Right Here, Right Now...

Favorite albums of 2012

dalryaug — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 03:00:09 GMT

My favorite albums this year ranged from French-singing Canadian singer-songwriter Peter Peter (with his eighties-sounding synth and saxophone) to the folk rock of Of Monsters and Men and Dry the River to the classical/electronic music of Anna Meredith to the electronic music of Grimes. Of course, as usual there are various strands of indie rock in the form of Tanlines, Tame Impala, Sun Airway, and Wild Nothing, and pop in the form of The Mynabirds and Manceau.

Favorite discovery: St. Lucia
Biggest surprise: Cat Power
Favorite album: Sun Airway - Soft Fall
Favorite song: RAC - Hollywood

11-20 (in alphabetical order)
Diamond Rings - Free Dimensional
Exitmusic - Passage
Hot Chip - In Our Heads
Jessie Ware - Devotion
Lord Huron - Lonesome Dreams
Passion Pit - Gossamer
Savoir Adore - Our Nature
The Winter Sounds - Runner
Twin Shadow - Confess
Yeasayer - Fragrant World

10. Tanlines - Mixed Emotions

All of Me
Green Grass

9. Tame Impala - Lonerism

Why Won't They Talk to Me?
Feels Like We Only Go Backwards
Elephant

8. Manceau - Life Traffic Jam

Full Time Job
The Way It Is

7. Dry the River - Shallow Bed

New Ceremony
Shield Your Eyes

6. The Mynabirds - Generals

Generals
Body of Work

5. Peter Peter - Une version améliorée de la tristesse

Une version améliorée de la tristesse
Carrousel
Les chemins étoilés

4. Of Monsters and Men - My Head is an Animal

Dirty Paws
Little Talks
Lakehouse

3. Grimes - Visions

Genesis
Oblivion
Vowels = Space and Time
Be a Body (侘寂)

2. Wild Nothing - Nocturne

Only Heather
This Chain Won't Break
Paradise

1. Sun Airway - Soft Fall

Soft Fall
Black Noise
Symphony in White, No. 2
Activity 3

EPs
1. The Royal Concept - The Royal Concept
2. St. Lucia - St. Lucia
3. Anna Meredith - Black Prince Fury
4. Youngblood Hawke - Youngblood Hawke

Older
1. Delay Trees - Delay Trees (2010)
2. The Last Bison - Quill (2011)
3. Alphabeat - Alphabeat (2008)
4. Diamond Rings - Special Affections (2010)
5. John Grant - Queen of Denmark (2010)

Favorite songs not on the top albums:
Au - Get Alive
Baby Monster - City of Lovers
Chad Valley - I Owe You This
Chris Malinchak - So Good to Me
Chvrches - The Mother We Share
Gemini Club - By Surprise
Goldroom - Fifteen
Haim - Forever
Jessie Ware - Wildest Moments
Letting Up Despite Great Faults - Bulletproof Girl
Kate Boy - Northern Lights
Kishi Bashi - Intro / Pathos, Pathos
RAC - Hollywood
Solange - Losing You
Zulu Winter - Silver Tongue

BAPHL 5 post-mortem

dalryaug — Thu, 10 May 2012 08:05:17 GMT

Rob wrote about BAPHL 4 in a post-mortem, so I figured I'd do the same thing for ours.

We on plugh ran BAPHL 5 on April 21; this was actually the first non-Mystery Hunt on site event that I was involved in organizing. It was also the first event I've written for which had to handle two answers per puzzle and also a "no internet" rule. I was overall leader and served as puzzle editor for this event so here are the behind the scenes comments about the puzzles (which are available on our site) and development of this event. I'll also talk a little about the location (did you know that the original idea was to have a finish line separate from the start and there was a 2 alarm brush fire right next to the proposed finish line location on March 11?).

Anyway, if you haven't seen the pictures from our event taken by Nick, we have a collection on Flickr, which includes photos of our Best Costume Award winner and our top two teams Azote and 111 Mice.

