Well wishes your way, of course, and if folks have nothing better to do with their own long weekends, they can pop round mine at noon for a #CrypticSunday Replacement Stream Service feat. @andrewt.net, Ozpiper, Baz and maybe a puzzle from yesterday if I have the time:
www.twitch.tv/pantherapuzz...
Technically I'm indisposed, but I'm also stubborn and (already) bored, so there will be a #CrypticSunday Replacement Stream Service come noon. I might just stick to the two puzzles by @evilflea.bsky.social & @duncanjwitham.bsky.social, though; we'll see how we go.
www.twitch.tv/pantherapuzz...
I should be fine enough; turns out I've got a fairly nasty infection, but have been prescribed some strong-ass antibiotics to match, so fingers crossed they do the trick and I just have to rest and grouse for a bit...
The bad news is that I had to spend the day in various hospital waiting rooms; the good news is that I've caught up with so, *so* many of the crosswords that I've been meaning to do, plus I helped a fellow patient complete the Times Quick Cryptic, much to his delight. So, you know, silver linings.
(technically I wanna do one more because the two versions of One Last Gift used different backgrounds and I'm not sure that should count, but that'll wait until after I've done the current No Man's Sky expedition)
(also there's a wip called Attractive Target that i can't remember how to solve lol)
A screenshot of a custom stage in the game Humanity, showing a series of pillars against a pale, cloudy sky, the focus being on a string of people (uncontrollable Others) jumping between two of these while the player (a dog) stands on a switch beneath them, surrounded by their own bunch of people (controllable Humans). The stage is called Trustfalls, because it involves forcing Others to repeatedly make leaps of faith in the hopes that you'll materialise a landing platform/obstruct a laser/move a fan to cushion their fall in time. Hewn from a wip called All The Way Round and given a new name to catch the end of last month's Love Jam (and also because I disconnected the four subareas and stopped you from having to do them in counterclockwise order in a bid to make it easier)
A screenshot of another custom stage in the game Humanity; this time, a bunch of people are failing to push a black block down a narrow, tree-lined path in a garden-like maze, with a lush rainforest in the distance and various Others milling around other garden features. This one's Lazy Garden, because it is seven hastily-combined vignette puzzles with the shared constraint that the player has no commands with which to effect change; there aren't even any switches they can press. (shout out to the one person who has completed this level and gave it the default 3/5 stars because honestly, I get it. the conveyor belt section especially.)
One more screenshot of a custom stage in the game Humanity, this time showing a handful of humans and a Goldy (special human) making a (spoiler: futile) jump up to a platform floating in space. Literally, space. There's the Milky Way behind them and everything. This is A Higher Place, because (a) it's the Cosmos background & (b) you gotta figure out how to get someone up to that "higher place" because there's a switch up there.
A screenshot of a playlist, consisting of: Frugality Inertia - Xploding Plastix lane switch - beardy Rowdy Pup - Spoonbill Concrete Over Water - Jockstrap Light and Waves - I Am Robot And Proud Rolling Blackouts - The Go! Team One Last Gift - Sidney Amos (ft. Felix the Hammer) Help Me Through - David August Circuit Breaker - Röyksopp Spring Cleaning - Jack Stauber's Micropop Unit Delta Plus - Ott Metropolitan Glide - Tom Waits Never Stop Running - Trentemøller (ft. Jonny Pierce & The Drums) Keep Stepping - Moloko PUSH ME ASIDE!!! - lizzy's personal army Trustfalls - Mister Lies Lazy Garden - Vanishing Twin A Higher Place - Röyksopp Each track gave its name to a stage I made, because once I started I couldn't stop. Frugality Inertia was a current single when I made my first level, and it fit so well I couldn't not, and then when I was trying to think of what to call my second I realised the song that was playing at that very moment described the central conceit so well that I had to commit to the bit.
With the stage-sharing part of @humanitygame.bsky.social shutting down at the end of the month (boo!), I've been playing it again to tidy up my wips: partly to achieve my old goal of having a stage for every background and partly so I can finally answer a long-forgotten question about my stage names
INDEPENDENT Playgrounds would become 'crack dens' if Greens were in power, policing minister says
I’m sorry, I know it’s a minor point, but crack dens are traditionally indoor establishments. What the scaremongering Labour minister is describing here is a crack paddock.
@cranberryfez.bsky.social I FOUND OUT THE THEME NOT ONE MINUTE AFTER YOU LEFT
Probably should have given a few minutes warning, but I've just started!
www.twitch.tv/pantherapuzz...
(wait hang on i never saved the video of me doing a Chalicea, so it just looks like I've only ever streamed Cranberry Inquisitors, and specifically soon-to-be three of them back-to-back. whoops.)
(other setters are available)
I threatened this on Sunday, but here's some (belated) confirmation - I'm going to stream my solve of this live on Twitch tomorrow, starting ~2pm. I'll also be saving the vod to upload later, like I've done with my previous Inquisitor solves, so folks can watch my unedited floundering at any time...
