Video game franchise featuring 100+ species of dinosaurs / THU 5-7-26 / Counterparts to calls, in stock lingo / One's appearance after a difficult journey, say / One providing timely delivery? / Plant used to make a Mexican beverage called "pulque" / Arctic seabird nicknamed "aerial pirate"

Constructor: John Guzzetta and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: -LESS — clues are familiar phrases that are missing a letter string that forms a word; answers are cryptic descriptions of those clues. So, e.g. 17A: is CARELESS MISTAKE because its clue, [BAD ___ER MOVE], is a "mistake" (BAD CAREER MOVE) minus the "care" part: 

Theme answers:

• "CARE"-LESS MISTAKE (17A: BAD __ER MOVE) ("bad career move" w/o "care")
• "WIN"-LESS SEASON (27A: ___TER) ("winter" w/o "win")
• "AGE"-LESS BEAUTY (44A: P___ANT QUEEN) ("pageant queen" w/o "age")
• "END"-LESS STRUGGLE (56A: ___EAVOR) ("endeavor" w/o "end")

Word of the Day: ARK (48A: Video game franchise featuring 100+ species of dinosaurs) —

Ark: Survival Evolved (stylized as ARK) is a 2017 action-adventure survival video game developed by Studio Wildcard. In the game, players must survive being stranded on one of several maps filled with roaming dinosaurs, fictional fantasy monsters, and other prehistoric animals, natural hazards, and potentially hostile human players.

The game is played from either a third-person or first-person perspective and its open world is navigated by foot or by riding a prehistoric animal. Players can use firearms and improvised weapons to defend against hostile humans and creatures, with the ability to build bases as a defence on the ground and on some creatures. The game has both single-player and multiplayer options. Multiplayer allows the option to form tribes of players in a server. The max number of tribe mates varies from each server. In this mode, all tamed dinosaurs and building structures are usually shared between the members. There is a PvE mode where players cannot fight each other unless a specific war event agreed upon by both parties is triggered. [...] 

Ark: Survival Evolved received generally mixed reviews, with criticism for its level of difficulty, repetitive gameplay design, and "bloated" level of content. The initial Nintendo Switch version was panned for its graphics and performance issues. Several expansions to the game have been released as downloadable content. (wikipedia)

• • •

Once again, I start a 2026 NYTXW puzzle and I immediately hit things like KIR and EVEL and wonder what kind of crosswordese time warp I've fallen into. ARLO ALIG SAHIB ECO ELLIE ESTA ESTES etc. etc. etc. I don't expect short fill to be exciting, and I do expect a clunker or two, but lately there seems like there's been a distinct carelessness with the short fill, as if constructors are just taking the first options their constructing software is giving them without bothering to see if maybe, with a little polish, the grid could look ... better. Or at least feel somewhat less creaky. So even before I hit the theme today, I was disappointed in this one. The theme itself is clever—one of those two-way cryptic dealies that's hard to explain, where the answer is more like the clue and vice versa. The clue tells you how to read the answer ... but once you figure out the gimmick, and you know you're (always) dealing with -LESS phrases up front, you can (probably) get to the answer from the clue alone. I never did. Took a while to discover what the gimmick was—needed most of the crosses in CARELESS MISTAKE, in part because I couldn't make anything out of [BAD ___ER MOVE] ("Badger move?" "Badfinger move?")—and after WINLESS SEASON told me they were all going to be -LESS phrases, I got the remaining two themers just from crosses and then inferring that there was a -LESS word at the beginning. Got BEAUTY and inferred AGELESS. Got STRUGGLE (actually just -GGLE) and inferred ENDLESS STRUGGLE. So the gimmick was kinda hard to pick up, but once you do, the puzzle becomes very easy to close out. 

