PUZZLE 33: BIG DUBSKIS (themeless)

[ACROSS LITE | PDF]

Solving Music: Aesop Rock - Jumping Coffin

(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.

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PUZZLE 32: I DON'T MAKE THE RULES

[ACROSS LITE | PDF]

(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.

That's all today; enjoy the puzzle, y'all!

SOLUTION:

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GUEST PUZZLE BY QUIARA VASQUEZ: HALLOWEEN THEMELESS

 [ACROSS LITE | PDF]

 

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.

SOLUTION:

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