"Find Us Online" September 23, 2022

[hottieruth]

Was unsure on what answer to submit.
I had movie, but was unsure if it might have been movie.film following the other clues included domain extensions.
How do you determine which answers follow same format as the clues and which ones do not? I've seen it both ways in previous answers.

[Omnibus]

PAT -> PA.gov (T)
NEAR -> NEA.org (R)
UMNO -> UMN.edu (O)
SHAWL -> SHAW.af.mil (L)
IDOL -> IDO-DANCE.com (L)

Something you find online - TROLL

At least I went down swinging….

[Wendy Walker]

My laughably lame rabbit hole was as follows:
1. See the five file extensions.
2. Ask self: What's the other major extension that's missing?
3. .net. There is no NET!
4. See MONET in 21A and NETS in 54A.
5. Cross out NET. Result = MOSS.
6. Reason that you actually can buy sphagnum moss online (though it's probably much easier to just buy it at the garden center).
7. Realize that there's no way this is the correct answer.
8. Go hiking at Hawk Mountain the next day. Spot lots of gorgeous moss.

[Mister Squawk]

Spent a lot of time hunting for altered TLDs in the grid (CODe -> COM, for example) after first looking for the "them" referenced in the clues (BRUIN, SENATOR, SAILOR, PIN, but what is a member of PETA called?).

Was about to go down a Morse code hole, but my anagram finder spit out PARGET as the first six-letter anagram for PETAORG and that was that. Moment of doubt trying to find an anagram for PINTERESTCOM, but I got it done in time to enjoy the rest of the weekend.

[Jace54]

I also tried finding alternative websites with the same five extensions, seemed promising but did not work.

After that failed, I decided the exclamation point was significant and tried to back solve for Yahoo! I still do not see why the exclamation points were added in the clues and the puzzle title.

Also, “find them online” and “find us online” pointed to the plurals being significant but they were not. Along with “IDs” being in the middle of the grid, “find them online” appeared to point to picking an item out of a list.

‘Parget’ was a grid answer that stood out as odd and would have been my path to the solution, but I did not see the connection to peta.org.

[MatthewB]

Oy. Played with the corresponding downs but never thought of the URL domains though I did have com ....

[Hamrock]

I'm still confused on how you got to answer. ????

[Flying_Burrito]

congrats to solvers. I overcomplicated the process as I often do with an MG and ended up with nothing. So many rabbit holes after identifying the fomain addresses. The most tantalizing had me adding a letter to an existing answer + domain suffix and still meet the scope of the original answer: so i had (mil)Estone Age, (com)E Near, (edu)catoR, etc., getting me to eRead being the answer. Speaking of ETC, that was another hole since phonetically speaking it equated to Etsy the online market place so i started pushing for a phonetic driven answer

[Joe Ross]

This puzzle was as elegant as a hernia. Navy also operates navy.com, which threw me off for a day. My least favorite solve in months.

Not being able to solve a puzzle does not make the puzzle inelegant.

Most constructors are members here and deserve the same courtesies afforded all members.

[RichA2]

I fell down the "find the/an-other domain with the same TLD" rabbit hole and never crawled back out:

Code: Select all

1A  NAVY      .MIL  72A CODE
5A  PETA      .ORG  73A CATO
57A SENATE    .GOV  49A TSA
62A PINTEREST .COM  37A ROKU
68A BROWN     .EDU  15A UTAH 

Like (I think it was) HeadinHome, I found three of alternates quickly, while one (.COM) had too many possibilities and the fifth (.MIL) not enough, although I eventually discovered that there is a code.mil domain. But I couldn't make anything out of CCTRU.

This is where I was, exactly. Spent way too much time trying to make CCTRU into a meta solution before I gave up.

[pjc]

I did solve this Saturday, but went down rabbit holes that ended up combining to show me the right path.

I started (as I bet a lot of people did) by looking at the 'line' of letters across the rows above or below the indicated clues (ON-line, you see), but that got me nowhere. And THEM sticking out on row 3 as part of THEMIRAGE sure seemed like it might have something to do with 'find them online', but nope.

