Should be sleeping right now, so just a puzzle and no write-up this week.
More (many more) words, crossed and otherwise, next week.
Update: I should have at least mentioned the origin of this week's grid. Shout-outs to Frank Longo for his astonishingly wide open Fireball themeless last week. An amazing feat of construction. I started with the intention of using the exact same grid because filling it with vowelless entries seemed like a tough yet doable challenge. I was able to autofill it starting with a few seeds as a proof-of-concept, but it wasn't giving me enough room to play once I started hand-filling, so I added a few extra black squares to lower the constraints. And now you know the rest of the story...
Puzzle: Vowelless #9 (NOTE: as always, Y is not a part of any answer)
Downloads:
PDF (no hints - harder)
PUZ (no hints - harder)
PDF (with full answer lengths given - easier)
PUZ (with full answer lengths given - easier)
Full Answers
Wednesday, 26 March 2014
Tuesday, 18 March 2014
3.1415926535897932384626433832...
Sorry about the skipped week there. I had a freestyle mostly finished, but didn't have quite enough time to devote to polishing it to my standards. The wonderful feedback I've received from y'all has really encouraged me to up my game, but as a result I spend much much longer on each puzzle because I hate to have an off week. Excuses, excuses.
In other news, although I totally forgot about pi day last friday, the topic came up at work this morning and I ended up betting my colleague that I could memorize and recite pi to 1000 digits by next week. I wasn't sure at first if I could get even remotely close, but over lunch I started brainstorming various possible approaches and it seems eminently doable. My psychology education finally paid off, in fact, and I recalled the method of loci (which is similar to Sherlock Holmes' memory palace technique). And just when you thought this post couldn't get any nerdier (you're reading a crossword blog, what did you expect?), I figured that the best thing to map the digits to would be the Super Metroid any% speedrun route, since I've been drilling it for the last few weeks. It turned out to be kind of fun, actually, trying to identify patterns in the sequence of digits and then thinking up meaningful associations to the game map. Tying individual numbers to the number of enemies or platforms in a room, say, or imagining that alternating strings like 323 or 3993 could represent contours in the terrain or patterns of movement around obstacles. Seems to be working: after only about half an hour I already had 150 digits down pat, and I'm up to 250 now. Victory is mine.
Anyway, that has nothing to do with today's puzzle, which is just another freestyle. Filling it was somewhat difficult, as evidenced by the abundance of cheater ("helper") squares. I prefer the look of a grid with very few black squares, but beyond that I don't actually care about cheaters if they improve the fill significantly, as they did in this case. Hope you feel the same.
More words, crossed and otherwise, next week.
Puzzle: Freestyle #30
Downloads:
PDF
PUZ
In other news, although I totally forgot about pi day last friday, the topic came up at work this morning and I ended up betting my colleague that I could memorize and recite pi to 1000 digits by next week. I wasn't sure at first if I could get even remotely close, but over lunch I started brainstorming various possible approaches and it seems eminently doable. My psychology education finally paid off, in fact, and I recalled the method of loci (which is similar to Sherlock Holmes' memory palace technique). And just when you thought this post couldn't get any nerdier (you're reading a crossword blog, what did you expect?), I figured that the best thing to map the digits to would be the Super Metroid any% speedrun route, since I've been drilling it for the last few weeks. It turned out to be kind of fun, actually, trying to identify patterns in the sequence of digits and then thinking up meaningful associations to the game map. Tying individual numbers to the number of enemies or platforms in a room, say, or imagining that alternating strings like 323 or 3993 could represent contours in the terrain or patterns of movement around obstacles. Seems to be working: after only about half an hour I already had 150 digits down pat, and I'm up to 250 now. Victory is mine.
Anyway, that has nothing to do with today's puzzle, which is just another freestyle. Filling it was somewhat difficult, as evidenced by the abundance of cheater ("helper") squares. I prefer the look of a grid with very few black squares, but beyond that I don't actually care about cheaters if they improve the fill significantly, as they did in this case. Hope you feel the same.
More words, crossed and otherwise, next week.
Puzzle: Freestyle #30
Downloads:
PUZ
Wednesday, 12 March 2014
Oh btw...
...did I mention that there won't be a puzzle this week? Sorry about that. With the trip last week and the tournament over the weekend I haven't had time to put anything together. We'll be back to our regular schedule next week.
Nice to meet up with many Cross Nerd solvers over the weekend. Had a nice lunch with Alex Jeffrey and Ken Crowell (jefe and oeuftete, as they're known here), got a much-needed lesson in cryptics from Alex, talked shop with Evan Birnholz, talked winter sports with Howard Barkin (who nabbed an impressive third place; go Howard!), and had some laughs with Erik Agard. Had many brief encounters with many others and met a ton of new people as well. Congrats to all of you, who are all much smarter than I am and placed much higher.
See you next week!
Nice to meet up with many Cross Nerd solvers over the weekend. Had a nice lunch with Alex Jeffrey and Ken Crowell (jefe and oeuftete, as they're known here), got a much-needed lesson in cryptics from Alex, talked shop with Evan Birnholz, talked winter sports with Howard Barkin (who nabbed an impressive third place; go Howard!), and had some laughs with Erik Agard. Had many brief encounters with many others and met a ton of new people as well. Congrats to all of you, who are all much smarter than I am and placed much higher.
