Dan

For the people posting their times, I will say this: Seeing the times of fast solvers is disheartening to many developing solvers, and for that reason is considered gauche in many corners of the crossword world.

Wow, that was one of my slowest Fridays in recent memory. I think this was probably one of the tougher Fridays recently ... and I am 100% in favor of more and more puzzles like this. I'm too punchdrunk from being buffeted hither and thither by this puzzle to be specific, but I enjoyed a whole boatload of super-clever clues that kept me guessing for a long time. A very fine Friday experience for me.

Loved this Friday puzzle. First of all it was no pushover for me. But especially, there were So. Many. tricky clues with cleverly deceptive wordplay that made me chuckle aquiet. Looking forward to more puzzles from Kevin Zhou!

A cute theme, which was fun to solve. But once the theme clicked (thanks to the revealer clue), filling in most of the Down answers was nigh-automatic, so the puzzle did not put up much resistance. Also, some of the clues seemed unnecessarily strange. SETI is not a subject; it's an organization. I don't think OGLE is related to greediness.

I watched Lassie for years (with Jeff, Lassie's true owner) and Lassie don' need no stinkin' leash!

That felt just like a fine Saturday puzzle during the solve, but it was over too soon.

Aha — so OREO is now a collective noun.

I found this difficult to get completely right, but not in a fun way. I paid no attention to the theme while solving. Now that it's solved I began looking at the theme, but it quickly seemed far too obscure for me to waste time figuring it out.

I loved this!. (Though I confess that my first try for "Game point" was Antler, which made me chuckle, but after realizing the answer is ARCADE I had to retract the chuckle.)

No doubt this is just me, but I *never* want to se either HEAD CHEESE or SEWAGE in my crosswords.

Not being a Star Trek watcher, my first reaction was "Oh, no, another puzzle based on something I know nothing about". But as the solve progressed, I became a big fan of this puzzle: By ignoring the circled letters it was possible to guess the long phrases without any Star Trek knowledge. And of course I could not help having learned a little about it just by osmosis, which did help a bit. At the end, I had to find my mistake(s), which turned out to be YeP instead of YUP. Lots of clever misdirection! So I ended up liking this puzzle a lot.

Broken link again, again. This was my favorite kind of Friday puzzle — tough, fair, clever, fun, and mysterious. Lots of tricky clues that had me guessing until they managed to solve themselves (I take no credit). Looking forward to more from this duo!

We have been very nicely treated to some lovely recycling!

A fun puzzle and cute graphics. But I have no idea what the theme was.

Nice one. Cute using OCTAD and not OCTet.

A really fun Friday puzzle today, that had me struggling to figure out many different tricky clues, and which felt as if it took much longer than the clock shows. Just the kind of Friday puzzle that is my favorite.

I'm all in favor of the many forms of wordplay that Will Shortz has introduced to the NYT crosswords. But if I had my druthers I'd be totally in favor of going back to a time when no brand names were ever mentioned, people's sexual orientations were never alluded to, there was no slang that only a niche crowd knows, and no answers involved not-nice words (the kind that people used to teach their young children not to say).

I'm not sure why exactly, but I enjoyed every moment of solving this puzzle, which went pretty fast for me. The clues seemed very much on the easy side, but fun.

Wow, that was hard! I had to really work to get the upper left area, and I'm still figuring out why a few other things were what they were.

(The normal link doesn't work.) I liked this puzzle a lot, since it made me feel smart. It felt very hard in some sense, yet I was able to guess a lot of clue answers without any letters, which made this hard puzzle proceed pretty quickly. At times this resembled riding a pogo stick down a steep hill in a thick fog. (It did not, however, smack of juggling three flaming battery-powered chainsaws while they are turned on — not at all.)

I enjoyed tonight's Wednesday puzzle. But I'm curious if anyone else has this puzzle symptom, which I've seen in the last week, give or take, upon solving on the NYT website on my desktop: As soon as I type the final letter, there is an unusual one- or two-second pause before the little musical phrase, etc. appear as usual. This never happened before, since the advent of this online app. Just in case, I cleared my cache and then solved an old Monday puzzle from the Archive right away ... and the exact same thing happened. Anyone else have something like this? (In case it's relevant, my browser (Firefox) and my Mac OS are both up to date.) What might be causing this?

Well, that was snappy. Nice puzzle. Felt fun at all times.

Other than the broken link (again?!), this was a perfect Frday puzzle for me: Tough, but not as hard as a typical Saturday; fair; and fun. What more could one ask? I may be the only one who read the title "A Christmas Story" in that clue and thought it was "A Christmas Carol". Yes, the depredations of age. I knew OVALTINE was an old-time product (one I even enjoyed as a child) but — To think! — it was around during Dickens's time. Who knew!

