#573 - "Character Development" - May 24, 2019

[Hector]

Great puzzle. I'll spare you my tortured, knew-it-was-wrong solution, which ran through finding the word NECKWEAR.

[BarbaraK]

Congratulations to everyone who solved this week! That's a group I'm not part of.

I did wonder about ABET/COMFORT early on but was thinking in terms of partial words and never got anywhere with it.

My stickiest rabbit hole was noticing that MYRA is a subset of MYRIAD and finding 5 other similar pairs. (Six total - can't be coincidence, right? Hah!)

I finally noticed the Greek letters late this morning but the clock ran out without my figuring out what to do with them. So Kas 4 for me.

Ah well, that streak is over. It really was high time. Next week will be the opportunity to start a new one. Or not:)

[Leslie]

My stickiest rabbit hole was noticing that MYRA is a subset of MYRIAD and finding 5 other similar pairs.

I also was hung up on MYRA/MYRIAD for a long time. I was convinced Myra had to be part of the meta, since she's an actual character! But I couldn't figure out how SEPT/SETUP, POS/WSOP, etc. related.

[Laura M]

Wow, that was an ingenious meta! I'm very impressed with Matt G. and with everyone who solved it.

I didn't spend enough time* on this one to go down a lot of rabbit holes. Among other things I considered Greek letters, and alternative answers like comfort/abet, but I didn't go far enough on either and didn't put them together. I also started out with the perspective that I probably didn't have a hope of getting a week 4 if it wasn't in an easy month or a month of week 2s :-)

*In my case this puzzle was kind of overshadowed by this week's WSJCC--which was also a Gaffney, and which I couldn't solve either--but I thought I had a better chance with that one!

[TMart]

My answer was "chords" which, as a group of symbols or characters, was the first thing that came to me. That left me with finding something for the "d" rather than the far more obvious "u". The clue for Dampens (Makes less dry) worked as that is what barmen do for their patrons.

I almost went there myself - didn't see the BARMEN/UMPS clue connection at first, so had CHOR_S. As a guitarist, that said CHORDS to me, but I couldn't find a D word that made sense. I realized that CHORUS made more sense, and went looking for a U word to go with Barmen. Google told me that there are asteroids named UNA and BARMEN, which seemed amazing, but way too obscure. Then I reread the clue for UMPS and slapped myself in the head.

[Anita]

Got as far as seeing the Greek characters, that's it.