XWord Muggles Forum

boharr wrote: ↑Sun Aug 01, 2021 10:07 pm @Meg , cabana boy, and the Rays rule the East*

*For now

Did you see all the brooms?? LOL! The ESPN commentators actually knew something about the Rays players. Usually they just fawn all over the Red Sox, but I am not bitter.

SReh26 wrote: ↑Sun Aug 01, 2021 7:50 pm

pookie wrote: ↑Sun Aug 01, 2021 7:41 pm I lost the other half of my post.
This is a joke, yes?
If not, you're saying that the author is still living?
I already submitted my answer, so I'll wait to see if I'm right or wrong.
If it's a joke, you've confused me, for one.

omg it would be awesome if it were a joke! I’m not saying it was, and I’m not saying it wasn’t. too funny!

Update: it sort of has to be a joke, right?

—the author wouldn’t know the answer
—the answer is not out yet
—the author would not care if we hadn’t heard of that author
—and even if so, the author probably would not bother to communicate displeasure to us
—the author may not even be among the living/who knows?

so I got looped into a subtle joke- it if it was a joke I’m glad we didn’t offend!

Yeah, that really cleared things up....
Wha?
Maybe you or Bob or ANYBODY can let me in on it after the answer is posted.
Maybe it's just too hot and I'm kind of tired.

Done and done, Friday. Yeah, late post, but I got this one pretty quickly after completing the grid.

TFTXWD

Dang it! I'm on the right track, but gonna come up short for the third week in a row! Thank goodness Isaac is a great host!

I demand that all puzzle constructors create meta answers that are well-known to me! Winning four Hugo awards doesn't make someone well-known in their field if I am not aware of their name.

Golly Gee and other impolite imprecations. I had the PG HP JD DH things; spent hours trying to find something to do with the words (e.g. HOTPOT). Always wondered about that lonely NiceKid, which had seemed contrived. Got nowhere with my struggles. Finally, around 1 p.m. Sunday I asked Google "science fiction writer NK Somebody" and out came N K Jemisin. Never heard of this person (well known? all the stuff in the book listing is in the last decade). Threw NK JEMISIN as a Hail Mary. Where is Asimov? Clark? Kornbluth? Pohl? My age has crept up and overwhelmed me.

[The rest of this post is an added edit.] Now that I have submitted, and the answer is out, I went back and read theis week's forum from page one up to here. It seems that my feeling is not rare: that the author, to some of us, is not really known, and so my comment above is redundant. (It was new to me when I wrote it.) It also seems that Google was invoked by many. I just feel lucky that I decided to go try an application of the apparent mechanism on that extra piece of data. I feel really unsatisfied, though, with answers that include and in fact require and rely on, as does this one, a form of the word "suggest" (as in "The fifth two-word answer, NICE KID, suggests the contest answer."). But that is just the constructor's style, and many people revel in it.

And I too feel that there was, for me, a lot of spoilerish commentary this week. That is why I do not really read here, any more, until I have got an answer I intend to submit. Then I get the full dose of puns and pictures all at once.

The answer to the crossword contest was N.K. JEMISIN, a three time Hugo Award-winning author.

The four authors listed were:

(H.P.) LOVECRAFT
(J.D.) SALINGER
(D.H.) LAWRENCE
(P.G.) WODEHOUSE

Each of their initials corresponded to a two-word answer in the puzzle:

HOT POT
JOT DOWN
DON HO
PASS GO

The only two word answer without an author: NICE KID. Knowledge of famous authors in the genre (or help from your favorite search engine) yields N.K. JEMISIN.

At first, I wanted it to be H.G. WELLS, and nearly submitted that in a bid to get on the first page. But that didn't have anything to do with the title, so I settled down and looked some more.

Luckily (with the help of google) I arrived at the right answer, but I was a little worried if IPAD was considered a two word answer it would throw everything off.

I do not know this author, but in the sci-fi realm, the HUGO awards are the bees-knees.

I got the 4 authors and the double initials and then saw the 4 two-letter answers with corresponding initials. I was then convinced that the answer HAD to be HG WELLS. Try as I might, I could not backsolve that answer from the grid. For some reason, I went looking through the grid for 2-word answers and noticed that there was an "extra".

Wondering if there were a lot of HG WELLS submissions.

