New York Times, Friday, November 22, 2019

I'm not a very good millennial, so I wasn't aware of the term "situationship" until I heard it in a Toyota commercial that was playing ad nauseam last winter. But after learning it, I thought it would make a nice marquee entry to build a puzzle around.

This is my first successful foray into themeless puzzles which I find much harder to construct in part because I don't have a custom word list to help with auto-filling (which is purely out of laziness/being bad at computers and not fully understanding the functionalities of Crossword Compiler, not some ascetic stance on crossword construction).

Overall I'm pretty happy with how this turned out except there are more short 3- and 4-word answers than I'd like, and the process of making this exponentially increased the amount of respect I have for constructors who seem to effortlessly crank out these wide-open, elegant Friday and Saturday puzzles.

If you gave me ?????TIONSHIP and told me to complete those five question marks, a million monkeys typing at a million typewriters would have come up with the right answer faster. I thought, can SITUATIONSHIP possibly be a thing? Turns out, it is! I'm afraid I still don't quite get it ... but perhaps that's the point — neither do the people in said SITUATIONSHIP.

The other marquee answers popped much more strongly for me, BRITISH INVASION not something I'm old enough for, but a cultural phenomenon even this pop music idiot knows. And given my son's fascination with 1) trucks, 2) smashing things, and 3) combining numbers 1 and 2, I'm well versed in the noble art of DEMOLITION DERBY.

ACUPUNCTURE also sang, with its fantastic clue, [Some needlework], misdirecting toward sewing — it had me fooled for the longest time. FASHIONISTA rounded out the set; such an evocative entry. Usually, editors prize multi-word phrases for their color and juice, but ACUPUNCTURE and FASHIONISTA measure up.

A couple of solid mid-length entries to help round out the solving experience: OPEN BAR had another great clue, repurposing "free spirits," as did USB PORT — "Mouse hole," indeed! Toss in a fun word to say in STYMIES, and you can call it just about good.

I did notice a stop-and-start feeling as I solved, though. It felt like there were so many short entries, and indeed, 12 three-letter words + 26 (!) four-letter ones comprised over half of the puzzle's entries — Emily's comments above hit the nail on the head. It's a common problem when you run diagonals of black squares through the middle of a themeless grid. Those diagonals forced so many 4-letter words.

Puzzles featuring a couple of long, marquee answers often require the constructor to make trade-offs, since those entries take up so much real estate. That often comes in the form of gluey short fill (OSO, I see you — oh wait. Is that an OJO I'm thinking of?). Not a problem today, but it would have been great to open up that center to create better solving flow.