Indie puzzle highlights: February 2021

A short post for a short month! 

February 8: Meta Shed (Brian Thomas, Puzzles That Need a Home)

February 17: Freestyle 4.7 (Andrew Ries, Aries Freestyle)

February 21: Themeless 23 (Paolo Pasco, Grids These Days)

February 21: R2D2-Like (Monday Mini #7) (Quiara Vasquez, QVXWordz)

February 27: themeless vi ("real hot girl shit") (Brooke Husic, xwords by a ladee)

February 28: Round and Round (Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, The Hub)

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Meta Shed (Brian Thomas)

Technically, this was posted in January, but the solution wasn't posted until February, and I had no hope of solving this meta suite. So I didn't know just how intricate it was until February. I won't lay out the theme(s) here, because it's so multi-layered that it would take too long, but Brian has posted the solution here. Given the conceptual complexity of this one, I'd love to see more meta suites from him!

Freestyle 4.7 (Andrew Ries)

Andrew has ramped up the difficulty of his freestyles recently, which is a welcome change given the recent decrease in difficulty of the Newsday Saturday. As I've mentioned before, he excels at pithy wordplay clues, and there are plenty of great ones in this puzzle: [Yearly collections] for ANNUAL FEES, [Dark rock variety] for DOOM METAL, [Showing character] for REALTOR, [Set amount] for REPS, and [One way to give someone credit] for INSTALLMENT PLAN are highlights. All in all, a satisfyingly hard but still smoothly filled challenge.

Themeless 23 (Paolo Pasco)

ARMPIT FART! SHORT KINGS! HYPE BEASTS! This puzzle just OOZES CHARM. Aside from the fill, it's (of course) full of Paolo's trademark fun, conversational cluing. A delight through and through.

R2D2-Like (Monday Mini #7) (Quiara Vasquez)

A lovely pair of intersecting seeds, MIU MIU and XIU XIU (with a clue referencing their great Twin Peaks cover album), anchor this mini. I also appreciate how, even in a mini with lots of common fill, Quiara always injects a lot of personality into the clues. I've mentioned my anti-mini bias, but Quiara's minis manage to be consistently engaging.

themeless vi ("real hot girl shit")

A relatively (emphasis on the relatively) easy outing from Brooke. But there's still as much creativity and care in the cluing as there is with her uber-hard themelesses. Even the cross-reference clues, which I generally am not a big fan of, feel very purposeful here. In the fill, I particularly like the matrix of interesting long answers IT HAS POCKETS, SHINKANSEN, THE THING IS, and SOUL-CRUSHING.

Round and Round (Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon)

A lovely and eye-catching visual theme, where the grid looks like an eddy/ripple pattern, and all the 9-letter across entries are related to things that go round and round: DERVISHES, CLOCKWISE, PROPELLER, PIROUETTE, CARTWHEEL, ELECTRONS, HURRICANE, MAELSTROM, and TURNSTILE. The 9-letter downs aren't part of the theme, but I did amuse myself thinking about planets as CELESTIAL/MEATBALLS.