36: free your mind

here's themeless midi 8. have fun!

construction notes (warning: spoilers)

a lot of my themeless midis have been based around stacks of long entries, so i thought it'd be fun to switch things up with a more "scrabbly" puzzle.

my first step was writing a program to look for 11-letter entries that use a lot of the four least common letters (JQXZ). i was very happy when this turned up the delightful EXSQUEEZE ME. once i had that, i ran the program again, but replacing QXZ with the next three least common letters, KVW. of the results, RAVE REVIEWS was the highest-ranking one that sparked joy. (there were "better" ones, though: JACKI WEAVER uses all of JKVW!) from there, i took an initial stab at a grid shape in crossfire, with a quartet of 11-letter slots, and let the filler find BRAIN IN A VAT and PLAY FOOTSIE for the remaining two entries.

i loved all four of those entries, so i pretty much decided to lock them in and build around them however necessary. (actually, i tried replacing RAVE REVIEWS with GIVE IT A REST for a bit, but ultimately i decided i'd rather have the positivity of the former than the snarkiness of the latter.) from there, the rest of the process was basically me being forced to lower my ambitions over and over again.

part 1: at first, i was fixated on getting the puzzle to work without the little mini-section in the middle. i wanted either a diagonal right down the middle or some kind of more interconnected configuration. but it just wasn't going to happen, mainly due to the troublesome X-Q double-whammy in the bottom right. after a stupidly long time, i finally accepted that i needed something a bit more sectioned off. this meant no other entries longer than 6 letters, which is pretty weak, but whatcha gonna do?

part 2: i spent a LONG time trying to find something i liked without that helper square in the top left. that section was the last part of the grid i filled, and i really wanted to make it work. i even combed through the REALLY low-ranked stuff in my dictionary, trying to find misscored words to boost and give the filler more to work with. it's not that i dislike helper squares---i just really liked how the existing black squares looked, with those two nice curves, and didn't want a random dot in the corner messing things up.

there were configurations without the helper square that worked, but no configuration sparked the necessary amount of joy. eventually, i admitted defeat and put in the helper square. i considered redoing the bottom right section with a matching helper square to maintain the rotational symmetry, but i liked the non-helper-square fill better. plus, the grid still has diagonal symmetry, so it's fine.

part 3: i wanted to make the puzzle a pangram, but after a half-hearted attempt at rehauling various sections of the grid, i decided i was sick and tired of working on it and gave up. honestly, i think it's kind of a power move to make an almost-pangram where you leave out a fairly common letter like H. or at least i'll tell myself that.

i'm happy with how this turned out in the end, despite the compromises along the way. the unimpressive layout definitely gave me more leeway on deciding which sorts of things to include in/exclude from the grid, which was nice.

hope you enjoyed!