Dave

Wow, a real stumper of a theme - I'd figured out it was some form of rebus involving YES and NO but couldn't come up with anything consistent, and the regular clues were tricky enough that I didn't have much to go on for the revealer, so I almost gave in and looked at the column. But I'm glad I didn't, the rush I got when I finally puzzled it out was worth the struggle!

A quick fun one today. Mostly I just wanted to take a moment to agree with the folks giving praise, "Use non-lead pipes?" is an all-timer of a clue.

Fun puzzle, the difficulty felt like the right balance between tricky and doable to round out the week. My only complaint is that it had an intersection of two names I don't recognize (HUNTER*AYES and Sian *EDER), with the shared letter being one that I couldn't reasonably infer. It's always a bit disappointing to finish a puzzle by randomly entering letters until you hit the right one. Oh well, it was a fun time otherwise!

I don't think I've ever felt older while solving a crossword than when I instinctively answered LPS for "Media for old music players", then had to delete that and type in CDS. Thanks, NYT!

Very fun theme, although I was thrown off by the NE corner because I would've sworn that the band was N*SYNC, and only learned otherwise when I was forced into it to complete the puzzle. Berenstain'd again!

I was surprised not to see ALOP mentioned in the writeup, I was able to guess it as some form of "lopsided" but as far as I remember, it's new to me. Well, it was a fun puzzle and I always enjoy finding new words, so good times all around.

Imagine getting that dial-up modem clue through in your debut puzzle, what a coup! Great stuff!

I figured out the S to SH part of the theme first and was trying to puzzle out how it made sense, then laughed out loud when I got to JAMESBOND and knew it had to be a Connery reference. Great fun all around, a really impressive debut!

Fun one today, great theme design. I always appreciate when a constructor can pull off something clever in the puzzle layout without making it feel awkward to solve.

Wow, that was the toughest puzzle in quite a while. I just could not get on the constructor's wavelength today. Between incorrect guesses obscuring the board and many more clues than normal that I just plain didn't know, I went way over my usual solving time. But I got there eventually, now it's time to have a relaxing Saturday.

I got a little worried when I was going through the across clues and didn't see any holiday theming, but then I looked around a bit more and saw what was going on. Great theme idea, and the perfect difficulty for a nice relaxed solve. Hope everyone has a great Christmas!

Not a super tricky puzzle, but a very fun one, especially for the theme. I got thrown off by instantly going with DENIM at the start, but after that fell through, I lucked it and found it and its reverse in the correct space. From there, it was a lot of fun to work through the rest of the themed answers. A good time all around!

A perfect AHA moment when I solved the puzzle except for the empty center, with an apparently unresolvable conflict between the top ICE and the center's apparent SIEZE. Then I started the area fresh and noticed the "Diamond, informally" clue without any crossing letters, and the entire solution instantly became clear. Well done by the creator!

Broke my months-long streak, sigh :/ But it was a fun one anyway, with an impressive amount of long fills. I just couldn't get past putting BEAST instead of BEAUT and SOY instead of SON, I knew they were the problems but I absolutely could not figure out anything else to go there.

Very clever theme - too clever for me, I completed the puzzle without figuring out the trick. The closest I got was knowing the true answer to the first gimmick should be GUTTER, and having a general idea that RAT should be taken OUT of the entered one. But that didn't quite get there, and didn't make any sense for the subsequent ones. Oh well, it was a fun solve even if I had to read the theme explanation afterwards!

This was an oddball you since, kind of a reverse difficulty for Sunday - I got the theme pretty quickly, which is usually the tricky part, but this time around the rest of the fill was what gave me trouble. Plenty of unfamiliar words or names that I had to puzzle over for longer than normal, but I got there in the end,and had a good time overall. The most interesting piece was figuring out EOLIAN by crossing answers - I have no recollection of that term, and I have a whole background in weather science! I guess there's always room to learn something new.

I'm glad I checked the column today after finishing the puzzle, the theme felt a little clumsy because I hadn't realized all the relevant Across answers ended in an exclamation point. I figured I must be missing something, and I was. Not that it would've mattered that much, this was a very fun solve today regardless of the theming.

Loved the theme today, I'm a big cryptid-head and I was delighted when I saw the silly play on them coming together. Well done!

A cute theme today. I'm glad the blog's around - I managed to figure out the general gimmick and solve the puzzle without ever seeing the INONESENSE clue, so I enjoyed the extra laugh when I read how SORTA fit into the theme afterwards.

Fun puzzle, just wanted to say I enjoyed the original clue for GLAMROCKER very much!

Wow, I knew I was in for something different saw such a walled-off design with so many grid-spanning entries, then I was blown away to find out it was a debut puzzle. Kudos to the constructor, it was a tricky challenge but with just enough short cross clues to get me through the long answers without any help. Great job!

This was a fun one, an especially good one to work out the theme on my own, and I had a big laugh when I got to FINESTHOMER and realized the wordplay wasn't necessarily at the start of a word. Just good times all around, and a great debut puzzle.

A very good one, it was a delight to work out the theme and suddenly realize it was a "holiday". Crazy that it had such a short turnaround, but I'm glad it didn't sit for another six years!

This was a nice one - a straightforward difficulty level making for a fun stove, with a cute theme. I enjoyed the (presumably unintentional) trickery of immediately jumping to AVOW/AWOKE for a cross solve when it actually turned out to be AVER/AROSE - the AVOW/AVER possibility pair never misses a chance to sow chaos!

That was a fun puzzle, classic Friday difficulty that seems impenetrable at first but then starts coming together smoothly after you fill in a few minutes key words. I'll admit to being thrown off by ADAPTOR with an O, though, I was so certain it had an E that I had to look up the solution to finish off the puzzle. I should've known that the crossing was OSTENTATION, but I just assumed it starting with an E was a term I'd never heard of. Oh well, I got an interesting read about regional spelling variants out of the whole thing, at least.

