Five by Five #5

A double dose of Five by Fives this week to make up for lost time. Sid Sivakumar kindly gave this one a whirl before it went to print; what a mensch. I think this is my favorite grid of the initial bunch, on account of how coherent this one feels. 5x5s are kind of punishing to do well on account of you only having ten entries, all of which have to interlock, which makes it sort of a small miracle that this grid has such pleasing symmetry to it (you'll know what I mean after you solve it). Enjoy.

If you didn't do it, I edited an AVCX grid last week by Parker Higgins and Mali Handa titled "Low Scores," which kind of totally rocks!?!? Give it a whirl if you haven't already.

Five by Five #4

Inspired by last week's Times Sunday, which falsely identified 6-Across as a rapper (happy as I was to see him referenced), and also by my friend Allison who interviewed 8-Across recently (which I assume was a life goal of hers, as it would be for any journalist). Enjoy.

Five by Five #3

I know this sounds fake, but I didn't really intend for the theme here to B ("be") a thing until I got to the down entries and said "hey wait a minute." Thank you to Kate Chin Park for playtesting this and assuring me this was not pointlessly forced. (Kelsey helped too but I refuse to thank her for anything.)

P.S.: I think this is a good time to remind anyone reading this blog casually that I have an e-mail address and am always down to chat with people who have considered making crosswords but have no idea where to start, or people who have made crosswords but worry they're not very good at it and want guidance on how to suck less. And I'm really, *really* down to chat with those of you who are going, "gee, I really vibed with this puzzle, Quiara, but I've never really thought of myself as the kind of person who makes crosswords," because I'll level with you: this blog is very much pitched towards other constructors, so if you're gelling with it, you probably do have "constructor brain" (which is definitely a thing) and would probably be decent at puzzlemaking. Or you just really dig Migos, which is a trait more crossword constructors should have anyway. Either way - I don't bite!

Five by Five #2

Belated 5x5 because I had to make a new puzzle to accommodate current events.

Speaking of current events, did you see that last week I had a guest puzzle on BEQ's site!? Everyone loved it, with the exception of nearly every commenter on CrosswordFiend. But everyone else loved it, other than the 36 people on BEQ's site who wrote in to tell me that I am a deranged maniac. But everyone else loved it, if by "everyone" you mean Sam Ezersky (a person who no one on the Internet has EVER said anything mean about):

@quiarados your guest puzzle today (on @fleetwoodwack's site) will go down as a personal favorite!! The theme itself, the ahas throughout, the whole grid … take a freakin bow

— Sam Ezersky (@thegridkid) May 5, 2022

What an endorsement! See you next week.

Introducing... Five by Five

Hey all! It's been a while. Not that you've been wanting for places to see my byline this past month, between assorted editorial work at AVCX and guest puzzles such as this Toto-themed one to close out Alex Boisvert's "Yacht Rock" series. Not to mention I have an all-new never-before-seen grid in the coolest crossword book of 2022, Inkubator Crosswords: 100 Audacious Puzzles by Women and Non-Binary Creators from Andrews McMeel Publishing.

Anyway, the monthly roundups for March and April are on tap for this week, as is another guest spot on a different blog. But I have a much more exciting feature for you all to check out, namely... the return of Mini Mondays! Or Monday Minis. Or whatever the hell I called them. Called, past tense, because as of today they're now called Five by Fives. You can remember the name because it's what Faith said all the time on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and also because the grids are literally 5x5s. I have about eight of these queued up for the next two months, after which point I might get a tad more ambitious with the format. (E.g., I might do a vowelless... or a consonantless... or a squeeze phrase... etc etc.) Because they're so tiny I don't think it's really worth making a PDF or .puz for these.

Anyway, see you Thursday - or possibly before then. Applet ABOVE the cut, because I feel like being quirky and cool.

#38: The One with the Deez Nuts Reference (Themeless #17)

 

[PDF] [PUZ]
difficulty: medium

Just a quick themeless built around a (chef's kiss) perfect northwest corner. Not a lot to say about this one, other than that I tried to make it pretty straightforward relative to the regular QVXwordz themeless, which skews towards the very difficult.

Did you guys do the awesome Yacob Yonas themeless I edited for AVCX? You should! It's great! Oh, also, there's a great book of Inkubator puzzles that's coming out next month, and I have a puzzle in it!! I don't have a puzzle in These Puzzles Fund Abortion II but it's a great pack of puzzles for a good cause, so if you haven't donated for that, do that too. OK, applet below the cut, hope you love it!

Crossworld Monthly Roundup, February 2022

 

Hey gang! It's that time of the month again - the time where I get cranky and insist on making very poor decisions - that's right, it's monthly roundup time! After doing another 250 puzzles, I've separated the wheat from the chaff, and I'm proud to announce that I have the objectively correct takes on all of crosswords.

My favorite puzzle of February 2022 was... "Throw Some D's" by Kelsey Dixon and Erik Agard! Everyone loves Erik Agard; everyone loves Kelsey Dixon [citation needed]; everyone loves Rich Boy's ringtone rap classic "Throw Some D's" [citation sorely needed]; what could go wrong with a grid like this!?!? (Nothing, that's what.) Give yourself a minute to solve the puzzle, then report back to me...

...ok, you did it? Awesome. What I like about this puzzle, on the most obvious level, is that it's a very interesting fusion of two distinct but synchronized varieties of "you don't see that every day" cluing and entries. Erik's doing his thang here, as evidenced by the one-two punch of the consecutive across entries [daequan smith org. for workers' rights] and [___/xer pronouns] (cluing UAW and XIE, of course), but you also have some extremely Kelsey clues like [painting, cinema, minions fanfic, etc.] for ART. The unabashed voiciness here means that clues that would be the highlight of any other puzzle - e.g. [south american city where you may have a come to jesus moment] for RIO - barely even register when deluged with such cool stuff.

But all this talk about cluing voice is surface level - one of the secretly most brilliant things about this puzzle is it how it handles its theme. "Add a letter" themes are, of course, a dime a dozen, but I don't think I've ever seen a puzzle which lays out the added letters in the same way this puzzle does. There are ten Ds sprinkled across five theme entries, but instead of putting 2 Ds in each themer, the Ds are put in in quantities of 1/2/4/2/1 - a very mathematically appealing way to do it, which allows for greater theme density in that you can get both HAND SOLO and the marquee DRANK AND FIDDLED to fit. It's a very satisfying themeset, done very elegantly. I give this... a D+!!! Get it, because... oh, never mind. Anyway, Erik edits a lot of puzzles, duh, so you'll see his name... um, literally everywhere, and Kelsey you will start seeing monthly as part of Lil AVC X, the midi branch of the AVCXpansion! Please sign up for that if you haven't already, because I get more money if we get enough subscriptions.

More highlights and lowlights under the cut...