After exhausting all of that, I found my first fruitful rabbit hole - four of the five indicated clues had anagrams in the grid with two additional letters (so NAVY and VAINLY, leaving IL left over, for example). Unfortunately, CONTRETEMPS and PINTEREST seemed SO close, but I couldn't make it work. Besides, the two-letter leftovers got me nothing.

Putting it aside overnight, it occurred to me that the five indicated answers all had different suffixes for their websites, but looking at those (MIL, ORG, etc.) got me nothing.

And I put it aside again.

Coming back later, that's when I noticed that the three-letter suffixes overlapped greatly with my two-letter leftovers from my first rabbit hole. And that's when the AHA moment came of just treating the answer and the suffix as a collection of letters and THEN applying that to the anagrams, finding the leftover single letter from each anagram.

Whew! And onshore!

Winning streak now at 6 (one less than my personal best).

Maybe I'll see some of you at Boswords tonight?? Looking forward to night 1!

[Dplass]

"Addagrams" are soooo 2019 lol.

[sweetc]

One of my rabbit holes was focusing on the "online" portion of the clue and looking at the numbered line of each theme answer: 1, 1, 57, 61, 68. I then just knew, I KNEW, the creators made their own website located at 11.57.61.68 and I set myself up for a bit laugh as I typed that in the address bar.

After lots of fruitless spinning...shockingly no such page exists. I was actually pretty disappointed this wasn't the mechanism

[MaineMarge]

My laughably lame rabbit hole was as follows:
1. See the five file extensions.
2. Ask self: What's the other major extension that's missing?
3. .net. There is no NET!
4. See MONET in 21A and NETS in 54A.

I was right there with you @Wendy Walker, but couldn’t catch anything in that net.
I use moss from our woods for all my pots

2017

[boharr]

Coming back later, that's when I noticed that the three-letter suffixes overlapped greatly with my two-letter leftovers from my first rabbit hole. And that's when the AHA moment came of just treating the answer and the suffix as a collection of letters and THEN applying that to the anagrams, finding the leftover single letter from each anagram.

This was key for me too.

[kurtalert]

Argh. I was too focused on the fact that all 5 domains in the theme answers had different TLDs, I wasn't really thinking about attempting to do anything with their full domain. A few of the clues were super weird, though- PARGET and CONTRETEMPTS should have jumped out at me and I should have tried to make some connection between them and the theme answers.

[vandono]

Well, that was wicked. And clever. But mostly wicked.

I got as far as noting that the 5 grid answers had web sites with different top-level domains and guessed that those were probably involved in the solution but never got beyond that. In a bit of a dry spell, but still enjoy the hunt. Congrats to the solvers!

[Barney]

Solving partner and I figured out where to start, but not where to go with it. Matching grid answer + domain with other grid entries seems like more of a Shenk than a Gaffney mechanism?

“Parget” should have been more than a clue. How many times I’ve seen a choker in the fill and not concentrated on it to my regret.

Cool puzzle.

[BarbaraK]

With CODE and IDS in the grid, I was sure that the key would be looking up the IP addresses and then using the squares with those numbers. Even when the first one I tried included a number larger than those in the grid, I was not deterred. Probably just need to skip those. And this may be the reason the grid numbers go all the way up to 73.

Only when I was convinced it was total gibberish did I let go of that lovely rabbit hole.

[MatthewL]

Like many others, I focused at first on the extensions and finding other words in the grid that had those extensions, but could make nothing of CCTRU. So I asked Joe if that was a rabbit hole and he waved me off that path (thankfully). So then I went back and applied the two methods I try when nothing else seems to work: first, I wrote everything out that I had on a separate piece of paper, and second, I looked to see if there are any unusual words in the grid. Focused on Parget and Pawls, and then I saw the anagram for Peta.org. From there it was a bit of hunting, but eventually found everything. When all else fails, go back to the basics, I guess.