Hi Crossworders (and Matt Gritzmacher's link-crawling bot)!
Seeing so many old, new, and remote friends at ACPT last weekend was amazing, and hopefully you all know how great it was to see you already, because I am not even going to try and list you all. It was also exhausting, and some of us were making truly terrible decisions, like waking up at 3am Friday morning to clue a puzzle until 6am; staying up until 2:30am Saturday morning and ordering McDonalds to the hotel on Uber Eats; and closing down the lobby at 3am Sunday when Puzzle 7 starts at 9. NO RAGRETS
Clean puzzles 1-4 & 6-7, and got nearly all of puzzle 5 done. Saw that I had 9 minutes left with just one corner to go---"Great, plenty of time!" Suddenly it was over and I'd made no additional progress. I might even have taken a correct entry out? If I'd managed to finish puzzle 5, I think I'd have beaten my very nice placement of 69th in 2018---still my only ever perfect record. But still ended up at 79th place, around the same relative ranking as my 119th from 2019, so a great result and I'm happy.
crassword
— New New York Times (@NYT_first_said) February 17, 2021
Proud of this goofy crassword puzzle I left on the ACPT giveaway table. It's a theme I'd been thinking about for months, and I figured it would only make any sense to diehard crossword fans, so ACPT was a great motivator to get it done. The paper copies had Just Try It on the front as a totally new puzzle, and a bonus puzzle on the back: either Cutting Corners, a tricky Thursday-ish puzzle posted last August, or Let's Roll, a light Tuesday-ish puzzle with a theme that makes me smile from August 2020. Please free to pick multiple poisons, and tell me about it here or on Twitter @hero_complex
This crassword puzzle has been rated PG-13 for strong language, solver discretion is advised.
