NYT puzzle gripe
Nov. 6th, 2008 04:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuToday's NYT puzzle: good basic idea, but I didn't enjoy the execution. Too many hard crossings that I eventually got but didn't enjoy, and worse, it seemed to me that the theme was inconsistent.
Sometimes, the symbol represented its English spelling (rotTEN). Of those, only one spanned a word boundary (saleS EVENt).
Sometimes, the symbol represented itself (no one writes "mp-three players").
Of the two cases where symbols were adjacent, in one case they formed a two-digit number ("86 it") and in the other they were a "replace with English spelling, then take a two-digit number, then a one-digit number" -- so I must say that "worKING 24/7" was my least favorite of the theme entries.
So partly I was frustrated because I never felt that I could extrapolate from what I knew of the theme to help solve the empty circles, and partly I was frustrated because the non-thematic parts of the puzzle felt unnecessarily hard.
Am I being too picky?
Sometimes, the symbol represented its English spelling (rotTEN). Of those, only one spanned a word boundary (saleS EVENt).
Sometimes, the symbol represented itself (no one writes "mp-three players").
Of the two cases where symbols were adjacent, in one case they formed a two-digit number ("86 it") and in the other they were a "replace with English spelling, then take a two-digit number, then a one-digit number" -- so I must say that "worKING 24/7" was my least favorite of the theme entries.
So partly I was frustrated because I never felt that I could extrapolate from what I knew of the theme to help solve the empty circles, and partly I was frustrated because the non-thematic parts of the puzzle felt unnecessarily hard.
Am I being too picky?