Magical Mystery Four - March 2024

[hoover]

Oh no! I realized right after I clicked SUBMIT that I entered the difficulty level in the Ratings widget, and I may have been doing so all along.

[BethA]

On the board.

Have others received email confirmation of submission? My board update was a bit delayed, so the lack of confirmation was unsetting - (what on earth did I enter?) I am now on the board, but still no email. Anywho, I have the correct YTD points, so apparently I typed enough in correctly for what matters.

I didn’t get one today either. I feel like it’s been sort of off and on for several months.

[hoover]

On the board.

Have others received email confirmation of submission? My board update was a bit delayed, so the lack of confirmation was unsetting - (what on earth did I enter?) I am now on the board, but still no email. Anywho, I have the correct YTD points, so apparently I typed enough in correctly for what matters.

I got an email confirmation immediately, before the board updated.

[damefox]

I got the red herring too!

I continue to be baffled by how this many people have already solved the red herring. It was already up to at least 20 after only two puzzles!

[benchen71]

Awaiting a board update but quietly confident despite one shaky moment!

Edit: ... and I'm on the board. Now to have a look for the red herring!

2nd edit: ... and there's the red herring! Woo hoo!!

[SamKat9]

Awaiting the board update after one of the entries gave me a ton of trouble. I've solved the red herring, so I'll see if there's any potential link I notice for the mega-meta. You never know.

ETA: And there I am!

Edit 2: I see something that may be mega-meta worthy but I don't have enough info to do anything with it.

[lbray53]

Solved, magically!

[hoover]

I got the red herring too!

I continue to be baffled by how this many people have already solved the red herring. It was already up to at least 20 after only two puzzles!

I don't even know what to do to solve the red herring OR the mega-meta. I think I'll go back and look at last year's notes and worked examples.

[Qmark]

Solved...I've never gotten one of Pete's red herrings, but sounds like it's worth taking a closer look this time around...

[BarbaraK]

"The meta is a well-known pop rock band." Well-known, huh? Let's just say YMMV:) But google to the rescue. In fact googling for the meta helped me finish the grid.

And whoa, what a grid. I was grumpy about it yesterday. Much as I enjoy all the clues that could have been musical in Pete's write-ups, I don't think everything that could be musical necessarily should be musical.

But thinking back on it now, I must admit that I did manage fill the grid with only one wrong square with only googling meta-related info, not any of the clues themselves. So maybe this one really did hit Pete's usual level of hard but solveable.

[Laura M]

I got the red herring too! (I usually don't bother to look for it until at least April.) My extra points are on the contest board, but I never received an email confirmation for my red herring submission yesterday. I did receive an email confirmation for my monthly meta submission earlier yesterday. Not complaining at all, just an FYI in case others have the same experience.

[KayW]

Well after the first two months I made notes of three things that *might* have to do with either the red herring or the mega meta. NONE of them were in this puzzle

[Katiedid]

Got it! That was fun.

Went back and looked for the red herring since so many are finding it. Got it too!

[Cindy N]

On the board yesterday - well before I completed the grid. Guess I should look for the red herring!

[HunterX]

On the board.

Also submitted the Red Herring. But need to wait for an update to be sure if I got it.

Edit: Yeah, got the Red Herring.

[HunterX]

Have to say I didn't know how to rate this one. The grid was very difficult for me. But the meta answer came very easily. I assume Pete's looking for a difficulty rating of the meta, not the grid. But I don't know that for sure. And while in all meta-puzzles, the grid is somehow connected to the meta (even if the metanism is hidden in the clues), there are some puzzles where the grid difficulty is more directly related to the metanism. So maybe he wants an overall rating of difficulty?

[ChrisKochmanski]

Came to this puzzle a few days late. We’re traveling, and I almost overlooked Pete’s email entirely. Yikes! No printer here, so I had to draw the grid on graph paper (which I always have on hand while on the road; is that weird, or what?). Never like doing that, but fortunately this one wasn’t too hard. Happy to be on the board and still in the running. (Got the red herring last month.)

[damefox]

Have to say I didn't know how to rate this one. The grid was very difficult for me. But the meta answer came very easily. I assume Pete's looking for a difficulty rating of the meta, not the grid. But I don't know that for sure. And while in all meta-puzzles, the grid is somehow connected to the meta (even if the metanism is hidden in the clues), there are some puzzles where the grid difficulty is more directly related to the metanism. So maybe he wants an overall rating of difficulty?

I often find myself torn over how to rate these puzzles, and I think by and large the rating is basically meaningless because it's extremely unlikely everyone is interpreting it the same way. Rating: well does that mean how much I liked the grid or how much I liked the meta? Or does it have nothing to do with "like" and I'm supposed to try to judge how "good" the puzzle is independent of how much I liked it? I didn't like this grid at all - I get that it's a music meta, so very fair that things are clued musically, but oof it was a slog. I did enjoy the meta though, once I got it, and it made me appreciate some parts of the grid more. So is that 3 stars overall because really it was a sliding scale of 1 to 5? Difficulty: does "Just Right" mean something different in January vs. November? And again, the difficulty of the grid or the difficulty of the meta? Or some combination of the two?

Month-to-month I can't remember how I interpreted Rating and Difficulty the previous month, so basically Pete's getting different information from me every month, and I would be hard-pressed to explain how I logically arrived at any kind of quantitative metric for these puzzles. And if a significant number of other solvers out there are having a similar experience, the upshot is these numbers are meaningless. But unfortunately you can't just not rate the puzzles because I'm pretty sure leaving them blank comes through as 0 stars, which is never what I want to say!

[schmidzy]

Wait... leaving them blank rates as zero stars? That's what I've been doing ... because I too struggle to quantify my puzzle experience!

[damefox]

Wait... leaving them blank rates as zero stars? That's what I've been doing ... because I too struggle to quantify my puzzle experience!

I actually don't know for sure, maybe Pete just doesn't count those. But I'm always worried he's going to construe it as me trying to make a statement that I hated it lol