XWord Muggles Forum

Ashore. Grid was tougher than the meta!

Grey Goose Martini please!

Thanks to the folks on Zoom for their head shakes at my musings, and the nods encouraging me to go back to ideas I'd glossed over earlier.

I sorted it out immediately after leaving the call.

So fun!

Made it shore! Cerveza, por favor.

I decided to play ski-hooky today and missed the Zoom call, but as I was composing a DM to plead for a nudge, the mechanism cracked itself wide open! Sometimes it really helps to just talk through the thought process.

Count me ashore.. and very much ready for a frothy stout.

On the beach!
(1 for 4 in 2024 )

D'oh! Mountains from molehills etc. On shore.

Ashore. The WSJ online app has been acting up a lot!

Neither ashore nor hanging with Isaac.I'm in the ship infirmary dealing with a nasty bout of the stomach flu. Rather than alcoholic beverage my nurse, Issa, insists that I drink lots of water and some hibiscus tea.I don't anticipate finishing this puzzle unless I have an amazing recovery. I did finish the grid which fatigued me so I took a 2 plus hour nap.

See you muggles tomorrow.

Ashore. That was clever. Seemed hopeless for a few minutes, but there was sort of an AHA moment.

On shore after floundering and despairing on and off all day as I took care of household chores. And then the light came on! I can repeat the common mantras: I was making it way too hard, and this construction was amazing!

Ashore! Had to think about my answer, but positive I have it now. Turning an unflattering single malt into an Old Fashioned now.

Relic wrote: Fri Jan 26, 2024 9:20 pm Neither ashore nor hanging with Isaac.I'm in the ship infirmary dealing with a nasty bout of the stomach flu. Rather than alcoholic beverage my nurse,Issa, insists that I drink lots of water and some hibiscus tea.I don't anticipate finishing this puzzle unless I have an amazing recovery. I did finish the grid which fatigued me so I took a 2 plus hour nap.

See you muggles tomorrow.

Feel better!

woozy wrote: Fri Jan 26, 2024 2:07 pm

SewYoung wrote: Fri Jan 26, 2024 11:47 am

woozy wrote: Fri Jan 26, 2024 11:18 am

Well, just concatenating the given clues for the entries (with a little allowance for grammar/syntax tweaking) is an acceptable clue.

But we're a creative bunch. We can do better.

I love this bunch of folks. I have learned, yet another new word. When I saw "concatenating" I thought surely it was a typo, but looked it up and Lo and Behold, it was a real word that I had never heard of.

Whoa.... just as Charles Schulz once assumed everyone knew what a ZAMBONI was (Snoopy as the WWI flying ace accidentally shot one and all the readers in the SF Bay area went "?????"), I assumed everyone knew what concatenate meant.

CON=with or together
CATENA= chain

concatenate= to chain together.

This is interesting. It's a very common word for me, but only because in programming we concatenate things all the time. Only the most primitive of languages do not have a concatenation operator or function. In fact, much of programming can be described as taking things apart and putting them back together again. Which is exactly what the AI of a Large Language Model does. It takes apart a tremendous amount of data and puts it aside such that it can put it back together in new ways in response to a query.

Ashore!

Life has been so out of control for the last couple of months that I haven’t got to the crossword and seen it thru since November. So very encouraging to get onshore in 2 minutes (extremely unusual for me and sure to be back to normal programming, e.g. pinging Wendy on Sunday with very little done, next week). Happy Saturday all + gratuitous shot of Fuji from the kitchen window to brighten your weekend.

Ashore. vety tough solve but meta [almost!] easy.

I somehow fell off the crossword bandwagon for a number of months - may have had something to do with my baby turning into a VERY busy toddler. Earlier this week I decided to do a few puzzles and was able to solve last week's meta pretty quickly! Woot!

However this one is another story. Nothing I think of yields anything at all and I am very much stuck on the boat. If anyone wants to send me a nudge, I would appreciate it!

Zoom...zoom...zoom...ashore!

Solved

Ashore. Sleeping on it helped. Also a shout out to the Zoom crew.