The Sphinx's Lair

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lyxal

00:29

@DanielS sounds like your friend wouldn't hear that from anyone else

Did you make it clear you wanted to tell them how you were feeling about the situation, to try and make them understand?

Jafe

hehe

Sphinx

00:46

Q: You won't believe what John's hostesses discovered

This is a three-dimensional crossword. The seven grids below depict the layers of a 7x7x7 cube. "Across" and "down" clues work like in normal crosswords, and "away" clues go through the layers, using circled cells only. Solve on Penpa+ Across 1. John's hostesses discovered he's frequently almost...

cryptic-crosswords

3 hours later…

oAlt

03:45

@AncientSwordRage what do you mean

@Jafe oh was it this one

Feb 6 at 14:04, by Jafe

started working on a 100+ clue 3d cryptic... what the hell is wrong with me

Jafe

04:18

yeah

1 hour later…

Jafe

05:28

TIL the carpentry term butment cheek... sensing the wordplay opportunities here

msh210

06:00

@Jafe Men inserted between…

Jafe

writes itself, pretty much

3 hours later…

oAlt

09:10

@Jafe this is subjective but would you say the writing pace was fast, average, or slow

out of curiosity

im trying to remember my pace but I think it's 2 weeks for a 15x15 crossword, though the sample size is very low (<10) and I mentioned having taken ~4 months once before

Jafe

09:59

it was definitely slow at first, think i mentioned an early-june estimate at some point which would have been like 1 clue per day... then i rattled off a bunch of clues in the last week or so :P

but it's hard to compare when you're working on other things in parallel

used to do weekly 13x13s which is like 4-ish? clues per day, not sure if that counts as normal or max speed

Sphinx

10:16

Q: Off to the sky!

What bird is represented below?

word knowledge enigmatic-puzzle visual

Q: A Venndredi Special!

Another Venn based puzzle from me. The three overlapping ellipses form seven curved regions. Your task is to place exactly one tile per region, so that the four tiles in any one ellipse can solve the corresponding clue!

wordplay lateral-thinking

3 hours later…

oAlt

13:02

@Jafe oh right I think I remember that estimate

@Jafe and yeah,

Sep 29, 2022 at 16:04, by Stiv

(Life)

I wonder what the physical let down is in the C4

Sphinx

13:19

Q: Not Once, Not Twice

FIND THE WORD HIDDEN IN THE IMAGE BELOW. GOOD LUCK!

knowledge visual

3 hours later…

GentlePurpleRain

16:41

@AncientSwordRage I think this is LACTATE from a homophone of LACK (without) + TATE (art gallery). Lactation involves the "let-down reflex", and is often referred to as "letting down (one's) milk".

Ankoganit

ooh

nice find, never would've thought of that

juicifer

yeah same^

(to both points)

Sphinx

17:07

Q: Another four 3D masyu

This puzzle is inspired and descended from this one: Brain-breaking 3D masyu Here the exact copy of rules, for convinience: This is a three-dimensional masyu puzzle.1 The five squares depict the layers of a $5\times5\times5$ cube. The goal is to make a single loop in 3D space which fulfills the ...

three-dimensional masyu

oAlt

@GentlePurpleRain wow, thank you

oAlt

17:45

So it wasn't a cdef + ddef and the art gallery was Tate after all...

Making me the close one, and yet I went so far after that...

Sphinx

18:38

Q: The game of 42: 10 cards to make 42

This is a game inspired by other recent questions. It is a 2-player game. The game is played with 10 cards numbered 1 to 10 and 2 positions or stacks. The game starts with all cards in stack 1. The goal is to bring the total of stack 2 to 42. Each player in turn takes one card from stack 1 and p...

strategy game

GentlePurpleRain

19:13

A couple of minor quibbles (which I think might have contributed to the time it took to solve this one): 1) "Without" really means "lacking", not "lack". If you wanted to clue "lack", it really should have been "to be without", or something similar. 2) As was mentioned earlier, "let down" should really have been "let-down" (with a hyphen). And the "a" doesn't really belong as part of the definition.

Still, good clue overall. It was fairly obvious when I (finally) stumbled across the solution.

GentlePurpleRain

19:51

CCCC: Key European backing art gallery, uh, reportedly smells. (8)

I may not be very available the next few days, so if someone solves, go ahead and post another without confirmation. (It should hopefully be obvious if it's solved correctly.)

Sphinx

20:10

Q: Diamond Rush: Back to... um

It is summer in the Pse School Of Logicians, and everyone studying there is dying for a break (they absolutely hate school, and can do anything to get out of it). And because the teachers there are nice, the students there are offered a chance to be off school for as long as they like, given that...