Andrew

It's been a long time since there's been a puzzle with such a high percentage of clues whose answers I did not care one bit about. It's really hard to do a puzzle when they evolve things that I find unbelievably tedious. I got disgusted after a few minutes and decided to reveal the entire puzzle rather than waste my time.

This was so much fun. I actually had solved the entire puzzle before I figured what was going on. That took me maybe half a minute to figure out. Cute and clever. Wordplay.

At first I did not like this puzzle. I thought there were too many really vague clues, for example, 'wordlessly "indicate give me a hand." ' But I ended up really liking it. For me, what was essential was to figure out what goes in the circles. Often, I don't even pay attention to these and forget about them until I read the blog. But that wasn't the case for me today. It was really necessary for me to figure out what was going on with the circles, and then to fill all of them in. That gave me sufficient help in solving the long long down clues, which in turn gave me the necessary help to solving many of the shorter across clues.

The revealer today was just wonderful. A little bit hard to see the connection, even when solved. But after that moment's hesitation, it was just so clever.

Simply wonderful.

"I hope you are familiar with your U.S. state abbreviations." I am, thank you. And I still found this utterly tedious. This is the kind of theme that I really hate. Something that has to be explained and elicits groans rather than a sense of delight. Also come a way too many of either the clues or the answers involved garbage that I have no interest in. Who cares about donkey Kong? Not me. Far too much of this puzzle relied on things like this. That really turn me off.

This was a great puzzle. I loved it. But much too hard for a Monday. I think this should have been a Wednesday or even a Thursday puzzle.

Ugh. I did not like this puzzle at all, even though some of the clues and answers were good. Yes, I've actually figured out that there was something going on there with whole, but it still didn't click on how to enter or not enter this into the puzzle. Even after I used the Reveal Puzzle, I was not interested in how it worked. It reminded me of those times when you have to listen to somebody who has an obsessive interest in puns and bores everybody else at the table with them.