This metanism has definitely come up at least once before for me!
Toast 🤓2:06 · 2023-05-28T17:42:00.295Z
Whew! The wild geese in my neighborhood may have cause to complain after all the chasing I've been doing for the last two days. Thanks for the fun puzzle!
Great job, Mikey! I should know by now to closely examine the clues of a MikeyG meta.
JHSeeman 2s · 2023-06-02T17:03:03.787Z
fun one, like how you slipped CAT into the answer....
David Clyde 🤓12:35 · 2023-06-02T23:45:36.103Z
I see people mentioning "nudges" in the comments but I'm new to this website. I finished the crossword but I ended up clicking the "show me the meta answer" button and I still don't understand how the meta worked. Where can I look for discussion/info/hints? Meta crosswords are a cool idea, so I want to see how this one worked in hopes of getting the hang of metas in general.
David. many, if not most, of the solvers here are part of a forum called Xword-Muggles. There are Meta puzzles almost daily and the group is always friendly and helpful, especially to a new convert to the church of Metadom. You can visit and look as a guest, but the real fun is to join and participate in what can be a lively, and sometimes downright hilarious exchange of tactics, ideas, jokes, limericks and drink recipes. Here is the link to this puzzle in particular, but the board is so much more. https://www.xword-muggles.com/viewtopic.php?t=2249
And in full disclosure to David as well, this wasn't my favorite meta that I ever created nor necessarily the most elegant mechanism, so I do exhort you to solve a wide variety: MGWCC, WSJ, and several others on the aforementioned Muggles forum. My first few months of meta-dom, I was like, "This is kind of random but okay" and then something hit and I fell in love with them. Great people at that forum too!!
And during the summer, where I post a new meta at 1 pm ET on Saturdays, I'll edit this past meta's intro, where I will link to the intro post on the Muggles. There, I'll have the grand reveal.
This one, in fairness, was more challenging than I anticipated, so I'll explain how it worked. Ten clues have the word STOP hidden within them; the first and the last across clues, sometimes a good place to look in a meta, both had STOP used rather blatantly (in line with the title of not going anywhere being equivalent to stopping), which may have meant something was up. Longer names like AriSTOPhanes, SevaSTOPol, and ChriSTOPher also had this, and some spanned spacing like "Common teST OPtions."
The initial letter of each of these words, a common concluding step in metas, spells STAYCATION, a portmanteau whose definition is literally not going anywhere.
You had me going (or I guess stopping) for a while. I started with the pause thing but that yielded little of use. With your 1A STOP and 71ANOGO I just knew it was a hint but I did NOT realize it was the mechanism. But when I saw "stop" in both of them I wondered if it could be coincidence or not. I think it was ARISTOPHANES that finally did the "Oh, yeah, that is the third", which usually means I'm onto something. Took some searching (old eyes tend to hate these things) but once I found them I LOVED the meta answer and its play on the Title. A Mikey by Crickey (or am I mixing metafarriers, since you and Ben have both been nailing some good stuff!) I am proud to say I got it without nudges, though I was about to throw in the towel after I spent WAY too much time trying to make the Let's pause and 30A which along with 33D forms TPAUSES. I was sure there would be 10 T words that, if I added a pause (like ER, UM, AH, etc. I could form a new word that would be a secondary answer. I made a mess of several sheets before I tossed them and went back to "Going", and then I interpreted it at first as; "if it is not going it is coming, causing me more rabbit trails. At any rate I liked it a lot.
Yeah, I need to make a public service announcement that the tagline is just me being silly. (Spread the word!). I did think the STAYCATION answer was a pretty humorous twist on the title, and it's my kind of vacation! Thanks, Tom!