Theme
The theme we ended up writing was initially suggested by projectyl and people on our Mystery Hunt team might recognize that he proposed a somewhat similar idea when we were discussing possible ideas for Mystery Hunt 2010. We discussed how we might do an event themed on this for some time after he proposed it for this and ultimately voted to do this over a different proposed theme concept.

Location
We ran the event in the Back Bay Fens starting at Evans Way Park (the first BAPHL in Boston proper after three in Cambridge and one in Brookline). Mike B. was the first one to propose an event route in this location and he initially suggested Evans Way Park as the start and Mother's Rest near the northern end of the park as the finish (because, yes, our initial plan actually had a different finish line from the start line). I had been scouting the location along with Mike, so it was pretty interesting when the fire happened in the Fens on March 11. When I was looking at the pictures of the burnt out reeds, I realized that this burned out area really was right next to the area I had been scouting the past weeks. (This picture set sort of shows where it was. This picture shows the Victory Gardens on the other side of the river and the last photo in this set is the location of our Checkpoint 3 where devjoe was staffing).

Of course, those of you at the event know we didn't ultimately have a separate finish line; we decided that we wanted to consolidate the number of different locations that we had to have people manning given the number of on site GC we had. Also, one reason that I liked Evans Way Park as the finish line also is that I think it's a better location for teams to come and work than the Mother's Rest area (in that area, there are less benches in the immediate area and outside of the playground, the ground isn't quite as reasonable to sit on due to the goose crap all over).

Unlocking
The unlocking system used in our event was initially suggested by devjoe. A different one had been proposed for our event earlier, but it was swingier in terms of how many puzzles a team would get at a time; in that older idea, teams started off with one puzzle and solving it would let them get the first two puzzles from all three checkpoints. We thought we wanted to give teams more puzzles at the start and devjoe's suggestion would let teams be able to unlock one checkpoint before the others no matter which two of the first four puzzles teams solved.

Ultimately, while I think our unlocking system worked, one aspect that I think I should have reconsidered was the selection of the four puzzles at the start and perhaps reconsidered whether Huckleberry Finn should have sat at the start given that it was a puzzle that teams were not always able to come up with the idea to solve the way it was done. Teams needed to solve three of the first four puzzles to have unlocked all three checkpoints. This might not have been as much of an issue if Gulliver's extraction also hadn't proven to be easy to miss. Gulliver had to be one of the start puzzles (since the start of the walkaround was much closest to the start than any other checkpoint), so I might have shuffled Huckleberry Finn to later in the event or made it easier to get the idea of the puzzle.

Event Length
Our event was the longest BAPHL of the ones that have been run so far and I think it's definitely possible to argue our event was too long for the 7 hour time span of the event (given the number of puzzles plus the fact that the puzzles all had two answers). 9 out of 19 Hard teams finished the last meta (which is the lowest proportion to finish of the BAPHLs so far, I believe). Detailed information about when teams received the various puzzle packets at the different locations (as well as finishing times) can be found in this spreadsheet.

Normal Difficulty
One of the challenges of writing for BAPHL compared to other events lies in its Normal difficulty level. Normal difficulty has been around since the first BAPHL and it's intended to be an easier level of difficulty for the event. However, going into it, we on plugh weren't really sure what difficulty we should be aiming for adapting our puzzles to; we didn't really know the people who register for the event at Normal difficulty. The idea of what to do for this became a lot clearer to us, though, when we had a test solve with a team that had registered for Normal difficulty at BAPHL 4.

There are two main things that we learned from them about how to pitch the Normal difficulty:

1) Be careful about what assumptions a puzzle makes on what solvers will know to do. Normal solvers are less likely to know these things. This should seem obvious, but it's easy to forget when writing hunt style puzzles how much experience comes into play when solving both in terms of recognizing what a puzzle type is (and hence what to do) and in terms of prioritizing likely ways of trying to extract an answer. The Mario dropquote proved to be a pretty good example of this for us as it was a puzzle that didn't have a Normal version when we did our test solve with our Normal BAPHL 4 team (the current Hard version is pretty much what they test solved) as it does assume certain things that pretty much all Hard teams were able to get through (that the team knows that the puzzle type is called a "dropquote" and that 1, 2, 3 are to be used as indices (which our Normal test solvers got to, but not before trying a few other things that were a little surprising to us given that I think to more experienced solvers using the numbers as indices here is likely the first thing tried).

