New themed puzzle! Some advice as well: you are way better off staying out of social media right now. Just keep a news broadcast open to stay informed, and make the most of today. And of course, today more than most, enjoy the puzzle!
Happy New Year! It's a very aptly-timed puzzle this time. The theme is gonna be a tricky one, so hopefully you can manage it. Some of the fill might be a little iffy but y'all should understand why when you get what's going on. Sacrifices had to be made to be able to escape the Hell Year, so I figure it warrants a crossword. Enjoy the puzzle!
I normally don't like to do simple themes like this one, but I have not been
able to get enough of my favorite anime, Bubblegum Ancestor, lately; I just
had to make a puzzle about it. If you haven't seen it, you can go check it
out
here and see what everybody has been raving about.
As always I try to make sure that even more obscure entries are crossed
fairly, so if you for some reason haven't watched Bubblegum yet, you can
still take a crack at this puzzle. Hope everyone enjoys this one, especially
Ricky Billingsgate:
Ricky's puzzles aren't hard. You just need to have an encyclopedic knowledge of anime. Don't blame him just because you don't know which character used the purple Xorph cannon in Bubblegum Ancestor. — Ricky Billingsgate (@ambivalentricky) May 27, 2020
Wanted to try a funky grid shape for this one; I've been interested in trying to make themeless grids with classic themeless structures in the wrong places, and this attempt at stagger stacks outside the center is the first that's panned out. I've been tempted to try a triple-stack of 9s in the middle (which would force two 3x3 areas of blocks on the sides), so maybe you'll see a grid with that layout soon. Probably worth noting that this puzzle is a bit name-heavy, but the crossings should all be fairly gettable. If not, then good luck!
In other news, if any of you are avid Cracking the Cryptic viewers, you'll probably have heard about the Modern Art Puzzle Pack made by the CTC Discord server. I have a sudoku in that pack! It's available for free over on the CTC Patreon page; go check out all the amazing logic puzzles if you get the chance!
(This is from the new Aesop Rock album, Spirit World Field Guide, which just came out this past week; HIGHLY recommend listening to the whole thing)
Really happy with the center stack on this one; all three of the entries in that stack are ones I've been trying to get in a puzzle for a while, so it's pretty sick how it ended up working. Enjoy the puzzle!
Small change to blog posts, btw: I'll no longer be including a solution image at the bottom of the post to simplify the blog post process on my end. If you're a PDF solver, you can easily check the solution by revealing the puzzle in the PuzzleMe applet in the post. If that creates any issues, go ahead and comment to let me know; I'm happy to keep including the solution images if they're still needed.
(The colored squares aren't necessary for the theme, so feel free to solve in
Across Lite)
Solving Music: Hachioji P, Giga - Gimme×Gimme
Really happy that this puzzle panned out at all, to be honest. The theme felt
like it wasn't going to all tie together, but I managed to find some theme
entries that fit together! Even if the theme isn't lost on you, check out the
solution image on this one; you'll get to see the proper formatting and
everything.
Solving Music: Oingo Boingo - No One Lives Forever
Quiara's Notes:
It was fun pitching a crossword towards what I presume is more of a zennial audience (e.g., the 62-Across clue). I miss getting sloshed on October 31st. :v
It's been a while! Today's puzzle is by Quiara Vasquez of "making a 90s Will
Shortz emote for the crossword Discord" fame; it's a really solid Halloween
themeless with some really wonderful clues. Editing this puzzle was
particularly enjoyable; Quiara's constructing voice is very unique and fun,
and I hope to see a lot more from her soon.
I've been losing constructing steam a bit lately, but I am still working on
stuff. I actually have two finished puzzles that are ready to be posted here
to the blog and another couple that are close to being done, it just takes a
good amount of mental energy to get these blog posts set up (getting the
download links for the .puz and PDFs is a bit of a lengthy process) and I
haven't been feeling that energy lately. But rest assured I will, in fact,
be popping off in November. I'll have another puzzle up later this week (and
it's themed!), so look forward to that.
By the way, I've had a couple of sudoku puzzles solved on Cracking the Cryptic recently! Here are the videos of the solves:
I was thinking of putting those sudoku puzzles here as a blog post at some point, so that may be coming soon; if you want to solve them now, CTC has solving links in the descriptions of the YouTube videos.
