Do you like crossword puzzles?
I value my sanity and I will leave this undone for now. I hope I can provide some sanity pills for the people who need it for this crossword. Happy cakeday!
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I do the mini crossword and Wordle daily through the NYT Games app. There’s several other games you can play daily that I don’t keep up with and several free crosswords of varying size/ difficulty. There’s daily sudoku too. It’s a decent amount of material for free and you could get the full backlog of everything if you subscribe (which I currently do not).
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Mini crossword sounds fun and much less intimidating. I'll be checking it out.
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Happy first cakeday! Had to check because it actually felt you were here for longer hehe
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Thank you! :)
I was pretty active here when I first joined, so good to hear it made an impact! :)
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Happy cakeday, UnknownEAK!
Crossword looks solid, but also like firm native speaker territory - I'll watch from the sidelines :)
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Yup even with a firm grasp on the English language and as someone who plays crosswords daily, it's still difficult. It feels a lot more like cryptic crosswords but really is just lots of almost double entendres. Def gonna take me a bit to solve.
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Thank you, Tomas! :)
I am sure this will be easier for native speakers, but I just want to note that English is not my native language either.
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You're just a genius with words then :) - missing 6 and 7 for now - once the pattern revealed itself it got a bit easier
PS: found 7 - it 'is' a bit silly - but not wrong...
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happy cakeday! just stuck on 6 and 9 (nice). These are honestly good crosswords. They make sense as soon as you get them but are definitely difficult.
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I think PuzzleQueen3 is more apt. You rock at these.
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Thank you. I started doing cybersecurity competitions because of puzzles on here and now use this as a bit of practice for them. Have one in March that I'm trying to beat my score from last semester, so even if there's not cybersecurity skills needed for these, just solving them gives me more skills and helps with lateral thinking. Also helps being a native english speaker as I feel a lot of puzzles rely on that.
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I feel confident in saying you are brilliant. Good luck with the competition. I mostly do these to keep my mind from wasting away with age.
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Thank you so much. And I think it's good for anyone at any age to constantly do puzzles even if they can't solve them as the thinking itself is so helpful. Honestly, crosswords are mainly just a memory game as the hints are so often reused (no NYT crossword is complete without an ERE somewhere in it) and other puzzles can be helpful in other ways. There are some studies on how FPS's ca be helpful for decision making and things like that (specifically for those who don't normally play video games but those who do tend to do better when tested in those areas). It's just interesting how since we're living longer, we're more prone to dementia and how we can try to stop that when we're younger.
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Dementia is one of the things I worry about most. Now after seeing Bruce Willis its certainly a reminder of how nobody is immune to these things. We have come so far in the past 500 years and yet we have only scratched the surface.
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Happy first cakeday UnknownEAK! Hope to see many after this one :)
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I am totally lost with the scottish girl and a few others (not asking for clues). But I just wanted to thank you for putting the GA's. Much appreciated.
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The Scottish girl one might be the most silly one of them all. But I want to see if some more people can solve it as it is, and if not I might have to add more hints.
For now I added one very general hint for the crossword answers.
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Lol, I just found 3 and 4 - clues are pretty cleverly constructed - let's see how far I'll make it...
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Once I understood the theme I was able to get a bunch of them, but now I'm stuck on only question 9. Hopefully, it will come to me later or a hint will enlighten me.
Anyways, happy cake day!!!!
Edit: nevermind I got it 10 mins later, thanks again for the GAs and puzzle
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Happy cakeday Unknown! I'll take your advice and value my sanity this time but thanks for the crossword anyway :D
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I haven't got time to look at it today. Did you mention what time they giveaways end? Thanks.
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You have plenty of time, the GAs end two weeks from now. :)
I also added that to the description now.
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Happy Cake buddy! 🎂
Crossword? Easy peasy... not.
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Thnak you! :)
And it is an unconventional crossword, as well, more difficult than normal crosswords, something akin to cryptic crosswords without using their methods. It is what you'd get if a person who doesn't understand cryptic crosswords tried to make one (because that is basically what happened 😄).
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Haha, I had a very similar experience when I had first heard about cryptic crosswords (but didn't really understand them) 3 years ago!
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Too tired to fire up my last few working brain cells right now, but I wanted to say Happy Cake regardless!
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Thank you! :)
And if you do decide to give it a shot, the GAs are open for two weeks, so plenty of time.
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Solved the sudorku! 😄 For the longest time I didn't get the -(i^2), because I read the "i" as a 2. Clearly been a while since I've had to deal with imaginary numbers.
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from a quick skim it all looks good. impressive shit, take a whitelist
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They joke, but many Sudoku variants do work entirely off clues and custom rulesets (I also personally prefer Sudoku variants to classic Sudoku).
Here's some examples:
Completely empty grid Sudoku
A wild looking grid with many things on there but no digits
A colourful orbital Sudoku
A Monopoly themed Sudoku
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There's also the 9 (or N) queens problem which is how many ways can you place N queens on an NxN chess board (or some versions have NxM chess boards).
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I've heard of that one, but that starts to get too math-y for me. Though in general problems like those can be fun exercises, and even if you can't do them yourself, looking up ways to solve them can still be enjoyable.
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Well, I got one so far, not sure on the theme yet, but it's progress.
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Depends on which ones you get, but you can most likely infer the theme from as little as two of them, so don't give up! :)
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Got another one this morning. I think I know the theme, but still not quite sure.
Edit: and another. lmao still not sure of the theme actually.
Edit: and another. I think that just pushed me slightly further from what I thought the theme was, but maybe now I got it.
Another edit: only #7 left.
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So, apparently it is my cakeday on this site. I had completely forgot this was coming up, but I was kindly reminded by some. It doesn't feel I've been here that long, but I did take a break for a few months when I had all my stuff stolen last June. Anyway, apparently it is a tradition to do something for your cakeday here, and while I didn't have anything specifically prepared, I dug up an unfinished crossword puzzle I had planned to do, and I repurposed it for this.
WARNING the crossword puzzle is dumb,
(probably)difficult, and should NOT be attempted by anyone who values their sanity. The crossword answers may or may not make sense, and if that would frustrate you, I recommend avoiding the puzzle. I am not joking here and this not some obscure clue for the puzzle, as I really think some of the clues may be too obscure and not make sense, so proceed only if you are fine with a dumb puzzle that you might not be able to solve. Although, if no one can solve it, I will give some hints.The GAs (LVL 3+) behind the puzzle: Sorry James, Parasomnia, Dungeon Rebound, BlackJack Math Cross Numbers, Who Pressed Mute on Uncle Marcus? and they end 27th of February 20:00 GMT
The crossword puzzle is in the picture below, and you enter the answers here.
P.S. In regards to the poll, I am actually curious if someone regularily does crossword puzzles, and if you do, where do you do them? I recently found out about cryptic crosswords and while I'm terrible at them, I find them much more fun than regular crosswords. Though, I much prefer Sudoku to crosswords myself. For example, in newspapers I do the Sudoku, but not the crossword puzzles.
P.P.S. Judging from the poll results, I might need to make my next puzzle here, Sudoku. I'd just have to come up with a variant that can't be solved with online solvers.
Hint 1: All the answers share a common theme/category.
Hints 2: For 6, 7 and 9, that were claimed to be the most difficult ones:
6. You'd have to be mad to leave it behind.
7. Danish Toy + Scottish girl.
9. The version in your hand actually wouldn't be laughing.
Hints 3: For 1, 5, and an extended hint for 7.
1. The general didn't have people for dinner.
5. She won't explode like her namesake.
7. Danish Toy + Scottish girl - s.
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