XWord Muggles Forum

I too have been searching for the second step for a few days. Gentle nudge if anyone is around please - I'll let you know what I've got.

Oh for.... As others have said, I was trying to make that way too complicated. I was trying everything BUT. It took a much-appreciated assist from @Wendy Walker to apply the one variation I hadn’t yet tried. To quote @sharkicicles , “brains are weird.” Mine in particular, these days.

In hindsight, a very nice mechanism.

The kicker: after submitting, I received a message that “submissions are now closed.” Hope Matt adjusts for the extended deadline.

Please allow me to do this: Cry, man, netly.

Sheesh. So many hours wasted. It really is that simple. "Doy!"

I'm overthinking what has to be right in front of me. I have 75 minutes, haha. Light nudge, anyone?

Sign me up for the Nudge Boat so I can get off the Love Boat. Oh, wait, that the WSJ. How about:

I'm down here on the planet wearing this red shirt and the clock is ticking. Can someone give me a blue or yellow shirt so I can get the hell out of here? I'm in the same place as all the other red shirts who have been posting.

I have what I think are a LOT of steps along what I can only assume is the correct path, but would love a nudge to what is (hopefully) the final one, if anyone is willing.

Finally aboard, kicking and screaming. Thanks to MikeyG and Cindy. Someone launder this red shirt. It stinks.

All about that #buzzerbeaterlife. Wow.

Edit: Shout-out to Joe and Tony for the nudges and camaraderie. My mind was so locked-in to one thing there was no way it was going to see the other.

This was a "never" for me. Glad I didn't spent time on it.

I got it via anagramming right off the bat, but the implied space travel made me nervous enough about it that I didn't submit until I finally saw the two groups and got redirected to the answer I already had.

Edit: I see that Matt is suggesting NZ or Antartica as fitting the description poetically, which, ok I guess.

Do I win the convoluted non-solution award this week?

This is the actual text of assumptions and rabbit holes I sent to poor @Wendy Walker for an eleventh-hour confirmation/nudge. What patience she had to read through that mess!! Observation #12 was the first thing I tried and in my mind was such a throw-away I almost forgot to include it in my list!

TL/DR: look at #12 below.

Facts:
This week's 12-letter answer describes where some creatures can go and others cannot.

111A. SKY - the clue is contained within the title "Where some creatures can go"

12 grid entries contain birds within them. 6 flying birds:
fraTERNity
aSWAN
reaDOVEr
otHERONe
fingerbOWL
fauxHAWK
6 flightless birds:
wiKIWIki
oveRHEAted
rEMUs
lOSTRICHes
DODOma
saMOAn

Assumptions/rabbit holes:

1. Each bird entry contributes 1 letter to 12-letter answer directly or indirectly.
2. I could also find (W)REN peeking out of 29A RENdered, but no other partials.
3. 109a Polar explorer BYRD a mis-spelling of BIRD. Turn other words into homonyms? (e.g. TERN -> TURN)
4. There are more than 12 geographic references in the clues, I could tie only some of them to bird native habitats (mainly the flightless ones). E.g. KIWI -> New Zealand
5. I also tried to find other things relating to the birds in the clues. Nada.
6. 74D MASHUPS - try to combine pairs of birds. TERN-KIWI (turn-key) MOA-HAWK.
7. Find all or part of bird words in other entries or clues - nope. (e.g. MOA -> MOrAlism, lOSTRICHes/SITupfOR)
8. Construct other geographic entries out of birds - e.g kittyHAWK.
9. SKY/LOFTY (from title) - use letters above (or perhaps below, for the flightless birds) the bird entries. Gibberish.
10. The bird words are not all symmetrical entries within grid, but looking at the corresponding symmetrical entries yields gibberish. e.g. fraTERNity => itaLICIzes)
11. A few of the birds and/or other entries seem to pair either as opposites (HAWK/DOVE, OWL/DODO) or similarities (KIWI/ACAI, OSTRICH/BEEF). But it's a stretch, it's not consistent, and worse - it condenses the 12 to 6.
12. oh and just to state the "obvious", I tried the first letters of each of the birds. The first letters of the flying, last of the flightless. Vice versa. First letters of related clues. All gibberish.

ajk wrote: ↑Wed May 26, 2021 1:23 pm I got it via anagramming right off the bat, but the implied space travel made me nervous enough about it that I didn't submit until I finally saw the two groups and got redirected to the answer I already had.

Edit: I see that Matt is suggesting NZ or Antartica as fitting the description poetically, which, ok I guess.

