XWord Muggles Forum

At last ... beam me up!

FrankieHeck wrote: ↑Tue Jul 20, 2021 3:41 pm I *finally* got this one almost immediately after taking my first ever sip of Red Bull. (We won some in a drawing at a bar.) If I start buying/drinking that crap, I'm going to blame Matt.

Maybe that’s my problem - not enough caffeine!

I've been lurking around here for many months now, but never made an account until today. Just wanted to say that this puzzle was fantastic. I had to come back to it several times, but finally saw the light earlier today, and was so amazed at the construction that I had to come here to say nice things about it

UPDATE: Nudge Received, answer submitted, but rejected as it was after midnight eastern time” - I thought the deadline was noon Weds, but apparently not. Thanks for the nudge - wouldn’t have gotten it without the help.

would appreciate a nudge. Have gotten the grid and saw ‘step 1’ while still completing the grid. But no further enlightenment has come. Not looking for the solution, but perhaps a gentle nudge in a certain direction…. Frustrated and running low on time…

JennyByrd wrote: ↑Tue Jul 20, 2021 11:17 pm I would appreciate a nudge. Have gotten the grid and saw ‘step 1’ while still completing the grid. But no further enlightenment has come. Not looking for the solution, but perhaps a gentle nudge in a certain direction…. Frustrated and running low on time…

PM Sent

JennyByrd wrote: ↑Tue Jul 20, 2021 11:17 pm UPDATE:... answer submitted, but rejected as it was after midnight eastern time” - I thought the deadline was noon Weds, but apparently not.

AM for PM might have been entered when resetting the deadline. It seems to have been fixed, as you're on the leaderboard. Congratulations!

In the future, should this happen, solvers can email their answers to Matt on crosswordcontest@gmail.com.

Been staring at a heavily highlighted grid (with obvious first Thing clearly visible but noticing nothing else yet) for many minutes now. Going to sleep on it with crossed fingers but still humbly requesting the most delicate of nudges and/or simple chats

Edit: have nudge(s) thanks

I think I’ve been looking at this wrong all along. If anyone is available for a nudge I’d appreciate it.

OK I give up. Looking for last second nudge/assistance...

EDIT: Thank you all!

Thanks to the three Good Samaritans that dragged me out of the ditch. I’m waiting to be beamed up. Very nice puzzle, as usual.

Anyone around for a last minute bail out?

Spotted the obvious thing that everyone has been mentioning but lost as to what comes next ...

E: Also dragged to safety, thank you to all who helped - slowly working my way back to a 10 emoji!

Nudged to the... no wait... DRAGGED KICKING AND SCREAMING to the transporter bay by cbarbee002. Thanks again. Happy to be aboard. yeesh

Submitted "buzzer beater" entry....

<refresh>
<refresh>
<refresh>

... and !

Got my buzzer beater! (for real, didn’t solve until 11:55)

Another joon DNF this week. I was gonna be right with him without the help I got. I REFUSED to accept that the TYPOs could be replaced by letters that made the entry a new clue. I was CONVINCED that I was looking for new entries.

Also, Warsaw in two different clues? Come on!

I was hung up for the longest time on how to replace the TYPOs. I even tried '4 letter grid entries' pretty early on, but either PARISLANES didn't jump right out at me or I somehow didn't try ISLA.

Also noticed early on that all the themers were the same length and thus paired with a single word of the same length on the same line. For some reason I didn't connect those until right after I sent my white flag PM. At that point I tried ISLA again(?) and looked more closely at the result. Then SIXANDSUCH, which didn't seem like a slam dunk but was promising. When SALOONALES came up I knew it was right, and the rest took like 10 min.

ajk wrote: ↑Wed Jul 21, 2021 12:35 pm I was hung up for the longest time on how to replace the TYPOs. I even tried '4 letter grid entries' pretty early on, but either PARISLANES didn't jump right out at me or I somehow didn't try ISLA.

Pretty much my experience also, except that I'm sure that I tried ISLA and saw PARIS LANES, but I didn't realize that it was a clue, despite having a good idea from early on that the theme entries were going to connect to other words in the grid of lengths given by the parenthesized numbers. I would have been much faster if I had connected those two insights.

What finally did it for me was becoming obsessed with the idea that the WER in MEATY POWER should become ANSWER after replacement, and I saw NANS among the 4-letter entries, so it become MEAN ANSWER, leading to RIPOSTE, and from there it was fast.

For a while I was hung up on AIRPORT as an entry, but for the wrong reason: The entry EWRY seemed very unusual, and contains EWR, an airport, but I couldn't make that go anywhere.

MikeyG wrote: ↑Sat Jul 17, 2021 9:18 pm Hardest Week 3's of 2021 were TOP HAT (133) and OCHO (228). I'm thinking about 250 or so for this one
Mikey G

Dang, good guess!

Agree - we were at 180 yesterday and I would have bet @MikeyG we wouldn't get to his number.
He knows about the last day surge for sure!

I've definitely studied the surges before, haha!

This reminded me a lot of AMUSED, which was one several months back where each row was important, i.e. you needed the key entry (here, the TYPO one) and that involved something with the other row. In AMUSED, I think it was you used the Greek letter embedded in the first entry to extract a letter from the second.

This might point to a doozy of a Week 4 and Week 5 this month - only time will tell!