Thread by @ckingsc

For every like this tweet gets, I'll give a burning hot crossword take. Note: you may actually agree with some of these takes.

1. I've yet to be convinced that any publication can or should publish 7 days a week. Why publish seven ho-hums when you can publish one awesome one?

2. Any noun is almost always better than any adjective.

Clues for adjectives are essentially just synonyms. Yes, they are important as a tool, but you can pretty much make a puzzle of nouns and names and abbreviations of nouns and names.

3. You should have to defend directly to the editor the use of plural first names in a grid.

4. The use of non 15x15 should be promoted and encouraged.

5. AcrossLite is fine, and will continue to be the solving app of choice only because it is so bare bones, what else does a solving app need to have?

6. PDFs of crossword grids should be black and white, not gray and white. Printer ink be damned! This is the nature of the crossword.

7. You should NEVER read the comments of a crossword reviewing website, and I slightly judge you when you tell me that the comments of a certain website were particularly nasty, because that means YOU went and looked yourself.

8. The Saturday Stumper is not a benchmark we should judge things by.

9. Americans invented the crossword, and we also perfected it. A good cryptic is not as good as a good standard crossword.

P&A crosswords are a watered down version of both.

10. I've never solved a Mystery Hunt puzzle involving a crossword and came out the other end thinking I enjoyed it. Of course there are constraints, but the fill suffers every single time, and suffering fill is the leading hallmark of a non-enjoyable puzzle.

11. I am a big believer that everyone should enjoy a crossword the way they want, but I also think we should encourage paper solvers not to mark out the clue number after they figure out a word.

12. I HATE the word "Scrabble-f@#$ing".

13. Similarly, thinking adding "-esque" to the name of a person makes a fun new word stopped being cute 3 years after "Wordplay".

14. Patrick Berry variety puzzles are some of the smartest stuff ever written. Patrick Berry NYT crosswords are...fine.

15. The three contestants in a crossword tournament final should start their puzzle at the same time. No advantage for making the medal stand, your advantage is you get to show off for the entire room.

16. I get tired of how much some of you talk about crosswordese. Remember how Chris Words had a series "The X-Word Files" where I talked about how crosswordese like ERLE, LOA, and TET were actually cool things?

17. Everyone calm down about Dr Fill. It's a cool thing and y'all get too worked up about it.

18. Matt Jones should genuinely be considered for any list of best constructors of all time.

19. Commentary during tournament finals is boring to me.

20. The fact there is not one crossword constructing program that is found on both Mac and PC is absolutely insane.

21. I think @bewildering_ly is doing a fantastic job writing his monthly "Best of Indie" blog posts, and that exact model should be reproduced by someone I trust on the mainstream publication circuit.

The Orcas should be cancelled.

@bewildering_ly 22. The articles in newspapers are written with more zeitgeist than the crossword puzzle. We should rethink the submission-publication delay.

@bewildering_ly 23. We should only end funny tweets with (15) or (21) and no other number.

@bewildering_ly 24. A handwritten constructed crossword is not as finely tuned as a computer-assisted constructed crossword.

@bewildering_ly 25. Cruciverablist is a word I'd like to retire.

@bewildering_ly 26. There should be more crossword metas out there.

@bewildering_ly 27. Every month, there's a video of a song being performed in a beach house with the Pacific Ocean in the background, and we don't give that a second thought.

28. I will never figure out what a .jpz file does.

29. There should be a list of unacceptable words in crosswords, and any puzzle that features one of these words should be 1) not accepted 2) a discussion should take place in correspondence 3) future puzzles by person should be further looked at.

29a. Good editors already have a list, and "benign" meanings of words is not an excuse.

The 1/1/2019 incident is an insane thing that happened and I don't know how it came to be, and it worries me that it might happen again.

30. "The cycle" is a boring constructing metric.

31. Wide open puzzles that sacrifice clean fill are the devil, and I hate that we allow those things.

32. I have no problem with puzzles about the Beatles or baseball. I also think you have a real problem if you complain about current musicians being included in the puzzle.

33. Crossword books were never meant to be finished. There meant to be elusive, never complete, and always having the possibility to solve another one when you at the airport.

34. Evan's fill is better than Merl's fill.

35. The "Crossword Clues" category on J! is boring, and I'm not sure why they are so persistent on keeping it.

36. Every country and every capital is fair game. If you are in the UN, you are for sure fair game.

37. I find it odd we have no idea who Adrian Powell is.

38. Any defense about how puzzles "are supposed to be" regarding demographic, fill, or design should be treated IMMEDIATELY with caution, and possibly consider the accuser making cases in bad faith to crosswords as a whole and as an evolving art.

