crossword constructors: stop putting harry potter shit in the crossword. not in the clues, not in the fill. I don't want to see it.
Rose S, PhD
@acommonrose.bsky.social
I'm mostly just here to post about crosswords. She/they.
Just thinking maybe, perhaps, possibly, it’s time to stop putting JK Rowling things in the crossword puzzle
As I do more Zoom trivia, what I'm learning is that the key trivia captain skill is being able to answer emails.
I forgot about sports and assumed the MBTA just wanted to remind us that it’s annoying but possible to get to South Station from the orange line
I've been watching the bee with friends in Discord, but please know that if the spell-off has no haters, I am dead.
Linguist moment: heard someone casually directing someone to the "fourth floor" with enough of a Boston accent to drop the Rs.
I can't actually watch the bee today, and the spelling bee website is showing only the wrong spellings for misspelled words, so it's a fun little game for me to figure out what the right spellings are.
I don't have that much to say about the National Spelling Bee prelims, but always a delight to see the words I spelled coming back. (Alcarraza in this case, misspelled this year.)
Ive been doing the Construct One Crossword Per Week regimen for a while now, it works great bc if i miss a week it just gets tacked onto the next week. Try it!! anyway on Friday im slated to write 1250 crosswords
I don't know if I have many BOTC people following me here, but in case there's any overlap, I'm at Final Three Con, come say hi?
Hello from the #acpt where everyone looks disconcertingly like someone I *might* know
We are excited to announce Midis for Minnesota, an upcoming crossword pack by Minnesota constructors. Proceeds will support immigrant families in Minnesota who have been impacted by ICE activity. Pack will be released in late April. A preview puzzle by Zhouqin Burnikel is available now.
midisforminnesota.com
My last Puzzmo mini is running today, so I just wanted to say a big thank you to anyone who has solved and enjoyed the March minis!
I've started solving the NYT crosswords again in preparation for ACPT, and I don't think they're bad per se, but it is wild to me how some people act like these are so much better than all other puzzles, when they're just... not.
happy 4-Across day from our mini crossword resident @acommonrose.bsky.social 🍄 solve here! www.puzzmo.com/puzzle/2026-...
I probably won't post every individual puzzle here (especially this week when I'm traveling), but I am Puzzmo's resident mini creator this month! www.puzzmo.com/puzzle/2026-...
Puzzmo - Cross|word
Play Cross|word on Puzzmo, Take a hint.
puzzmo.com
spotted on ravelry: the pattern to knit the sock pictured on the Wikipedia article for "sock" www.ravelry.com/patterns/lib...
I'm not reposting this as much bc I'm not doing the NYT crossword as much, but please know they're still doing this.
Rose S, PhD@acommonrose.bsky.social · last yr.Should I stop solving the NYT crossword? Yes, but they should also stop doing this shit
genuinely insane for the new york times to call a new york accent a "mispronunciation"
Lol my "AI crosswords bad" thread got a reply from a (now blocked) account that looked like an AI bot that was saying that I'm onto something about the "potential future" of AI crosswords. To be 1000% percent clear, I do not want AI-generated crosswords. At all. Ever.
In fall of 2022 (shortly pre-ChatGPT), Alex Boisvert and I made an "AI-generated" crossword where all the clues were written by a small language model that I intentionally trained to be kind of bad at writing clues. At the time, I remembered observing that AI could write perfectly serviceable clues.
Evan Birnholz@evanbirnholz.bsky.social · 9mo agoAmuse Labs had created perhaps the best digital crossword-solving software I've ever seen, with the ability to program all kinds of puzzles that were never possible before. That's why this news about them creating a generative AI puzzle maker is so unbelievably sad and infuriating.
Teaching a 4:30 class this semester and it is very rude that my computer’s blue light filter keeps turning on when I’m presenting slides