XWord Muggles Forum

FKelly wrote: ↑Fri Dec 04, 2020 10:24 am (no diagonal, vertical or horizontal reflection)

The grid has rotational symmetry, and very nearly has vertical and horizontal symmetry. Sending PM.

Liked the grid, had the meta answer quickly once I got down to the hint at the end. Only one of 4 or 5 of these I did this year, and of those I only got the meta 2 or 3 times. Need to look at the rest to try to guess the mega but I doubt it will come easily...

Wow, no idea on this one so far.

I took a wild guess and submitted. I tried to use the obvious clue but that got me nothing.
Can I PM someone to verify my answer? Just tell me yes or no.

Guessed wrong. Ah well.

In hindsight I found it to be pretty impressive that the five pluses had the five different letters of BOARD in their center position.

Got a good email from Pete last night. I will need to make some room in the kitchen cabinet

Did anyone else notice that BOARD was used in 8 of the first 17 posts on this topic?!

I don’t believe any were intentional spoilers, but thought it was pretty funny!
(My spoiler detector alarms kept going off!!!)

BethA wrote: ↑Mon Dec 07, 2020 3:25 pm Did anyone else notice that BOARD was used in 8 of the first 17 posts on this topic?!

I don’t believe any were intentional spoilers, but thought it was pretty funny!
(My spoiler detector alarms kept going off!!!)

I was hesitant to use that term, but since others did, I didn't feel too bad. Also, it is a common term when posting about successes with MGWCC metas.

BethA wrote: ↑Mon Dec 07, 2020 3:25 pm Did anyone else notice that BOARD was used in 8 of the first 17 posts on this topic?!

I don’t believe any were intentional spoilers, but thought it was pretty funny!

I had mixed feelings about it...

I solved it in a completely different way... okay, most famous recording studio in the world, Abbey Road (RIP, John incidentally), so I noticed the pluses all had a lot of the letters of Abbey Road... in fact, I spent a lot of time looking for ABEY around the grid -- even got as far as saying "it's weird that they're all missing the same letters" Eventually -- I mean, it was within a minute, but it seemed like hours -- it eventually dawned on me that it wasn't the four letters that were missing in all cases, but the five letters that were there in all cases. Duh.

I mostly backsolved this one. After trying many things and failing to find the right "plus signs," I Googled recording studio equipment and compiled a short list of 11-letter ones (SYNTHESIZER was my Hail Mary at first). But MIXING BOARD wasn't on the list originally, I only thought of it afterwards (although my memory was probably triggered by something online). At that point I finally did what I should have done in the first place: looked at the "plus" right in the middle of the grid and saw BOA across, R on top and D below. Huh, I said. :-)

I thought this one would be tough for people who have zero experience with the technical side of recording or performing music, because I don't think that a mixing board is a generally well-known piece of equipment, and it didn't jump out from Google either.

Thought I'd already posted this, but I don't see it. I do have some experience with broadcast and recording mixing boards. I just happened to see the pluses right away, and thought, can it really be that simple? And plus shapes connect to mixing boards how? It just didn't seem like a Muller December concept. (I don't mean that it seems too *easy*, because I realize that there is luck involved in what you happen to notice.) So I googled around for other kinds of studio boards.

If the prompt hadn't specified 11-letters for the studio addition, a case might be made for GROUPIES based on addled BROADs I"ll show myself out.

While looking for the "plus signs", I started in the middle and saw BOARD, plus the 4 other variations in each quadrant. I'd never heard of a MIXING BOARD, but I have heard of "mixing" music so it seemed logical to me that that funny board with all the levers that I see in every single movie involving a music studio would be called a mixing board. Google only kind of confirmed it, so I crossed my fingers and submitted. Whew!

I figured based on the grid shape that it had to be symmetrical, with one of the five pluses in the center. So I took the five center "plus" letters (RBOAD) and looked for them in the four quadrants. Unscrambling them led to the answer (as well as lots of nonsense anagrams that got me onto Pete's "Groaners" list!)

Al Sisti wrote: ↑Tue Dec 08, 2020 5:09 pm (RIP, John incidentally)

I can't believe it's been forty years. I remember that day very clearly - a painful one for this then-teenaged Beatles fan.

TMart wrote: ↑Wed Dec 09, 2020 11:41 am I figured based on the grid shape that it had to be symmetrical, with one of the five pluses in the center. So I took the five center "plus" letters (RBOAD) and looked for them in the four quadrants.

I did exactly the same. I didn't notice until afterwards that the four other pluses were perfectly symmetrical and abutting the ends of the implied X (multiplication symbol?) of black squares. #geometryteacherfail

I created a small template with the plus sign cut out to move around the board to look for possible words. Once I saw that there were more than one mix of BOARD, the rest came fairly quickly.

Finally got this one. When I went to submit an answer I noticed that the deadline had passed. At least I was able to check my answer right away!

I spent way too much time trying to coax synthesizer out of the grid. That was a tough task with only one Y and zero Z's. Even after finding the pluses I shied away from the answer because I was assuming it had to be one word. I finally read the meta explanation again and all was good.