To that end, I basically pushed for two things on Normal puzzles. If the puzzle assumes knowledge of a base level of a puzzle type (because it's a variant of it), then explain what the rules of the base type of that puzzle are. In general, give Normal teams a stronger idea of what to do. The second aspect I pushed for was to make extraction cues clearer on Normal puzzles. We learned from watching from the Normal test solvers that they don't necessarily work through extraction methods in the same order more experienced solvers are more likely to do.

2) Normal difficulty solvers are quite capable if they know what to do. To me, Anakin was a pretty good example of a gridded word puzzle (whose grid difficulty I was unsure about going into our test solve when it came to Normal solvers) that our Normal test solvers were able to solve the grid of at the on site test solve (admittedly Normal had enumerations that Hard did not).

Puzzles
The Start
3UP! (Mario) (projectyl)
Initial drafts of this puzzle were a bit different in that the grid was shorter (it was height 4), but there were no clues and the numbers in the grid weren't given (you had to drop them down, too), so you actually had to sort of solve this like a dropquote. It solved kind of weirdly, though, because it was really pretty hard to figure out what the words were and in fact, in that stage, it was easier to extract the message of the extra letters rather than trying to solve the grid, so this puzzle ended up being changed to make it not as wide (and to have the extra letters spell a message that was not quite as easy to pick out) but have given numbers and clues.

Economy of Scale (Phileas Fogg) (devjoe)
This puzzle never really changed much from its initial conception; most of the changes in it from the initial state had to do with presentation. The major challenge to this puzzle was getting solvers to understand the rules and what the diagram is showing and this wasn't trivial and there was a lot of refining of this.

Travelogue (Gulliver) (sin_vraal and Mike)
The route on this puzzle used to be about 50% longer. The first time I walked through the route used in this puzzle; it took me 90 minutes and this is even after I had spent enough time in this area to know a lot of what is in the area. The initial route originally sent teams all the way around MFA and up the road from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum past the Kelleher Rose Garden to the War Memorial. I really liked the writing that these guys did for the route and I managed to find all but one of the photos at the time on my own. I found this part of the puzzle enjoyable, just long.

Then, there is the wall extraction, which I think is the least liked aspect of this puzzle (for hard solvers). Believe it or not, this part used to be longer since there were more photos and it used to be that all the coordinates were relative to the last coordinate instead of absolute. In retrospect, I think we should probably have gone even further (or more strongly clued how to find the password in the puzzle) given that for normal solvers we had already chosen to remove this aspect of extraction completely.

Double Dealing (Huckleberry Finn) (me)
So I took this hazard answer, but the puzzle I ultimately wrote for this was not what I was thinking I was going to write for this when I claimed it. I didn't do that idea, because I ultimately ended up deciding I wasn't quite satisfied by it. So I ultimately decided to focus on TWAIN's meaning as two and deal with double crossing somehow.

So I rather like how this puzzle came out, but I'm not sure in retrospect that I should have put it at the start (without pushing harder in the puzzle about what to do) given it was a puzzle that teams could easily just not get the idea of what to do.

Checkpoint 1
Roll It! (Dick Dastardly & Muttley) (canadianpuzzler)
This puzzle concept was turned in pretty early, but wasn't particularly tied to any racer, so I set it as a puzzle whose answer would be a hazard that no one else wanted and at the end that turned out to be this hazard answer.

Shape Up, Man! (Marty McFly) (devjoe)
This hazard was one of the later ones to be claimed and the initial draft of this puzzle that was test solved actually clued a different password (that would eventually get taken by the Speed Racer puzzle) since this puzzle was pretty flexible in what its password message could give.

