them's crossing words

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Body Temperature

by vriska

A great entry from the Open Submission Week. Even though I got hung up on the upper-right corner this might be my favorite puzzle in the batch.

The theme is an apt pair with HOTHEADED/COLDHEARTED, intersecting at the E. I sent myself down a wild-goose chase by filling IMPATIENT for "Having a short fuse", impacting my time with some overzealous solving. After I realized the theme there was definitely a "oh, duh!" moment of reflection.

The upper-right corner absolutely roasted me. I started strong by plonking OSIRIS; I'm familiar with the mythology and have some lingering memory of its connection to a brand from middle school.[1] CITE wasn't so tough and ERIE is a gimme for regular solvers. That's about where my luck started and ended.

LUPINE and DRIEST were the source of my troubles, the former clue seems a little easier but I had tried forcing some variation of CANINE in its place. The problem really stems from the downs, ISUREAM and TIPI. Without word separators, ISUREAM is just a spaghetti blend of letters. Not to mention that the clue "That's absolutely true about me!" is accurate, but a bit colloquially distant. Throw that together with an alternative spelling to tepee that I didn't know existed, and you've arrived at my hint usage for the day.

But hey, all that aside I still had fun. I love the SEGA clue, "Company that 'does what nintendon't'", referring to this Genesis commercial. The themer "Difficult to move?" also provides some nice wordplay (COLDHEARTED).

  1. That memory is adjacent to the one where I bought some knock-offs at Big 5 and was endlessly made fun of. Brand loyalty in public schools is a scary thing. ↩︎

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