#the usatoday crossword puzzle

[breadboylovin]

@saturn-scribbles ok heres the story of how i became a hivemind fan through being addicted to crossoword puzzles (making my own post about this bc i think its funny)

feb 2022 i was a Word Game Wacko bc everyone was doing wordle so i would play literally anything i could find and so i did a ton of crossword puzzles every day. usually i would do the new york times, washington post, dictionary.com and usatoday. anyway on feb 19 2022 (i remember the date because i scoured the archive to see if i could find the exact puzzle LOL) one of the clues on the usatoday one was this

i saw this and i was like what the hell. why are we putting tweets in crossword puzzles what is this. who is this guy. so i looked him up on twitter and saw that ro ramdin (who i was already watching) followed him and i was like okayyyyy...

then i saw his bio linked to another twitter (the official hivemind account). clicked on that and they had just uploaded the first weird lyrics video and i was intrigued. watched that and the first best tweets video and thought they were funny. was a casual fan and then in summer 2023 i got an evil brainworm that made me obsessed with them and now im here

[vanessa-m-lounsbury]

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online word search

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[transmutationisms]

hey! i saw all the crossword stuff and wanted to ask if there are any other crosswords you like besides nyt/new yorker. thanks!

hi! so, the closest you'll get to nyt is the washington post and wall street journal puzzles; these are generally drawing from roughly the same knowledge base, though i find their clueing tends to be a bit straighter and less creative (new yorker's knowledge base skews a little more toward arts and academic theory, though this depends heavily on who the constructor is on any given day). the usatoday puzzle tends easy (meaning lots of straight clues; usually about the difficulty of an nyt monday) but it's also become much more interesting since erik agard took over as their puzzle editor: he's really pushed to move beyond the usual stodgy newspaper knowledge base, so although that puzzle doesn't scratch the same itch as, like, an nyt saturday, i do still really like it. i also love the black crossword, which is a free daily mini that places emphasis on terms and clues from across the black diaspora, and there are some free online puzzles that are pretty good: brendan emmett quigley posts a themeless one on mondays and a themed one on thursdays, and there's merl reagle's archive, which posts a sunday puzzle once a week.

but! puzzle preferences are highly individual so it's always worth poking around to see what you like. this is a good list of puzzles you can try out; you might also find that you really like certain constructors, and just follow their work (i love erik agard and anna shechtman, eg).

[daisydumpstaire]

ok I keep forgetting to make this post but last week (p sure it was August 20) I was playing some online crosswords and in usatoday one of the clues was "Brennan __ Mulligan of Fantasy High" or something and I want to find it again to show a screenshot but they have a weird thing where you have to have an account to see past puzzles but like. I don't know how that kinda shit works but does he know??? that he's a clue?? did they have to get his permission? I feel like it would feel so cool to learn you're a crossword puzzle clue if you didn't know already I'd tweet it at him but I don't have a usatoday account and don't use twitter but like now the question of if he knows just won't leave my brain

[boycritter]

whoever made the usatoday crossword puzzle for today is gay as hell

[transmutationisms]

sudoku classism is so interesting to me because in my country crosswords are a thing grandma does on a train station and sudokos are a little more respected (because grandmas usually dont know the rules and you dont need to know rules to do crosswords). also usually our crosswords are easy idk ive tried doing english crosswords and it’s some c2 language proficiency stuff😭

yeah there's certainly no actual grounding to sudoku being any 'easier'---it's just a different skillset that's required. a sudoku designed to be challenging requires complex logic, whereas a crossword can look sort of hacky in comparison if it comes down to, like, how many actors' names you know lol. and like i said, in america a lot of the disdain for sudoku is racialised and also coming from a specific segment of like, nyt intelligentsia who wants to culturally differentiate themselves from some imagined technocrat class 😭

the difficulty of a crossword puzzle depends both on its fill (the letters in the grid) and on its clueing. a puzzle clued 'straight' (definitions of words, direct trivia) will be a lot easier than one clued with a lot of wordplay, clues that cross-reference one another, or a particularly complicated theme or metapuzzle. so within the crosswording world there's also a lot of internal hierarchy lol. like, people who religiously do the saturday in the new york times look down on people who only do the sunday in the washington post, or god forbid just do usatoday. new yorker is more erudite. and construction-wise, grids with a higher percentage of shaded squares or 3-letter answers are easier and therefore legacy media submission guidelines usually limit these things lol.

anyway my point is just that american crosswords are made exclusive and highbrow on purpose, and people who think solving crosswords makes them smart usually don't realise how much they're just using "smart" to mean "part of the narrow reader demographic being targeted by this publication." also there are tricks you pick up by doing a lot of crosswords, and certain words that show up in crosswords and nowhere else (smee). down with crossword superiority complexes or whatever