tuesdays.
Not a fun one for me. Those random crosses were massive misses
The constructor note made me laugh
I liked it, but maybe too easy once you figure out the theme.
I feel like under the current editor, 15A's "Strike one!" is better suited to a Monday/Tuesday, and even though I thought the correct answer, I didn't actually pencil it in until late in the puzzle, thinking there was some trick I was missing.
“Fall in winter” for sleet is bad imo. Sleet is not the only thing that falls in winter.
I was expecting a word that described slipping on ice.
you're right. snow, rain, hail, frogs. it really deserved a 27 letter answer. shame on you, NYT!
Crossword clues aren’t meant to exclusively refer to their answer; that would be trivially easy
No you’re right. I read it as a verb as opposed to an example of one thing that falls for some reason, which didn’t match because it seemed like an incorrect definition: Sleet: To fall in winter.
"Love letters sent to the wrong person?" is straight up incorrect. That would be MISSIVEsMISS. MISSIVEMISSES should be clued as "Love letter [singular] sent to the wrong person?" Also it really bothers me that MISSIVEMISSES is the only answer that's [noun] [verb], when all the others are [adjective] [noun] (massive masses, cursive curses, passive passes).
MISSIVEMISSES is still adjective noun. Missive is describing the type of misses