Carpels' counterparts / SAT 12-3-22 / Brain-tingly feeling that may come from hearing whispering or crinkling, in brief / Inefficient confetti-making tool / That's on me slangily / Alternative to a blind in poker

Constructor: Kate Hawkins

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ASMR (25A: Brain-tingly feeling that may come from hearing whispering or crinkling, in brief) —

Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a tingling sensation that usually begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. A pleasant form of paresthesia, it has been compared with auditory-tactile synesthesia and may overlap with frisson.

ASMR signifies the subjective experience of "low-grade euphoria" characterized by "a combination of positive feelings and a distinct static-like tingling sensation on the skin." It is most commonly triggered by specific auditory or visual stimuli, and less commonly by intentional attention control. A genre of videos intended to induce ASMR has emerged, over 25 million of which had been published on YouTube by 2022 and a dedicated category of live ASMR streams on Twitch. (wikipedia)

• • •

I don't know if this was a proper Saturday or if it just feels like a proper Saturday because yesterday's puzzle was a Monday, but either way, I appreciated the fact that it put up a fight. The puzzle is doing its best to skew younger today, with three short answers in (or near) the NW corner that are likely to make a lot of solvers cock their heads questioningly (or some more extreme reaction). The first of these was MOTO, which ... a phone ad campaign from, what, the aughts? (3D: "Hello ___" (classic ringtone)). When was that? I had zero idea that "Hello, MOTO" was actually a "ringtone"—I can remember ads that started "Hello, MOTO" or something like that; I assume they were ads for ... a phone ... maybe a Motorola ... something or other? Razr, is that a phone? Anyway, the "Hello, MOTO" voice always creeped me out because it sounded artificial / put-on, and kinda reminded me of someone evoking the yellowface portrayal of Mr. MOTO in old detective films (he was played by Peter Lorre, doing basically the same voice he uses for Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon ... I thought MOTO was played by Warner Oland, but that was another yellowface detective performance: Charlie Chan ... but I (seriously) digress...). But if you got a cell phone when you were a young person in the aughts, then this "ringtone" is likely Superfamiliar to you (and has zero associations with the Japanese detective). This video has over 3 million views wtf!

So that answer seems aimed at Millennials (who are now actually middle-aged, I guess) and younger folk, as does "MY B" (for "my bad!") and ASMR, which I had never heard of until some time in the last decade. How did the term (an initialism where most people including me don't know what the letters even stand for) go mainstream? Well, I direct your attention to the last sentence of the "Word of the Day" wikipedia quotation, above: "A genre of videos intended to induce ASMR has emerged, over 25 million of which had been published on YouTube by 2022 and a dedicated category of live ASMR streams on Twitch." I'm so out of touch I thought ASMR stood for the actual sounds, not the feeling they induced. Anyway, people soothe themselves with YouTube and Twitch. I will never get it, but there you are. It's very very much a thing. But if those three answers skewed young, it's not like there weren't Golden Oldies to offset them: even in the 20th century, I couldn't accept that anyone had ever TOPEd or been IN A PET, and I certainly can't accept it any more now, but boy are those familiar crossword terms of yore. So overall the puzzle has a nice range, covering lots of topics, varied in its generational familiarity. It's also chock full of vibrant longer answers, the best of which came right up front: 

APOLOGY TOUR over "NO TAKEBACKS" is a beautiful two-stack (14A: Guilt trip? / 17A: "Too late to change your mind now!"), and the other three such pairings in the grid aren't bad either. Not EVEN A LITTLE bad. I like MARASCHINO / OVER THE TOP because you might put a MARASCHINO cherry OVER THE TOP of your sundae, or even your cocktail, but For God's Sake don't use those cheap-ass pinkish garbage cherries you get at most ice cream parlors (or in the sundae fixins' aisle of the supermarket). It's Luxardo or get out!

I also liked HEE HEE over JOLLITY (for hopefully obvious reasons), and, well, there's not a lot I didn't like. I didn't like the metaphorical VIRGINS clue (34A: Newbies), which ... I mean, I don't know that I'd like the literal VIRGINS clue either, but something about snickering about a "newbie" being a "virgin" is ... unnecessarily sexualizing or something. It's just a metaphor that I wouldn't use. It's normal and fine. It just always gives me bad vibes is all.

I had some trouble moving between the N and W half of this puzzle into the S and E half, but I ended up throwing a weird word-rope into the void, and the rope kept going, and it got weirdly long, and I figured some of it must be wrong, but it wasn't (!?).

So I linked JIBS to "COULD IT BE?" and just kept building, and somehow all the answers stuck. Not sure why I got stuck on the back half of HOLE PUNCH (28A: Inefficient confetti-making tool) (funny clue btw). It's a perfectly normal "tool." I have one sitting here within arm's reach, but all I could think was "HOLE ... maker?" Bizarre. MY B! I also had some trouble getting the back end of PHONE CALL (I figured the "phone" itself had a "ring to it," so what else was needed, I didn't know). Also couldn't get TREATY ("Compact" means sooooo many thing), STAMENS (I thought maybe "tunnels"?) (38D: Carpels' counterparts), or IN A PET, so the SE was briefly elusive, but then PATSY Cline came riding to the rescue, bringing the PEP I needed to finish things off. Overall, a delightful romp, this one, with a little youthful flavor here and there ... you know, for kids!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]