Seriously...I had looked at this puzzle not long ago and really thought I had clued it too easy for Thursday. Will toughened it up in a few spots. But people had a rougher time than I would have expected. I figured the unnumbered squares (or hyphens) would have been dead giveaways for "turn here" ... but apparently not.
John, I think the "turning" answers were fairly hard to spot with the hyphens, and most blog commenters probably solved online. Otherwise, "freshness" always increases difficulty because less-common words don't jump to mind as easily (regardless of cluing). 99.3% Thursday percentile, yowza!
maybe my spidey-sense for metas helped me here. i "knew" it wasn't going to be a rebus, because we had one last thursday. and i knew from the warning about clue numbering that there was going to be grid funkiness, so i was on the watch for that. it still took me a long time to get the theme, but i did navigate through the other clues fairly smoothly.
The online aspect did make it a little more difficult, but it was actually only a few fill words that amped the difficulty here.
For me, SEMIOTIC (which was actually an unfamiliar word and uninferable to me without every crossing letter), combined with a couple of tricky crossings made the last section much tougher - the rest of the puzzle, I am with Joon and John.
I think if you got stuck on a bit of non-theme fill in this one, it amplified the difficulty level since it made the long theme answers much harder to crack. Of course, go the other way with easy cluing, and the whole thing falls too quickly. So a nice balance here.
6 comments:
another one? i'm on a roll. this wasn't that hard, was it?
I didn't figure out the theme until near the end! Had [NOSE] in a rebus square at 1A...
this wasn't that hard, was it?
I'm with Joon.
Seriously...I had looked at this puzzle not long ago and really thought I had clued it too easy for Thursday. Will toughened it up in a few spots. But people had a rougher time than I would have expected. I figured the unnumbered squares (or hyphens) would have been dead giveaways for "turn here" ... but apparently not.
John, I think the "turning" answers were fairly hard to spot with the hyphens, and most blog commenters probably solved online. Otherwise, "freshness" always increases difficulty because less-common words don't jump to mind as easily (regardless of cluing). 99.3% Thursday percentile, yowza!
maybe my spidey-sense for metas helped me here. i "knew" it wasn't going to be a rebus, because we had one last thursday. and i knew from the warning about clue numbering that there was going to be grid funkiness, so i was on the watch for that. it still took me a long time to get the theme, but i did navigate through the other clues fairly smoothly.
The online aspect did make it a little more difficult, but it was actually only a few fill words that amped the difficulty here.
For me, SEMIOTIC (which was actually an unfamiliar word and uninferable to me without every crossing letter), combined with a couple of tricky crossings made the last section much tougher - the rest of the puzzle, I am with Joon and John.
I think if you got stuck on a bit of non-theme fill in this one, it amplified the difficulty level since it made the long theme answers much harder to crack. Of course, go the other way with easy cluing, and the whole thing falls too quickly. So a nice balance here.
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