It's about crossword puzzles: history, current bigshots, the author's personal experience attending ACPT and a crossword-celebrating ocean voyage, … You are not shocked to learn that I apparently already absorbed a fair amount of crossword knowledge by reading blogs, watching that "Wordplay" movie some years back, hasty research for puzzlehunts, etc. But I did learn a couple of nifty things:
Ernie Bushmiller, the Nancy cartoonist, got his start drawing crossword grids. Back in those days, you couldn't just ask a computer to draw a grid of squares and fill some of them with black. Someone had to sit down with a straightedge and draw by hand. People call Nancy "diagrammatic," maybe Bushmiller just never got over drawing those grids.
Crossfire is OK. The author, Adrienne Raphel, writes about her experience creating a crossword using the Crossfire program. I used Crossword Compiler, a different crossword-making program. Crossword Compiler is made for Windows machine; I don't have a Windows machine, so I struggled to use Crossword Compiler with an emulator. It mostly worked, but some buttons in the app just did nothing. In recent years, more buttons stopped working. (I don't think Crossword Compiler changed; I think my Windows emulator changed, alas, breaking some things.) Raphel used Crossfire and didn't notice a horribly long wait when using its auto-fill feature. I'd stuck with Crossword Compiler for its fast auto-fill; but maybe Crossfire was fast enough? Crossfire runs on several kinds of computer, even my Linux machine. I gave Crossfire a whirl, and it worked fine. You might have noticed that for #EnigMarch so far, I made three crosswords and uploaded them to Crosshare. I made those crosswords with Crossfire.
In my efforts to give less money to the recently-Nazi-wannabe-aligned Amazon, I put my old Kindle on a shelf and bought a Kobo e-reader. It works about the same as the Kindle. It's fine. This here book was the first I read on the Kobo.
