This is the crossword puzzle thread

I just passed a year-long streak a few days ago and felt good about it.

While I am not TOO into speed, I do like to finish quickly - for example today I finished under 5 minutes (4:54), which is almost as fast as typing.

But that's not my main goal. I like improving my average over the long term. Unfortunately a system glitch has given me some bizarre 1-minute "best" times.

Anyways.

Solve how you like, do what you like, this is all a voluntary leisure activity

I started getting into the NYT hard sudoku because I'm good at it, but I really don't like the idea of timing in puzzles. I want to walk away and not worry about the clock.

My brother-in-law has OCD and won't even try the timed NYT crossword or sudoku puzzles because they are too stressful for him

I like that Spelling Bee has no clock

I do crosswords to quell the shrieking worries in the back of my mind, so a longer solve is value-adding for me

Speed solving is not for everyone, that's for sure.

I do crosswords to quell the shrieking worries in the back of my mind

I hear you, brother. I do them to stop thinking about cares and stress, not for the mental challenge. The Sunday puzzles take longer, but are solvable without too much brain-sweat and are therefore better for my purposes. I go months without doing any, but save them up and drag 'em out when I need to empty my head.

Agree with Dan S in principle - speed-solving the Bee would not be good for my sanity.

That said, my current routine is that I like to get to Genius on my own, generally before getting out of bed. I can usually get to QB using the Forum grids (but no Hive hints) before work, but it's okay if it leaks a little into the day. Then I turn to the puzzle.

If I haven't finished the daily puzzle by lunchtime, something is probably wrong.

i now have a 25-month streak

friday and saturday are the only interesting ones to me at this point, although one can hope for a truly insane thursday that's all mirrored or some shit

honestly hate sundays; they're almost never interesting, and among so many answers a bunch of them are gonna be lame

i guess 1000 days is within reach and i'll keep going but also i kind of wish i would just forget about it one day

Have to say I am kind of impressed that you guys can solve for years without hitting the check button.

500 days around the corner for me

if it weren’t for the app clock i wouldn’t care at all about timing (well except maybe for those mega-large puzzles they put out every december) - when i solved mostly on paper i never timed myself

friday and saturday are the only interesting ones to me at this point, although one can hope for a truly insane thursday that's all mirrored or some shit

honestly hate sundays; they're almost never interesting, and among so many answers a bunch of them are gonna be lame

Have to say I am kind of impressed that you guys can solve for years without hitting the check button.

For some of us the motivation is purely an irrational worship of the Streak.

I'm going to brag for a bit and say that I usually hit Genius by the time I've had breakfast, though QB is a much rarer achievement (though today I managed to do it without hints, and while I was sitting on the can).

I am not ashamed to say that I do sometimes hit the check button on archived puzzles.

(Like, in addition to doing each day's puzzle, I am also working backward through the archives. I am in 2011 at present, just doing Thursday/Friday/Saturday. Using check on an archived puzzle does not affect your streak or statistics.)

My first sub-5:00 Tuesday puzzle today!

I actually hit a new record on Monday - 4:10! - but I think this might be that I was doing it on my computer rather than my phone.

Ha, and a record for Thursday just now (8:48, and what a corny theme) - I think "I'm on leave, so I'm on my computer but I'm concentrating, not half-listening to a very dull stand-up" is probably a big factor.

I did it but still don’t quite grok the theme.

It's just using I over V as a down-arrow rebus for 'down' (more like a traditional rebus, I suppose) in the four big down clues - I usually do the downs first on Thursdays, since the gimmicks are usually in the acrosses.

Oh, okay. Still slightly underwhelmed. Also was there a reveal/explanatory clue hint anywhere? Couldn’t find it.

No revealer IIRC. I liked Thursday's theme better than Wednesday's, though.

I can see that.

FB FOTO

I don’t do Thursdays because I have a severe rebus allergy, am I a lesser person?

No way! We all have our own preferences and reasons for solving.

No problem. It's really kind of a slog to do every day of the week tbh, unless you are really into it.

are you not the tasmanian mattt? it's impressive that you do them at all, given their heavily american slant

Saturday’s is an enjoyable challenge. Couldn’t zip through it but it also didn’t feel like a chore.

Stick in, I think, NW.

Stuck, rather.

Rex hated it too, but turns out I had an error in the West.

Rex, like the kid in the old Life cereal commercial, hates everything.

