43: touched by his noodly appendage

themeless midi 13. enjoy!

construction notes (warning: spoilers)

hoo boy, this one took a loooong time to make. my goal was to make a midi using only 10 black squares. after a bit of playing around, i decided that my best bet was to go for triple stacks on the top and bottom, connected by two more spanners in columns 3 and 9. this was pretty tricky to work with. it's hard enough already to find snazzy triple stacks, and it gets even more constrained when you have two additional long entries running between them.

i settled on the top stack of PASTAFARIAN / ACCELERANDO / STAN TWITTER pretty early on, but i just couldn't find fill for the rest of the puzzle that was sparkly enough for my liking. eventually, what did the trick was adding a bunch of lower-scoring 11-letter entries from my wordlist into Crossfire. of course, that means you have to manually sort through a lot of mediocre-to-garbage entries, but there are bound to be some hidden gems.

sure enough, it turned up the SHALLOW ENDS / LET 'EM HAVE IT / YESYESYESNO stack, which i liked a lot. (admittedly, YESYESYESNO is a bit weaker than YESYESYESYESNO, the former being a less-popular offshoot of the latter. but i think the colorfulness of the entry more than makes up for it.) INTERTWINES was boring, and there was some gloopy 3-letter fill (SIE, ADE, HEE, OHS), but i liked the rest of the puzzle enough to overlook it.

hope you had fun with this one!