Lesson Learned (The Tortoise and The Hare) (me)
I'd never written this type of puzzle and I hadn't quite realized going into it how it isn't easy to make things line up vertically in the grid. I wasn't initially that happy with the grid, because it seemed a little odd to me that the first phrase at the top of the grid essentially divides the four first words each into their own block so that you can scan the lists for whole words for them, but eventually I realized that's not such a bad thing. Plus, at the time I was wondering about this, I was aware that there might be length concerns for our event, so I decided I was okay with this.

Checkpoint 2
Hur-ticulture (Ben Hur) (coreyplover)
Initial versions of clues for this puzzle proved too tough and we had to bring the difficulty level of the clues down twice before test solvers were able to solve enough of the grid. Rows Garden puzzles can be really tough to get through if too many of the clues aren't specific enough (and solvers at our event weren't going to have the benefit of online tools to look up possible words), so a good number of the clues were made more specific from the more vague, trickier clues that had been turned in initially.

Winning Ways (The Flash) (me)
While I liked the idea of this puzzle and I liked its use of the Fenway Victory Gardens, I feel like this puzzle had one weak area and it was that its extraction process is not a very smooth process for solvers because the plot numbering is not always easy to disambiguate; this is particularly true for a number of the plots that were used for the end of the hazard answer.

New World Odyssey (Odysseus) (me)
This was the last puzzle written for the event. I'd never written this type of puzzle before either and the eventual designs that were used in the real puzzle were a completely redone version of the diagrams that I made for the first major test solve of our event. I debated when I was making this whether I should just have the diagrams spell out the messages in given order (or whether they should be reordered in alphabetical order by city, say), but left them in given order since I didn't really want to make the puzzle take longer to solve.

Checkpoint 3
Doing Laps (Anakin Skywalker) (canadianpuzzler)
On initial drafts of this puzzle, I was a little uncertain how gettable certain answers were (some of the clues seemed a bit tough given the restriction of not using the internet) and of course, the variation used in this puzzle makes it tougher to get traction on than a typical Marching Bands. Test solving did show the cluing difficulty may be on the tougher side, so the cluing difficulty was eventually brought down a notch.

Test solving did end up leading to a few more tweaks on this puzzle since people kept missing how to extract the password from the puzzle, the clue to extract became more and more emphasized in its clue. Also, the locations of the letters in the puzzle were initially in the upper left corners like a typical Marching Bands (because the answer initially read down the center column), but feedback from test solvers came back that people did expect to see the answer in the rows (because rows are really the focus of a Marching Bands more so than the columns), so the start location letters were ultimately changed to the lower left corners to make that work. I think this also reinforced the idea of how to extract (to those who know the Marching Bands puzzle type) since otherwise, there is no particular reason to put the letters up that corner.

The Road Goes Ever On (Frodo) (devjoe)
This puzzle concept was also turned in pretty early, but wasn't attached to any particular racer, so draft versions of it clued a different hazard along the path. I initially wondered if this puzzle was even a bit too short, but after seeing it and how other puzzles fared in test solving, I decided it was probably okay even if it was short given the length of our event.

Vanity Plates (Speed Racer) (me)
When one suggested puzzle using license plates didn't end up happening, I ended up picking up the license plate presentation idea and writing this puzzle, which turned out to be surprisingly constrained the way I set the puzzle up (due to needing a different state for each word). Test solving here mainly served to remove false ways of joining the letters together.

Metas
While the team worked together in developing ideas of what the metas would look like and ideas for what the hazards would look like, coreyplover and projectyl took shots at making an answer list for the hazards that would gradually become our used lists of hazards (once the CHECKERED FLAG answer was established). coreyplover came up with the answer list for the flag.

One thing that came up in test solving was that solvers were having trouble discerning what the final answer to the checkered flag meta was; the intended answer very much seems like an instruction to look at the Mario puzzle for an answer. I think ultimately, we didn't go far enough to make it clearer on the final instructions given on the page not to do that and Mike had to do that verbally when giving out copies of this puzzle.

