Marshall
New York
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New York
I wonder how frustrating it must be to move through life with a disposition that compels one to complain so vehemently about the difficulty of crossword puzzles. People are ruthless. My heuristic for a good Thursday puzzle is: "Did it make me smile when I figured it out". The answer today was yes, absolutely. Cool idea in this theme! There were a few answers I didn't love (GOIPO is meh, NETWT isn't fully an abbreviation...), but that's cool. Also, I wonder if the people complaining about difficulty have ever considered the fact that when you do something for years you... get better at it... which makes solving ... easier....
Really nice puzzle. For whatever reason, I found it easier than yesterday's puzzle but it made for a flowy solve which I appreciated. It's tight, it's simple, the clues don't stretch too much to make the theme work, and there were just enough tricky ones to keep a bit of tension. Well done.
I enjoyed this puzzle. I was surprised that I finished it quicker than yesterday's, which was a tricky for a Monday to be fair. Overall, it a well-balanced Tuesday grid. Nice theme. To me, Tuesday puzzles should be "fast but a bit frustrating because of 3 or 4 tricky clues", which is exactly how I felt today. The pedants in the comment section are baseless in my opinion... One answer that frustrates me as a music producer is "Longer than a midi" solving to "MAXI". I still don't really understand that answer other than just as a simple word play on "mid" and "max". In music production, "MIDI" is an extremely common communication protocol, so it was hard to see it as anything else.
@marigold I agree, I think I meant to aim more at the tone of the comments around difficulty... They often come with a lot of heat and I think that's a bit unfair to the solvers + creates an environment where new solvers might feel unwanted
@SP Fair point, and as a golfer... heard! It would be frustrating. Although, I'm not convinced that complaining with the vigor often seen in the comments would be a solution. I think a better solution would be to raise my concern, and then ultimately switch my approach. If I previously shot a consistent 75 on the course previously, and now I regularly fire around par, I think a similarly enjoyable challenge is "seeing how low I can go". But I understand the general sentiment! Nothing wrong with voicing opinion and raising concerns, but I find the tone of comment (from those complaining about difficulty) to be needlessly aggressive and gatekeepy
@Nancy J. I hear you! Maybe it's a conscious move to make the full week more accessible to an audience that has learned to go to the NYT for games more than the news these days, and while that is in many ways a good thing, I understand it can be frustrating for a longtime solver.
@Captain Quahog Can't argue with Occam's razor... I really do mean more to point at the tone of the frustration/complaints rather than the the last point I made. I mostly thought it was just funny to write.
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