PUZZLE 43: DIGITAL RELEASE

Solving Music: chelmico - Easy Breezy

You'll notice that there's no Across Lite or PDF links for this puzzle. You'll also notice that the grid in the applet is absolutely terrifying to look at. This puzzle is meant to be solved in the applet, so I've decided to leave out the links this time.

It's pretty difficult to talk about this puzzle without spoiling the revealer/theme, so I'm gonna openly talk puzzle spoilers (and explain the theme if you're out of the loop) below this break:

I've been seeing a lot of artists that I really love fall into the NFT trap recently, and it's been more than disheartening to see. Part of it is how pyramid-schemey it all feels, but mainly it's how much the environmental impact of NFTs is being swept under the rug. There's a super-informative blog article detailing the massive CO2 emissions caused by NFTs here; the long story short is that most current NFTs are based on Ethereum, which is a cryptocurrency that is horrible for the environment, leading to a single NFT's carbon footprint coming out to about 200 Kg of CO2 emissions. There are plans to make NFTs environmentally safe in the future, but as they stand now, they're an unreasonable harm to the planet, and most artists who are getting into them are completely unaware of that. So this puzzle's meant to be a "raising awareness" sort of deal, to the extent that that can be done with a crossword.

If you want to see how the solution looks without the letters being obscured, turning the applet into dark mode in the Settings menu will turn all the grid letters white.

Hope you enjoyed the puzzle!

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