PUZZLE #100: Remedial Chaos Theory

Happy Puzzle #100! I wanted to get this milestone right, so I spent a lot of time brainstorming ideas. Unfortunately, I ended up with six puzzles I liked a lot and no way to choose between them. So, I gave each puzzle a number, rolled a die, and decided to publish the puzzle whose number came up.

I rolled a three, so here's the puzzle I chose; thanks to David Gold for testing! The meta answer is a word associated with chaos.

PUZZLE #93: Progress Bars

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SOLUTION to the last puzzle

Meta this week; first off, many thanks to Ada Nicolle and David Gold for test-solving! Second, no points for guessing what thing from this week inspired the puzzle. Email your answers to pascopuzzles [at] gmail [dot] com by 11:59 A.M. Pacific time on Saturday, May 29, 2021 for a chance to win a crossword subscription of your choice. Best of luck, and don't forget to look at the information below!

The meta answer is nine letters long.

These clues might be helpful:

"Cosi fan ___"

Grand ___

Honor

Olympic equipment pieces

Online admin

Saw

Shade of purple

Silent performers

Strain

Hope you enjoy the puzzle, and happy solving!

-Paolo

PUZZLE #49: Happy Grid-hog Day!

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Hello!

Sorry about missing last Sunday—school started, things got busy, same old story. Here's a light, breezy holiday-themed puzzle to make up for the absence.

As always, hope you enjoy!

-Paolo

PUZZLE #41: Double Play (Variety puzzle + CONTEST)

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SOLUTION to the last puzzle

Hello again! After three months of silence to the day, Grids These Days is back, and with a fresh puzzle to start the new month.

This week's puzzle is a variety crossword that I'm going to call "Double Play" (it's a modified version of squeezeboxes, seen if you scroll down on the linked page). The gimmick is pretty straightforward: each square in the grid contains either one or two letters, like in the example below:

There are two versions: normal (multi-word tags are included) and harder (no tags)—choose whichever version you're feeling. Also, this is a metapuzzle! When you're finished filling in the grid, you should be able to come up with an apt pair of songs with equal-length titles.

When you have the correct answer, send it to pascopuzzles [at] gmail [dot] com. One randomly-selected solver will win this week's prize, a free subscription to The Inkubator crosswords, a fantastic woman-edited, woman-constructed project by Laura Braunstein and Tracy Bennett (or, if you already have a subscription to the Inkubator, a gift subscription for a person of your choosing OR an extension to your subscription OR talk to me and we can make something work). Send in your answers by 11:59 p.m. ET on December 14, 2018 for a chance to win. Enjoy, and best of luck!

Feels good to be back,
Paolo

(P.S. you should follow @gridsthesedays on Twitter)

PUZZLE #17: Highway to the Stranger Zone (CONTEST)

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SOLUTION to last week's puzzle

Happy Friday, solvers! I know a Friday release doesn’t follow the normal schedule, but you’ll see the reason for its odd timing.

I wrote this puzzle to coincide with the release of season 2 of "Stranger Things," and I’m very excited to share it with you now. And it’s a meta contest! You should know the metapuzzle drill by now (and, if you don’t, click here for a refresher), so let’s just get started.

URGENT: Researchers of this grid have discovered the existence of an alternate dimension, which some have called the Upside Down. The scientific world is abuzz-- but there's rumors that they also discovered something else in the puzzle. What did they find?

Just FYI, the .pdf has an extra thematic element. I’d recommend you at least look at it before solving.

When you have the correct answer, send it to pascopuzzles [at] gmail [dot] com. One randomly-selected solver will win this week’s prize, a free copy of a forthcoming puzzle project I’m working on, which I’ll send on its release date. Plus, they have the option to suggest any word for me to use in a future puzzle (within reason, of course). Send in your answers by 8:59 p.m. PT on November 4, 2017, for a chance to win.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be watching the entire new season working on college applications.

Best of luck,
-Paolo

PUZZLE #5: All Night Long (CONTEST)

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SOLUTION to last week's puzzle

Welcome back, solvers!

We’re back with a new puzzle— and it’s a meta contest! The next two paragraphs are gonna be a rundown of metas, so if you're already familiar with them, you can just skip ahead. For the uninitiated, meta crosswords are basically puzzles within puzzles. They solve like regular crosswords, but there's a hidden extra layer that you have to discover for yourself, which typically leads to a final bonus word or phrase. Matt Gaffney’s Weekly Crossword Contest and Pete Muller’s Muller Monthly Music Meta are two excellent regular sources for these, and I highly recommend clicking through and browsing through the last few months of puzzles to get a feel for what metas tend to ask of the solver.

The meta element can be anywhere from easy (like this puzzle, where the solver had to see that the three longest entries ended with LATHER, RINSE, and REPEAT, thus telegraphing the meta answer SHAMPOO) to nigh-impossible (like this puzzle, where the solver had to see that each of eight starred entries contained an anagram of one word of a two-word country name, and that for each unused word in the country names there was an entry somewhere in the grid that was exactly one letter off, and that the changed letters can be arranged to spell meta answer SRI LANKA). I'm hoping this meta will be somewhere in between those two examples in terms of difficulty.

So, onto today's puzzle. When you have the correct answer, send it to pascopuzzles [at] gmail [dot] com. One randomly-selected solver will win this week's prize, a free copy of a forthcoming puzzle project I'm working on, which I'll send on its release date. Plus, they'll get to suggest any word for me to use in a future puzzle (within reason, of course). The submission deadline's 11:59 pm PST on Saturday August 12, 2017, so be sure to get your answers in before then.

Meta crosswords typically have some kind of prompt to lead you off, so here goes:
Full disclosure: this crossword was a total last-minute effort-- in fact, I was up from yesterday night until now just so I could get it done. Now, (a) I'm impossibly tired, and (b) since I just finished the puzzle, I haven't been able to get it test-solved like usual. So, you're getting the raw, uncorrected version. Provided you look past that, you should be able to find the eight-letter meta answer. 

Best of luck!
-Paolo