From experience I can tell you that being present for a live solve of one's own puzzle is both satisfying and terrifying, but even just being able to watch the process back can be incredibly informative. And yes, imo that was a defensible gerund, not least because it benefits from the rule of cool!
Inspired by @cranberryfez.bsky.social's recommending of Fossil's debut, the #CrypticSunday Replacement Stream Service will feature puzzles by folks who are new to me, including @bendrobinson.bsky.social & @fimjishwick.bsky.social (maybe Kempley too?). See you at noon!
www.twitch.tv/pantherapuzz...
Lionel, a Jellycat soft toy lion, sat on a grey chair, holding a copy of Unch issue 2 between his paws.
The copy of Unch is now upright and open, and Lionel has stuck his head in it so that only his rear paws and tail are visible.
When it arrived this morning, Lionel very happily posed with @unchcrosswords.com issue 2... and then he realised it had Catnip in it, so he's had his nose stuck in it ever since. *ba-dum-tish*
This is also why people react so badly to self-described centrists making pronouns in bio jokes, you're providing rhetorical space for this radicalisation.
I appreciate a lot of us will think "they've always been like this" but the utter moral decay on the right in the last few years has been notable.
A shift from love the sinner, hate the sin fig leaf to "yeah, kill she/her, haha, pronouns in bio."
(in summary: ~57% of respondents would classify the online NYT Crossword as a video game, presumably on the grounds that it is a sort of game that appears on an electronic device. But, let's be real, ~13% said the paper copy was a video game, and ~3% said mayonnaise was too, so who the hell knows?)
I was reminded of a survey that did the rounds on Tumblr last year, asking whether or not various games, game-adjacent experiences, and mayonnaise counted as video games, and while the version I answered didn't feature crosswords, turns out the expanded version did:
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
There will be a #CrypticSunday Replacement Stream Service, otherwise I wouldn't know what to do with myself come noon, but I am nowhere near organised enough to tell you what I'll be tackling then. Anything from the past week of MyCrossword puzzles is fair game!
twitch.tv/pantherapuzzles
Output from code that produces pangrammatic fills of the "default" mini grid, showing a family of six valid fills that all utilise "skibidi". The six are achieved by picking 7a from MISTERY, MASTERY & MYSTERY, while picking 1d from TRANS AM & TRANSOM; for example, the last is: across: TV SHOWS / AJUTAGE / SKIBIDI / MYSTERY down: TRANSOM / SQUAILS / OXAZINE / SPECIFY TV SHOWS is the only other non-Chambers entry that is forced, and even that's not hideous compared to AJUTAGE, SQUAILS and OXAZINE...
Delighted to discover that there actually is at least one family of pangrammatic mini grid fills that uses SKIBIDI, and that it honestly comes off comparatively well against its kin from the dregs of Chambers...
I'm a big cat fan, and I'm a big cat fan, and I'm a big cat fan.
(it's also an oblique twofold callback to my puzzle hunt days, which is what clinched it over the other candidates - I do sometimes regret not going with Macavity, mind, especially in the context of my occasional sudoku flirtation...)
I'm prepared to try streaming a second puzzle, even though I haven't actually tested OBS on the new computer yet... but, honestly, it's not like the typical Replacement Stream Service isn't rough and ready at the best of times anyway...
tbh my troubles are wholly self-imposed, because I'm 90% sure there's no acceptable fill that includes anything more than the most desirable optional extra...
...but I just wanna keep whittling that 10% down in the desperate hope that something comes up...
me, a week ago: look, i love the process of making thematically-dense grids, but it's tricky, time-consuming and sometimes sisyphean. this time i think i'll do a perimeter nina with a handful of optional bonus entries instead
me, now: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
...and me reading the final Mog book while left unsupervised and promptly bawling my eyes out so dramatically that some poor stranger tried to step in to help out the weeping child who had presumably got lost or something similar!
I've just asked my dad and while neither of us are 100% sure, there's a chance that the same trip to the (long since closed) Borders in Bournemouth was the source of our favourite anecdotes about the place: him braving their dodgy headphones to listen to the thematic record for the first time...
I'm flattered, though I'm definitely younger than the average setter... I just don't act my age! Josh is just scarily young; when I first rocked up to Cryptic Sunday, I was already older than he is now...
(though funnily enough I started loading the "spread the word(list)" into my mini grid building code the other week so I could have these new-fangled terms like "emoji" and "gyoza" and it has meant I have had to grapple with whether or not I am fine with e.g. skibidi as a gridfill which is. yeah.)
oohhh I feel this in my bones. I still felt the need to semi-defend textspeak in my wordplay yesterday, and when i did the WOTY puzzle at the start of the year I had to use W as an adjective and it was both liberating and terrifying, despite the entire conceit giving me a source to fall back on!
(as an aside, I *adore* the link card that @mycrossword.co.uk gives you when you share a puzzle on here; it's lovely and neat, shows the cover photo in all its glory, and in this instance makes me feel good about staying up late to finish the annotations so that the displayed date would be correct!)