Great fun, trickier thank normal for a Wednesday (in a good way), and a very good entertaining theme. I even took a screenshot towards the end to sketch in the lines myself to see if it was going for the illustration I expected (it was), which was a fun little extra bit of business.

A fun one today, I also found it to be more of an engaging level of trickiness than an outright hair-puller. My only trouble spot was the final blank winding up on the intersection of KOLN & ANNEE - I didn't know the German town, and couldn't make heads or tails of the "Mars" clue until I guessed right and read the crossword blog.

I liked this one. I always enjoy when there are identical clue pairs, so elevating them to the theme level (plus having a standard one in "British title) made for a good time.

A fun one today, it was a good level of difficulty that turned out to be trickier than I expected after the first few upper areas. I enjoyed discovering the theme - my favorite was me being so certain about the standby drink with marshmallows (COCOA) that I took way too long to even consider it revisiting it, only to find out it had zagged on me with a longer, themed version of the answer. Great stuff, really solid debut.

Fun little theme today, I liked that it caught me off guard twice while being so simple - first, when I noticed SET was coming up multiple times, and second, when I realized a bit later that it was the *only* three letter word. Good times.

After no end of trouble with yesterday's puzzle, this one was perfect to finish off the weekend with. Funny theme and about the ideal challenge level for a big Sunday solve. Great job by the constructors!

Fun solve today. I liked the theme, but I think I would've been hopelessly lost without the shading, so I'll add another vote in support of having added it in.

Whoof, I like a good challenge, but this one got me. Between names I didn't know and some trickiness on the longer answers, I had to look up a couple for the first time time in ages. It felt good to finally wrap it up, but I'm definitely ready for an easier time tomorrow!

A very fun one - I saw the creator's name joke ahead of time so I had some idea of what to expect, but even with that, I still had to think a lot to puzzle out most of the groaners (meant positively) in the themed answers. The only downside for me was having to finish the puzzle by solving SOL*M/*LTA with complete guesswork, but that's a small complaint compared to how enjoyable the puzzle was overall.

Trickiest one in a while, it was a bit much for me. I got there eventually, but I had to look up some names and places along the way, asking with some guesswork finishing off the previously unknown (to me) MENOMOSSO.

Fun one today, although I got tripped up by the MEN - I coincidentally managed to put both TINMAN and LIFEBEFOREMEN, with the incorrect crossing answers KABAB and OLE being close enough to real possibilities that they took me quite a while to track down.

Solid puzzle today, I enjoyed the theme a lot - it's always fun to hit that sweet spot where you can guess a couple themed answers on sight, but the others still need some cross letters to solve.

Whoof. Fun one today, I liked the mix of themed clue types, but ALL YOUR EGGS as rebuses defeated me. I just couldn't get past the idea of it being EGGS all three times, especially since the last one fit. Ah well, it was a good time anyhow.

Great fun today, a lot of the longer answers were funnier and clicked with me more than usual on a themeless day. I'll also add to the praise and say that "Golden retriever who ends up with a chocolate lab" is my favorite clue in quite a while, well done!

Tricky one today, especially the right side with longer foreign words I had to solve purely from their cross clues. It suddenly got more doable when I finally realized that there aren't ZERO states beginning with B, there are NONE. A good time overall.

The reveal was pretty entertaining today. I had no idea what was going on when I had KLEE, KLIMT, and MIRO in place, those just look like gibberish if you're not up on art history enough to instantly recognize them as surnames. Then I finished up the puzzle with GOYA, which *is* instantly recognizable to me, and I suddenly figured out the theme.

This was a toughie, I had to pause and come back a few times through the day before I wrapped it up. But it was great fun, I loved figuring out the theme, and it felt like an interesting balance between that and the punnier long answers that you expect from a Fri/Sat puzzle, in a way that worked out well for me.

That's gotta be my fastest Sunday solve, at 12:23. It helped that I latched onto the theme right away and skipped through to solve the related clues aside from BALLETSLIPPER and EMILYBRONTE, that was a big set of letters to help the cross clues go by quickly. In any case, I loved the theme and had a great time playing plowing through the puzzle!

I had a good time with this one. I randomly wound up filling the entire right half with almost nothing on the left side, which made for an interesting visual that seemed weirdly fitting for the theme. I guessed it was going to be long anagrams, which are always entertaining, and sure enough I had a lot of fun working out the left half of each pair.

Good one, another Saturday puzzle at about my ideal level of trickiness without making me beat my head against the wall. I also enjoyed the quadruple Qs, I always like finding cute little touches like that in the late-week themeless puzzles.

Fairly quick solve for a late-week puzzle, in a good way (especially after beating my head against the wall a bit yesterday). Although I technically didn't quite finish it - someday I'll remember that SHYER can also be spelled SHIER, and I'm bad enough at remembering place names that LANAY didn't jump out as incorrect to me. Oh well, a good time anyway!

Phew, people's names, foreign languages, and the usual longer themeless phrases - tricky, but I got there in the end. A good challenge for the end of the week.

Nice one today, tricky but doable with only one break to let my subconscious stew for a bit. I was a bit surprised that HEGIRAS didn't show in the column, as it's one I don't recognize or remember seeing before. I had a bit of luck finishing it (and the puzzle) off with the R in CRU, a word I'd never come up with on my own, but managed to pull from vague NYT crossword vocab memories at just the right time.

Well, thank goodness for the column - I appreciated the theme once it was spelled out, but I was yet another one who solved the puzzle without getting it myself.