A 'Worldie' from Lollapuzzoola

The fact the page title says "Connecting... [This might take a minute.]" is pure evil, haha. Good job Mark. Once you caught on to the trick, you absolutely blitzed it.

This puzzle was the highlight of this year’s Lollapuzzoola. The best part of the tournament solving experience for this puzzle was Brooke on the Twitch stream warning all the solvers beforehand that “what you see on your screen is what you’re supposed to see”; nothing like that warning to give everyone chills. Also worth noting that Lollapuzzoola has a special “downs-only” division for expert solvers that wanted a restraint; apparently all of those solvers had a significant amount of errors in their round 4 puzzles (wonder why!).

That 71-Across "LAG" clue was very clever, to kind of describe what was going on with the Down clues (especially with the missing ones showing the flashing "..." as sometimes happens online when something LAGS)

I was really hoping to see you feature this puzzle on the channel, so happy to see that you did. :) I was the runner-up in the Local division (the amateur division, basically) at Lollapuzzoola, and something like 33rd overall, which I attribute mostly to this puzzle tripping up even some of the strongest competitors, who up until then had had much faster solving times than me on the other puzzles. But I somehow managed to have it down in just over 12 minutes, which apparently was enough to take me all the way up to 2nd place. It's also fun to see one of you guys take more than twice my time to solve something. That's probably a first.

Distro = Distribution. Typically how different brands of Linux are referenced.

"lim" is short for limit. In calculus, one looks at changes at smaller and smaller values. So as one looks closer to a point, one takes the LIMIT, which is abbreviated with LIM when writing it in an equation. ;-)

Some more explanations: 4 across: "pho king" sounds like you're swearing. 49 across: "Expo, these days" refers to baseball teams. The team that used to be the Montréal Expos is now the Washington Nationals (Nats). 58 across is in fact ATM (at the moment), which Mark said but dismissed. 70 across: "Tip for a Pilot" Pilot is a brand of pens, which is why it's capitalized.

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I'm glad you enjoyed that by the end! These kinds of clever clues sometimes frustrate me so much I can't appreciate them by the end, so it was nice to you smiling at the wit.

Mark did not appreciate the "LAG" clue in time, it describes the theme pretty literally

I winced when Mark said "LIVID. No, VIVID, That's better" I had VIL/LIVID, never thought of VIVID under the time pressure and it was my only wrong letter of the tournament! oh and for what it's worth, Brooke was also one of the co-organizers of the tournament, alongside Brian and Sid as a 3-person team, she just happened to also take center stage for this puzzle.

Lim is shorthand for the limit which is an operation used all the time in calculus

I always watch the cryptic videos AMAZED at how quickly you put together seemingly impossible strings of nonsense. Then I see you do an American crossword and struggle on things that seem standard for me, and I feel better. Well done, even though this is my preferred style I don’t think I could have finished this one in 10x your time.

Happy to see this fantastic puzzle featured here! I took part in the Lollapuzzoola tournament on the weekend and was lucky enough to get through this puzzle reasonably quickly (a little under 12 minutes) with no mistakes, which really helped my ranking in the final standings. It was a wonderful tournament and I'd highly recommend it to any American crossword fans - this puzzle was absolutely the highlight for me but they were all great! This one certainly creamed a lot of competitors though.

That was pho king brilliant, Mark. Your knowledge is astounding. (Pho is one of my favourite restaurants, and is usually pronounced 'fuh'.)

My family are wondering why I was shouting "Stationary" at my phone repeatedly.

"Lollapuzzoola was held on a Saturday, August 21 (which was a Saturday in August)." is very funny to me

that was so fun watching your confusion, and then when u get the trick and just smash it haha, awesome work!

Id like to see more crosswords on the channel!

"England and America are two countries separated by by the same language" (attributed to George Bernard Shaw) . Mark does much better with these than I do with the Brit version!