XWord Muggles Forum

The meta for this puzzle is the mega meta for 2020, a song from the 80s.

...and a dumb question: if I solved the mega meta earlier this year, am I supposed to submit for this as well?

KayW wrote: ↑Tue Dec 22, 2020 12:30 pm ...and a dumb question: if I solved the mega meta earlier this year, am I supposed to submit for this as well?

You don't have to submit, but you can if you want to leave a comment or a rating.

I'm excited to find out what the red herring is, because I stumbled onto the mega answer when I thought it was the red herring.

C=64 wrote: ↑Tue Dec 22, 2020 12:41 pm I'm excited to find out what the red herring is, because I stumbled onto the mega answer when I thought it was the red herring.

Same here. I got the mega meta sometime over the summer. But the one time it would have "paid" to find a red herring, I was oblivious to it!

I didn’t try to do the mega meta this year, but this is a fun one.

Same, I never got around to trying for the mega meta after finding the red herring. If anyone would be willing to explain what the mega mechanism was in a PM, I'd be grateful.

I got the mega meta early, but never found the red herring. And I'm not really sure I found the true path to the mega, so I'll be curious to see Pete's writeup when it comes out.

That was fun. I looked for the mega meta a few times, just didn't spend a lot of time on it. Now I'm going to look back to see how it was done.

Fun puzzle, even after having gotten the mega earlier!

DOH! (dope slaps forehead) Should have seen it earlier, but its nice to solve the mega-meta anyway.
How in the world did two people solve it on Feb. 5? Quantum tunneling?
Still looking for the elusive red herring, which seems more difficult to find than the mega-meta oddly enough.

Wow, how did I manage to not notice that all year? I even had some of the relevant info marked on my puzzles, but never put it all together - really never came close.

I can understand now how people got it in March. No idea about the February ones though - they must have just been lucky guesses?

I may go back and take another look for the red herring. (I think I can still guess that even though I've solved the real answer.)

I found the mega puzzle today pretty straight-forward. Curious as to how the monthly puzzles fed into this (I haven't looked back yet).

After this puzzle, I just got the mega meta, as well as the red herring. But I still don't know how the mega was shown in the 12 monthly puzzles, I only got it from this last puzzle. Can somebody please PM me to explain? I see how the red herring answer is revealed now.

BarbaraK wrote: ↑Tue Dec 22, 2020 7:07 pm Wow, how did I manage to not notice that all year? I even had some of the relevant info marked on my puzzles, but never put it all together - really never came close.

I can understand now how people got it in March. No idea about the February ones though - they must have just been lucky guesses?

I may go back and take another look for the red herring. (I think I can still guess that even though I've solved the real answer.)

I got it in March because my husband noticed the necessary pattern and I googled!

I'm in the "got the mega meta (in April) but never found the red herring" school. But I don't feel too bad about it because ...
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/66811eb6-c ... 66b7c8ca1e

I think this year there's a reason many of us have gotten one but not the other of the mega and the red herring.

After seeing Pete's write-up, I see that I am one of those who got it after two puzzles through an incredibly lucky guess. I found the red herring mechanism of 12-12-12 and 11-11-11 in the first two puzzles, saw it as a countdown, and lobbed in "THE FINAL COUNTDOWN" as a guess that turned out to be correct. By month 6, I saw "THE END" spelled backwards in the clues for those grid entries, but I failed to realize it was the red herring, since I had used the red herring process to guess the real answer. I should have realized that since that mechanism ended after 6 months it probably had something to do with the red herring. Not sure I would have ever gotten this one for real! Definitely better to be lucky than smart!

Wow, even after I solved the reveal meta, I assumed that the red herring and the mega used exactly the same material. THE END means "final" as well as being part of "It's The End . . .", and the count-down of only the "final" six of twelve months also cuts off the red herring pattern. I wasn't likely to guess "The Final Countdown" on that basis, though, as it's the type of music I was aggressively ignoring at the time.

Also, I'd been concerned that all this finality might have meant that Pete was wrapping this franchise up; I'm very happy that he's not.

So apparently the 14 shaded squares spelling out the answer was a misprint that Muller didn't know had happened. Not having experience with the MMMM before this year and kind of weaving in and out of them each month, I was all "aren't these supposed to get harder each month? Maybe that doesn't apply to the Mega."