It’s that time again. Here’s my October puzzle for you to enjoy/wrangle/love/loathe. Scroll down for the browser-solvable version.
£5 prize for the first correct solution sent to me by Twitter DM, or by email. (Offer ends at 14:00 8/10/2019, which is when I’ll post the solution.)
I had some positive feedback on the puzzle I submitted… hopefully that might emerge into the light soon. Comments on this one welcome, by email or Twitter (no spoilers!), as per usual. I think the 1Across forum might be going the way of all flesh soon, but it’s still there as I type.
Right then, off you go…
Embedded playable puzzle: Use the cogwheel/settings menu to turn off the clock, and untick “skip over filled letters”, and the main menu to Save.
The solution to my September puzzle can be found here.
4, 7 & 16 were clues that had fallen out of previous puzzles, so this one was built up and around those. From which, you can deduce that they were my favourites. Shame about the double-unchecked squares, and from now on I’ll try my hardest to avoid having any of those. Third appearance for Ovid, who’s an excellent anagram on his own. 🙂
Here’s my latest puzzle, as printable png, or as in-browser solvable puzzle. Hope you enjoy. I hang out on 1 Across and Twitter, if you want to give any feedback. The solution will go up on this blog in one week’s time.
I’ve recently submitted a puzzle for possible publication somewhere. Hoping to hear back about that soon… Use the settings menu to turn off the clock, and skipping over letters. Remember to use Save in the menu if you have more than one session at it.
Three answers were nods to specific people (*waves*). 5 was quite horrible to clue, but I liked where I got to in the end. 21 has a bit of dated knowledge required, maybe not one for the young’uns, but I didn’t want to go with the more obvious reference. 18 was my favourite. Right, toodle-oo!
Edit: Oh, I’ve just noticed that there’s a Nina down there. Entirely unintentional, but perhaps it was a subconscious tribute to Rutger Hauer. (It’s not easy being a dolphin.) And well done if you get any of those references.
Edit 2: Oh blimey, there’s another one! Well, just about. How bizarre.
Here’s my August puzzle. I ended up having three puzzles on the go at once, and this was originally pegged to be my October puzzle, but I decided to move it up the queue. Any feedback welcome. I’ll be on holiday next week, but I’ll schedule a post with the answers to pop up next Thursday.
Here it is as a printable png, or a browser-solvable embed below (Use the settings menu to turn off the clock, and skipping over letters. Remember to use Save in the menu if you have more than one session at it.).
In 2005, my friend Howie called me up. “Do you want a job?” The last time he’d said something similar, we’d ended up running a yo-yo company together for a while. This time I thought he was offering me a juggling gig. In a way, he was – he’d had the idea for a juggling video archive, where all the great juggling videos (and the average ones too) could be stored on one website. He knew I was into juggling video, and could write, so wanted me to run the social media side of things (not that we called it that back then) and help gather videos for the site. Some development got under way slowly, and jugglingarchive.com was launched with a holding page, and the promise of more to come. Neither Howie nor I were actually web developers, but Howie slowly turned himself into one, and after getting a little backing, buying some software and throwing spanners at it for a few months, we finally launched as juggling.tv in April 2007.
While there had been other aggregator sites, this was the first juggling-dedicated video hosting and playback site on the net. We got a good response, and people signed up, and started adding their videos. Meanwhile I’d been mining all the sources I could find for juggling videos, and persuading people to join and upload. It was going well. Of course, things move on the web, and we had bugs to fix and features to add, and in 2009, we had a major upgrade (mainly thanks to having the actual programming skills of David to call on for a good while) with widescreen, increased file sizes, HD, and much more. Looking back, alas, that may have been our peak.
When it was just Howie and I again, we didn’t really have the skills for major web development, and survived for quite a while with minor bug fixes and fire-fighting. Howie was moving on to bigger things in the real world, and eventually decided to leave entirely. I was left holding the fort, with occasional help with server-side tweaks. But the web was moving on too fast. We still had Flash for goodness sake. I had a really long list of improvements to make the site so much nicer, but lacked the skills to actually implement them. Sadly I just couldn’t persuade our backers to stump up for a programmer’s time, and nor could I afford it myself. So the day came when I said, guys, it’s do or die. And the word came back… die.
Well, not absolutely. As I type, I’m a few short hours from flicking the switches which will turn JTV into a static archive, so at least 10000+ juggling videos will stay around to _be seen_ (Howie always loved those underscores). It’s a sad day for me, but ah well, we tried, we did something, and for a long while, it was good. Thanks to everyone who helped along the way, and all the uploaders too.
Maybe one day the site will rise again. I hope so, but it will be without me if so, as my time there is now done too. I’ll leave you with one of my favourite videos from the site, the elegant and skillful Wang Hong.
I wondered too late, if starting 12 with “holds” might have been a slightly nicer surface. A bit of scrabble knowledge would have helped you with 10. I’m not sure if the definition of 21 was “war” or “of war”, possibly arguable, but if you don’t like one, you ought to be ok with the other. I wanted to have “declaration of war”, but it didn’t feel quite right. 25 didn’t necessarily need the brackets, but I liked the juxtaposition of topper with bowler, so I put it in. 18 & 29 were my favourites.
August’s puzzle is almost finished already, so I hope I can start a new one and get ahead of schedule again soon.
Here’s this month’s puzzle from me. Right-click to download printable .png file, or play in-browser at the bottom of this post (Use the cogwheel/Setting options to turn off the timer, and skipping over letters, if you prefer. Ignore the Submit button, it’s not a competition). The grid is a little over-crossed, ah well. August’s puzzle is well under way.
If you know anyone who wants to publish a monthly crossword, do send them my way. And if you think you get 50p’s-worth of entertainment from my puzzles, please feel free to paypal me on
the-bka@tlmb.net . (Sorry to ask, but times are hard. Obviously, it’s totally okay for you to carry on enjoying them for free.) ReTweets and the like help too.
Thanks for reading, hope you enjoy. Answers in a week. Chat to me on Twitter if you like…
Cheers!
1d, 16 and 17 were my favourites. How about you?
Time to get going on my July puzzle. Except I’ve got a video to edit before I can do that. Damn, too many hobbies, I should have less fun.
It would have been my friend Gary's birthday yesterday. Sad that he's not still around to share my crosswords with. pic.twitter.com/12fwgawiau
I ran my Cryptic Crosswords For Beginners workshop at Lestival, and again at Bungay Balls Up. And again at Bungay Balls Up. And again at Bungay Balls Up! It seemed to go down well each time, with me talking through types of clues and wordplay, with example clues for the participants to be led through. It does need a bit of re-organising though, and a few better sample clues.
Speaking of BBU, there was a lot of crossword action there. I made a 19×19 crossword for people to solve, ran the workshop, and there was a lot of solving of other puzzles going on too. (I was working my way through a pamphlet of 20 of Knut’s crosswords.) While there, Dominique decided to edit a zine for the convention’s anniversary, and asked for contributions. So naturally, I threw together a crossword for it. In an hour – which was my excuse for completely omitting one clue in it. Only one person solved my BBU puzzle during the week, with a few getting well along the way. (I’m not putting it online – There were some BBU-specific references, and anyway, if you missed it, you missed it.)
Had some feedback on my May puzzle (spoilers), and have just got around to finishing my June puzzle, so here it is as a printable png. Sorry, no embedded browser-solvable puzzle again this month, as the software didn’t like the accents in “Dvořák”. (*sigh* Why isn’t everything UTF-8 compliant these days?)
Answers in a week.
