Crossword puzzle: LessWrong Halloween 2022
Just in time for Halloween—the spookiest themed crossword puzzle of the year!
The comments below may contain unmarked spoilers. I don’t expect many people will solve it without doing at least some Wikipedia lookups, but you’re welcome to try.
Enjoy!
That was fun. I did indeed need to consult the Wisdom of the Internet a few times, in almost every case because I am either insufficiently American or insufficiently Japanese.
[EDITED to add:] For calibration, I reckon it took me about 20 minutes, but I wasn’t actually timing. I’m more likely to have underestimated the time than to have overestimated it.
It turns out Japanese words are really useful for filling in crosswords, since they have so many vowels.
Ha!
At last I solved it! From the perspective of someone who doesn’t usually do crosswords: this was quite difficult. I did have to resort to Wikipedia-ing and (in some way worse) Googling for many of them, but it was fun.
ROT13 of my solutions that the website in the original post will accept as input to the “Save/Load” button after decoding:
Fairly confident after filling it all in (with gradually increasing amounts of googling as it went on)
With the exception that I have answers for 79 and 102 across, by virtue of everything around them being filled in and making sense together, but it’s not a nightmare-haunting character or a synonym for “afflict” that I recognise.
102 across makes perfect sense to me. But I also don’t understand 79 across even after googling.
Hint:
It’s a character from a movie.
Can’t speak for Charlie but that did shake loose a memory to make 79 across make sense to me.
Still stumped on 102 across though.
It’s a perfectly normal word, though not a very common one. Not a movie reference or a Japanese loanword or anything like that. You might be more familiar with
AILMENT, meaning an illness—literally it’s a thing that afflicts you. Or you might have heard a person or thing described as AILING, meaning sick; same idea. (Though there’s something a bit odd going on there; usually “to ail” is transitive, so that X ails Y when X causes trouble for Y, but in “ailing” it’s intransitive and Y ails when something causes trouble for Y. Verbs that work this way are called “ergative” or “labile”. There are actually quite a lot of them in English.) I’ve sometimes seen “what ails you?” meaning “what’s the matter?”.
Ah, that explains it, I was misspelling the name of the “greatest Laker”. So what I had in for “afflict” wasn’t a word.
Well done! This is faster than I expected it to be solved.