I also struggled a bit earlier, when doing the SE, because in addition to the preposterousness of ART CINE and NUTLETS, I had to deal with a wrong but very plausible guess in one of the short answers down there. I had to go into the SW and work upward, which meant the west was the last thing to fall (as you can see by the cursor in my finished grid, above- SCAR was the last answer I got). obscure proper noun, other proper noun, and hard-to-parse phrase had me stuck. something maybe Italian and WWII-related? Further, parsing CLOSEINON was too much for my morning brain today ( 29A: Near). No idea what "Gaspard de la NUIT" is ( 23D: Ravel's "Gaspard de la _"), and despite the "Z," which normally gives an answer away quickly, my brain just refused to see SUN TZU (author of "The Art of War") ( 25A: Who said "The greatest victory is that which requires no battle"). I'm gonna ask the squirrels in my yard how the NUTLETS are today and I assure you they are going to laugh at me. I never saw a squirrel eat NUTLETS in its or my life. in the universe?" TOADIEDUP feels awkward. " ARE WE ALONE?" might've worked with a saucier clue, or one that gave it a more everyday context, but the alleged "question" of "humanity" just doesn't resonate at all for me. I don't really see what the marquee answers are supposed to be, and in a Friday (best of all days) there should be a bunch of them. But mainly it was the fill that put me off. It seemed like it was trying too hard to be clever, or else it was too humdrum. The cluing was what made this a humdrum-to-unpleasant experience for me. I guess HOT TOPICS is OK, and STALE JOKE would've been OK with a more accurate / specific clue-"routine" and "stale" just aren't the same the latter is far more value-coded, but I guess the "routine" wordplay was too tempting to lay off of. The fill felt flat and the fill felt forced and now I'm alliterating just to amuse myself.
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