I wish that at at the start of every Wall Street Journal crossword that I wouldn’t have to change the settings to skip the filled-in squares. It’s not even like I’m not logged in. I am logged in. Why won’t it save the settings?

OK now for today’s puzzle. The theme became obvious early, so that helped me clear out a bunch of the clues. But 33D They may be hard to keep up with: THETIMES. The WSJ puzzles fall far behind those of The [New York] Times. Also 32A Exam for H.S. students: APTEST. I didn’t have AP Tests, I had AP Exams. I think the clue was bad and the answer was worse. Maybe have a clue like Way to determine the relative success of a campaign (ABTEST) and then have 33D Common crypto (BTC) and then I guess I’m stopping there because I’d have to unwind a lot of other things, and I’m not willing to do that for this blog post.

But I guess I’m getting faster: A Wednesday crossword took me 8:00 (including the skip filled-in squares setup step. That’s more than a minute faster than the Mondays were when I started.