Matt

I found this puzzle thoroughly enjoyable and Thursday-appropriate. Sure, it was possible to get all the theme entries on the vertical crossings, but I loved the 💡 moment when figuring out the grade-inflated letter in each themed across clue. Thanks to the cruciverbalists for a charming collaboration!

Bravo, Kit! 🎉 Thrilling debut, novel theme, devious cluing ... I didn't even mind that I filled in the entire grid before slowing down to suss out the theme rows. Sometimes understanding the theme helps me to finish faster, but in this case it was enough to spot the pattern (as others have noted.) No complaints here; I still experienced a delayed epiphany when the realization dawned on me. I just needed to return to the completed grid and FURFURFURFURFUR my BBBBBBBBBBBBBBB for a moment! And how is it possible that MACGYVERED has never appeared in a grid before? I feel certain that it has at least appeared in clues!

Fun puzzle, took me about 10 minutes and brought my streak to 500 😅

Off to a good start and enjoying the bouncy theme. Came here to rejoice over ZORK, an early classic of the Interactive Fiction (IF) genre. I suppose it was a "PC game" in a sense, but ZORK was originally a mainframe game devised at MIT. I first encountered it on the Commodore VIC-20, and I've been a huge fan of IF ever since. Adventure, Colossal Cave, Infocom, the Inform parser, the Interactive Fiction Database ... I know way too much trivia about this topic, don't get me started! > DOWN It is pitch black. You might get eaten by a grue. > LIGHT LAMP 💡 Anybody else love this stuff as much as I do?

Loved this puzzle! I found it quite ... remarkable. ✏️

Excellent debut, Rena! Time f(LIE)s when you're having fun, and I had a lot of fun while quickly solving this puzzle. Like a lot of Thursdays, it started slowly, but gained momentum as I progressed. I briefly thought that POLYGRAPH would solve to (LIE)detector, but that was before I caught on to the relative placement of the"spikes" above the blackout squares.

Congrats Kenneth! 🏳️‍🌈

Congrats to our crafty cruciverbalists, Ginny and Avery, on a fun and Wednesday-appropriate puzzle! I got the theme clues pretty handily, and managed not to enter "Oxford" before checking the crossings. But I still got twisted up in the northeast corner, by entering eArl for 12-down instead of LADY 🤦 I ended up finishing in 12:34 -- a number I like to think of as "Ramones o'clock" 🥁🎸🤘

I thoroughly enjoyed this charming debut puzzle. Yes, it helped that I know the poem pretty well. Nonetheless, I found the terse paraphrase grew more difficult to guess as the puzzle progressed, leading to "Aha!" moments at the end of the last two lines. 💡 My only, relatively minor, compliant: the crossing of 30D and 34A felt like a bit of a Natick. I assumed these two entries were two obscure proper nouns and I initially entered MonA for 34A. There really is an activist named Ramona Africa (see <a href="https://allthatsinteresting.com/ramona-africa" target="_blank">https://allthatsinteresting.com/ramona-africa</a> for info) so I got stuck here for a while!

What a lovely amuse-bouche! Finished in 6:38 (4:40 faster than Tuesday average), bringing my streak to 590 days. As soon as I saw the first theme clue highlighted, something made me click on the lower left corner for the revealer, and I guessed it immediately based on the length of the two words. That gave me quite a boost with the remaining theme entries. And now I want a Reuben 😜

I found this one very difficult to break open. I kept expecting a Thursday trick, like rebus squares, or answers that wrap around corners ... but no, it was just a good old-fashioned chewy challenge of a puzzle, with a clever theme that managed to be simultaneously obvious and maddeningly elusive. Solved in 26 minutes, much longer than my Thursday average. Bravo, Sam, and thanks for the workout!

A worthy Thursday from Kevin Curry, albeit one of those puzzles that could be solved easily enough on the crossings without understanding the theme (as the first few comments show.) I liked the theme just fine! Each of the common two-word pairs in the theme answers could be split into two parts: a verb (DREAM, THINK, IMAGINE) and a noun (synonymous with the words in the clue. So the theme answers had a double meaning, exhorting us to visualize the thing which was clued. I'm sure the Wordplay column explains it better than I did! 😅

Quick and fun, though I didn't quite grok the theme. Guess I'll read Wordplay to figure out what I just solved 😉

nearLy poLeaxed -- marshaL's quaLity puzzLe withheLd reveaL untiL Last cLue! 😃

I had a lot of fun racing through this one. In before the usual rebus backlash in the comments to say that I love puzzles like this, with just a [TW]EENSY but of [RD]AZZLE! 🤪

Finished in 13:18. Slowed down by some flyspecking -- I had "NOt I" for 26d which left the headscratching "ACtE" for 32A. Otherwise, fun quick solve. No rebus squares, so the usual Thursday complainers will have a bit less to grouse about! 🤪 I did find this one Thursday-appropriate, if a bit on the light side. I enjoyed the theme in hindsight. I didn't really get a quicker solve from the theme clues, though, since I easily filled the first three theme entries on the crossings.

