Infotech commonplace akin to ASCII / WED 11-8-23 / Trade time period for action-ready movie locales / Bornean primate, informally / Vape “well being” declare / Lumbering creature of fantasy / Dongle connector, briefly / “Pierce movie with fork” may be the primary one

Constructor: Daniel Hrynick

Relative issue: Medium

THEME: SMASH HIT (18A: Runaway greatest vendor) — songs that had been SMASH HITs “in two methods” (very profitable + actually involved with smashing), with an imagined-scenario bonus reply involving DEMOlition: 64A: What 25-, 40- and 51-Throughout may initially have appeared on (DEMO TAPE)

Theme solutions:

• “WRECKING BALL” (25A: 18-Throughout by Miley Cyrus, in two methods)
• “BREAK ON THROUGH” (40A: 18-Throughout by the Doorways, in two methods)
• “SLEDGEHAMMER” (51A: 18-Throughout by Peter Gabriel, in two methods)

Phrase of the Day: UNICODE (61A: Infotech commonplace akin to ASCII) —

Unicode, formally The Unicode Normal, is a textual content encoding commonplace maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to help using textual content written in the entire world’s main writing methods. Model 15.1 of the usual defines 149813 characters and 161 scripts utilized in numerous peculiar, literary, tutorial, and technical contexts. 

Many frequent characters, together with numerals, punctuation, and different symbols, are unified inside the usual and are usually not handled as particular to any given writing system. Unicode encodes hundreds of emoji, with the continued improvement thereof carried out by the Consortium as part of the usual. Furthermore, the widespread adoption of Unicode was largely accountable for the preliminary popularization of emoji exterior of Japan. Unicode is in the end able to encoding greater than 1.1 million characters.

Unicode has largely supplanted the earlier atmosphere of myriad incompatible character units, every used inside completely different locales and on completely different pc architectures. Unicode is used to encode the overwhelming majority of textual content on the Web, together with most net pages, and related Unicode help has turn out to be a standard consideration in up to date software program improvement. (wikipedia)

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This can be a good instance of a puzzle the place the core theme concept is nice however the execution (the grid form, the fill (!), the “bonus” reply) takes issues off observe, turning what may need been a light-hearted romp with a clear, tight theme into … this. I ended time and again to take screenshots of moments I believed the fill was weak or unhealthy till I spotted the issue wasn’t going to cease and I ought to simply get on with fixing. What this puzzle *ought to* have been was three themers + a revealer (SMASH HIT). However the groany, hypothetical (!?) DEMO TAPE bit acquired added and by some means we ended up with these corners which might be stacked 8s, each of that are kinda ugly *and* extraordinarily lower off from the remainder of the grid. After enduring MY MAN, GEST, ISH, NIH, and EZINE earlier than I might even exited the NW, I used to be feeling just about accomplished with this puzzle earlier than I might even began. I did not know I might already seen the revealer as a result of the revealer does not inform you it is the revealer. As a substitute, the “reveal” is available in probably the most awkward of the way—via cross-references within the themer clues (all of which ship you again to “18-Throughout”). So the theme feels upside-down and backward, with the revealer sneaking previous you unnoticed, after which the themers pointing again to the revealer going “the revealer’s again there,” and simply if you thought you’d endured sufficient of this out-of-order awkwardness, alongside comes DEMO TAPE to do some vaudeville act that you simply undoubtedly didn’t order, and that has solely an *imaginary* relationship (“…may initially have appeared…”!?) to the theme. Additional, these themer clues ought to, correctly, have had “?”s on them, since one of many “methods” through which they’re SMASH HITs (the best way through which they’re all about smashing) is a very figurative, not in-the-language method. In the meantime, non-winners like NOTAR and ADA LTE GMC ENS ARS STS ENID ORANG hold raining down on you. By the tip, I used to be questioning why such a great theme concept had resulted in such an disagreeable fixing expertise. Let the themers be themers and the revealer be the revealer, tame these NW and SE corners, fill the grid much less gunkily, and also you may have one thing good right here.