puzzle 177: "wap (guest puzzle by ada nicolle)"

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guest puzzle by ada nicolle, who's dropped a lot of great freestyles on her site recently and still has a puzzle pack available for a charity donation; see details at her site. also, lollapuzzoola tomorrow; i'm signed up for the downs only division, and haven't practiced that much, so we'll see how it goes. but it'll be fun no matter what happens.

otherwise, apologies for not having a puzzle in a bit; didn't have anything finished last weekend, but ada was nice enough to offer this puzzle. we were discussing possible revisions to this monday and basically had this finished when the derecho hit, and i ended up losing power for three days. all things considered, i'm fine; there's a lot of people around here that won't get power back for much longer, to say nothing of all the property damage. gonna try to do a crossword twitch stream some time next week to raise some money for this; details to come soon.

puzzle 176: "chekhov's gin (freestyle 123)"

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this puzzle started with the upper left; i thought about having the two nine letter entries there start and end the grid, but the letter patterns looked nice enough that i figured i'd try stacking them. got lucky in that not only did it work out, but i was able to get a third entry in there to complete the themed stack. unrelatedly: the clue at 8-down works as both a straight clue and a cryptic clue.

last weekend's boswords tournament went well; i finished fifth overall, behind four people that i expected to finish behind. many congrats to paolo pasco for winning; we'll see if he repeats in two weeks at lollapuzzoola, where i might be solving downs only (gulp). in any case, you should sign up for lolla and get the boswords puzzles if you haven't already.