Next I noticed SAC and DELE are in the grid. CARLOAD is a decent enough answer for “Amount of groceries.” The thing is, the grid kept validating my mistake! FOREPLAY is the correct transformation, so that worked out. I thought, “Okay, the game is to remove the letters of FACEBOOK to make a new word.” So FORcEPLAY and CARboLOAD. I spotted the two 9s, but got the mechanism slightly wrong. I don’t think I’ve ever been so confidently down a rabbit hole before. Oof, it’s frustrating to have gotten so far and be unable to finish the job. that’s interesting enough in the sense that it has enough vowels to be a disarrangement of the right answer, like CAKE CLUE or something. if the replacement letter in META is the third letter in the transformed word, we take the third letter of the answer to the matching clue? that gives … KALCCEUE. maybe instead of taking first letters, we are supposed to take a corresponding letter i.e. Is there anything else going on? the pairs of related grid entries don’t intersect each other (the first eight were all acrosses, but the second set of eight were five acrosses and three downs). reading off in order of the original 8 themers), but maybe i’m not taking the right letters.
it actually seems more likely to me that the ordering mechanism is right (i.e. i’m not saying we should have to anagram it, but i am saying that it’s not likely that i’ve got the right eight letters and just haven’t thought of the correct ordering mechanism. none of these eight-letter strings looks like it could be the answer even if we anagram it.
i don’t think we’re supposed to use the original theme entries, but the first letters of those are either CCJRFOBF or CEJRMABF depending on whether we apply FACEBOOK -> META first. reading them off in grid order instead gives BACESCER.
taking the initial letters of the eight other entries (which is normally how this works) gives SAEBCERC. Okay, well, we’ve done it, except, uh… what’s the answer? i have eight theme answers and eight corresponding other entries in the grid. there are two nine-letter across entries, clues CARESS but also FOREPLAY. for this week 5 puzzle, the instructions are: This week’s contest answer, which is eight letters long, is something that’s often useful in solving metas. Hello and welcome to episode #700 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, “FACEBOOK Is Now META”, referring to last week’s announcement that the company facebook (but not the app) is changing its name to meta.
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