The elimination clues used to order the racers were one of the last things written and devjoe ending up picking this up off our list of things that still needed to be written that no one was doing. At that point, we already knew we were planning to have three checkpoints, so I thought the idea of putting a basic ordering logic puzzle but dividing the information needed to get the order between the checkpoints was a good idea for that based on our unlocking structure.

Hunt 2012: A musical experience

dalryaug — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:14:44 GMT

So Mystery Hunt 2012 happened and it was a pretty good event. This year's event plot extended the plot of The Producers leading us to be script writers writing a series of flop musicals. I had a lot of fun overall.

[This post like last year starts with comments about hunt and my experience this year followed by a long recap sort of section followed by any other remaining comments about specific puzzles (and two of the metas).]

There were a lot of things I liked about the hunt; I liked the general idea of the overall structure of the hunt. I thought the way the hunt used the show answers twice was neat and done interestingly. I thought the puzzles were for the most part well done, too. The general production work for the event was handled well, too.

I'd say probably the only thing I didn't like so much was the weird gap of time between our finishing the last three critic metas and being able to perform the performances associated with them. It is understandable given how those last three solves occurred (roughly at 9:30 PM, 10:10 PM, and 10:30 PM) around the time the coin was found that there might be some delay, but it was kind of weird since for the prior performances I more or less scheduled the appointment when we were ready to perform them and pretty quickly got appointments (well, for the two earlier ones I had scheduled). Here, we got the Phantom of the Operator script written and had people ready to perform it, so I tried to schedule an appointment and we waited and waited and waited (long enough that Mayan Fair Lady had gotten written and I managed to ask about scheduling that too before we got our call back) and eventually found out at around 11 PM that we'd have to wait about 90 minutes to perform those two (and so we just went ahead and submitted an appointment request for Ogre of La Mancha since we knew it at least would be written by then). So there was kind of a weird gap of time when there wasn't a whole lot to do since the performance skits had pretty much been written and we just mainly had leftover puzzles to do (and we didn't really have enough of the review letters at that point to notice anything). I will say that I do think this a minor thing in the grand scheme of things, though (especially since another team had already won).

It was interesting to discover in the submitted answer data that our team actually submitted the answer to our last meta, Ben Bitdiddle, before Too Big to Fail finished their last meta, Watson 2.0 (by just 2.8 seconds!). So Did Too Big to Fail get pushed to endgame second because they had a performance request in the call queue before us when Codex started scheduling appointments for us after the coin was found and so they had all their remaining performances queued before ours (and due to the break Codex took the 45 minute rule didn't really apply)?

I think overall the team performed pretty well and pretty close to as well as we could perform this year (unlike last year when we had some trouble with Mega Man and fell behind the lead pack at that point). I knew going into this year's event that a higher number than usual of our strongest solvers wouldn't be on site this year including pretty much everyone on the team actually strong in musical theater; one of them sort of ironically wasn't there because he had tech rehearsal for a play. I wondered somewhat how that would affect us, but I think that in these last two years we've kind of worked out a lot of the kinks of how to handle having remote solvers as best we can and there were certainly a lot of contributions from off site. Granted, this is by no means to suggest that it was better than having them on site; nothing can really replace being there and having easy access to various people to work with or talk to if you need them, but certainly it works better to have them remote than not having them at all.

This isn't to say that we weren't affected by not having our strong musical knowledge people on site. You might notice if you watch our team's performances that most had nothing to do musically with the musical that the show was supposed to be referencing; I think Okla-Holmes-a! was the only one written that actually included rewritten songs from the musical in question (though I might be wrong, I never saw the script for our team's Into the Woodstock) and it turned out that one of the performers of it didn't know the song Pore Jud Is Daid whose lyrics had been adapted for one part of the performance. Admittedly, our Jesus Christ Superstar Wars performance did have some adapted songs from Jesus Christ Superstar, but that performance was pretty much not at all pre-written (I don't think it even actually included the hit song with the title we had solved for in the earlier puzzle).