Hah I guess I wasn't saying much there. I think he's definitely a sour curmudgeon a lot but for today's he gets to why I didn't like the puzzle: the NW felt capricious and ungenerous. I'm fine with ambiguity and misdirection but that corner was so arbitrary and willfully obscured with little payoff.

xps I am indeed the Tas Matt - switched accounts to shake my work email, but just discovered my iPad was logged in as the old user so have been posting as matthewk too. and yes, being a non-American I absolutely hated the Saturday puzzle.

it’s saturday and one expects hard cluing but yeah, 1A is just fucking with ppl

Oh yeah, took me forever to get that right.

By the way, there's a major kerfuffle today because NYT messed up the coding on an otherwise very nice puzzle.

I (and many others) struggled with getting the website to recognize that it had been solved correctly. Some people gave up in frustration and broke streaks by using check, only to discover that they had not made any mistakes, it just was picky about what it would accept, and it wasn't consistent platform to platform. IPad and iPhone users reported different results from Android and PC users; ultimately switching browsers worked for me but it took an extra 20 minutes of trial and error.

What sux is that I actually really liked the gimmick! Just poor technical execution made it frustrating. Anyway try hyphens, spaces, Xes, the word "nothing," the word "blank," and the letters from the phrase SPACE OUT, surely one of those strategies will work for you.

Yes, I discussed this last night elsewhere.

The Wordplay comments are on FIRE.

Hyphens worked for me on the iPhone app. I don’t have much of a streak going so didn’t really mind today’s but can see how it might annoy others. It was quite a nice, breezy Sunday puzzle I thought.

Usually when I’ve got everything right but it’s telling me I’m wrong it’s because my fat fingers have mistyped so yeah I combed a few times before I realised there must be a glitch & googled

Based on my knowledge of the, um, addictive nature of gamification and streaks I can only imagine how upset people are.

tbh if you have a significant streak you should know better

the gimmick was obvious enough, and so was the fact that the app(s) might be touchy about it

I’m quite new to this, finally gave in & got the sub to do the spelling bee thing & started doing this despite not really getting on with us style xwords previously - I still on the whole find them less satisfying/interesting than uk cryptics but there are moments of inspiration that wouldn’t be possible with the latter, the worst thing tho is that the lack of black squares means that the same answers have to come up over and over again

The relative easiness also makes it dangerously addictive (I’ve done 15 daily puzzles since I joined but 69 total, you can just blast through the archive) and echoing recent posts the existence of “stats” and timing is toxic

One of these days I'm going to take another whack at cryptics, but the learning curve seems pretty steep for a newcomer.

Anyway, I solved today's on Android and had no trouble getting it to accept it, so my streak never felt threatened (lol feeling called out).

I think this is the best possible time to get into US/Canadian cryptics, as they play a bit fairer than UK ones, and you can get 5/6 new ones a week from various publications. There are also a lot of how-to/training guides popping up on both blogs (see https://toughasnails.net/2022/01/01/announcing-the-oneth-of-the-month-mini-cryptic/) and publications (see The Browser, The New Yorker, AVCX, and others). I've been doing one a day for this whole year and it's been very satisfying.

Hard to believe NYT with all of their resources can't figure out how to make an online puzzle with the tiniest of variety elements work. This isn't the first time a gimmick like this has gone wrong. Indie creators have figured out how to make digital versions of acrostics, spirals, marching bands, and other variety types. You would think NYT could at hire them or at least copy their work.

The received wisdom on UK cryptics at least is that they are very specific to the setters - you'll need a month of one setter to really settle in, but it won't help you much with others - is that less the case in the US?

There is some small variance among US setters, but mainly the vocabulary and references of their cryptics are familiar to people who do US Crosswords.

With UK cryptics, the best advice seems to be British. Or, have a desire to learn about British locales, slang, and abbreviations that seem a bit crusty/outdated at times. UK cryptics rarely (if ever) have living people or current events in their clues, but they do go far into the Chambers dictionary to find words like SPATCHCOCK or OTOLITH. I have to be in the mood for the challenge, but it’s a bit of a steep climb to get there.

OTM

The received wisdom on UK cryptics at least is that they are very specific to the setters - you'll need a month of one setter to really settle in, but it won't help you much with others - is that less the case in the US?

I don’t mind the vocabulary hunt at times, and there are definitely some inventive ways of clueing/punning in UK puzzles. Feels like only recently though that the average US solver now knows that cryptics are a thing, and might want to do them. Although that is a bit of speculation on my part.

Just remembered that I started doing cryptics with a Telegraph (?) How To Solve Cryptics I bought at Heathrow. I then kept going with the variety cryptics in Harper’s and the Atlantic and would still try to do UK cryptics on and off for various spells but ultimately didn’t really feel it was worth it for me.