I’m going to try something new here. I’ve got a new toy, and I’m going to play with it.

Last week, Brendan Quigley made a triple stack puzzle and mentioned

Still, even with the computer assistance, I can’t pull off the three on top, middle and bottom with another 15 running through all of them. Maybe sometime in the future. But as of today, it’s a mystery how to pull those off.

Well, I took that as a challenge and created this puzzle with a program that automatically fills a grid and clues it. It came out … okay. There’s a naughty word in it that really shouldn’t be there, but it’s more or less all right.

Well, this week, Brendan wrote a puzzle “with the six longest theme answers intersecting each other in the middle so that there’s a chunky 3×3 white in the dead center.” Well, that sounds like a challenge too! What about a puzzle with a chunky 5×5 block of white squares in the dead center? Well, here it is. 64 words, 38 blocks. A few too many partials, perhaps. The intersection of 4-Across and 6-Down could obviously be better. Still, not bad for a little under two minutes of computer work.

I think I’ll keep doing this. It’ll improve my word list and it’s fun to see what is easy with this little computer program, and what is not. Just FYI: quint-stacks and 50-word grids are NOT EASY.