Oblique Meetings (Meta)

Great!

But geez these are hard to do online when crosshare doesn't allow you to edit your grid after you've submitted.

Excellent construction, Ben. That was fun to solve.

Meta took me a lot longer than it should have... I must've gone too fast and missed the last letter so I ran around trying to find a 6 letter word for a singular tryst... I am a dumb... thanks for the puzz sorry for the inconvenience

The best puzzles are the ones where the metanism, answer, and title all work together -- like this one. I wonder how much more difficult it would have been without the directional indicators.

Solid construction. But isn't "oblique" a math(s) term? ;)

Went through solving the second half clues before realizing what UR/DR meant! Haha - shaded them in Puz and circled the “meeting” - altho accidentally circled an extra space and had Trlysts for a second. Amazing construction- thank you again, Ben!

Clever construction! Thanks Ben!

That was fun! Thanks.

Nice one Ben! Had to print it out so I could circle all the intersecting words (else my computer screen would be quite messy right now). Thanks for the puzzle!

That was just a DR clever puzzle!

Great puzzle...wonderful construction. Thanks Ben!

Fun stuff, thanks. Agree that the grid was the tougher challenge--there aren't that many Clapton songs I don't know. :) Got a little lucky and spotted ANTE almost immediately, but still fun highlighting the rest.

Enjoyed that!

Impressive. Thanks.

Cool! I started it online, but then saw that this would be one I’d need to do on paper.

Well that was fun! I love how you gave an implied meaning to oblique (I'm guessing you were going for "not straightforward" or "askew") to tie it to trysts. I'll bet you could have done it without the directionals because when I got to 2D (I start with the first row across, then come back and do downs) I read too fast and wanted to enter STROP but of course did not have enough letters. Then I did 14 and 17A to get the crosses and that is when I noticed S T R and caught on without really looking at the direction. From your title (which I mistakenly read as OBLIQUE MEANINGS I had assumed it would be angles (not slants), but then I got into a rabbit hole. I was trying to find the letters in the angles formed by the two lines so I was getting gibberish. Then it hit me that they all had a common letter and looked back at the title - LIGHTBULB! Thanks for a fun puzzle and one I know from experience had to be difficult to design; which explains the Persian fill with the Kitten meta. This gets a distinct MEOW WOW!

Nice one -- very clever!

Love how the obliques were clued, completely mysterious at first and then oh 71UR !

Great puzzle, thanks Ben!

Whoa!!! Brilliant construction, Ben! How do you think of these things?!

Wow. How on earth did you get the fill to work?

We gotta stop meeting like this...

Great construction fitting in those diagonals. But the meta was definitely a kitten for me, having been alerted not to overthink.

Whimsy, whimsy quite contrary here -- didn't have that much trouble with the grid but was stumped by the meta for too long. I was taking the peak letter of the angles -- all 12 -- figuring there would eventually be some method of reduction to end up with 6 letters. I'd like you know that with those 12 letters I could express: "So I had pi cats." That .14 cat must have been coming or going from Schrodinger's box at that particular moment. Anyway, didn't help me.

But I was very impressed with the puzzle even before I finally solved! Great work, Ben, and thanks!

This was so well constructed! Must have been a challenge to work out the intersections. Enjoyed!

FWIW - My method when I need to do some scribbling on a grid after solving on Crosshare is to screenshot the filled grid (save it to photos) and then use Photos editor (open the photo, choose “edit” then the pencil icon; hilite and circle stuff etc. If I need to also see the clues I can side-by-side that screen with the browser/Crosshare screen. This saves lots of paper! (On puzzles I know will have tough metas I just screenshot the whole PDF… but then you have transcribe your grid work into Crosshare to submit.)

Since ALL the diagonal entries go rightward, this makes the "R" superfluous in the cluing indicators. I understand that diagonals are less legible if the entries are to be read right-to-left, but to make full use of the gimmick's possibilities, I can't help but wish that the 2DR clue for STROP had been replaced by a 24UL clue for PORTS. The same thing goes for the 20UR clue for ANTE, which could have been replaced by a 4DL clue for ETNA. Better still (for someone like me who likes more challenging metas), you could have listed all the diagonal clues without directional indicators at the very end of the puzzle, and let us find the diagonal entries on our own. Granted, this would have made for a very long 63D clue, but it would have extended the fun of the hunt, too.

Nice one, Ben! Thanks!

As usual, the meta was double plus harder than the puzzle! I wish Crosshare let me "print" the filled grid… it was all about screen capture and markup :)