40: "soooo..."

oops i forgot to make a post for this puzzle. welp here it is, a couple months late.

construction notes (warning: spoilers)

this is the first puzzle i made using a new wordlist i cobbled together from spreadthewordlist, peter broda's wordlist, and matt ginsberg's clue database. i'm only moderately satisfied with how the wordlist turned out. i could definitely improve it somewhat, but i'm too lazy at the moment. besides, you're always going to need to do some amount of manual rescoring to get a truly great wordlist. so my plan now is just to manually rescore like crazy, with the long-term goal of having a large chunk of the wordlist manually scored. i'm gonna put the wordlist i'm using up on github sometime soon and continually update it with new edits.

anyhoo, this was a fun puzzle to make. the only real compromises imo were the partial-ish BROCAS and those four S's in a row sitting on the middle staircase. however, i will justify the four S's by saying that the grid can be easily modified to remove two of them: black out the S's of RAWBARS/REFS and SHAGS/SCATS. black out the symmetric squares on the other side. ANON/ALITTLE becomes NON/LITTLE, and PRIDE/PLANE becomes RIDE/LANE. isn't that cool?

also glad to introduce a new cluing angle for ULT. go listen to the song, it's a banger.