Coffeecake with cross-sectional swirls / MON 7-3-23 / Professionals who work with graphic designers / Video game franchise whose players gather natural resources

Theme answers:

• KIND OF BLUE (17A: Miles Davis classic that's the all-time best-selling jazz album)
• "JUST YOU WAIT" (24A: "Oh, I'm not messing around!")
• UPRIGHT BASS (47A: Big member of the string section)
• NOBLE GASES (60A: Neon, argon and krypton)

Word of the Day: MINECRAFT (3D: Video game franchise whose players gather natural resources) —

Minecraft is a 2011 sandbox game developed by Mojang Studios. The game was created by Markus "Notch" Persson in the Java programming language. Following several early private testing versions, it was first made public in May 2009 before being fully released in November 2011, with Notch stepping down and Jens "Jeb" Bergensten taking over development. Minecraft is the best-selling video game in history, with over 238 million copies sold and nearly 140 million monthly active players as of 2021 and has been ported to several platforms.

In Minecraft, players explore a blocky, procedurally generated, three-dimensional world with virtually infinite terrain and may discover and extract raw materials, craft tools and items, and build structures, earthworks, and machines. Depending on their chosen game mode, players can fight hostile mobs, as well as cooperate with or compete against other players in the same world. Game modes include a survival mode (in which players must acquire resources to build in the world and maintain health) and a creative mode (in which players have unlimited resources and access to flight). The game's large community also offers a wide variety of user-generated content, such as modifications, servers, skins, texture packs, and custom maps, which add new game mechanics and possibilities. (wikipedia)

I posted a picture of KIND OF BLUE a few days back, alongside the definition of "modal jazz." Fun to see it pop up again here today. Makes a nice complement to UPRIGHT BASS. Paul Chambers plays UPRIGHT BASS on KIND OF BLUE, in case anyone asks you, which ... you never know. Those were my two favorite themers, for sure, and my favorite answers overall. The theme itself is a pretty standard "first words"-type puzzle, with a revealer that plays on words in a familiar phrase. A fine example of its kind. Importantly, the "good" words do not mean "good" in their respective phrases, so that only by reference to the revealer can you see the "good" meaning, and the pattern. I DUG this one a reasonable amount. I think I DUG the theme more than the fill. The longer Downs are reasonably strong—DUMB WAITER is the real winner there. The shorter fill gets a bit gunky in places (DAHS ULAN ERS EENSY OUIS ATEAM) and there are a bunch of repeaters (ALOHA HANOI etc.), but it's pretty solid and varied, especially for a reasonably theme-dense puzzle. From a Downs-only solving perspective, the real bear for me today was ART EDITORS, yeeeesh. Don't really know ... what those are, though I can guess. I mean, it's inferable. Just not a phrase I'm used to seeing, and the clue really didn't help much (27D: Professionals who work with graphic designers). I had the ART part but then a lot of blankness. The "I" and the "T" eventually went in because those Acrosses became undeniable, but still, I had to stare and squint a bit before my brain turned up EDITORS. ARGH!

Beyond that, just a couple Downs-only glitches. SUMO / JUDO is a kealoa* that I never considered. Is SUMO an Olympic sport? If not, why not? I would tune in for that. Anyway, I wrote in SUMO before JUDO (24D: Olympic sport from Japan). I hesitated at the ERS/ORS dilemma, for obvious reasons (36D: Locales staffed by M.D.s). Found LOUSY oddly difficult to come up with (8D: Pretty terrible), mostly because AR-O and LE-N could've been many things, and when I looked at OUI- I actually thought maybe I had something wrong. Then I figured the only thing that could go at the end of OUI- was an "S" and yup, correct. LOUSY became clear after that. The stickiest Downs-only moment, after ART EDITORS, was BABKA! Give me five letters, a "B" start, and a clue related to "coffeecake," and, well, to be blunt: BUNDT (51D: Coffeecake with cross-section swirls). 

Other things:

• 13D: Embarrassing sound to suddenly make while laughing (SNORT) — who's embarrassed? I know several snort-laughers and they don't seem embarrassed. *You* should be embarrassed. They're laughing at you, after all.
• 19A: The "M" of MSG (MONO-) — because MADISON wouldn't fit
• 32D: Shout that might give you goose bumps ("BOO!") — absolutely not. Goose bumps are a reaction to eeriness, not shock. If you startle me, I don't get goose bumps; I get angry. 
• 30D: Alien's ride, for short (UFO) — this clue is many layers of hilarious. Like, first, we're using slang ("ride") to talk about alien vehicles? Also, UFO? If you know that it's carrying aliens, then you have identified it. It's just an FO now.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*kealoa = a pair of words (normally short, common answers) that can be clued identically and that share at least one letter in common (in the same position). These are answers you can't just fill in quickly because two or more answers are viable, Even With One or More Letters In Place. From the classic [Mauna ___] KEA/LOA conundrum. See also, e.g. [Heaps] ATON/ALOT, ["Git!"] "SHOO"/"SCAT," etc. 

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