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This took me 51 minutes and is probably the first Friday gold star. So as a counter to all the wonderful people who can do this in 8 minutes and want something harder, it was nice to have one that is achievable to people who are still in their first year. Someone said they needed to do very little pondering. Bully for them, I had plenty to ponder.

Fun one, well done. I stand by kebAb but if it makes the puzzle work then it's worth it.

At a low ebb indeed.

Kind of a Tuesday. More themed than tricky. XKCD ref was nice. Homer quotes gives me an idea for a puzzle theme which is a mix of Homer quotes and Homer quotes. Admittedly I'd only recognize one of the two.

This is the worst puzzle I've dealt with in my 5 or so months. Saturday levels of endless crossing trivia and proper names. One rhebus. The image was hard to visualise in app, and the cluing around it felt just irritating. Ambiguous figure? Could be a great fill but a terrible pairing with the clue. On top of the the grid was highly segmented. I hated this, found it was an unenjoyable slog, and a waste of a rhebus puzzle. And the clues were inaccurate in several places. Just bad.

Heck of a Tuesday crossing NOLA with a baseball player from the first half of the 1900s. Plus the whole jugband thing. I've had better. Just overall too heavy on the americana to be enjoyable.

I'm sorry, who is supposed to know this trivia? Zero foothold to be had for your average human. Some Saturdays are doable but this isn't one of them.

Not much to say about this one but here I am, saying it.

Maybe not surprising that this isn't the popular opinion of the early crowd but this is the first Wednesday in a while where I didn't gold star, having leaned on autocorrect to get this done. Brutal amounts of trivia crossing wordplay, many naticks. If you don't know the trivia and haven't done crosswords for years, it's likely to be hard to get enough foothold to close this out. Ignore the complainers who said this was too easy. Bully for them. The trivia gap is huge on this one. The theme was ok. I've had better and worse. I strongly disagree with the columnists stating that people who do anagrams will solve this easily. I admit I find it annoying when they make statements like these as if they are universal. Not so.

M'eh. Slog. Can't stand Jason Mraz. Seems out of theme for the word edgy to be in the same puzzle where he's a revealer clue. Revealer was very well defended, but didn't help solve things. Anti-climactic reveal. Wow, a lot of ks. Boo-urns.

Back to trivia heaviness. Also lots of clues lately relying on knowing fancy words. If I look up the word and the first line in the definition gives away the answer, seems not like a clever clue. Just a vocab test. Feels more like homework than puzzle solving. Wish the puzzles relied more on solving and less on lookups.

Well we got a friday on Wednesday and a Wednesday on Friday. Guess it balanced out. Beat my average friday time by half.

Difficult but not for fun reasons. So much crossing of niche names and words, and specific trivia, in relatively closed corners. Didn't leave any fun to solve my way around it, just slog and lookup. And there has to he another way to hint Adele at this point I swear that skyfall clue makes a weekly appearance.

Cute theme, middle was a dense trivia slog. Who song could have used better hinting IMO.

This weeks has just been made unpleasant by the amount of proper name trivia and frequent natick. Not sure if it's random or part of some meta theme but IMO it's much worse. Do difficulty without relying on knowing the names of payroll services etc.

Just brutal.

Didn't enjoy this one. I got the theme but the answers felt forced or obscure. Feels overbaked, like someone really clever made it too clever to be fun. Just a slog of Thursday calibur wordplay and trivias. Maybe it's me but I'm finding the past week or two way less enjoyable.

This puzzle reminded me how grateful I am that every other puzzle stopped having hints that relied on seeing Wicked. It's a particularly high puzzle tax for people who don't care for musicals. The bottom half wasn't hard to solve and the song name easy enough to parse out even without knowing it. The top was brutal, though it didn't seem like it should have been. I hope this puzzle can be a send off to the whole Wicked thing. Love it or not, It's had enough crossword space really.

Easy and fast. Wish the images were part of the puzzle.