Yes. after all the grief I went through identifying flying and non-flying birds and their lands of origin, I was happy to see that the distinction played a part in the solution, and I appreciated the elegance of the flying birds contributing to FAR-OFF and the non-flying to WORLDS.

I truly was in the FAR-OFF WORLDS of the obtuse this week. I've said before that typing up my thoughts to ask for help sometimes helps me organize my thoughts and see the answer for myself. I should have listened to me this week!

First, I carelessly omitted SWAN from the list I sent to Wendy. But had I bothered to count to six to see my omission and then looked more closely at my list, the answer practically leaps off the page to bite me:

KayW wrote: ↑Wed May 26, 2021 1:33 pm
12 grid entries contain birds within them. 6 flying birds:
fraTERNity
( aSWAN <--oops! )
reaDOVEr
otHERONe
fingerbOWL
fauxHAWK
6 flightless birds:
wiKIWIki
oveRHEAted
rEMUs
lOSTRICHes
DODOma
saMOAn

Even after solving and submitting, I completely failed to notice this until someone else pointed it out to me

KayW wrote: ↑Wed May 26, 2021 1:33 pm
12. oh and just to state the "obvious", I tried the first letters of each of the birds. The first letters of the flying, last of the flightless. Vice versa. First letters of related clues. All gibberish.

This was me - - tried everything BUT the letters of the original grid answers. . . . .

I kicked myself for missing this one. Oh well, I learned a lot about birds while trying to solve.

I didn't get the answer.  Like KayW, I visited way too many rabbit holes.  I'd found the 6 birds of each type and had written them out separately, but I hadn't included the words that contained them.  I tried various ways of going upwards, checking scientific/family names, etc. I shared KayW's 74D MASHUPS warren for quite a while, especially with "D_OVERHEAd" sitting on the same row. 

Then I found my way to a den that I just couldn't stay away from.  REHAB was an anagram of RHEA + B.'. Then I found OWL+T coming down at an angle.  From there, it got weirder (and harder to find) like HAWK+S inside ASKWHy. Now, I've done these puzzles for WAY too long to have kept going in this direction, since anagrams plus a letter plus various extra letters was really an unlikely mechanism, and I would never fully find OSTRICH. 

Still, in a last ditch attempt while waiting to see the eclipse last night here in Idaho I went back to it and kept finding more and more partials, stalling out at 8 of them.  But if I ignored the two that spanned over a black square, EHs-RONalds and eD_OVEr (which additionaly was ambiguous as to which adjacent letter to choose), then there were exactly 6 cases, three flighted, three flightless, shown in the grid below. .
So, could we use those 6 added letters (come on now, stop!) and oh, maybe the first letters of the bird's name, and then anagram them all (you KNOW Matt wouldn't do that!)  Well just check:
Hawk + S   
Tern   + A
Owl    + T
Rhea  + B
Emu   + R
Moa    + D

Earth?  Star?  "To the __"?  Could it actually be something?  Nope, of course. 
 
And the skies were cloudy here at 4 am as it turned out.

I'm including this grid as another example of how often accidental/coincidental confounders can pop up in these puzzles.  I know better, but the sheer number still surprises me.

.

Ugh. Farewell, my hard-won streak of 8. I didn't see MOA, I'd never heard of that bird and it didn't come up in Googling flightless birds. (To be fair I didn't specifically look for extinct flightless birds, although I should have considering DODO.) Instead, I decided that BEE (52A) must count as a flying creature, although the odd-one-outness did nag at me. That mistake messed up all of the letter sorting and anagramming I tried to do just enough that I couldn't see the true path. So I was looking everywhere for another step and didn't find one.

I suspect that Matt probably really wanted to work PENGUIN into this puzzle instead of MOA, but was rightfully stymied :-) Anyway, I await Friday's week 4 to try to redeem myself. (Although my aspirations for that are not very lofty!)

I got a really late start to this, but I quickly noticed the birds. However, I then immediately opened the Wikipedia page for flightless birds and lo and behold, there are flightless doves, herons and owls! Because I had that info implanted in my brain, I didn't think of separating the birds into two classes and wouldn't have even if I had another week to solve it :/

I needed a kick in the shins (politely called a nudge) to remind me that not all birds fly. What? Of course birds fly. That’s why they have wings. That’s why they’re called birds.

Once I had mastered that concept and separated them into two teams, it was a quick flight (or walk) to the finish.
.

This critter found me on a walk soon after solving.