49: mmm... purple

hello! here's a rejected NYT puzzle from 3 years ago that i never posted...

in 2023 i decided to take an indefinite break from constructing. i had been finding myself getting more and more obsessive over quality level to an unhealthy degree, and puzzle creation increasingly felt frustrating rather than fun. i also stopped paying much attention to the crossword world in general, aside from occasionally solving puzzles with friends.

the past couple years have been pretty good for me, for the most part. i'm considerably less socially isolated than i used to be. the past year or so i've gotten super into Scrabble; i've been going to my local club and doing IRL tournaments (as well as playing a ton online). i've also been doing more music stuff. i'm in a band now! i play guitar in a post-hardcore duo with my friend tristan, who plays drums. we've played a couple local shows and are currently working on a demo EP. we might even try to go on a mini-tour next year up the east coast or something, we'll see!

anyway, i might give construction another shot while i have some free time over the holidays. i think i have enough distance from it now where i can approach things more freely and have some fun with it again. until next time!

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a useful construction trick

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hello! it was recently brought to my attention that a couple years ago i said on Discord that i would explain a certain useful constructing trick i use and then forgot to follow up lol. well, today's the day i finally make things right :P whoops here's a basic example to start: let's say you're trying to fill a grid where 1-Across starts at the top left square and is 10 letters long, and you want 1-Across to be anything from your seed list (but you don't care what). then what you can do is: 1. create a custom dictionary which contains all your 10-letter seed entries, except with some arbitrary non-letter character like "1" prepended to each of the words. (i have a python script for this. side note: i don't have a "seed list" per se, i just pull out the highest-scoring entries in my personal wordlist/edits file.) it should look like this: 1BENDYSTRAW;59 1HEARTEMOJI;59 ... (side note #2: i always use odd scores for entries tha...
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