@SohaFarhinPine I have dwalt with a constant migraine-like headache for 18 years now. The last 5 - the pain is unbearable. During this time: I graduated high school, university, changed my qualification while on my maternity leave with my second child and I am almost on the verge of getting my second Master degree. Only I know what that cost me. And next week - I will be having a surgery for a pituitary gland adenoma removal.
You can do everything despite any hurdles - if you are stubborn enough
:)
Despite how it sounds, I am not complaining. I am actually bragging.
Even my mother is easily surprised by everything I do. Although, she is so used to it, if I tell her tomorrow I am going to Mars - she won't even question it
Less is more and more is less,
But let's go down the wondrous list -
Ignoring the one, so high and near,
And yet the lowest of all, I fear.
The dog's on top, then find your way,
The nearest, and a giant far away.
These are all above what's naught,
And yet in truth they are below.
So many more, ...
You are a secret agent in the service of the KGB, about to embark on a highly dangerous mission to infiltrate MI6. You have your disguise, your papers, and your backstory all prepared. The night before your departure, you receive the following email:
From: Andrew Void < a.void@disparition.com...
... seems some copywronger went to the trouble of deleting a better version i had saved ... get used to intertruders ... but meanwhile, here's an almost-as-good version. It's in 7:
yeah. When I heard Genesis back in the day, I heard the later stuff which was easier on my ears. But now, of course, I can tackle the 'boring' parts too
The Clues:
ACROSS
2: Tungsten for Hundred in tilt gives Chinese frying Pan (16,0)
5. Copied a monkey beginning to dance(5,0)
7. Adjusted tailless fish with Sheeran(7,4)
9. Rage boils over for equipment(4,0)
10.Burn a letter,maybe?(13,0)
13. Lebanon's Leader in amount for German River(14,0)
14....
Feel like going to LONDON from DALLAS but take a detour in BERLIN by the word change game.
All are six letter towns. You can change up to TWO letters at a time and make a new word. The new 6 letter word MUST BE a town, village, city, commune in Europe.
Cannot rearrange letters before or after ...
Adding on to @Ankoganit's answer, I can only guess but...
Interpreting the EDIT
Sounds the samest. Err...
But no hesitation would do;
the unlawful and the unworms don’t last.
Worms? Don't eww.
Preceded it is by the
successor of the alpha, starter in kites
With two big ladoos stacke...
People will give feedback as they browse the site's new questions, there's no need to advertise it in here. I'm sure you'll get ample upvotes if your answer is good.
@user38403 If you look at the puzzle itself, the author states she edited to add more lines after receiving a correct answer "so fast... so that the riddle keeps hot for longer".
@user38403 Well, puzzles should be fair. If a puzzle is solved - the solver should get the green tick. Changing the puzzle for drawing more attention after it has been correctly solved is not fair.
There's nothing wrong with the original riddle or the addendum riddle (as far as I can see) but the fact that it was solved and the poster decided to just tack on what is basically another whole puzzle is not something that should be done.
The preposition à, often meaning to, in(to) or at, combines with the definite article to produce the following contracted forms. These forms thus all have the rough meaning of "to the...", "in(to) the...", "at the...":
à + le > au à + les > aux With la and l', the corresponding forms are à la and à l' as expected.
Apart from the clues themselves (which I could go into more detail on if you'd like), the only criticism I had was that it wasn't really clear when it was over.
Like I said, I spent a while looking for something else.
2. "WOCK" isn't a real word. You're looking for "WOK". 5. "ape" as in to copy and "ape" as in the animal come from the same place. This isn't invalid - it's just underwhelming when the same meaning contributes to the same part of the word in both halves of the clue. 7. Lots of possibilities for "tailless fish" - took me a while to find the right one. 9. I don't think "boils over" is an anagram indicator? I'm pretty sure it's fine though. 10. No validity complaints here. 13. "Sulm" is fairly obscure.
Hm. In any case, I wouldn't allow it to be an entry without it being close to fully-checked.
1. Lots of abbreviations here, and you use "shortly" twice. It's not invalid, just not good style. 2. Nothing invalid about this clue. I'd've used "first-place" rather than "first" though. 3. "UA" for "underage" doesn't seem very common to me. I'd never heard of it before you sent me that clue for testsolving. 4. Nothing invalid here. 6. "Jogi" is very uncommon - not invalid, but I wouldn't allow it in a grid without it being close to fully checked. The J would definitely have to be checked. 8. "au" doesn't exactly mean "the", and CAUL is another very uncommon word.
Overall, I notice a lot of reliance on first and last letters. Eight clues use them - that's nearly half!
Also, the surface readings aren't great. Clues 2a, 9a, 13a, 16a, 1d, 3d, 6d, 8d, and 15d don't make sense at all, and 7a, 17a, 2d, 4d, and 12d are iffy.
Oh, and 11d has a tense mismatch - it would be "give employment" for HIRE, not "gives employment".
@Sid Yeah, it's definitely an alternate form of the word "Yogi", but I would not expect people to know that spelling. And I wouldn't expect people to know the Jogi community either.
Yeah, it's very difficult to make clues sound natural.
Part of it is choosing your indicators carefully so they blend in.
