Generative AI? The protagonist of Left Hand of Darkness?

Do we think Babka knew MAJA/MALDEN

Given how my puzzle 3 went, I think that might have been my peak

Hello from the #acpt where everyone looks disconcertingly like someone
I *might* know

Got to be the person who answered the Ellesmere Island question correctly at the geography/wordplay thing last night, so I’m going to call myself good at trivia based on that alone

This is my obligatory come say hi to me at ACPT post

We are excited to announce Midis for Minnesota, an upcoming crossword pack by Minnesota constructors. Proceeds will support immigrant families in Minnesota who have been impacted by ICE activity. Pack will be released in late April. A preview puzzle by Zhouqin Burnikel is available now.

That was you?

Can't tell if April Fools, using today to post all your unpopular opinions, or just using the newfound Jeopardy fame to make everyone online mad

My last Puzzmo mini is running today, so I just wanted to say a big thank you to anyone who has solved and enjoyed the March minis!

I've started solving the NYT crosswords again in preparation for ACPT, and I don't think they're bad per se, but it is wild to me how some people act like these are so much better than all other puzzles, when they're just... not.

We gotta get you on the show, clearly!

Do they at least know Bugs Bunny

The clue for 4-Across is "Nintendo protagonist who eats magical mushrooms and rescues princesses" and the answer is 5 letters

happy 4-Across day from our mini crossword resident @acommonrose.bsky.social 🍄

solve here! www.puzzmo.com/puzzle/2026-...

Puzzmo - Cross|word Play Cross|word on Puzzmo, Take a hint.

I probably won't post every individual puzzle here (especially this week when I'm traveling), but I am Puzzmo's resident mini creator this month!

www.puzzmo.com/puzzle/2026-...

This puzzle was wild.

We switched to Zoom lectures, which felt like the worst of all possible worlds in terms of schedule juggling.

Lol I definitely thought All Hail West Texas/Tallahassee/Sunset Tree for sure, but of course The Mountain Goats just put out too much music for that to work.

"As seen on Wikipedia socks" Photo: a handknit sock in lightweight cream colored yarn with a variety of vertical cables

Ravelry description: From December of 2010 to the time of writing, the key photo on the Wikipedia ‘sock’ page has been a hand knitted sock. If you’ve ever looked at that picture and thought, “I wish I had those socks!”, then this is the pattern for you! This is a cuff down traveling stitch cable sock pattern, with a standard heel flap construction and charted design. The pattern includes instructions for four sizes, both with and without calf shaping. The sock shown on Wikipedia is the medium size with no calf shaping.

spotted on ravelry: the pattern to knit the sock pictured on the Wikipedia article for "sock"

www.ravelry.com/patterns/lib...

I'm not reposting this as much bc I'm not doing the NYT crossword as much, but please know they're still doing this.

Loved this one

genuinely insane for the new york times to call a new york accent a "mispronunciation"

I don't know if anyone ever made a youtube video about it, but I need to know if you saw the 1000 comment reddit thread about whether it's Morally Evil to send a copy of a knitting pattern to your mom.

Lol my "AI crosswords bad" thread got a reply from a (now blocked) account that looked like an AI bot that was saying that I'm onto something about the "potential future" of AI crosswords.

To be 1000% percent clear, I do not want AI-generated crosswords. At all. Ever.

Anyways, I don't really know where I'm going with this (and I haven't even touched on AmuseLabs's sample grid being a "not a crossword"), but there's so many good human-created crosswords in the world, and I'm just sad to see otherwise useful software adding a completely unnecessary "AI" component.

Now, there's nothing wrong with stock clues, so I hope this "AI agent" is leaning more towards those, but is it really fun to solve a puzzle that ONLY has stock clues? I have long said that AI text generation is really only good for things no human wants to read or write, and crosswords aren't that.

2 years later and everyone is trying to inject LLMs into everything, so it's no surprise that someone realized that AI can write perfectly adequate clues. But to be clear, these clues are either 1. variants of stock clues or 2. clearly plagiarized from clever/fun clues that humans have written!

In fall of 2022 (shortly pre-ChatGPT), Alex Boisvert and I made an "AI-generated" crossword where all the clues were written by a small language model that I intentionally trained to be kind of bad at writing clues. At the time, I remembered observing that AI could write perfectly serviceable clues.

Teaching a 4:30 class this semester and it is very rude that my computer’s blue light filter keeps turning on when I’m presenting slides

I think they were bought (awhile ago) by a larger company that was then bought by a private equity firm