Infotech standard akin to ASCII / WED 11-8-23 / Industry term for action-ready film locales / Bornean primate, informally / Vape "health" claim / Lumbering creature of fantasy / Dongle connector, in brief / "Pierce film with fork" might be the first one

Constructor: Daniel Hrynick

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: SMASH HIT (18A: Runaway best seller) — songs that were SMASH HITs "in two ways" (very successful + literally concerned with smashing), with an imagined-scenario bonus answer involving DEMOlition: 64A: What 25-, 40- and 51-Across might originally have appeared on (DEMO TAPE)

Theme answers:

• "WRECKING BALL" (25A: 18-Across by Miley Cyrus, in two ways)
• "BREAK ON THROUGH" (40A: 18-Across by the Doors, in two ways)
• "SLEDGEHAMMER" (51A: 18-Across by Peter Gabriel, in two ways)

Word of the Day: UNICODE (61A: Infotech standard akin to ASCII) —

Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard, is a text encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text written in all of the world's major writing systems. Version 15.1 of the standard defines 149813 characters and 161 scripts used in various ordinary, literary, academic, and technical contexts. 

Many common characters, including numerals, punctuation, and other symbols, are unified within the standard and are not treated as specific to any given writing system. Unicode encodes thousands of emoji, with the continued development thereof conducted by the Consortium as a part of the standard. Moreover, the widespread adoption of Unicode was in large part responsible for the initial popularization of emoji outside of Japan. Unicode is ultimately capable of encoding more than 1.1 million characters.

Unicode has largely supplanted the previous environment of myriad incompatible character sets, each used within different locales and on different computer architectures. Unicode is used to encode the vast majority of text on the Internet, including most web pages, and relevant Unicode support has become a common consideration in contemporary software development. (wikipedia)

• • •

This is a good example of a puzzle where the core theme idea is great but the execution (the grid shape, the fill (!), the "bonus" answer) takes things off track, turning what might have been a light-hearted romp with a clean, tight theme into ... this. I stopped over and over again to take screenshots of moments I thought the fill was weak or bad until I realized the problem wasn't going to stop and I should just get on with solving. What this puzzle *should* have been was three themers + a revealer (SMASH HIT). But the groany, hypothetical (!?) DEMO TAPE bit got added and somehow we ended up with these corners that are stacked 8s, both of which are kinda ugly *and* extremely cut off from the rest of the grid. After enduring MY MAN, GEST, ISH, NIH, and EZINE before I'd even exited the NW, I was feeling pretty much done with this puzzle before I'd even started. I didn't know I'd already seen the revealer because the revealer doesn't tell you it's the revealer. Instead, the "reveal" comes in the most awkward of ways—through cross-references in the themer clues (all of which send you back to "18-Across"). So the theme feels upside-down and backward, with the revealer sneaking past you unnoticed, and then the themers pointing back to the revealer going "the revealer's back there," and just when you thought you'd endured enough of this out-of-order awkwardness, along comes DEMO TAPE to do a little vaudeville act that you definitely did not order, and that has only an *imaginary* relationship ("...might originally have appeared..."!?) to the theme. Further, those themer clues should, properly, have had "?"s on them, since one of the "ways" in which they are SMASH HITs (the way in which they are all about smashing) is a totally figurative, not in-the-language way. Meanwhile, non-winners like NOTAR and ADA LTE GMC ENS ARS STS ENID ORANG keep raining down on you. By the end, I was wondering why such a good theme idea had resulted in such an unpleasant solving experience. Let the themers be themers and the revealer be the revealer, tame those NW and SE corners, fill the grid less gunkily, and you might have something nice here.

I absolutely resented the HOT SETS / UNH crossing, first because HOTSETS (69A: Industry term for action-ready film locales) is a dead giveaway that your wordlist is controlling you and not the other way around. That is a bought-wordlist word if ever I saw one; stands out like the sorest of thumbs in this otherwise believably filled grid ("believable" in the sense of "I believe you knew that word and put it in the grid intentionally"). It's possible I might have "enjoyed learning a new word" (as I'm repeatedly told I'm supposed to do in situations like this), but that "Durham" quasi-misdirect on the "H" felt cheap. If you're the puzzlemaker, you know you've got the most unusual / unfamiliar term in your grid down there (in HOTSETS) and you decide that *that* is the right moment for pulling a little "nope, UNC is in Chapel Hill; Duke is in Durham! It's Durham, New Hampshire, idiot! Gotcha!" stunt?? Great. Good thing COTSETS sounded (very) wrong.

Bartleby is a scrivener. It's ... in the title of the story. Yes, that technically means "SCRIBE" but, still, a literary boo to that clue. Beyond that, and the UNH clue, I don't have many clue gripes. I had FEAT before GEST (largely because FEAT is a word people use) (4D: Heroic exploit). I had FDA-compliant because any alphabet-soupy answer seemed like it might've gone there (43A: ___-compliant). Still not over the ungainly shape of this grid, with a highly black-squared midsection, where all the proper themers are, and then these chunky 3-stacks of longer answers in the corners. You don't usually stack longer answers in a themed puzzle—that's Friday's and Saturday's job. It's like the grid doesn't know how to be, physically, so it ends up kinda Frankenstein's monster-ish. But I think the main issue today was the way the theme flowed. Revealer not revealing up top, "bonus" revealer being corny down below, theme clues all starting with awkward cross-references ("18-Across..." "18-Across..." "18-Across..."). The theme makes sense, but it doesn't have the, let's say, impact it might've had if it had been executed differently. Three solid songs, solidly hits, solidly about smashing. The puzzle's got good bones, as they say (about houses). But the non-bone parts (i.e. the fill), and the cluing scheme really undermined solving pleasure today.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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