F Progress!

Welcome to 2025! Progress may be dead, but I'm back on the blog, baby, and you are here to solve an F-ing puzzle!
It's been a minute (maybe a year? sheesh!) since I put a puzzle up here on this little blog. It's also been about a year since my last paid-for puzzle ran at Defector. Needless to say, I've been a bit tied up with personal matters this past year and haven't had a whole lot of free time to sit down and write new puzzles. Rest assured, I'm still very much invested in the extended puzzle-verse and I will do my darndest to post more regularly here, in addition to sending more please-pay-me puzzles to our favorite outlets. Let's call it a New Year's resolution! Please hold me accountable - I need this!

Now onto this particular puzzle... I would be remiss if I did not caution you there is some slight NSFW content here. You deserve to know what you're getting into. I hope you can appreciate the art nonetheless, and, most importantly, find some joy in your solving experience! Don't hesitate to provide feedback in the comments or seek me out on social media (bsky, these days) to chat about puzzles!

Don't forget to read Matt's Musings after you solve for a peak behind the curtain!

Matt's Musings

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I was inspired to write this puzzle for two reasons: 1. This theme type is supposedly "dead" and I don't give a shit. 2. The NYT ran a theme like this very recently on 12/2/2024, and the puzzle debuted both PISSED OFF and PUSSY-FOOTS (two "risqué" answers by mainstream standards). I thought, hell, I know a particularly good FU- word that would be even more risqué for the NYT, and dammit, I can make a vowel-progression too! Who's going to stop me? I really enjoyed cluing this one, too, without much care for character count or any of the "made-to-print" constraints imposed by mainstream outlets.