Again, if the theme had done something spectacular, as I kept hoping it would, we'd be having a very different conversation. The rest of the grid is good enough, but not delightful. I think I like BUM A RIDE and ANTI-THEFT and maybe STEAM OPEN. It's basically an excuse to lade your grid with vowels, is what it is. is it "old" in that Yoko ONO no longer works in that genre? I honestly didn't even know it *was* a genre. Does ETHERNET still exist? How is NEODADA "old" and also "neo" (95D: Old genre for 12-Down)? Like. "Myopic" (also eye-related), sure, but MIOTIC was a yikes (crosses were easy, though, so no big deal). No idea what MIOTIC means ( 73A: Causing constriction of the pupils). Had LAYIN before LAYUP, of course ( 108D: Easy two points).
I think of them as "college loans," or "student loans," not SCHOOL LOANS, but I guess that's a colloquial expression people sometimes use, so OK.
I like that this puzzle has more ambition than your typical stale Sunday, but this needed another layer, another element, to really stick the landing. The rebus double-letter circles were both the most interesting and the hardest part of the solve, but they weren't as interesting as they could've been, and they stand out mainly because the rest of the grid is lackluster. the double letters are in one order going Across, and reverse order going Down, for some reason). It would've been slightly nicer to solve this on paper, where at least I could've seen the letters I was entering, but it would've been equally disconcerting in terms of letter order reversal (i.e. but no, there's no message here, ultimately). This is the kind of puzzle that almost *has* to have a meta-puzzle payoff to be worth it-that is, if the double double letters had ended up spelling out some kind of message, something relevant to the idea of doubling or doubleness or whatever, then you could go "wow, cool, nice." But I tried spelling things and it didn't really work out (though depending on how you write out all the double letters, you *can* almost make the word DOUBLE happen. It was tiring to enter the double double letters, and it was double tiring that there was no point. I don't know if it's harder or easier than normal to make a puzzle like this.
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