Redd's Roster of Crosswordese: Do not read if you hate DRNO

"I had trouble but i managed to eke by" sounds fine to my canadian ear.

take by, hoser

I finished today’s none the wiser how the gimmick was supposed to have worked

Me too, but I did it online so there was a cute reveal at the end.

Do you (a) care, and (b) want to know?

a) not really b) 10000% yes

SPOILAGE

SPOILAGE

SPOILAGE

The revealer is "shipshape," and if you connect the circled squares it makes a stylized sailboat. But that's not all - the theme answers each have a shape word: LOVETRIANGLE, STORYARC, SECURITYLINE, and TOWNSQUARE. The boat shape is made up of a triangle, an arc, a line, and a square.

like so

also ETS, AMI, ATEIN, PTA

Yeah. In hindsight it looks like I erred by omitting SKISLOPE from the theme answers

i thought it was something like that. i didn’t think to actually do a connect-the-dots. usually “getting” the gimmick is an aid to solving and it wasn’t this time.

ACAI

GOJI

ALOE

UGLI

ELOI

EPEE

a few days ago FBPOSTS was, i thought, a step too far

ILE

before i forget i just want to give a shout-out to last friday's nyt. most pleasurable one i've done in a long time. was really much more about the funny/lateral cluing than the words themselves, if that makes sense.

i got a DRNO in the wild on my phone app last night!

ALEE

ACK ICK OCH UCK OCH
all these suck as "exclamation of disgust/surprise"

DRNO was in matt gaffney's xwordcontest.com puzzle this week. not meta related.

Feel like an interesting thing to do would be to go through the week to see how the clues change for one of these

like this?
https://crossword-solver.io/crossword-clues/drno/

Never saw that particular search engine, nice. Assume clues that mention Bond are Mon-Wed, whereas Joseph Wiseman/Crab Key are Friday-Saturday, Bond & Julius an easy Thursday, just Julius a hard Thursday.

disappointed that we have yet to see FAUCI

seriously!

In the Mini, last Saturday.

i don’t do the mini - it’s not in the newspaper

I was about to say, it was in the mini last Saturday.

Does anyone do the Times online-only? I feel foolish for wanting to give myself a Christmas gift of a sub to the crossword, but kind of want it at the same time. Is it worth it?

I'm sure a lot of non-Americans do, myself included. I mean, I could probably find a NYT in print, but I'm not honestly sure where.

larger WH Smiths, Waitrose, newsagents etc - it’s not too hard to find. outside London forget it though.

I get it delivered.

i only subscribe to nyt games and not the paper itself. officially a spelling bee addict too

The print version is ludicrously expensive in comparison to the online version, even if one subscribes to both the paper and games.

I begin each day with Spelling Bee and the Mini in bed, before the coffee. Helps me wake up.

Gotta say that every time I see this thread bumped I think DRNO must be a city in Poland or Slovakia or something

beat my previous record for solving a Friday puzzle today. KAC’s one of the best constructors, always happy to see his name on a puzzle

Does anyone do the Times online-only? I feel foolish for wanting to give myself a Christmas gift of a sub to the crossword, but kind of want it at the same time. Is it worth it?

I do, for puzzles only though. For $20 a year, totally worth it.

^^^

Brno is in the Czech Republic - a lot of my employer's European staff work there.

Oh that’s why!

thought saturday was really hard. it almost defeated me. first time in a long time i’ve had that feeling.

same

(This is just above Blue Saturday in my bookmarks - some confusion)

the Saturday took longer for me to finish than today’s Sunday

Been feeling very annoyed lately by the proliferation of "schoolyard comeback" "schoolyard retort" etc. - AMTOO, ARENOT, CANSO, etc

while I'm reviving the thread, can anyone direct me to a good primer on the common mechanisms, tricks, logic of Cryptics? I am beginning to find regular puzzles a little too straightforward (I do the NYT Sunday every week, and sometimes the Saturday). But I am usually at a total loss to even get started on cryptics. I did complete a Puns and Anagrams in the NYT Mag a month or so ago when it was featured as the second puzzle, which made me feel like Cryptics might be something achievable when in the past they just felt way too far outside my capacity. But I'd need to raise my baseline a little to get started.

this PDF download is a really clear guide to cryptics

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nqqbfts95ywzluz/Introduction%20to%20Cryptic%20Crosswords.pdf?dl=1

The NYT Mag cryptic is on the easier side imo, lots of anagrams, and this indie crossword page has some cryptics too: https://www.ariespuzzles.com/2020/08/aries-cryptic-29.html

either the beginning or the end of a cryptic clue are a straightforward definition or synonym of the answer. I couldn't figure out how to do cryptics until I grasped that concept.

awesome, thank you! just DLed that pdf and will read through, but your comment here is illuminating on its own

looking back up at this thread. it's kind of a funny phenomenon how certain celebs get their stature cemented because of how useful they are for crossword constructors. issa rae is mentioned upthread, i imagine that if and when she fades into obscurity in the general zeitgeist, crossword doers will keep having their memories jogged. it's something like having a hit song that can be closely associated with a holiday or other recurring phenomenon - an easy path to canonization.

no problem! I only learned how to do them this last year (productive use of my newly vast amount of free time, yes), and I love them now. The New Yorker site runs old ones from their archives once a week, and the Guardian has tougher ones (with some incomprehensible to me Britishisms), and both sites let you check for mistakes