#daniel and doug I curse you to be unable to find good coffee for two days

[copperbadge]

When I mentioned I was feeling a bit apathetic about my usual phone games and apps, therapist (I should give her a nickname of some kind) suggested rotating in a new puzzle or game for a dopamine hit, so I thought I might go back to "Diagramless" crosswords, which is where you do a normal crossword but without any of the dark spaces or numbers. I used to do the normal crossword but when you've been doing crosswords since the age of 15 they stop being very challenging after a while.

The problem is that because diagramless or skeleton crosswords are more difficult, they're not readily available, like I couldn't just go out and buy a book of them; there was one Chicago paper that would print them but they were cribbing the clues from the LA Times and anyway that only worked when I was stealing the paper from my workplace years ago.

My workaround was to create a 15-square grid in Excel, print that out, and do them by hand (more satisfying anyway) using clues from the LA Times crossword that I copy-pasted in. I stopped doing diagramless basically because just acquiring them was slightly more work than I wanted to be doing on a regular basis. (If anyone knows of a phone app that offers them, or a book of them I could buy, sing out.)

Anyway all was going well; above you can see the first two I did, and while I'm obviously rusty it's very satisfying to just do one, let alone complete them. I didn't bring very many with me while traveling but I was doing today's and something seemed...very off. It took me about four lines in and several headscratchers to realize that the puzzle clues were randomly and unusually for a 16 square crossword and I was trying to cram them into a 15 square grid.

Insert old joke here about "You aren't allowed to do crosswords anymore when you can do them entirely wrong" etc etc

Personally I blame Dan and Doug who designed it, and Patti who let it through, but on the other hand "Dan Doug and Patti" is a great name for a folk trio so I can't be too mad.

[ID: Several images of a printed 15-square grid filled out by hand with both crossword clue answers but also the squares and numbers that give the puzzle structure; the third image is only partially filled and clearly full of errors, and the last image is of the actual LA Times puzzle pattern, showing that there are 16 squares instead of 15. This never used to happen.]