Rose S, PhD

Puzzmo - Cross|word Play Cross|word on Puzzmo, Take a hint.

I probably won't post every individual puzzle here (especially this week when I'm traveling), but I am Puzzmo's resident mini creator this month!

www.puzzmo.com/puzzle/2026-...

This puzzle was wild.

We switched to Zoom lectures, which felt like the worst of all possible worlds in terms of schedule juggling.

Lol I definitely thought All Hail West Texas/Tallahassee/Sunset Tree for sure, but of course The Mountain Goats just put out too much music for that to work.

"As seen on Wikipedia socks" Photo: a handknit sock in lightweight cream colored yarn with a variety of vertical cables

Ravelry description: From December of 2010 to the time of writing, the key photo on the Wikipedia ‘sock’ page has been a hand knitted sock. If you’ve ever looked at that picture and thought, “I wish I had those socks!”, then this is the pattern for you! This is a cuff down traveling stitch cable sock pattern, with a standard heel flap construction and charted design. The pattern includes instructions for four sizes, both with and without calf shaping. The sock shown on Wikipedia is the medium size with no calf shaping.

spotted on ravelry: the pattern to knit the sock pictured on the Wikipedia article for "sock"

www.ravelry.com/patterns/lib...

I'm not reposting this as much bc I'm not doing the NYT crossword as much, but please know they're still doing this.

Loved this one

genuinely insane for the new york times to call a new york accent a "mispronunciation"

I don't know if anyone ever made a youtube video about it, but I need to know if you saw the 1000 comment reddit thread about whether it's Morally Evil to send a copy of a knitting pattern to your mom.

Lol my "AI crosswords bad" thread got a reply from a (now blocked) account that looked like an AI bot that was saying that I'm onto something about the "potential future" of AI crosswords.

To be 1000% percent clear, I do not want AI-generated crosswords. At all. Ever.

Anyways, I don't really know where I'm going with this (and I haven't even touched on AmuseLabs's sample grid being a "not a crossword"), but there's so many good human-created crosswords in the world, and I'm just sad to see otherwise useful software adding a completely unnecessary "AI" component.

Now, there's nothing wrong with stock clues, so I hope this "AI agent" is leaning more towards those, but is it really fun to solve a puzzle that ONLY has stock clues? I have long said that AI text generation is really only good for things no human wants to read or write, and crosswords aren't that.

2 years later and everyone is trying to inject LLMs into everything, so it's no surprise that someone realized that AI can write perfectly adequate clues. But to be clear, these clues are either 1. variants of stock clues or 2. clearly plagiarized from clever/fun clues that humans have written!

In fall of 2022 (shortly pre-ChatGPT), Alex Boisvert and I made an "AI-generated" crossword where all the clues were written by a small language model that I intentionally trained to be kind of bad at writing clues. At the time, I remembered observing that AI could write perfectly serviceable clues.

Teaching a 4:30 class this semester and it is very rude that my computer’s blue light filter keeps turning on when I’m presenting slides

I think they were bought (awhile ago) by a larger company that was then bought by a private equity firm

I’ve been deep into BOTC lately and this looks very fun

Okay, what do I need to do to get Jet Lag the Game to release Amy's newest puzzle box for the public? I wanna do the crossword in there.

Love a Gundam clue

A screenshot from Smartypants saying "The NYT puzzles are ruining my life"

Just saving this for the next time the NYT publishes a bad crossword and/or rejects one of my puzzles

That looks so good!

I cannot let myself get into spinning because that is simply a step too far in terms of craft commitment, but it does look cool

Bought a nice men's suit for a wedding I'm going to, and I have now realized that the men are clearly better than I am at ironing dress shirts.

As the summer winds to a close, I will probably have more to say about the summer puzzles project as a whole at some point, but for now, I'll just say, I had a blast making all these puzzles, and I'm so happy that they found an appreciative audience.

acrosswordrose.blogspot.com/2025/08/trou... The 15th and final summer puzzle is a tribute to the game Blood on the Clocktower--an idea I've had rattling around my head for a bit.

acrosswordrose.blogspot.com/2025/08/them... Penultimate summer puzzle is up!

Anyways, if you think this post is niche and incomprehensible, just wait until I make the puzzle!

This is me realizing that no good TB roles are the same length as POISONER or SCARLET WOMAN and wondering if making the puzzle is worth having to use rebus squares.

Blood on the Clocktower is a very good game, and Trouble Brewing is a very good starter script except for the fact that the evil characters' names and good characters' names are all different lengths, making it very hard for me to make my hidden role themed crossword puzzle.

My friends are doing a cool thing