This was a fun theme, but the number of clues that felt inaccurate and the amount of trivia, lead me to bail at 95%. I just won't even feel good taking a blue star for this. Some areas were just brutal with cryptic and trivia crosses.

Bit niche for a Monday. Didn't enjoy multiple naticks.

This was hard and didn't feel enjoyable. Didn't even pushed to finish it. Shame. I'm in the middle if a Parks and Rec rewatch. A crossword written by Ron's Character would be interesting but probably also really hard.

Enjoyed this. Cute theme, punwork felt (no pun intended) fair, enjoyable to discover.

Tha middle row was a slog. Top and bottom mostly fun. But wow. Some pretty opaque if not outright disconnected cluing. Also I had the last 4 letters of scrape for 'unpleasant encounter' and ooowee I'm glad it went in a different direction.

Very difficult, I think the was for the hardcore puzzlers, not for me.

Good, fun.

Not so fun to fill, so many lookups. I never get these 'switch a letter themes' Like I understand them in hindsight but the clue never tells me anything. Also often the crosses are hard enough that I kind of have run out of care by the time I slog them out. This was a lot of googling. Do others find that fun or just know all the random trivia?

This had some really hard entries. Much tougher than the average Wednesday. Theme was fine. Who's played bridge this century though?

Meh to the theme and meh to all the trivia.

Enjoyed this. Theme revealed itself early without giving away the puzzle, so that's a great balance IMO. Enjoyed the dad pun. Was stuck for a while in NW because I assumed nitro was the booster.

Fim theme, enjoyable puzzle, brutal amounts of concentrated trivia in south east, gotta give something to solve it with. Shame to be forced into lookups.

This was hard. I guess when you reach a certain level, clues that seem like BS became fun to solve... giveen how many people loved this but complained about the more accessible puzzles that I enjoyed earlier this week. Tough friday, not for the casual crowd.

Suspect this puzzle was aimed at the older generation. Very difficult but not that fun for me. Nothing felt rewarding about it. Probably need years of puzzle doing to get they joy that a relatively miniscule number of commenters are reporting. Relieved that at least today, the overall vibe here is that this was for the harcore folk.

Nice to have a theme gimmick thrown in. Fun. Some tricky crosses. Maybe let's give aldi and aloe a break and bring back Oreo ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Fun theme, the bottom half just brutal with naticks and difficult solves.

A lot of these clues felt borderline, or worse in terms of relating to the answer. Didn't feel good about many of the reveals.

Killed by trivia. Tough for a Wednesday.

Record setting Monday natics. Not my favorite. Past two days have been 90% easy and punishing to finish. At least the comment button works now on the new in-app column page. Will be great when it respects dark mode instead of face blasting me with white light at night. I'm sick and grumpy and this puzzle wasn't the right one for me today.

Well done. Great theme, fun to solve.

Got the theme instantly (nutshell Gabe it away) but solving it was tough because the end result was a word or phrase that seemed to have no relevance itself to the puzzle, other than fukfillingnthe clue. Would have been way better if the answers had a theme or relevance. The rest was challenging. Some pretty obscure stuff and difficult crosses. Probably easy if you could get half of the trivia. The constellation answer did not even show up when I googled list of constellations. Talk about niche.

Fast but fun. Lots of very common answers.

Got the theme quickly, it works for a Wednesday. Struggled with a few spots like the north. A couple of tricky answers in this one.

Seize on? On set? I don't know. Feels thin. Should have just read a book tonight.

Good enough. A couple of clues relied on lesser known words. Always feels a bit soft when looking up a words definition essentially solves the hint. Beats obscure names as answers tho.

Good puzzle Crossing Tehee (odd spelling) with keel is a bit of a kick in the shins. I guess I should have joined the Yale online boat club during the pandemic.

Got the theme immediately but didn't catch that some words didn't it twice till near then end so the theme gave an added aha. The fill was challenging in places, so was remembering which squares were fake black. Wish I could have marked them.