Eureka

by rafa

• Play it ↗
• Difficulty: hard

Oh boy there's a lot of references in this grid that are outside my realm of knowledge. TikTok recipes, Instagram, Tinder, no thanks! The Chronically Addicted to Phone edition of the daily crossword.

I know swipe left/right is a Tinder thing but I couldn't tell you which one is yes or no. Miraculously I did know about the TikTok recipe (FETA pasta) because my partner wanted to try it. My advice: never follow TikTok recipes, they're all bad.

This is the first rebus in a Puzzmo crossword (I think), which is pretty rad. Unfortunately the rebus squares were marked with a vertical line so I knew exactly where they were and that they took two letters each. Talk about spoilers. It turns out that there's an option in the settings to turn this hint off (just like the word separators), but I think it defaults to "on". At least I'll be ready two years from now when the next rebus crossword is published.

Rebus aside, today's theme is rough. The theme is two California cities, SF and LA, hidden in the themers via rebus squares. That's it, really. I guess the grid is kind of shaped like the state of California, at least if you squint your eyes and tilt your head and pretend that you're not just looking at a diagonal line.

Although the tone of the clues didn't resonate with me, the difficulty of the grid was spot-on. I'm sure if the rebuses weren't revealed the grid would've been substantially more difficult (hence the hard rating), but even with the hints I had a great time working through the grid. The one exception was YAHEAR, which is some questionable 30s slang. I'm never quite sure when I fill something that has a "ya" as a substitute for a "you", it just feels sketchy.

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