But really, even if we had those strong remote solvers on site and even if we had spent the bupkis (we finished the hunt with all of them unspent), I don't think that would have been able to make up the five hour difference by which Manic Sages beat us. (Maybe the smaller things would have pushed us farther ahead of Too Big to Fail, though, so that we would have actually gone into endgame before them (given the answer data seems to suggest that we finished all the metas before they did). I'm not really sure tactically there was anything we could have done to make up that five hour difference except be a larger team. I've seem some discussion that perhaps their team was better suited to the balance of puzzles, but I'm not sure I agree with that as the cause of such a fast solving rate of their team compared to ours. This year I remember coming back from sleep and feeling like we had a number of puzzles left abandoned while the active people were marching onward on to more newer puzzles, which we had been steadily unlocking while I was away (selectively solving puzzles in a round and then solving the metapuzzle only really strongly helps on keeping pace with the larger teams if we can use it to backsolve the other puzzles, otherwise, the larger team's ability to keep going on leftover puzzles or leaving people to backsolve them still kind of outweighs the strategy we can try to take through a hunt in this style of structure, which can require leaving some puzzles left behind since we just don't have the people to spare to keep on those). I think it has more to do with the size of the team given the number of puzzles available. I do suspect we possibly should have really started Ben Bitdiddle earlier if we could (though I'm not sure how feasible that is given that one of the two people who soldered went to the pool event for our team and the other was in charge of our food).

Regarding length of hunt, I'll admit that I personally like longer hunts than this one turned out to be, but I can't say I really minded the length of this hunt too much either (for us at least, though I'm not sure what I think about a team completing all the regular content of the hunt in 29 or so hours... that does seem a little short timewise). This was perhaps the first hunt that Luck has competed in where our team did progress rather steadily through it; in '09, we stalled quite a bit on the bottleneck of trying to open Outer Zyzzlvaria (we won by being first to solve the metas even though we were quite a bit behind in unlocking Outer Zyzzlvaria stuff) and in '11, we stalled mainly in Mega Man (to a lesser extent in Zelda). In both years, sort of coincidentally this time spent stuck more or less corresponded with the time I was out of HQ nominally asleep so I never had really suffered the negative effects of getting stuck as much as other members of my team had, but I'm glad for our team's sake that this didn't happen this year. This year we didn't hit such a blockage and proceeded rather steadily through the event. Some people asked me at various points how I thought we were doing and I said that I thought we were doing well, but I know better than to be overconfident about how we're doing and so I always said that I thought we were doing well, but it's hard to tell how that stacks up against other teams and especially the larger front-runner teams.

It was a different feeling being done with the hunt early Sunday morning; this was the first time a team I had been on had finished a hunt this early in some time (last time was 2007 for me when I was on Palindrome). Someone on Luck had noted that of the three years we had competed so far, we finished '09 around 3 AM on Monday, finished '11 around 4 PM on Sunday, and finished this year's around 4 AM on Sunday and joked that following this progression we'd finish about another 12 hours earlier next year (and eventually a few years from now finish the hunt before it starts).

I'd never paid that much attention before to how much where you sit can possibly determine who you end up working with on puzzles at Hunt, but this hunt I did seem to spend a high number of times working with ertchin (who had taken the table opposite of me on our island of two tables joined lengthwise), which was interesting when I realized I don't think I had co-solved with him much before in the two years our team had competed previously. It was really good to have the chance to work with him more, though, since for a good number of the other people on the team, I've worked with them in other puzzle events (local or online), but I hadn't really worked with ertchin as much in any of those.

When hunt started, I had trouble latching on to a puzzle, so after a few early attempts to start on Potlines (which I didn't quite get the idea of), I just ended up doing Good Auspicious Hunting since no one else was doing it. I made some progress on identifying pictures and finding articles (along with Mike Booth who came over to work with me on it), but we didn't quite understand what to do with the blanks and I did not end up continuing with this puzzle. Rock* would get the idea of it later on.

