And approximately how much longer until those tents in the south are obliterated? It's a terror campaign of musical chairs. This trail of bombs hurts my heart.
thesa_bronto_saurus
joined 1 week ago
Love spotting a fellow IPA-familiar nerd in the wild
Clever one! (ha!)
PS I actually did manage to get the Friday one thanks to
learning "vocal" as a wordplay clue earlier and figuring "hearing" would be similar. Thank you for posting all these or I probably wouldn't have taken a second shot at them!
"Body doubling" is such a good approach. It's also one of the best ways to get me crafting again, just being next to someone else who's also working on something less instantly gratifying and more patient.
For me it was turning myself into a captive audience for my books. Being stuck somewhere on a regular basis for hours and knowing that my phone battery and data plan were not going to last very long. I don't have that commitment anymore, but I still do the most reading when I go out to a park away from my computer and chargers and my phone will be difficult to see and overheating in the sun, or when I'm in bed and avoiding screen light.
Also, I discovered how much I love ebooks (as long as I keep wifi off to avoid rabbit holes). I forgot how annoying it was trying to get comfortable and hold the book open without cracking the spine, plus it is nice to make notes without concern for margin size and resize text for my bad eyes and have countless options carried with me if I feel like switching. Smoothing over all the friction and little things that made reading more of a hassle helped. A pile of little "oh but if I do this I have to also deal with that" misgivings are what commonly keep me from forming better habits.
I think my biggest problem is that now reading relaxes me enough that I sometimes fall asleep midday.
They seem intent on giving us a string of puzzles where the lessons from the last don't quite carry over! I'm glad that figuring out the main word quickly filled in the others, though.
That's reassuring then, ha. Thanks for the confirmation! Definitely seems like once I've seen more of these, I'll pick up more patterns. Like the ubiquity of oboe and err and eerie in standard crosswords.
I definitely would not have gotten this one anytime soon without being led almost right up to it.
The "in the AM" part, sure, but certainly not the step involving whisky (maybe whiskey would've tipped me off though). The substitution, subtraction, and insertion is interesting though; feels like working through a math formula and then checking if your work equals "little bit".
Also, I went to look at the video comments and noticed the original version of the clue.
Am I correct in assuming...
That "vocal" is the part meant to indicate finding the homophone for "too"?
re: first time being comrade'd
Is this 
gender euphoria?
No, I know why it was a wrong answer, hence my spoiler title. It was just a momentary lapse.
Edit: Ohh okay I now am mentally reading the answer with a dash inserted and get the full wordplay (beyond just the pattern recognition).
me forgetting how numbers work for a moment
Staples??
The alternate clue on Minute Cryptic was significantly easier, though!
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Something about it clicked for me despite getting stuck on simpler clues! By the way, I'm having a fun time trying to solve full cryptic crosswords now. Do you think you could help me understand a particular clue I filled in but don't quite get? The clue is:
Broaden identity in three directions (5)
With the letters filled in from nearby clues I got the answer "widen" and know "broaden" is the definition part of the clue. I gather that the wordplay comes from the start of identity somehow but can't quite figure out how it works.