See you next week!
Tuesday, 4 March 2014
No Vowels Til Brooklyn
I think I also used a variation of the Beastie's classic for my post for the week of the 2012 ACPT. Real original. By the way, if any of my FB friends were wondering about the story behind my profile pic (you probably weren't, but humour me): it was taken during a performance of "No Sleep Til Brooklyn" at the 2013 Regina Band Swap and one my rare moments at the mic. I'm shouting one of the five syllables of the shout chorus, but I'm not sure which. Band Swap is a super cool event where about 35 musicians from the local scene get assigned randomly to quintets (with hardly any consideration given to the instrumentation) and are given 24 hours to learn and then perform a 20 minute set of randomly-selected cover songs. All ticket sales go to charity and the several-hundred person venue has sold out every time. I've participated in every Band Swap to date, and it's one of the highlights of my year. New musical relationships always arise, and you discover talents you never thought you had. My bands have played, among others, "Mambo #5", The Pixies' "Where Is My Mind", "The Weight", Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi", Rihanna/Calvin Harris' "Hopeless Place", Radiohead's "Creep", and "The Log Driver's Waltz" (Canadian readers will know what I mean).
Anyway, moving right along, there's a big event this weekend and I'll be there. Come say hi! Solvers of the special ACPT puzzle I wrote last year will know that I'm tall, have long hair and a soul patch, and wear glasses. Now you know too. Also, I'll be wearing a name tag that says "Bad Motherfucker" (actually they wouldn't print that for me, so it will say "Peter Broda").
Lastly, this week's puzzle. Return to form this week with another vowelless. Big clusters of black squares in this one, but still plenty wide-open in true vwllss fashion. I started by putting together the top stack in a 14x14 grid. I was fully prepared to throw symmetry out the window for this one, as it seemed unlikely I'd be able to make a fillable grid pattern given the constraints on the black squares terminating some of the down crossers. However, I found that putting the top stack into a 15x15 (which explains the black bars on the NE and SW sides) opened things up enough that I had few constraints in the bottom half. However, after searching through the hundreds of possibilities for the bottom stack and picking my favourites, I found that I needed to tighten the center a bit by adding a bunch of cheaters to get something resembling a clean fill, which explains the thick staircase pattern. In short, this puzzle, like so many before it, was brought to you by a lot of dumb luck, computational firepower, and hours of mucking about without a clue what I'm doing.
That's all for now. I'm at a hostel in Montreal at the moment, and heading out to eat a poutine and see some live jazz in a few minutes (those may be stereotypical things to do but that's literally what I'm going to do), so I'll leave it at that. Super excited to catch up with my cruciverbal friends this weekend and hopefully meet a bunch of new solvers. I'll be at the bar any time I'm not solving.
More words, slurred and otherwise, this weekend.
NOTE: As always, Y is not a part of any answer
Puzzle: Vowelless #8
Downloads:
PDF (no hints - harder)
PUZ (no hints - harder)
PDF (with full answer lengths given - easier)
PUZ (with full answer lengths given - easier)
Full Answers
Anyway, moving right along, there's a big event this weekend and I'll be there. Come say hi! Solvers of the special ACPT puzzle I wrote last year will know that I'm tall, have long hair and a soul patch, and wear glasses. Now you know too. Also, I'll be wearing a name tag that says "Bad Motherfucker" (actually they wouldn't print that for me, so it will say "Peter Broda").
Lastly, this week's puzzle. Return to form this week with another vowelless. Big clusters of black squares in this one, but still plenty wide-open in true vwllss fashion. I started by putting together the top stack in a 14x14 grid. I was fully prepared to throw symmetry out the window for this one, as it seemed unlikely I'd be able to make a fillable grid pattern given the constraints on the black squares terminating some of the down crossers. However, I found that putting the top stack into a 15x15 (which explains the black bars on the NE and SW sides) opened things up enough that I had few constraints in the bottom half. However, after searching through the hundreds of possibilities for the bottom stack and picking my favourites, I found that I needed to tighten the center a bit by adding a bunch of cheaters to get something resembling a clean fill, which explains the thick staircase pattern. In short, this puzzle, like so many before it, was brought to you by a lot of dumb luck, computational firepower, and hours of mucking about without a clue what I'm doing.
That's all for now. I'm at a hostel in Montreal at the moment, and heading out to eat a poutine and see some live jazz in a few minutes (those may be stereotypical things to do but that's literally what I'm going to do), so I'll leave it at that. Super excited to catch up with my cruciverbal friends this weekend and hopefully meet a bunch of new solvers. I'll be at the bar any time I'm not solving.
More words, slurred and otherwise, this weekend.
NOTE: As always, Y is not a part of any answer
Puzzle: Vowelless #8
Downloads:
PDF (no hints - harder)
PUZ (no hints - harder)
PDF (with full answer lengths given - easier)
PUZ (with full answer lengths given - easier)
Full Answers
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