39. Newspapers don't have variations on words they use in articles. We should phase out (var.) in crosswords by the publishing source having the spelling they use, and that should be the only version of the word they accept.

40. Y'all. Stop watching those Hallmark movies.

41. The word "tuez" is a symptom of poor crossword criticism.

42. I am stunned the 50x50 has persisted for several years now. This seemed like a fun one-off thing that is now apparently a mainstay.

43. The strangest entry in the history of the NYT is A LOT ON ONE'S PLATE.

Not because it was overused, but because it was used 7 times between 2007 and 2011, used by only three constructors (Nosowsky, Krozel, Ashwood-Smith), and has never been used again! A brief supernova.

44. The Ginsberg database and XWordInfo deserve a lot of credit for the effort to create both of those databases.

Other parts of XWordInfo don't need to receive that much credit.

45. The "e-" prefix is real and is legit. I've said that before, but might as well add it to the list.

46. Good job @joonpahk for coining the term "Schrodinger puzzles", which replaced the term "Schizophrenic puzzles".

Proof that we can permanently behind us words that shouldn't be used in a glib way.

@joonpahk 47. The Cruciverb-L email list is a remnant of the past. It should have virtually no impact affecting 2019 crosswords.

@joonpahk 48. One of the tournament puzzles from "Wordplay" involved adding day of the week abbreviations to phrases to get new phrases, and theme entry added TUE to BAT BOY to get BATTUE BOY.

BATTUE has never appeared in any NYT puzzle, and this puzzle should not have been in the ACPT.

@joonpahk 49. We need a new tournament between-puzzle game besides Celebrity. It's a fantastic game, but that is not the venue we need to play it.

@joonpahk 50. It's fun that I won all those medals, but if I could be remembered instead for puzzles like the Italian one, the .gif one, and the cootie catcher one, that'd be nice.

@joonpahk 51. If you see someone in the wild solving one of your puzzles, it is your obligation to let them know. I mean, why not? Don't linger, but no reason not to let them know.

@joonpahk 52. Connecting-the-dots in a Sunday is too much work.

@joonpahk 53. We a crossword community wrote too many puzzles about the Timothy Parker scandal. I'm also guilty of this.

@joonpahk 54. Pangram should not be a target. It should only be a happy coincidence after you finished constructing.

@joonpahk 55. Good on you for having crossword streaks, but that ain't going to be me.

@joonpahk 56. Any musician with a Billboard #1 hit, especially one within 25 years of current date, is fair game. The songs to a lesser degree.

@joonpahk 57. The Boston community of Natick didn't deserve all that.

@joonpahk 58. Barred crosswords should be more prevalent.

@joonpahk 59. .dict files are annoying and hard to update.

@joonpahk 60. Roman numeral math should be abolished. If the answer is a Roman numeral, you have to state the number.

@joonpahk 61. The fact more ACPT solvers competed in the New Jersey division than the South division is a problem of geographic outreach.

@joonpahk 62. Constructors who write majority themeless should be more open to writing themed puzzles.

@joonpahk 63. We should be hiding more jokes into crossword grids.

@joonpahk 64. The logo of the New York Times crossword app features an unchecked square.

@joonpahk 65. It's time to think about bringing ACPT back to a location that features more than one building.

@joonpahk 66. The same way we are deciding that Sunday can be themeless, I think can start deciding whether or not Friday and/or Saturday could be themed (has to be a decent theme and a very strong puzzle).

@joonpahk 67. If a constructor wants the puzzle to have a title, it should have a title.

@joonpahk 68. The three-letter entry of [City]-to-[Other city] dir. needs to go.

@joonpahk 69. The "word that can come after the ends of the long entries" is a perfectly fine and nice, easy theme.

@joonpahk 70. An airplane crossword is supposed to be solved.

@joonpahk 71. There is a systemic problem involving the lack of women and POC in mainstream venues, and I'm not sure what the solution is.

I think the efforts we are currently doing are a great start. Change is slow and trickling, but is important.

72. I think over the next couple of years, we will see real moves that will change the amount of published output of previously minimized groups, but for now, the good effort to increase how to make crosswords has been fantastic, and I hope we keep pushing those efforts.

73. Without a doubt, @metabymatt has earned enough respect for people to calm the hell down regarding the misaligned difficulty of a Week whatever puzzle.

@metabymatt 74. One Star is too small for our group post Lolla.

@metabymatt 75 Easy-to-Read Crossword Puzzles was the best crossword book published in 2019. Order it today.

amazon.com/Easy-Read-Cros…

@metabymatt With that plug, I think I shall end my thread. Thank you all so much for reading along this diatribe, and for more crossword takes, honestly, just keep reading my Twitter. I call it pretty straight a lot.