XWord Muggles Forum

I got a Week 5 and am quite proud of it.

Not a huge fan of this one though.

DrTom wrote: ↑Tue Feb 02, 2021 8:10 am Well even with a nudge I could not move off square one. Sometimes the META Gods are like that, they will just not let me see the light. I know I'll be amazed at the answer and completely aggravated with myself for not seeing it after what I am sure was the perfect nudge. Unfortunately I let work get in the way of solving a perfectly good META because I probably spent a total of 90 minutes on this one and that is WAY too little for me. Congrats to all those who solved.

I've gotten multiple nudges (thanks TMart) but to no avail. I may be at square one, but life is too short to let this kind of thing make me sad. It's in the trash now, with some of its siblings.

Beamed up!

I had identified the correct mechanic - I was just executing it wrong.

Thanks for anyone who sent a nudge, esp a member who provided the key hint.

I did the grid on Friday but didn't get a chance to look at the meta until this morning. I am pretty sure that I know what the numbers by the clues mean and I have what they refer to in a list, but it looks like that is as far as I go.

Now that it is over I see I was close - I had the books written down except I had the wrong 1996 Stephen King novel. I saw the C in Chesapeake and Centennial match but didn't see the unique matches in the 7.

As Linkin Park so eloquently put:

"I tried so hard and got so far
But in the end it doesn't even matter"

Came up short this week but not for lack of effort. (Rueful Sigh)

I got killed by one of my core tenets of meta solving: "It is not a trivia contest. Knowing things about the thematic content can hurt your solve because you want to use that knowledge, and really it's all about the letters or some other component of the answer." I guess I'll have to add in " *except when it is" to that belief.

Also, I guess the grid looking like a Half Japanese album cover didn't have anything to do with solving the meta?

MikeM000 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 02, 2021 12:23 pm

Also, I guess the grid looking like a Half Japanese album cover didn't have anything to do with solving the meta?


HalfJ.jpg

Yeah, the face was one of the many many did I mention many rabbit holes I traversed. Every rabbit that popped his head up saw his shadow, giving way to 6 more rabbits. So many rabbits... what do those rabbits *do* down there, anyway?

Amazing puzzle.

I did a lot of spreadsheet work before I retired and ALWAYS used the parentheses notation for negative numbers. This should have occurred to me.

One of my interesting rabbit holes was noting that four of the authors and three of the titles had eleven letters. Based on the title I erased (lightly) the authors and put the titles in the grid. It did not amount to anything even though I spent a lot of time on it.

I was also quite sure that the fact that the horizontal line starting at 36A intersected with every theme entry which were in a perfectly symmetrical pattern.

Like lbray53, I was intrigued by the row that went through all the long entries.

I also spent a lot of time thinking that Matt had chosen the books for their years, not their titles, and that the years, with the first two digits lopped off, referred to squares in the grid.

It turned out that the grid was irrelevant. You could have solved this one without filling in a single square of the grid. And yet, I thought it was brilliant. And I wonder how Matt came up with the idea and how long it took him to find the appropriate books. OK, with King or Grisham, who have written approximately 83 books each, it shouldn't be too much trouble to find a usable pair. But Achebe? George Eliot?

Bird Lives wrote: ↑Tue Feb 02, 2021 1:17 pm It turned out that the grid was irrelevant. You could have solved this one without filling in a single square of the grid.

I'm actually very curious on people's opinions on this. I love Gaffney's puzzles - and, still, I was very satisfied when I got the answer to this one. But I did have a tiny nit in that the grid had nothing to do with the puzzle. This might be irrelevant to other people and, obviously, all pieces are still there:

Title - Check: The name implies that you will be doing some "erasing" of names.
Mechanism - Check: You are using the like letters of names in two works to extract a key letter.
Answer - Check: Candide is a work (an actual palimpsest? not sure) of literature.

(Like I can talk - my first meta had no mechanism whatsoever, bahaha.)

Basically, at the end of the day, it's so minor - and it doesn't really matter since I'm a Gaffney fan for life, and discovering his puzzles has seriously been one of the highlights of 2020.

Mike

Gah. Was on vacation all weekend and just dove into this on Monday night. Was able to figure out the original movies* books this morning, but that was as far as I made it. To be honest, even if I had spelled out CANDIDE I wouldn't have known that it was a word, and with no 100% connection to "Palimpsest" I would have thought myself on the wrong track.

But for once, I figured out Matt's damn parentheses so that's good enough for me!

*I was trying to figure out if the earlier books each had film adaptations when the contest closed, which struck me as a possible palimpsest of sorts.

MikeM000 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 02, 2021 12:23 pm I got killed by one of my core tenets of meta solving: "It is not a trivia contest. Knowing things about the thematic content can hurt your solve because you want to use that knowledge, and really it's all about the letters or some other component of the answer." I guess I'll have to add in " *except when it is" to that belief.

Exactly! I nearly had the mechanism with my first idea, but I added to the dates instead of subtracted (see the plus sign in the grid + the clue to 22D). I stopped because I reminded myself that I shouldn’t need to google and that everything is always about the grid and the letters....... Then I was off on every rabbit hole imaginable for the next few days until I asked a kind muggle if I needed google and was told that I did.