The only real non-theme issues were some proper nouns I'd never heard of. I'm supposed to know all 435 congresspeople in the House of Representatives?? I know, like, two. AOC and my own rep, whose name, honestly, at this very second, I am forgetting. White guy, seems nice, shrug. I probably do know more than that (I do know the speaker's name, for instance), but JAMIE Raskin, no, I do not know that. Also if the three-letter "video game franchise" is not GTA (Grand Theft Auto) then there is no way in hell I will know it. ARK? LOL, given the clue (48A: Video game franchise featuring 100+ species of dinosaurs) I thought it was going to be some awful, ahistorical, and possibly Creationist game about how Noah lived in the time of dinosaurs or something. That answer was the last thing I filled in because there was no intuitive connection between the clue and the answer. Luckily for me, every cross was solid. The long Downs were solid today. I particularly loved SORRY SIGHT, though I did not love the clue (30D: One's appearance after a difficult journey, say). It's clunky and it takes all the colloquial energy out of the phrase. Gotta be a better way. Also, I'm not sure why a STAGE ACTOR's "delivery" should be more "timely" than any other kind of actor's delivery. Nothing in the clue seems "stage"-specific (29D: One providing timely delivery?), so I didn't like that clue either. MARROW BONE and MUSCLE CARS are just fine ... but I don't think the longer answer set quite offsets the gunky short fill. Doubly depressing that the fill is so gunky even after the puzzle has inserted a bunch of cheater squares (the black squares above ETS and below TOE, and then after MUG and before WAR)*. Those squares (which do not add to the overall answer count) are supposed to make the grid easier to fill for the constructor. But if EVEL is still in there sipping in KIR, I'm not sure the cheaters are working well enough. 

[I probably thought this song was cheesy as a kid but now it sounds Perfect]
Bullets:

• 13A: Plant used to make a Mexican beverage  called "pulque" (AGAVE) — "plant" and "Mexican beverage" are all you need here, AGAVE being the basis for other, more familiar Mexican beverages (tequila, mezcal). AGAVE shows up a lot in xwords—it's got that perfect five-letter VCVCV pattern that works so well in grids (OBAMA, ILANA, EDEMA, AROMA, etc.). Probably should've made "pulque" my word of the day, but the stupid video game got in the way. Pulque "is an alcoholic beverage made from the fermented sap of the maguey (agave) plant. It is traditional in central Mexico, where it has been produced for millennia. It has the color of milk, a rather viscous consistency and a sour yeast-like taste." (wikipedia)

• 46D: ___ Triangle (coastal section of Pennsylvania) (ERIE) — whoa, do ships disappear from there? Did Leonard Nimoy do an episode of In Search of... about the ERIE Triangle, the way I know he did about the Bermuda Triangle? Sadly, the answer is much more mundane. The "triangle" is literally just a triangle-shaped piece of land that connects PA to Lake ERIE, giving the state a freshwater port it wouldn't otherwise have.

[we used to have nice things... RIP Leonard Nimoy and his perfect voiceover voice]

• 40D: Counterparts to calls, in stock lingo (PUTS) — oh boy ... stock lingo ... everyone's favorite. Why clue a normal word normally when you can make it ... stock lingo ... ? 
• 9A: One who measures meter by the feet? (POET) — on the last day of classes, some of my British Literature students gave me a book they'd made filled with all the craziest things I'd (apparently!) said in class over the course of the semester. It was very sweet, if mildly humiliating. There's a lot in there about feet.

[I have no recollection of any of this, your honor]

• 39D: Arctic seabird nicknamed "aerial pirate" (SKUA) — first of all that's a terrible nickname. When you already have a cool name like SKUA! why would anyone bother with the syllabically excessive and boringly descriptive "aerial pirate"? Second of all, I want to point out that although SKUA is technically crosswordese (a bird I wouldn't have known existed were it not for crosswords), it is the official policy of this blog that all birds are given passes and will not be counted toward any puzzle's crosswordese load. Yes, that includes EMU, as well as extinct birds like MOA and DODO. All birds welcome, any time, in any amount. Yes, even TITS, of course TITS, why not? Haven't seen a TUI since '04, why not bring that one back? So many birds out there waiting for a crossword home. Constructors of the world, expand your ornithological range!

[TUI!!]

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*Technically, there are two more cheater squares, after ARK and before INN, but they're less conspicuous and they're propping up the colorful longer Downs, so I'm not mad about them)  

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