#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]

online word search

A video about a mobile application that can be downloaded for free from the Samsung Store and contains many great games

Enter to Samsung App store to get all these games for free. Here's the link below.

https://bit.ly/3Dqzk4j

[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).

[waveypedia]

if you're on a connections withdrawl, try connections stacked - it's exactly the same as regular connections except each category has a different amount of words!

i like the latimes crossword (because i don't pay for nyt and therefore cannot play the big crossword). they have a mini and a sudoku if you play the nyt's, and a wordsearch to scratch the strands itch. lots of other newspapers have free online crosswords - i've also played usatoday and seattle times

there are also a lot of other daily puzzle games out there that aren't related to nyt games! my personal favorite is murdle - it's a clue-style murder mystery puzzle with a daily mini and full. all of the descriptor cards are delightfully written

tl;dr don't cross the picket line: play another online daily puzzle instead!

(Source)

"The Tech Guild is asking readers to honor the digital picket line and not play popular NYT Games such as Wordle and Connections as well as not use the NYT Cooking app."

[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

[fagimator]

Im so pissed about this still my ritual of burning through the crosswords offered by puzzle society dot com and then going to new yorker on private tab to do the full suite has been fucking ruined by paywalls. Now I have to open a private tab for usatoday , then do puzzle society, then open another private tab for newyorker. They fucked with my little crossword ritual im going to shit

Fuck you fuck fyou fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fcuk you go suck cock and balls give me my fucking crossword back

[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

[transmutationisms]

okay as a doer of both types of puzzle and a dabbler in crossword making i feel this is my moment to shine. 

crosswords have both a cultural cachet and the veneer of like.... supposedly indicating intelligence. like, to solve a crossword you have to have a certain base of shared cultural, political, and linguistic knowledge. it’s a way of arbitrating who and what is In And Out. people who stake their identity on this sort of thing often look down on sudoku because it’s purely a logic game. it’s more democratic in the sense that anyone who understands the rules could theoretically solve any sudoku. crossword is perceived as an opportunity to show off how much you know.

sudoku is also a much more recent arrival to american newspapers (2004 according to wikipedia, as opposed to early 20th century for the crossword) and, obviously, sudoku is still widely perceived as a japanese cultural export. imo this plays into the view of it as overly technical or technological—the engineer’s mockup of a brainteaser.

crosswords are still predominantly designed by straight, cis, white men. it is still, like, a big scandal when a mainstream crossword like the one in the new york times prints a word like “cis.” people write in to complain. guidelines on what can be printed in the crossword have been loosening (erik agard at usatoday has transformed their puzzle partly by widening these parameters) but these are inherently political decisions. you’re basically choosing what knowledge is acceptable to discuss over breakfast and whose names you expect readers to know.

so like, logan doing sudoku instead is very much like.... he opts out of all this shit because he doesn’t have this type of cultural taste or the respect of tastemakers. like, the crossword is something that nan pierce definitely pretends to do. logan on the other hand would probably think it’s gay to know the names of too many actors or recent novels or whatever. he’s boorish.

anyway these associations with the two puzzle types are so strong that a couple months ago when will shortz, the famous crossword editor at the times, got interviewed in the new yorker, they literally asked him this:

so yeah it’s a minor detail but it immediately made me laugh. it’s not just “hey did you know this thing about dad”—it’s specifically a kind of sad pathetic crude thing about dad. logan was never really able to play with the literati types and even as a media mogul he was kind of excluded from certain echelons of the media class because of this type of failure to come off as adequately snobby and intellectual.

wait i forgot logan being a sudoku guy is so funny. sudoku enjoyers are like….. looked down on by crossword doers it’s seen as a less sophisticated and uncultured puzzle. like of course logan owned tabloids and did the sudoku. they were calling him lowbrow again lol