Am I the only one who let the Obama clue (containing numbers in the middle of all these parenthetical numbers) lead me to think the numbers in parentheses might be presidents? I spent a lot of time trying to make that work, among other ideas...

Am I the only one who thought the pixel art produced by the layout of the diagram was itself the palimpsest? Hold the crossword at arms length and squint. Yes, it’s a cute little baby chicken! This seven letter word sent me looking for validation. Yes, Jamaica(n) (1 down) Chicken, probably cooked on a spit (51 down).

Regardless of the fact that I had not solved the meta, I entered chicken as my answer and didn’t get on the board. What? Unable to drive out of that rut, I persisted and found that the pixel art actually may resemble Torchic, the Pikachu chicken...

MikeyG wrote: ↑Tue Feb 02, 2021 1:47 pm

Bird Lives wrote: ↑Tue Feb 02, 2021 1:17 pm It turned out that the grid was irrelevant. You could have solved this one without filling in a single square of the grid.

I'm actually very curious on people's opinions on this. I love Gaffney's puzzles - and, still, I was very satisfied when I got the answer to this one. But I did have a tiny nit in that the grid had nothing to do with the puzzle. This might be irrelevant to other people and, obviously, all pieces are still there:

Title - Check: The name implies that you will be doing some "erasing" of names.
Mechanism - Check: You are using the like letters of names in two works to extract a key letter.
Answer - Check: Candide is a work (an actual palimpsest? not sure) of literature.

(Like I can talk - my first meta had no mechanism whatsoever, bahaha.)

Basically, at the end of the day, it's so minor - and it doesn't really matter since I'm a Gaffney fan for life, and discovering his puzzles has seriously been one of the highlights of 2020.

Mike

That was my first thought after finishing, if you knew the authors the grid was irrelevant. I guess there is no rule that anything in particular has to be used to solve the meta. I’m still waiting for a meta where the answer is the first letter (or last letter) of the clues reading backward and there is really no reason to answer any of them. Matt is a creative genius, no question.

So this was pretty much a web search puzzle. Meh.

oldjudge wrote: ↑Tue Feb 02, 2021 5:17 pm

MikeyG wrote: ↑Tue Feb 02, 2021 1:47 pm

Bird Lives wrote: ↑Tue Feb 02, 2021 1:17 pm It turned out that the grid was irrelevant. You could have solved this one without filling in a single square of the grid.

I'm actually very curious on people's opinions on this. I love Gaffney's puzzles - and, still, I was very satisfied when I got the answer to this one. But I did have a tiny nit in that the grid had nothing to do with the puzzle. This might be irrelevant to other people and, obviously, all pieces are still there:

Title - Check: The name implies that you will be doing some "erasing" of names.
Mechanism - Check: You are using the like letters of names in two works to extract a key letter.
Answer - Check: Candide is a work (an actual palimpsest? not sure) of literature.

(Like I can talk - my first meta had no mechanism whatsoever, bahaha.)

Basically, at the end of the day, it's so minor - and it doesn't really matter since I'm a Gaffney fan for life, and discovering his puzzles has seriously been one of the highlights of 2020.

Mike

That was my first thought after finishing, if you knew the authors the grid was irrelevant. I guess there is no rule that anything in particular has to be used to solve the meta. I’m still waiting for a meta where the answer is the first letter (or last letter) of the clues reading backward and there is really no reason to answer any of them. Matt is a creative genius, no question.

There was pgw puzzle where the grid being completely irrelevant was the key to the meta. It was called “No Need to Fill Me In” and it was brilliant. So all’s fair in meta construction:


https://pgwcc.net/2020/04/07/puzzle-54- ... different/

TMart wrote: ↑Wed Feb 03, 2021 7:19 am
There was pgw puzzle where the grid being completely irrelevant was the key to the meta. It was called “No Need to Fill Me In” and it was brilliant. So all’s fair in meta construction:

https://pgwcc.net/2020/04/07/puzzle-54- ... different/

I should be grateful for the compliment, but I actually think my execution of that puzzle was significantly flawed, as I explain in the post you link to. Also, in that puzzle the grid was not irrelevant - to get the answer you had to solve the six theme clues, at least some of which were impossible without crossings.

I do certainly agree that all's fair in meta construction.

The assumption that I should need to use the grid to solve had me superimposing the (dated) title onto the AUTHOR'S NAMES on the grid, which obviously didn't work. When I did that I was working out whether I could get to 7 letters made from the "overages" of the titles that were too "long" to fit over the authors' names (i.e. "seven letters long"). That actually got me a potential word, but I forget what it was. I know it had nothing to do with books or authors or palimpsests!
Yes I agree it was a little odd not to have to use the grid to get the meta (unless you needed the grid to figure out the authors, which I didn't, except maybe for Iris Murdoch). STILL, I thoroughly enjoyed the puzzle, probably in part because this old English major didn't need to google all of them to get the companion title ... the George Eliot (ahem, Mary Ann Evans), Steinbeck, and Achebe were easy guesses. The rest -- especially for the prolific Michener, King, and Grisham -- required some Wikipedia lists.
I figured out which King to use once I noticed that all the pre-dated books I had so far had exactly the same number of letters as the one given (of course! so they would fit perfectly on the Palimpsest duh). I had guessed The Green Mile for King, of the same year as Desperado (sorry never heard of it...).