This is a symbiotic thing

by Kate Hawkins, chandi, Kelsey Dixon, & Brooke Husic

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• Difficulty: medium

Oh no, it's like a continuation of yesterday's grid. More COYOTEDOGGIRL-style fill, I suppose. These last two crosswords feel like arriving at a party where I don't know anyone and the group has already subdivided into cliques. I'm just looking for an opening in conversation before I give up and head to the bathroom to question my life choices. Middle school all over again.

I enjoyed the long downs in this grid, even if two of them stumped me due to a lack of remembrance for "The Princess Bride". It's satisfying that there are seven full-length downs that cross the longest word in the grid.

"Most art museum works" filled as ORIGINALS is absolutely devilish. Not only does PAINTINGS fit perfectly, it has an overlapping vowel at the only cross I could manage with my first pass (DIPS). By the time I got to HOTLAVA I was second guessing my childhood. Maybe folks outside of California call it something else? The fill has to be paintings, right?

I have a little bit of an axe to grind with the clue for SAYNOMORE. "I've heard enough!" sounds like it comes from an argument, not casual conversation. SAYNOMORE, on the other hand, is just a calm response to "I need a thing done." The exclamation point is unintentionally misleading, I've never heard someone shout SAYNOMORE.

Finally, ZIPDRIVES. Dated reference, yo. Readers know there's zero chance I can fill the Beyoncé song that is supposed to give me the leading Z, and that leading Z feels like its mandatory for landing the fill.^[1] Good luck guessing ZIPDRIVES from "Outdated storage devices for floppy-like disks". You know it's bad when I'm thirty and Puzzmo is pushing references from before my time.

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