MGWCC #755 - “What a Character” by Mike Graczyk

[BrennerTJ]

Loved this puzzle-hunt-ish meta!

[sharkicicles]

Didn’t realize Mike G was MikeyG here. Congrats! If you ever find yourself in the Wicker Park/East Village/Ukrainian Village area your food and drinks are on me.

[oggy]

Edit: I'm beaming up thanks to the shortest ever nudge from @oggy !

I just don't want to ever be accused of giving too much away.

(2 characters, if anyone's wondering.)

Agreed with others that it was a solid & fun meta, with just the right amount of footholds for a week 3. Nice one, MikeyG!

[Cap'n Rick]

Absolutely brilliant! Great job @MikeyG!

[KayW]

Edit: I'm beaming up thanks to the shortest ever nudge from @oggy !

I just don't want to ever be accused of giving too much away.

(2 characters, if anyone's wondering.)

Agreed with others that it was a solid & fun meta, with just the right amount of footholds for a week 3. Nice one, MikeyG!

@MountainManZach I see what you did there.

... Well, NOW I do. I didn't even notice that, pre-deadline

Well nudged, @oggy!

[HeadinHome]

Great puzzle, @MikeyG! Very satisfying solve with an assist from @Wendy Walker following the Zoom call yesterday. Thank you for not answering my question, Wendy, which would have given away too much. I had a big smile on my face as I realized I was on the right track as I worked out the answer.

she is a master not only of metas, but of subtle and perfect meta nudging!!

I would love to hear about the question, non-answer, and these brilliant nudges... post-deadline of course. I often find it's harder to give a good nudge on a puzzle than it is to solve it in the first place!

So - my message to @Wendy Walker told her that I was focusing on the characters #, @, etc… and trying to figure out how to get a word from them. At that time I had 7 of them (I was disregarding the open and close parentheses and exclamation point, because they seemed to punctuation-y to me). At that point I was using the associated number of those 7 keys, and using the letters from the grid at those numbered spots,and I had also tried first letter of those characters’ entries. One of these methods had yielded PARABLE if you anagrammed… and I thought maybe I was just off by one letter and it could be CAPABLE (what you might be if you solve this meta)… but couldn’t see my way out of this fix.

Wendy simply said the use of the characters was good, but there were more of them, and keep looking. That’s it.

Then I added the rest of the top—of-keyboard row — ! ( ) — and had all 10, but still couldn’t make a word. At some point it occurred to me to try the letter of the entry in the position of the number, and easily anagrammed to JUST MY TYPE. Submitted — then later learned how to get the order of letters a more methodical way.

Again, great puzzle, and the gentlest nudges still allow a great AHA moment. (I guess it helped that I had already figured out the character/number thing, and that Wendy knows my skill level well enough to know how much to hand me.)