Indie puzzle highlights

September 3: Dance, Dance Revolution (Nate Cardin, Lil AVC X)

September 6: Untitled (Quiara Vasquez, Slate)

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Dance, Dance Revolution (Nate Cardin)

There's a popular quote about Ginger Rogers that she did everything that Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in heels. That quote provides the inspiration for Nate's midi. The answers to the starred clues are written backwards inside the word for a type of heels: so [*Stem subject] is CS, which is reversed and added to MULES to make MUSCLES; [*Antlered forest animal] is ELK, which is reversed and added to BOOTS to make BOOKLETS; and [*Silver, per the Periodic Table] is AG, which is reversed and added to PUMPS to make PUMP GAS. An ingenious theme, and it's incredible that Nate found three answers that work, then managed to squeeze all three of them, plus a revealer, into a grid that's only 11x12.

But wait - that's not all! The revealer itself has another interpretation of the quote. Ginger Rogers appears in the grid as REGNIG and SREGOR, sandwiched between two chunks of black squares shaped like heels. It's basically a mini-theme in itself, with grid art to boot - and, I repeat, this grid is only 11x12. A feat of construction that's akin to, well, doing everything that Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in heels. 

Untitled (Quiara Vasquez)

Quiara has possibly the most distinctive filling style of any constructor currently working. She's certainly not the only constructor who's enamored of high-value Scrabble letters (JQXZ), but it's important to emphasize that what's going on here is more than mere Scrabblefucking. Quiara doesn't take J's, Q's, X's, and Z's to be of value in and of themselves - above all, her grids are packed with interesting and unexpected combinations of letters.

Now, this might be an odd preface to a writeup of a puzzle that has all of those letters, and indeed that's a pangram - we've got E-JUICE, QB SNEAK, FAUXLEX, and KIBITZ in this grid. But what's more interesting than the mere presence of these letters is their positioning. You don't expect to see QB SNEAK in the bottom row, of all places, since Q's overwhelming appear near the beginning of words. Yet it's a sneakily good choice for a bottom-row entry, because, the QB-K exoskeleton notwithstanding, it's filled with common letters, and K is extremely useful as an ending letter. So we have an unexpected and colorful choice for that slot, but one that doesn't compromise the fill quality at all.

Similarly, J is much more common at the beginning of a word than in the middle, and yet we have E-JUICE crossing SOJU. And that's not all: in the same section, the entry running down the side of the grid is not something like SENSE or ERRED, but UVULA. U and V aren't exactly common ending letters in English, so this is a surprise and a delight, especially with that ending V being provided by BOY WITH LUV going across. Everywhere you turn in this grid, there's something weird and wonderful (ZERG! COLLAB! MIXED-ISH!).