Never heard of her? Well, she's never heard of you either.

Semi-exhaustive list of science fiction authors writing under first & second initials:

AA Attanasio
AE Van vogt
AJ Deutsch
AK Otterness
AT Greenblatt
CJ Cherryh
CL Moore
CM Eddy Jr
CS Friedman
CS Lewis
DF Jones
EC Eliot
EE Knight
EE Smith
EL Arch
EM Forster
FL Wallace
FM Busby
GC Edmundson
HG Wells
HH Hollis
HL Gold
JD Beresford
JG Ballard
JH Rosny
JT McIntosh
KA Applegate
KD Wentworth
KH Sheer
KW Jeter
LE Modesitt
MA Foster
MJ Engh
MK Joseph
MP Shiel
NK Jemisin
PC Hodgell
PC Jersild
PJ Haarsma
PJ Plauger
RA Lafferty
RA Salvatore
RC Sherriff
RM Meluch
RW Mackelworth
SM Stirling
SP Meek
TJ Bass
TL Sherred
WHC Lawrence
WS Lach-Szyrma

I'd expect that the last name would suffice, as the theme answers are also last names (and you have to generate N.K. to derive the last name).

Weak sauce award for this one. Inelegant finish with too big a leap of faith (in my humble opinion). Got to the HOTPOT, JOTDOWN, etc., almost immediately. Saw NICEKID and googled "sci fi & N.K." shortly thereafter and out comes Jemisin, but without another reference to Jemisin this was a bridge too far. Two thumbs down.

ReB wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 12:18 am I'm assuming that the last name will suffice, as the theme answers are also last names.

I am sure it will as they pull out an entry and look at it. If it is correct they stop.

While I was working on this puzzle, I noticed that it's quite similar to Matt's puzzle from July 5, 2019, "He's Good".

They both use the fact that the authors are known by their initials and 2 of the authors are reused. I'm not complaining, the other puzzle was 2 years old and Matt has to create a new one every other week.

I wanted to make my 2 word post "I'm good.", but thought it might be deemed a hint and deleted by the mods.

Joe Ross wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 12:18 am WSJCC Two Word for You reveal MGs2ndBFF .png

Semi-exhaustive list of science fiction authors writing under first & second initials:

AA Attanasio
AE Van vogt
AJ Deutsch
AK Otterness
AT Greenblatt
CJ Cherryh
CL Moore
CM Eddy Jr
CS Friedman
CS Lewis
DF Jones
EC Eliot
EE Knight
EE Smith
EL Arch
EM Forster
FL Wallace
FM Busby
GC Edmundson
HG Wells
HH Hollis
HL Gold
JD Beresford
JG Ballard
JH Rosny
JT McIntosh
KA Applegate
KD Wentworth
KH Sheer
KW Jeter
LE Modesitt
MA Foster
MJ Engh
MK Joseph
MP Shiel
NK Jemisin
PC Hodgell
PC Jersild
PJ Haarsma
PJ Plauger
RA Lafferty
RA Salvatore
RC Sherriff
RM Meluch
RW Mackelworth
SM Stirling
SP Meek
TJ Bass
TL Sherred
WHC Lawrence
WS Lach-Szyrma

I think you can drop the "semi-".

HumbleScrivener wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 12:30 am

Joe Ross wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 12:18 am WSJCC Two Word for You reveal MGs2ndBFF .png

Semi-exhaustive list of science fiction authors writing under first & second initials:

...
MA Foster
MJ Engh
MK Joseph
MP Shiel
NK Jemisin
PC Hodgell
PC Jersild
PJ Haarsma
PJ Plauger
...

I think you can drop the "semi-".

"Semi-" is "half" of the fun & is in reference to several previous posts.

Joe Ross wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 12:18 am Semi-exhaustive list of science fiction authors writing under first & second initials:
...

I extracted a similar list of initialed authors from the Wikipedia page that is a list of science-fiction authors.

That was because I worked backwards from the list to the grid. Had I started with the grid and looked for a two-word entry first, I would have remembered Jemisin because she's been in the news lately. In addition to the three Hugo awards for best novel (the first to do so in three consecutive years), and the Hugo for best novelette in 2020, she was also the recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant in 2020.

For the benefit of those who don't read science fiction, the Hugo is a big deal like an Oscar.