That's Messed Up! (Meta)

Love the final flourish! Thanks, Ben.

And of course one more at the end! Thanks, Ben!

Love this since I’m always trying to anagram answers to meta!! Thanks, Ben!

Week 2. Not 3.

Delightful! Some were subtle. A few were obvious but about 5 were subtle enough I needed scratch paper and needed to count. Some really great ones there. Introduce and reduction is astonishing.

Finally DOERR>Order clicked!! And of course I submitted Gyrated without thinking… Clever and fun as always, thank you Ben!

EDIT: Now I realized what happened. I just went back to MMM (which I haven't solved yet) and I see I was submitting my MOAT entries on THAT puzzle. Now - THAT'S MESSED UP! LOL. It helps to enter the submissions for the correct puzzle. It could have been funnier only if one of those entries had been right! Thanks again!

Fantastic meta Ben - and either you or I employed it on the submission button LOL. (My money is on me, but that would be a fiendish twist - to have the submission mechanism periodically tell people they are wrong when they are correct) TRAGEDY was my second guess, er, submission. I was told it was incorrect I must have MESSED UP my typing. I then went on to try TORNADO as a GYRATED TRAGEDY Hail Mary third pass which was also wrong. Finally I checked with another muggle who told me TRAGEDY was indeed correct... anyhoo that's MY messed up solving tale. Much fun!

Oops, I should have figured on the final one! Some nice anagrams I never would have thought of: echidna/chained, reduction/introduce.

Loved the anagrams Ben! Thanks!

Submitted gyrated first, of course… yay for second chances (took a second to get its anagram). Loved “All the Light we Cannot See,” BTW. Haven’t read any of the others. Also, echidnas are adorable!! (and should never be chained, goes without saying)

I submitted "gyrated." then looked for a clue with "tragedy," and finding none, settled for it as the answer. A fairly quick solve though my grid still has a couple of holes.

Took me a while to notice what I needed to! Thanks, Ben! Oh, and those vicious little echidnas might need to be chained up after all :-)

It's a tl;dr (I learned that from meta-ing!) so just scroll quickly and look at the cute pictures. (And in your own backyard, Ben!)

Suspected metanism at Greta, confirmed at Cats, but still took two entries.

Finally got it. Didn't really need the nudges, as I had the right idea, but they did prod me to try again, and I finally saw it. And then, of course submitted GYRATED first. Doh! Thanks for the puzzle, Ben.

Really nice one, thanks Ben!

It took all the nudges - was too focused on variations of ERR in the grid. Very clever meta.

Very nice final twist, and you would think, of anyone, I would have gone that was first. I did not, I gyrated (like I had a gear loose) and was dancing wildly about when Crosshare told me I was wrong. I really should have seen the anagrams without the nudges. I am not a big fan of cryptics, but I do like anagrams and my subconscious knew they were there, if only from the odd wording. Nice one from our Aussie wonder (who makes us desirous anew)