Peter M

Felt pretty good about this one today! I beat my average Monday solve time, and had fun with the theme and spanners that happen to be two of my most impressive skills. Really liked the cluster in the top right corner, it felt a bit like solving a poem with the repeated phonics for some reason. My gold-star streak now stands at 120, and while I haven't been as good at doing the archives more regularly I'm still closing in on a lifetime 2600 solves. Happy solving everybody!

Nice clues that made me think a little for a Monday. Surprised I remembered a certain newspaper comic strip that I haven't thought about in years. I managed to beat my Monday average by 50 whole seconds. Also, today I finished up every NYT Crossword since January 1st, 2020 through the present and am that much closer to doing the full online archives. Cheers all & happy solving!

Shout out to D'Aulaire's Greek Mythology for making sure I will always know how to spell the various kinds of nymphs needed to get a Y or a few consecutive vowels in there.

15A made me incredibly nostalgic for my 2000s forum days, but the clue for 16A was so diabolically good I had to pause in the middle of doing this puzzle to leave this comment. Great back-to-back entries, fantastic debut, can't wait for your next grid!

Had a chuckle with the intersecting clues "Cry from Miss Piggy"/"Cry from Miss Piggy?" down in the bottom-right corner. Really good clues today and bonus points for getting some NYT crossword frequent-flier words in there without some of the obvious cluing that usually comes with them.

I think it's a great sign when I have to double-check myself more than a few times but each pass untangles more of the grid. Somehow the bottom left corner was my biggest obstacle but the clues wound up being as helpful as they were pretty funny.

i got "Kenya's second-largest city" right away from playing so much Halo in my youth. nice clues kept this from feeling like a monday, and the bottom-left corner is a case study in layered cleverness.

Really loved this one, especially the cluing around the theme & sub-theme entries. The center section was pretty tough until I got the recycled clues about Scots, but the rest flowed on from there. Final solve time was a tad slower than usual but this puzzle was so satisfying to solve that I don't mind.

A gem! Slightly chewy in the corners (finished top-right last because i blanked on Billy Joel's discography), always happy to see HATERADE make an appearance, and with this one I've crossed the 101 gold star-streak mark and have cleared well over 2,500 total from the archives. See you all when I get to the 200 day streak/3000 puzzles line!

nice & chewy for a friday, had a lot of fun with this one (even if i solve crosswords like i have never seen a single movie or know anyone who would ever be in one). in other news, i finally hit 2400 NYT Crosswords officially Solved this week! so it's just onward & upward to 3000 from here. cheers & happy solving!

as for hitting PB's: i got a 4:33 today which is only 15 seconds off from my all-time best Friday solve time. huge beaming smile broke out on my face when i solved 28D. great stuff, 10/10, no notes.