Author: plusjeremy

DNF. Got almost all of these in a very reasonable 25 minutes or so, but got stuck on the last three for an eternity. Eventually made a guess on one, which was wrong (I hadn’t heard of the actual answer), and had to look up the other in the dictionary. Ah well!

39:50, though the time is irrelevant as the puzzle was solved by myself and three other (in?)famous NYC solvers, who will make themselves known if they wish. (Perhaps even photograph evidence will be supplied.)

52:13. I’m writing from the beaches of Southern California. Perhaps the distance from the motherland has dulled my solving abilities, but I think this was actually a tough one.

DNF. I was so absurdly off the wavelength here, there’s very little I can say. I labored to fill in as many squares as I could, but in the end, there were three clues I couldn’t get.

43:39. Well, that’s how I felt solving this puzzle anyway. Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of absolutely delightful clues here (meaning surface reading, wordplay, word choice, etc), but I felt that a fair amount of the difficulty for me stemmed from using very uncommon synonyms or abbreviations. But let me parse the clues and I’ll get back to you.

20:02. It was that sort of puzzle, where clue after clue I would ask myself, “Is that a thing?”, and eventually answer, “I guess that’s a thing.”.

This one hurt.

This was an excellent puzzle, which I enjoyed bashing my head against at the time, and enjoyed even moreso while writing the blog.

24:30 for a puzzle which I found quite enjoyable, and neither too easy nor too hard. I imagine I’m on the slower side today, because I seemingly cannot finish a puzzle in under 20 minutes anymore, but nevertheless I felt at home with the clues, which is a welcome change for me.

40:52 for a challenging and very enjoyable puzzle. I worked hard, and in the end, everything was gettable.