Emily

Wow what a tough one! Persistence paid off, no amount of googling helped (I try not to outright cheat with google but kind of indirectly look around for clues). A great brain bender, no ifs ands or buts!

I struggled a bit but still finished within an hour (good for a Thursday for me). I didn’t know the “butting out” letters spelled words until I read the write up, so that definitely helped order some of the chaos I felt while trying to solve. It’s one of those puzzles that I didn’t necessarily enjoy during, but satisfied afterward!

Yesterday and today were both quite tough, had to google a couple of things to give myself a break! Cool theme though, these are the kinds of puzzles that make me want to try constructing.

Tough one! The NE corner took me forever! ADMITONE!!’nnnnnnndjfnffjckx

Fast Friday! I recently read the Janet Malcolm “biography”/criticism of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, so enjoyed the OTTER clue. Highly recommend for a simultaneously engrossing and challenging read.

Great puzzle! I didn’t even realize the theme until the end. Also my fastest Thursday to date … so maybe a notch for the “don’t overthink it” column

I like the theme! It clicked for me once I got “character arcs” and helped me solve “all elbows” and “dividing lines” since I then knew all the gray boxes had to be the same. This allowed me to realize I needed “tsa bin” rather than “in a bin” - agree with others that I’ve never called this a tsa bin. Still took a while to get regression curve, and I’m an economist….

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhfrjdkskcnrjriskakfj - I got all the answers but finally had to look up how we were supposed to handle the rebuses (rebi?). This was the longest a non-Sunday puzzle has taken me in a long time!!!!

Bleh I couldn’t get the SW corner for the longest time, finally got “antsy” which helped unlock “bot” and eventually “trey” (???????????) - “cuber” was last. ……… cuber.

For a while I was really hoping alley oops was BALLERMOVE.