This was a fun themeless for me. because the theme went over my head. But I will figure it out ex post facto (since it's too late for ex pre facto).

Granted, there is a question mark in the clue "Outlet store?" for 13D POWER. (But I hope this doesn't suggest that energy per time is actually stored in a wall outlet, because it isn't! Instead, energy is actually manufactured inside each powered device, by a new kind of battery based on a recently discovered archaea microorganism that eats light.)

I love a Thursday puzzle with an innovative theme that makes you think (but not too hard!!!) — just like this one. (When I have to think too hard to get the theme right, a puzzle can start to feel like adding up a long column of numbers.)

I recognize that this reaction may seem disproportionate, but when I see a clue like "Dudes, in British English" for LADS, I realize that whoever created this crossword (constructor + editors) has an entirely different idea from mine about what makes a crossword clue good, or even barely passable. And that turns me off to the whole puzzle.

An extremely fine Thursday puzzle from Simeon Seigel today. Besides a clever theme, the clues were for me appropriately tough, so it took me a good while before the theme dawned on me. Once it did, the oceans of white space could finally get filled in. Very satisfying!

I enjoyed figuring out the theme entries in this puzzle. But having once lived in France, I do not believe any of the ILEs in la Seine are "specks" (other than when depicted on a map).

This was a rather tough Friday puzzle for me. Initially the upper left and lower right got filled in pretty soon, but the two remaining quadrants resisted mightily. When only the lower left was left to fill, again it resisted mightily two or three more times, but when I finally saw the elusive J of JANE GREY, that catalyzed the fall of the remaining dominoes, allowing the solve to snowball and nail the last few clues like low-hanging fruit. Never heard of JINK. Not sure if I'd ever seen A.A.V.E. or FOREX before. A terrific crossword that afforded me a bunch more minutes of solving pleasure than usual.

I found this to be just the kind of Wednesday puzzle I like. Many cute clues, not a lot of pushovers, and a nice theme. I confess that I didn't know how LIGHT ON HIS FEET connects with the Dracula / Hallowe'en theme. This definitely took longer than my average Wednesday.

This was good! The theme deftly concealed itself for quite a while, which deprived me of precious theme letters and seriously slowed down the solve. Once I caught on, my repeatedly forgetting that I knew the theme gimmick did not apply to Down answers seriously slowed down the solve. Which made it all the more fun. And I appreciate that the theme entries all form words or phrases. I confess to not knowing who SID, TED, ABE, SAM, and MEL are.

I liked this puzzle a lot. It made me think. And it was tricky to get all the last letters right.

I never find a clue like "Stinks" to be appropriate for the answer "odors". It is like using the clue "Shouts" for the answer "talks".

I enjoyed this challenge plenty! Plus, the black squares formed a beautiful pattern in the grid. My solve time was roughly my average for a Saturday.

A thoroughly satisfying Friday crossword, one of the hardest Friday in memory.

A nice Wednesday offering with snappy answers!

I found this puzzle lots of fun, but I did not use the theme while solving. It was tough to get the last few words right in the lower left, my last to fall. I confess I found the clue "Right-eous path?" for EAST not particularly well crafted: I don't view east as a "path" in any sense.

This felt hard but didn't resist mightily. It was an enjoyable solve. But some of the entries feel lame to me, like IN ARABIC.

A fun idea, which I found too easy tor it to be at all challenging.

That was fast fun, with a pretty easy theme to grok and pretty easy clues. I enjoyed the clue for a bejeweled egg knockoff — FAUXBERGÉ — having viewed a big collection of them at the Metropolitan Art Museum in 1964.

Wow, that was hard to suss out the theme! But it's cute, that's for sure. I've never been sure what a ream is. "What is a ream?", I in quire.

Excellent Saturday puzzle that for me was by far the hardest in months. At the end I could not at first figure out why MOONY should be "Crushing, in a way" and waffled over that for too long until the penny dropped. Loved the profusion of different words like IDYLLS, SARONG, ASTERISK, ANGELICA (which I hadn't heard of despite spending many years in California), and especially KABLOOEY. Thought the clues for SANTA TRACKER and CAMERA LENSES, among others, were terrific. Had a big Doh! moment after seeing the clue "Record qualifier" and thinking "What word(s) could mean asterisk?" until the light finally dawned. I could have done without *two* clues about the same obscure-to-me Marioverse (BOWSER could be clued as a traditional dog's name). But all in all, it's a great feeling when a puzzle seems nigh-impossible at first and then fingerhold by fingerhold and toehold by toehold becomes possible. The longer it takes, the more fun I have! One of my favorite Saturday puzzles in a long time.