#48: Girls Gone Wild (ft. Richard Allen!)

 

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Hey, it's another themed grid - and this time, it's with a pal! Richard Allen runs the blog Lexicon Devil, where he posts metas and variety puzzles in addition to fun themelesses. In addition to this, he's also solved the puzzle classic Cain's Jawbone and one of the Zodiac Killer's ciphers (!!) - a real smart guy, and a great constructor too.

Anyway, we've got a 78-word themed puzzle of middling difficulty. Nothing too earthshaking, this type of theme, but I think it's a pretty good puzzle, firmly at the intersection of the two of our sensibilities. Especially that final theme entry! Actually, the northwest corner is... *very* Quiara, for better or worse. But we had our fun with this one, and we think you will too.

In case you missed it, I posted an "odds and ends" post earlier today recapping some of the cool stuff I did in the past three months. (I got a new job, among other things.) Anyway, applet under the cut; see you next week, probably.

Odds and Ends

Hey, how's everyone been? It was only a few months ago that it looked like I'd settle back into a regular schedule of posting on Sundays, and that... did not happen! But there are good reasons for that.

The big one is that I have now joined the hallowed ranks of the full-time puzzle editors, because I now edit a daily puzzle for Slate! Every weekday you get a lovely midi (an eleven-by-eleven one! not a wimpy little nine-by-nine like you'd get at Vox!) and then on Sunday you get a fun themeless grid. The grids are by some of the best constructors in the game - beyond me, you'll be seeing puzzles by Sid Sivakumar, Nancy Serrano-Wu, Hemant Mehta, Chandi Deitmer, and Ben Zimmer - and I think they're at least on par with the mini or midi offerings elsewhere on the internet. Fans of my work will get to see puzzles there somewhere between two and three times a week, such as this lovely one.

The other big thing is that I went to the ACPT this year! For the second time I worked on the judging team, spending most of Saturday in the mezzanine of the Stamford Marriott with three colors of highlighters. But I did try, to the best of my ability, to play along with the crowd. For those of you curious how I would have fared, I'd have scored 11,415 points - 44th place. Nothing to sneeze at, although I would be kicking myself for leaving two squares blank on puzzle 2, and thus just narrowly missing the C finals due to a very silly error. (Without that mistake I'd be in 23rd, and thus just narrowly missing the B finals instead.) In any case, I had a great time, having perhaps too much to drink (so, two IPAs) and too little sleep. Oh, and Elise gave me a free Cruciverbology t-shirt.

Anyway, in the interim I had a couple interesting grids I constructed or co-constructed go up - I had a Universal Saturday themeless run back in February (it's Freestyle 112, for those of you trying to find it in an archive on the Puzzle Society or whatever - or you can just DM me and I'll send you a PDF) which I thought was very, very good, and I also contributed to Gizmo's "Just One Word" puzzle, which has... much more than one word in it. I think every constructor's Salomon number was cut in half by this grid, oh my lord.

Well, I have a bunch of themed and themeless grids that got rejected from various places, and also some collabs that'll be posted here over the coming months. (Including *literally tonight* OMG!) So I'll see you all then.