Thursday 8:34

Kinda lame puzzle. The long down answers are nifty, but the rest are ho-hum and the cluing was totally tame, almost nothing that was tricksy or clever, and on a day when the puzzle is supposed to get that way. The only exception might be 56-across/57-down. xkcd is likely a mystery to some, and the clue that gives you the X is another tech answer with one of the only misdirecting clues "Echo starter". Still everything else is easy, and X becomse the only reasonable letter, even if you don't understand it The theme was whatever enough that I don't feel like explaining it.

It's been awhile since I've updated this blog. Google now has features that use AI to make me more "readable" or something. I won't. I've thought about feeding that elegy to my Dad to ChatGPT to see how it would rewrite it, but I'm not a politician; I don't need speechwriters to project myself to a nation. It's my voice, and it's better that way. I always hated the hourglass essay format.

This blog is public and not invisible, but I don't promote it, so nobody visits. I don't really mind, it's more of an excuse to write. Gotta feed my head, improve my attention span. I should read more too. I have a novel I got last Christmas, and I haven't read more than 20 pages of it, and it's good a good novel by a writer I like.

 Wednesday 6:35 New Wednesday record!

Pretty simple, and I sped through it without really pausing to overthink anything. It's very low on proper nouns aside from well-known people like CURIE and FERMI. A lot of whitespace too, with only a pair of "cheater squares" (blocks in the puzzle that don't change the word count), but they bookend the central clue so it can't be helped.

 Tuesday 9:07

Fair puzzle and a pangram. "Not on my watch" ties the other long clues together. Thei ends are all part of traditonal watch, but the clue is what a smart device owner might say (or a hint to the ends of 20-Across etc.) since a smart watch has none of those things (although what's a "case" is watch terms?) The smart watch seems pretty excessive as a device. Most texts are brief, but not so brief as I would want them in tiny text on my wrist, much less e-mail. I already have a phone, and it can do all that and much more, on a device that's much easier to use. If the watch could totally supplant the phone that would be one thing, but it can't, so you're going to have a phone anyway. A smaller, less useful phone on your wrist is nonsense.

I don't know. I'm far from a technophobe, but I do appreciate a paper book, a real magazine, a real deck of cards, physical software. I can appreciate breakthrough tech, too. The iPod, the iPhone, those literally changed my life. But I doubt a watch ever could. Phones have been supplanting the watch for years. It's as if we've all gone back to carrying pocket watches

Blah, I don't like this little treatise, but I wrote it, and I do have a blog, so whatevs. <clicks Publish>

 Tuesday 5:23 (crusht)

New Tuesday record! The theme (three-hole punch) is a little loose. A logical fallacy could be called a hole, an empty space is kinda a hole, and pigsty is also a little off. Punch works fine, but the other "holes" are a little too metaphorical.

Update: I just realized thid grid is only 14x15, which makes the time a tiny bit less impressive, but I'm counting it.

 Saturday 12:30

Hey, a double-pangram, and a good solve time. That's looks like an above average number of black squares for a Saturday. My time would have been a little faster if I hadn't tried to identify one pangram while solving. Since I finished in the southwest, I got the second Q and C very late, so it wasn't until the end that I discovered it was a double, and with 5 Zs in all. Clean fill, jazzy long answers, "new" things like SMH, POKEBAL, TSWIZZLE. Not much misdirection (23-Across, Made a lap?: SAT is one of very few). Overall very enjoyable, if a little on the easy side.

 Saturday 16:47

Not too tough for a Saturday, and my time bears that out. And a theme, kinda. Locked letters are usually verboten without a good reason. This one is a little thin, but making all the black blocks singlets (the confetti shapes don't appear until you finish) makes sacrifices like this necessary, and they do all connect. Plus there are 6 grid-spanners across and down. There's some nonsense like 50-down, but not too much. Just a Z short of a pangram.

 Monday: 5:10 (crusht, new online record)

Pretty straightforward. When the theme is redundancy, the long clues are easy to induce with just a few letters. There's the possibly problematic crossing of two proper names at 43-Down/60-Across. But most people know at least one, if not the other.