...and me reading the final Mog book while left unsupervised and promptly bawling my eyes out so dramatically that some poor stranger tried to step in to help out the weeping child who had presumably got lost or something similar!

I've just asked my dad and while neither of us are 100% sure, there's a chance that the same trip to the (long since closed) Borders in Bournemouth was the source of our favourite anecdotes about the place: him braving their dodgy headphones to listen to the thematic record for the first time...

I'm flattered, though I'm definitely younger than the average setter... I just don't act my age! Josh is just scarily young; when I first rocked up to Cryptic Sunday, I was already older than he is now...

(though funnily enough I started loading the "spread the word(list)" into my mini grid building code the other week so I could have these new-fangled terms like "emoji" and "gyoza" and it has meant I have had to grapple with whether or not I am fine with e.g. skibidi as a gridfill which is. yeah.)

oohhh I feel this in my bones. I still felt the need to semi-defend textspeak in my wordplay yesterday, and when i did the WOTY puzzle at the start of the year I had to use W as an adjective and it was both liberating and terrifying, despite the entire conceit giving me a source to fall back on!

(as an aside, I *adore* the link card that @mycrossword.co.uk gives you when you share a puzzle on here; it's lovely and neat, shows the cover photo in all its glory, and in this instance makes me feel good about staying up late to finish the annotations so that the displayed date would be correct!)

the best I can do in terms of sourcing, apart from just browsing image search results of industrial scales, is this Measurement Canada manual, which does at least suggest my initial thoughts about the context in which the abbreviation is used are accurate:

ised-isde.canada.ca/site/measure...

For tare, the abbreviation might come from commercial/shipping contexts (I'm thinking cargo containers and the like) but also: weighing scales. Industrial/posh ones might have a tare function as well as the zero function, and it looks like the button for that, if "tare" won't fit, can be marked T.

Both an excellent resource and a pleasure to browse - "used by medieval scribes and setters of advanced puzzles" got funnier every time I saw it!

Hah, one of my all-time faves just so happens to be "A run of notes getting higher or lower (7)" from a Methuselah a few years back...

oh whoops, that's *exactly* what happened, because i wanted an upwards reversal for an initial draft of 4d that never went anywhere - well deduced...

(as with many ideas one might have for a mini, this one has already been done by @henriwords.com - not long after they were introduced to MyCrossword, in fact! - but I've only gone and one-upped him... or, uh, one-downed him, I guess?)

4 is properly cute and thus my pick of the bunch, even if, like Blah, I'd have stuck a question mark on the end for whimsy. I quite liked the mental image conjured up by 2d, and I like how you managed to get both a fish *and* a river into 3, thus concentrating the crosswordese. Nicely done!

No pressure, 'cause you'll always have the vod - you'd be up second, so ~12:40ish I guess?

I was genuinely wondering how I would deal with that, but I opened up the puzzle first thing and realised ah, no worries, I can get it out the way immediately!

I mean, the checklist was presumably "does he have fur?" and "does he look cuddly?", and since the answer to both those questions is "absolutely", I can hardly disagree!

Henri's decision to have what he calls a "cuddly toy" slideshow on the website is one I fully support, and honestly it's made all the better/funnier that that's the set where he's put Aaron's pic of himself...

It's all really neatly done; the same columnar layout is used throughout, for puzzles and otherwise with the standard cryptics each getting a full page to themselves. Particularly like that there's always a jotting space below the setter's name, as you can see here!