puzzle #12: themeless #1

oh my god. i cannot believe this crossword is seeing the light of day. i came up with the seed entries for this one (hint: they're the massive ones) back in... october, i think. i spent a few days trying to make a grid that fills well, got nowhere, and repeated that a few times. one time i got an insanely ugly grid with way too many black squares that filled kind of poorly and was rightfully told by many in the crosscord server that i should rework it. but last night i decided to sit down with it again and somehow came up with this, which i think looks pretty good and filled... fine. either way i think we ended up with something pretty good!

thanks to Alex Boisvert for the test solve, and to everyone in the community who gave me such strong FOMO that i decided to go back into the mines to hammer this one out.  

.ipuz | .puz | .pdf | puzzleme fullscreen

or click the link below. as always, if you solve this on stream somewhere, let me know via discord or twitter, i'd love to watch! happy solving!