Former name of the electron / SUN 4-21-24 / Title pig of kids' TV / Creditor, in legalese / Speeches with an 18-minute limit / One-named singer on 1998's "Ghetto Superstar" / Former name of the electron / Shakespearean misanthrope / Small Southwestern birds of prey / Speculative fiction subgenre that imagines a sustainable energy future / District attorney-turned-Batman foe / What Tom and Daisy embody in "The Great Gatsby"

Constructor: Michael Schlossberg

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

Instructions:

BEFORE you follow the instructions...

And AFTER

THEME: "Get Cracking" — see instructions, above; basically, there is no theme, from a solving standpoint. Once you've finished the grid, you rotate some squares and you get a message that spells out JACKPOT

Theme answers:

• no, there are none of these

Word of the Day: SOLAR PUNK (111A: Speculative fiction subgenre that imagines a sustainable energy future) —

Solarpunk is a literary and artistic movement that envisions and works toward actualizing a sustainable future interconnected with nature and community. The "solar" represents solar energy as a renewable energy source and an optimistic vision of the future that rejects climate doomerism, while the "punk" refers to the countercultural, post-capitalist, and decolonial enthusiasm for creating such a future.

As a science fiction literary subgenre and art movement, solarpunk works to address how the future might look if humanity succeeded in solving major contemporary challenges with an emphasis on sustainability, human impact on the environment, and addressing climate change and pollution. Especially as a subgenre, it is aligned with cyberpunk derivatives, and may borrow elements from utopian and fantasy genres. (wikipedia)

• • •

This felt insulting. Truly insulting. There are all these instructions up front—the kind that make my eyes glaze over, after I have rolled them, hard, a few times—but then... when you solve on the app (as I did, like a good boy—"Solve on the app!" they said. "It's how the puzzles are designed to be solved," they said), the app just Does All The Work For You. That is, the instructions don't matter At All. I finished the puzzle, the screen said "Congratulations," and then the software just did all the rotating nonsense. I mean, thank god, on the one hand—I certainly didn't want to be bothered doing all that rotating nonsense myself. But on the other hand ... why ... I don't ... what is this? Why make this big up-front pretense of the post-solve work I'm going to have to do to appreciate the puzzle's design, and then set it up so that the software just does the work for me? I went from solving a pretty hard Sunday puzzle (like a grown-up) to having the theme spoonfed to me via animation (as if I were a child). But either way, this was never going to work. Either I was going to be forced to do all that 90-180-270º rotation stuff myself (slog), or I was just going to sit there and have stupid animation do the rotating. JACKPOT! What did I win? I demand to know. Because it really (really really) feels like I lost. 

The design of the grid is such that longer answers ... just don't exist. A 21x21 grid and ... nothing longer than 9!?!?! And only three of those!?!? It’s the Biggest Grid of the Week, the one that's built for flashy long stuff, and this puzzle gives you *nothing*. Scattered 8s and 7s and 6s and then a whole lot of 3-4-5s. Fussy, choppy, and (bonus!) hard. I don't mind the hard so much—there's no theme here, so at least I got a bit of a challenge, and thus the solve wasn't a total waste. But I don't know when I've ever seen a puzzle that was more "Look At Me!" with so little to show for it. A severely compromised grid, all so that I could watch some circles rotate after I'd finished? All so that I could see the word JACKPOT, when there is nothing, literally nothing, about the rest of the puzzle that has anything to do with gambling or casinos or slot machines or safecracking or An-Y-Thing? Before the rotation, the circled squares spell out ... SYWLAEN? Is that something!? A town in Wales, maybe? It anagrams to ... wow, nothing. WEANSLY? YEN SLAW? Help me make sense of this? I thought for sure that CCLEF and GSUIT and CCLAMP were going to take me ... somewhere. But no. As far as I can tell there is zero gambling or safecracking content. The gamification of the puzzle continues apace, with absolutely no consideration for how it relates to the actual experience of Solving A Crossword. Animation! Why? 'Cause we can! Flashing lights and shiny things! NUGGETS! It's the future! 

Formally, the one truly unusual thing today was the unchecked squares, i.e. those squares that projected into the little keyhole circles. I wanted those sets of four squares to spell things, but they did not. I guess the "check" on those squares (i.e. the equivalent of a cross) is the fact there are rotation rules, i.e. you have to be able to make words out of every answer when you rotate those four letters to some degree. Luckily, I didn't need any crosses for those answers. There were times when solving those answers felt dicey—that ARK clue in particular (67A: Partner ship?). But otherwise they were all very short and very gettable. Occasionally the puzzle runs into a nice longer answer, like POP QUIZ or "I CAN TELL" or OLD MONEY or "YES, YOU," but mostly it just stumbles along with short answer after short answer, IPO and CSIS (!!!?) and ERE and the like. To its credit, it rarely gets into real ugliness. PAIDAD and especially OBLIGEE are not very likable, but otherwise, things seem solid enough. Just dullish. 

Tough parts abounded. Tried to sing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" but never could find the "GAY" part (34A: Rhyme for "away" in "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"). Can't remember what comes before "From now on our troubles will be miles away." Oh well. "Let your heart be GAY?" No, I got it, it's "Make the Yuletide GAY!" Now I remember! Bah (humbug). GASCANS on the backs of moving vehicles seems odd and dangerous. I've only ever seen spare tires on the backs of Jeeps (that I can recall). No idea who the boxing SPENCE is. Had SANYO before SEIKO (14D: Casio rival). Forgot Ben PLATT was someone and really really struggled to make sense of MAA (49D: "Here's looking at you, kid"?)—I looked at MAA and thought "damn, I've got an error." Then couldn't see how I had an error. Then realized I didn't have an error at all: MAA was the sound of a baby goat, or ... kid. It's a pretty bad clue. I mean, kid pun, great, but the whole Casablanca quote has no relationship to ... anything. Certainly no relation to animal sounds or speech or sounds of any kind. ELF OWLS are a thing? (51A: Small Southwestern birds of prey). If you say so. My old audiobooks were ON DISC (50D: Like old audiobooks = ON TAPE). I saw The Fabelmans but MITZI's name I did not remember. Had it as HILDA (or HILDY) at first because instead of FOMO at 52D: Why some app users check their notifications constantly, for short, I had ADHD.

Getting from [Fun facts] to NUGGETS was a challenge. Same with [Throw in the towel] and BAG IT. No idea ETIENNE was "Stephen" in French. Wasn't sure about LYRE v. LUTE (112D: Renaissance instrument). Hard to think of SAUCER in relation to Area 51 if it's not flying. Had USS on the Saturn V rocket. BUT for 121D: Protester's word was hard as hell (I had BAN) (as in "the Bomb" or whatever). I think that covers it. Too tired to go any further. Fans of post-solve animation and/or elaborate architectural features, I envy you. We seem to be entering your Golden Age. Fans of solving crossword puzzles ... I dunno what to tell you. My kingdom for a simple funny Sunday theme. Why is being delightful so hard?  

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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