Finished in just under 8 minutes and scrambled over here to leave the first post. But someone else was already ahead of me! 😅 Oh well, that was a fun, quick, early-week puzzle. I appreciated the way the revealer brought all the theme clues together.

Finished in 12:03, wasted two additional minutes trying to find the Wordplay column. 🥳 I enjoyed this one. I found the theme interesting, though I basically solved the puzzle without looking to hard at the clues for the highlighted pairs. Instead, I somewhat subliminally noticed that the answer pairs were anagrams of each other, which gave me a decent speed boost!

What a lovely puzzle from Hemant Mehta! I breezed through it in 11:07, just 1:05 shy of my Friday personal best. Came here to gloat, and to see whether ILLINOISE and NEPOBABIES were debuts. (I'm still not sure!) 🤪

Nice one, Dario! I loved the ASCII art element in the theme clues, which reminded me of old character-graphic games like rogue and nethack — and their descendants, like Dwarf Fortress (<a href="https://indiewod.com/dwarf-fortress-how-to-understand-the-ascii-visuals" target="_blank">https://indiewod.com/dwarf-fortress-how-to-understand-the-ascii-visuals</a>). 🤓 Yes, it was a quick solve for a Thursday (13:30) — but I also found it challenging every step of the way, and had an especially slow start in the chewy northwest corner.

Sweet debut, very satisfying to untangle. This one only took two and a half minutes longer than my Thursday average, but it felt like a more challenging workout!

THAT'LL DO, pig 🐖 No complaints for this enjoyable Sunday grid from prolific cruciverbalist Natan Last. I did find the revealer a bit self-evident, which helped me to catch on to the pattern in the other four themed columns more quickly and shave 16+ minutes off my average Sunday. But I found that exciting, rather than disappointing! I guess some folks are just hard to please.

I raced through this puzzle and ended up with some fly-specking left to do at the end. (Somehow I knew TISDERPIO was the problem!) It’s been a great weekend for fun and fresh themeless puzzles. A few years ago Thursdays were my favorites, but I’m really starting to enjoy Fridays and Saturdays! 😊

Adored the puzzle, sweetie pie! 🥰 I've never encountered IDLI in the wild, so I expected some flyspecking when the happy piano surprised me.

Somehow I entered "playoff game" in the center and still managed to finish in record time 😅🎉

Thanks to Billy Bratton for an enjoyable puzzle! I spent the longest time flyspecking, finally found that entering BARk for 32D ("Biting comment") left me with the crossing OSCARkID, which seemed odd but plausible. (You might hear a bark before receiving a bite, and maybe someone nominated for an Academy Award could be considered an "Oscar kid" ... 🧐 ) Of course the correct answers for both clues make a lot more sense!

I loved this puzzle. I did enter MEEPMEEP initially but soon fixed it on the crossings. I just can't seem to get angry about such things, not sure why. 😇 I do agree that there were a few Natick crossings in the grid (so many proper nouns!) but they didn't really slow me down since the rest of the solve was so straightforward. I felt they added just enough ZEST to keep this puzzle from being too easy. I had a bit of fly-specking to do at the end (I had entered KinKY just above the HELP sign) but that's my problem, not the fault of the constructor.

Usually it's "not that easy bein' green," but today I breezed through in 16:56 (a bit faster than my Thursday average). Funny thing: when the happy music plays, it says I have an 865 day streak. But when I view my stats, it says I have an 11 day streak. (Last week I accidentally finished the Monday puzzle before noticing that I'd forgotten to flyspeck the last incorrect square in Sunday's puzzle.) 🧐

Whew! Pencils down in 10:04, what a rush. I worked the down clues on either side of the shaded squares until the right-to-left trick became obvious, and that gave me a huge boost with the rest. I groaned audibly at the revealer, but in a good way 🤪

CREATIVE LICENSE would make a dandy title for this brisk Friday workout, which I have filled but haven't finished at 21 min; just flyspecking left.

@Caitlyn If it's not too late to fix a typo in the article, surely you mean TRADE WARS. The singular form is a letter short.

4D: I really wanted Mr. Olympia to be DABNEY Coleman. 😂