greetings, friends and loved ones! (i am boldly assuming i have no enemies reading this— but i could be down to start publicly beefing with someone, if you want to identify yourself as such. drop me a line!)
summer 2021, i started watching a crossword stream on twitch called jibbyMAX. i didn't know crosswords were a thing people streamed, i didn't know that indie crosswords existed, i had not yet had an inkling of a thought to try and make one myself. i tweeted about this habit of mine—watching someone solve crosswords online—fairly often. it was so novel to me and so bizarre to all my friends. one of the people i encountered there, in the sidebar twitch chat, went by 'meatdaddy69420'. they were so funny and their humor was so familiar i was convinced it was one of my friends pranking me online.
it's an honor and a thrill to now consider meat an actual friend—and you're all so much more cursed for the fact that we both got into crossword construction. we've even done a puzzle together, which you should give a try if you have not already. all of this is to say that, when meat came up with the idea for this project, i would have signed up for it sight unseen and devoted my entire ass to it even if the grid was 'fart', 68 times. but it wasn't! it was so much better.
tabula rasa is an incredible concept that meat came up with to not only platform voices that you may not otherwise find around the crossword community, but also to allow people to understand the viscerous connections every person has with language and how that influences the angle from which they approach puzzles. with one grid, clued nineteen ways, it's a choose your own adventure that i was absolutely thrilled to be a part of. you'll find my puzzle below the jump. you can download the puzzle pack, which includes one clued by jibbyMAX himself (among others!), AT THIS LINK. below, i've included meat's thoughts on the puzzle they made and their vision for this wonderful project that is near and dear to my little freakazoid heart. (you can tell meat wrote it because it's written in sentence case— nerd!)
"One of my favorite things about crossword puzzles is seeing the many ways that different constructors will clue a single word - for just a moment, you get to peer inside the mind of someone else and at the expense of sounding cheesy, it's a lovely, intimate moment. Not only that, but I also frequently find myself thinking "man, I wish I would have thought of that cluing angle!" and it's a testament to the diverse skill sets and talent in our lil' community. The main goal of Tabula Rasa was to pick everyone's brains by sending them a silly grid with fun fill and words with a handful of different cluing angles. I also wanted to get new constructors involved - building your own grid for the first time is not only intimidating, but can also be cost-prohibitive during *gestures at world events*. I wanted this to be an approachable opportunity for new constructors to get their foot in the door, and I'm very pleased to say that I think it was successful in that. Ultimately, at the end of the day, I just hope everyone had a lot of fun doing this and I'm really grateful for everyone's enthusiasm about the project!"
[FULLSCREEN | PDF | .PUZ]
