Hi all. Wow, it's Halloween! I guess this mini is seasonally appropriate, albeit less so than my AVCX grid from last week (which was - spoilers - awesome!), but probably a little moreso than my Crossword Club puzzle for tomorrow. Hope you like this one as much as those two. Later this week you'll get a "these were the puzzles I had opinions about" recap post for October, which will hopefully be much more sustainable to make than my earlier attempts to be in that space this year.
[fullscreen] [PUZ 2 come]
difficulty: medium (like a Wednesday NYT)
I don't know why it is that when you make a puzzle for a real venue, one that will pay you and everything, it takes literal months of back-and-forth and grid iterations before you get something even remotely decent, but that when you shitpost, you can create a complete and clean and good grid in thirty minutes. Such is the case with this puzzle, co-constructed by myself and Riley Wise. Lila test solved this mess, god bless her. I'll edit in the .puz file when I figure out how to get a certain aspect of the grid to work in .puz form. Anyway, applet under the cut - enjoy!
(P.S.: Did you do my AVCX grid from yesterday? It was called Monster Mash and literally everyone loved it!)
Nothing to say this week, really. I have a puzzle with AVCX Classic in a week or two that's got, I think, the most concise and brilliant angle ever conceived for a very common crossword entry. So there's that to look forward to.
Well, here's the puzzle. There's a bit of a gimmick here, and a very on-brand one at that. Hope you like it.
difficulty: middling (Friday)
[fullscreen] [PUZ]
The dulcet tones of the Lady Miss Kier can only mean one thing - the return of QVXwordz themelesses! Holy shit!
Not too much to say here. Astute solvers will note that this puzzle has 74 words, which is too many for the majority of crossword outlets; I estimate that at least one of the clues/entries here is a no-go at most crossword outlets, too. (Hint: it's the one that says MOTHAFUCKIN' in all caps.) Thanks to Ben, Josh, and Riley for test-solving.
Puzzle under the cut! Although, I've also included a fullscreen link above in lieu of a PDF (which you can just make with the Amuselabs applet anyway), in case you want to solve it that way. Have fun!
A couple weeks ago I met up with some friends for dinner in Downtown Brooklyn. I had not really been to downtown since my high school days a decade prior, but not matter. I assumed I would have an easy time navigating from the subway to the restaurant - I would just use the Williamsburgh Savings Bank's clock tower as a massive compass needle, with Brooklyn Tech's spire and radio antenna as a backup, and use that as my north star. I had no such luck - apparently, in the past decade, skyscrapers had bloomed seemingly everywhere within a two-mile radius of the Barclays Center. My memories of a pre-Kyrie Irving downtown were useless, conquered by concrete kudzu.
It is in moments like this where I most appreciate Olga Dies Dreaming, the debut novel by Xochitl Gonzalez. I liked the novel a lot, despite its many flaws, largely because I am demographically obligated to - how could I not love this novel by a Mexican-American Bensonhurster, which claims to be dedicated to "South Brooklyn girls who stare at the water, dreaming," and then backs that claim up at least once per page for 400 pages? In heroine Olga Acevedo I see a mirror of my own strivings and failings. It is very rarely that I feel seen by a work of fiction with this level of precision.
Ergo, I was willing to put up with the shittier, didactic parts of the novel. So many of the secondary characters seem to talk straight past our protagonist and zero in on the reader, not so much speaking as orating, delivering multi-page lectures about Puerto Rican history for the sake of gringos on Goodreads for whom the greatest compliment you can give a book is "intersectional." Eventually, belatedly, these characters mostly become real people instead of The Jones Act for Dummies audiobooks. But not all of them, and especially not Olga's seemingly endless parade of lovers. I have seen Olga Dies Dreaming described/derided as "chick lit," which isn't wrong, naked misogyny aside. The book insists on the cover that it is A Novel but in my mind it is more of A Fanfiction, converting a century of Boricua radicalism into grist for love triangles. Which is only a negative insofar as that element of the book is so obvious - gee, will Olga fall for the white gazillionaire real estate mogul-slash-vulture, or the homeboy whose eyes and freckles merit a paragraph's worth of descriptors!?!?
And yet despite that cynicism I really did love the book, and its characters, and its lovingly chaotic depiction of a whole family ecosystem, and the parts where Gonzalez doesn't feel the need to explain la cultura to los blancos and instead just writes down the experience of walking down an ungentrified Sunset Park block for five pages. I even kind of loved the goofy fairytale ending. Great book. Four stars.
Wow, that was a lot of opinions. Anyway, here's a 5x5. It's times like these, when I forget to post the puzzle at the start of the week, where I'm glad I don't have these called "Monday Minis" anymore. There will actually be a new full-size QVXword this Thursday - a very lovely themeless which I got test-solved and everything! - and hopefully there will be more than one of them in the coming weeks. Love you all.
This is a labor of love for Kelsey, who I appreciate even though she repeatedly negs me for my choices in e-mail providers and/or romantic partners like a you-know-what. >:(
Also, I realized that people want links to the fullscreen puzzle because the applet can be a little weird as an embed on some computers, so if you click on the "fullscreen link" down there it'll open up the puzzle in a new tab or window or whatever. This is what we in the know call a "quality of life feature."
Throwing the nerds a Q-bone with this one. Get it? Q, like QVXwordz? But also like... Oh, you'll get it. Or maybe you won't? WHATEVER!!! YOU'RE NOT MY MOM!!!!!