24: a wierd puzzle

new puzzle! this one's a themed full size. difficulty: not easy, but doable, i think.

thoughts (warning: spoilers)

i really enjoy the "modifying common phrases to produce silly ones" genre of crosswords, so it was exciting to come up with this puzzle idea. finding theme entries was probably the hardest part. i basically did an exhaustive manual search, typing "EI" into the crosshare constructor at various positions in words of various lengths and looking through all the possibilities trying to find workable phrases.

i was happy with most of the themers. the only one i didn't like was "styli econ", because the pluralization is kind of grammatically awkward (surely you'd just call such a class "stylus econ"), and because "style icon" isn't quite as recognizable a phrase as the others imo. i was also considering NONPARIEL ("Metis resistance leader Louis, if he hadn't had any children?"), but in the end i decided on STYLIECON because it was more consistent with the other entries (multi-word phrase where the swap happens across a word boundary). other scrapped themer candidates included WEDGIESSUE ("pulls a cruel prank on basketball star Bird?") and WAFFLIERON ("light switch setting that more closely resembles a breakfast food?"). i also tried looking for CIE phrases to change into CEI, but didn't find anything good.

filling the grid was also tough. the SE corner was limited by STYLIECON and AFTERC, and it was tricky to do without a bunch of garbage fill. the key turned out to be moving the revealer to the second-from-bottom row, instead of the third-from-bottom where i initially had it. (i had to use NCO though, which was annoying because i hate having military shit in my crosswords.) then i decided to try to make it a pangram, which made filling the rest hard too. surprisingly, the NE corner was the easiest, even though that's where i put most of the rarest letters.