puzzle 89: "olin college"

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last puzzle of the year here, and i'm looking forward to what 2019 will bring. for sure, lots of puzzles, both here and elsewhere. fingers crossed that there will be a variety, both in terms of outlets and types of puzzles. speaking of which: last week's touchword was well received, and there will be more of those in the future. and: if you missed it, i had a guest freestyle puzzle with the american values club crossword. definitely proud to have a puzzle there, especially since they do such great work w/r/t many issues in the crossworld, and i'm hoping to have more there.

puzzle 88: "touchword 1"

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variety puzzle! it's a touchword, which is a format i learned about from joon pahk's outside the box puzzles. instead of having words cross at the same letter, in a touchword, every letter is vertically adjacent to the same letter in at least one direction. the top row is considered adjacent to the bottom row, so the entire puzzle forms a nice cylinder.

bit oversized here, and probably on the harder side, but i think there's a lot of interesting answers in here. many thanks to paolo pasco for testing this and convincing me to flag multiword answers and ease up on some of the clues, especially around proper clues and tricky crosses touches.

in any case: this is the first variety puzzle i've had here on this blog, but i'd definitely like to have more in the future, and would love any feedback on what you liked or didn't like.

puzzle 87: "we three songs (freestyle 83)"

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this is the quasi-themed holiday freestyle promised last week; you can probably guess what the theme is from the title alone. was really just going to have a freestyle with three grid-spanning entries, but unfortunately, i miscounted, and it turns out they weren't all the same length. fortunately, they intersected very nicely. made it a bit harder on myself by trying to get giant corners, which is never easy with two answers already in place in each corner, but somehow it came out pretty alright.

as always, hope you enjoy; mini from yesterday if you missed it, and variety puzzle coming tomorrow!

puzzle 86: "stocking stuffer"

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this is not one of the two promised puzzles from the last post, but a little something extra i came up with yesterday; people who know the history of crosswords and important dates and such might notice some things about this puzzle.

anyway: more goodies and presents to come this weekend, and next week as well!

puzzle 85: "so it goes (freestyle 93)"

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as noted on twitter, this puzzle was delayed by the end of the semester, traveling home, and by the fact that this puzzle just would not cooperate. i'm still not completely satisfied with this, and apologize in advance if you consider anything here to be a natick.

however: as penance to make up for this, there will be two puzzles next week. one of them will be a quasi-themed freestyle; the other a variety puzzle (of which i'm looking forward to making more in the next future). there might also be more puzzles and/or surprises and/or presents under the tree as well.

puzzle 84: "playback"

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one of the perks (if you can call it that) of doing my own thing here is that i can see something in pop culture and make a puzzle off of that reasonably quickly and get it out there while it's still relevant. which isn't to say that the inspiration behind today's puzzle is going away any time soon, as opposed to some other puzzles i've made. but still, it's something to look forward to, i think.

as for the puzzle itself, should be enjoyable, although your mileage may vary on the two incredibly mathematical theme answers in a puzzle whose theme has nothing to do with math.

puzzle 83: "about time (freestyle 82)"

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once again, i found myself doing battle with across lite to get this one to work. if you didn't know, it has a limit of 256 characters per clue, which kinda reins in my tendencies to write really long clues. but for this, a themeless built around the really long clues for the seed entries, it almost caused some problems. ended up having to cut out more of the quotes than i would have liked, but it's probably for the best, to be honest.

(i should also note that the really long quotes are just two of the seed entries; there's four more shorter entries that also tie in to the mini-theme, and whose placement did not make things easier for myself.)