This is the crossword puzzle thread

i sent an angry email about it. subject line - "angry email re: crossword cancellation".

new muller music meta today at least?

dammit. that's the only crossword that doesn't make me feel stupid. :(

So now it's the AVCX and it will be pay to play.

is anyone doing this diagram-free puzzle via twitter by robin stears? i'm gonna try the most recent one out

update: this is fun and hard! but i'm cheating as much as possible.

i'm not usually much for non-american standard crossword puzzles but i think i should maybe start giving diagramless a shot

Handy link to Matt Gaffney's new site: xwordcontest.com

Which I guess has been out there for two months, but I often end up going to the old one first.

― 45 DOWN: "NYPD Blue" actor ____ Morales (R Baez), Thursday, November 8, 2012 7:00 PM (3 days ago)

So kickstarter now for ACVX/Onion puzzle: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/403421588/the-american-values-club-crossword

Did you guys get the pmx meta?

i haven't :(

pmx meta isn't too hard

ugh, JUST got it and the deadline passed

Probably jinxing myself by telling you guys but I haven't missed a single one of those pmx metas.

anyone figured out the gaffney meta? i've whittled it down to two possibilities but i'm pretty sure they're both wrong

Had an idea on Friday but forgot to send it in. Just did so now but don't know if he is up and checking them yet

Nope. I didn't get it.

The thing about metas is, you feel pretty good if you can get them quickly but if you don't, how much effort should you put in and even then is it productive? Sometimes you can wrack your brain, go up, down and sideways through the grid and google up a storm but still not get anywhere. It's not like, say, a cryptic clue, where you can either go about it a little systematically and check for the different types of clue or you can simply mull it over and your subconscious eventually serves up the answer.

yeah, but i actually have a streak going (on two ridiculously easy ones) and this one seems like it should be gettable

Yeah, I had the same streak of two but it's all over now. Good luck.

Hm. If you look at the earliest meta puzzles he put out, you see something like 50 people get the correct solution where you might see 200 today. So either a lot more people are doing them or people got better over the course of four years

Thought the arches were GATES, but I knew I was missing something

what arches?

The ones in Paris and St. Louis and London I think.

ooooooh. you gotta look at the asterisked clues

Reminiscent of the HOP ON POP gimmick of a few weeks ago.

Saw there were asterisks on Friday then put the puzzle down and forgot about them when I looked again on Monday to think about the meta. Wonder how many of these I will have to do before I can make it through a month?

tbh i connected the asterisks and the theme entries asap and it was still hard as hell bc i had never heard "oracle of omaha" before, and i don't think it's really that common a nickname

my two other possibilities were howard hamm (cause he's an oilman of oklahoma, you see) and oprah

So I guess if I am going to continue doing these I'd like to start when everybody else does and get the puzzle on puzzlesocial on Thursday night. But puzzlesocial website just says "New Puzzle Social website coming soon," Facebook app is a pig and I couldn't find this puzzle anyway, although maybe it is the one that says "AV Club, Matt Gaffney, Hard"
/disgruntled_moronic_amazon_reviewer

Also, labeled "A humorous daily puzzle by today's top constructors" or something like that. But I just clicked and it is in fact Matt's Meta.

And then clicked the print icon for the pdf so I don't have to deal with the solver app.

Sorry "the nation's top indie constructors"

But he just sent it anyway. Puzzle is easy, no clue about the meta.

and still no clue. This one seems to be hard. Leader board has only fourteen correct answers so far. Usually it is about eighty by one pm.

OK, some bigtime solvers DNF on this one.

Also, toyed with PMX First Words of Songs Theme Construction Contest but it really seems to be quite a bit of work- no wonder he wasn't able to do it himself.

**SPOILER ALERT**
So, for future reference, in this week's MGWCC you had to take part of each theme answer, anagram it to a classical composer, then take the first letters of those composers names to get another composer. Some sixty-odd people got it right.

i've never done any of those gaffney metas. guess i should get on it, eh

i'm mostly just catching up on all the NYT puzzles i haven't done this year via iphone app (up to mid-september now)

ugh. that doesn't even sound too bad. i think i was just spoiled with weeks 1-3.

OK, zachlyon, we got the two easy metas this month let's see how we do this weekend when the challenging third puzzle drops.

gaffney's? just tried the most recent one and got it (altho it's closed now)

Yeah, Gaffney.

i was too late on the first one and i didn't spend much time on it but i was thinking too hard and it went right over my head anyway. last one was sorta fun tho.

Didn't get this last one which many people apparently found pretty easy, although thankfully I didn't spend too much time on it. Still not quite on his wavelength. Also haven't quite accustomed myself to the amount that you might need Google and Wikipedia for the meta.

working retail at christmas, didn't even have a chance to look at it

Nowhere on the muller meta-meta, sent in for the hint but it didn't help.

ditto

Feel like the hint was no hint at all. Have had some half-baked ideas but either they don't seem to lead anywhere or they lead to too many ramifications to chase down - how much time are we supposed to spend on this? Would try harder if more people had solved it pre-hint. Of course we don't know yet how many the hint helped.

yeah i was already sort of going for what the hint suggested anyway since they kind of lend themselves to that interpretation