For instance, in 2-down, I'd use "first-place" rather than "first". It's still a first letter indicator, but "first-place" means "the position of someone who is winning or has won something, usually a race".
Oh, and finally, the puzzle as a whole. For the grid, I'd have made it interlock more - at least have everything connected. There are websites that will generate "skeletal crosswords" like those for you. I spent hours looking for something else since I thought the disconnected components were important.
And also, I'd have some sort of final answer. Even if it's just indexing into the cities to spell something, it's still nice to have some sort of signal that you're done with the puzzle.
Yeah, I did think of a "meta-answer" like thingy but It would have required even more careful choice of cities. They then would have to rotate into a word. It's pretty hard to find cities which rotate to a word.
This is a variety cryptic. Each clue or answer will be modified in one of four ways:
ONE CLUE: These clues are lonely.
TWO CLUE: These clues are twins - they have a bit of an identity crisis.
RED CLUE: These clues are communists - they love sharing specific parts of themselves with oth...
(I first entered the cities into the grid instead of the clues and thought we hat to do something with the intersections, which were made up, of course, of two distinct letters.)
@Sid If you were humn, you could call me your muse. (But on second toughts, better don't. It's nice to know that the rot13 was useful for something.)
I haven't posted a puzzle yet, but I've got some half-baked ideas sitting in a folder in the backyard of my hard disk. Some ideas come from misfired attempts at solving other puzzles.
@Deusovi When I read about the German river, I thought I was on home ground, but it was surprised to learn the solution. (The wordplay is quite straightforward.)
There used to be a car brand called NSU, which is a shortening of Neckarsulm, the town where the Sulm flows into the more common, but still not famous Neckar. A former colleague of mine always got upset when people pronounced the name of the town Neckars-Ulm, and he would get incensed and shout: Sulm! Sulm!
(Not a very interesting story, I'm afraid, but I was nice to be reminded of my colleague and my former workplace. So thanks, Sid.)
Follow my instructions to find me out.
Choose from sea men—one stripped, then one elite,
But they like to shift their places round.
The rest can be the rapper star, Paul
if only could his heart juggle.
What is me, you ask?
You say me as a first man
Used as an object, yet not a...
Well, the S is supposed to go to the last syllable. (Not to bore you to death with German grammar, but words can be pasted and sometimes, an S is put in between, which isn't very stressed and belongs to the first word. There's that river Neckar and of course the city of Ulm, so people tend to think that the first sound in the last syllable is the U, not the S. In the end, it isn't anything to get worked up about. That colleague was a decent guy otherwise.)
Hey! I'm assuming straight "here's an encrypted message, decrypt it" challenges aren't really welcome here. How would I make it more interesting? Is something like this usually accepted/well received for homemade encryption?
Here's a code. Can you crack it?
fw8904730983kf89023ncweamnfiope20tmi9b6m89ny327nery895mbi9tm0ei09x2e1m3y8n2
Good luck!
When a puzzle looks like this… AUGH.
I believe that the main purpose of this site, apart from entertainment and sharpening our puzzle-solving skills, is learning...
oh hey, I just got another gold badge that I was never expecting. Populist, for that more-than-a-billion matchstick puzzle. Why the hell is Populist gold, though?
Less is more and more is less,
But let's go down the wondrous list -
Ignoring the one, so high and near,
And yet the lowest of all, I fear.
The dog's on top, then find your way,
The nearest, and a giant far away.
These are all above what's naught,
And yet in truth they are below.
So many more, ...
The Clues:
ACROSS
2: Tungsten for Hundred in tilt gives Chinese frying Pan (16,0)
5. Copied a monkey beginning to dance(5,0)
7. Adjusted tailless fish with Sheeran(7,4)
9. Rage boils over for equipment(4,0)
10.Burn a letter,maybe?(13,0)
13. Lebanon's Leader in amount for German River(14,0)
14....
Feel like going to LONDON from DALLAS but take a detour in BERLIN by the word change game.
All are six letter towns. You can change up to TWO letters at a time and make a new word. The new 6 letter word MUST BE a town, village, city, commune in Europe.
Cannot rearrange letters before or after ...
Adding on to @Ankoganit's answer, I can only guess but...
Interpreting the EDIT
Sounds the samest. Err...
But no hesitation would do;
the unlawful and the unworms don’t last.
Worms? Don't eww.
Preceded it is by the
successor of the alpha, starter in kites
With two big ladoos stacke...
This is a variety cryptic. Each clue or answer will be modified in one of four ways:
ONE CLUE: These clues are lonely.
TWO CLUE: These clues are twins - they have a bit of an identity crisis.
RED CLUE: These clues are communists - they love sharing specific parts of themselves with oth...
Follow my instructions to find me out.
Choose from sea men—one stripped, then one elite,
But they like to shift their places round.
The rest can be the rapper star, Paul
if only could his heart juggle.
What is me, you ask?
You say me as a first man
Used as an object, yet not a...
Here's a code. Can you crack it?
fw8904730983kf89023ncweamnfiope20tmi9b6m89ny327nery895mbi9tm0ei09x2e1m3y8n2
Good luck!
When a puzzle looks like this… AUGH.
I believe that the main purpose of this site, apart from entertainment and sharpening our puzzle-solving skills, is learning...
