28: eye on the ball

new puzzle! it's a themeless midi, but i'm retiring the "themeless midi x" naming format. why pass up the opportunity to make fun titles?

thoughts (warning: spoilers)

very glad i made this one work lol. the first step was finding a triple stack at the top that gave fairly common starting-letter combinations for each of the down stacks (SCA/POL/ONT on the left and RAI/ATO/TEN on the right). i started out by filling in the ATE at the end of the second row and the TION at the end of the third row, because i knew those would give lots of possible words and also allow for a nice start to a right-side stack, as long as you could get a decent first-row word. eventually i committed to SPOILEDBRAT/CONTEMPLATE/ALTERCATION, which gave a nice top-middle section and seemed to give good enough starts on the left and right.

for filling the rest of the grid, i started with the left side. (tip: if you want to just use autofill on one section at a time, fill all the other sections with X's or something temporarily.) initially, i didn't have any helper squares at the bottom---it was just a plain tuning fork-looking thing---but that gave garbage fill. eventually i figured out that having two helpers in the bottom row did the trick. the fill also conveniently allowed a black-square toggle from PETS/TEENS to PET/TEEN, which could be useful for maintaining symmetry depending on what was needed on the right side.

getting the right side to work was a nightmare. the main trouble was how limited the options for 16A were---the only decent options after RAI were L, N, and S, and the only decent options after ATO were M and N. autofill couldn't come up with anything good, no matter what configuration of helper squares i tried at the bottom. eventually i realized that my only option was to go rogue and find a stack entry not in the wordlist. i figured my best bet was something starting with TEN, because you could make up a bunch of stuff using units: TENKILOGRAM, TENWATTBULB, TENMILERACE, etc. i tried a ton of things, but none of it seemed to work. after a lot of tedious, frustrating effort that went nowhere, i finally found a nice configuration with TENHOURDAYS. not the greatest entry in the world, but at that point i was more than willing to take it. the helper squares don't mirror the left side, but i kind of like how they make the bottom 5 rows rotationally symmetric.

on the cluing side of things, i was very happy with how this turned out. i really like what i came up with for TENHOURDAYS, and i stole some fun puns from the clue database for SPOILEDBRAT and POLEVAULTER. there was also a nice pun clue for SCAMARTISTS in the database---"pros with rackets"---which is funnier than what i came up with, but i figured it's better to be original. also had some fun with several of the shorter entries. all in all, probably my favorite puzzle i've made yet.