Early on while I was working on this puzzle, I was meanwhile trying to resolve a phone issue. I had sent in a request to revise the phone numbers for the team in the week of hunt, but that apparently had not at all been done. Even worse, the only phone number they had listed for our team was typoed so we basically couldn't call in any answers and get any message back, so I spent the early part of hunt trying to make sure this phone situation got resolved. Someone talked to the person who came by to drop off posters to our HQ. This was eventually straightened out.

The next puzzle I put some time into was Winning Conditions. We got to work on collecting the various rules, but we were not entirely sure what to do. We realized quickly that there wasn't any individual word that would satisfy all the rules at once and we noticed pretty early on that entering in the same word at different guess stages would cause us to violate different rules, but we didn't quite get the hang of the puzzle at this stage and I ended up abandoning this puzzle (this would later be solved by motris and veep).

The next puzzle I ended up moving to was Match Game, which I worked on with ertchin. I guess some people had suggested early on that transparencies might be nice, but I thought it was easy enough to do it by eye and I grabbed ertchin to help me (devjoe and Dart would end up coming by later as we got further) and we ended up finishing this off together.

The next puzzle I moved onto was The Answers Are Somehow Connected with ertchin and devjoe, but while we fairly early managed to get the T connection, we didn't quite grasp the aspect of each clue having two answers (grr, and this is even though I had noticed Butler and Orient Heights and wondered a little about them, but didn't say anything). I ended up going from this puzzle to Towers with the same group plus Dart. We fairly easily got the clues answered and understood the 5-letter answers, but we weren't quite sure how to do the extraction step using the Towers of Hanoi. Both of these puzzles ended up getting finished by other people later.

I ended up getting drawn into what people were talking about on Critical Thinking, though I didn't have much to offer on this one and so ended up bouncing from this one to work on Of Course! We quickly got the acrostic clue from the answers, and ertchin and I both thought that the puzzle likely involved the chromatic scale aspect since there are 12 chromatic notes, but once we ordered them this way, we didn't quite see what to do with that (and I think it was Six who came along later to see the diagonal message). After this, it was about 12:30 so I decided to head out to try to get some sleep.

Unlike prior years, my night plans involved going to the Hyatt this year (past years I stayed over at the Mariott and the Kendall) and wow, what a change that was since it involved walking outside for quite a bit longer than I was used to. I walked over with zotmeister since we were crashing at a suite sin_vraal had gotten. I had a lot of trouble sleeping that night though and I'm not entirely sure what it was that was keeping me from really sleeping well. It was one of those nights where I felt like I was awake a long time, but when I looked at the clock it seemed like time was advancing faster than it should be if I had just been lying awake the whole time.

Anyway, I got out of bed around 6:15 AM, took a shower, and headed back to HQ (catching up with zotmeister who left before I did) getting there at about 6:50 AM, which was not long after we had just unlocked Phantom of the Operator. I decided not to start off looking at the newest stuff but looking at the older stuff that had come in while I was out and left unsolved to see if there was anything I could contribute. These included both Itinerant People of America and Pacific Overtones, but after getting them explained to me (as far as we had gotten on either), I wasn't really able to make a contribution to either (our team's overall idea of what the IPA cryptogram was a list of was wrong and I didn't have any ideas on extracting the answer from the grid of Pacific Overtones was. I ended turning to My Summer Vacation since no one had worked on it, but I quickly realized this involved counting things at T stations, so I wasn't really going to do that (but did email the list about it for people who had gone home for the night). So then Mapmaker passed off The Undiscovered Underground to me wondering if I had any idea on it. I spent some time on this without really knowing how to get an answer out of the coins at the lettered intersections (having not worked on the earlier part, it hadn't even occurred to me that there were elements in the game that didn't correspond to actual things at the location).

Around this time, veep had solved Rainbow Connection, so we were inching closer to getting the answer to Mayan Fair Lady. In fact, after projectyl had called in HARDEST HEARTS, I ended up suggesting the answer might be HARVEST HEARTS, which was pretty much my only real contribution to solving metas this year for the team. After this I joined the people looking at Set Theory, but didn't really have much more to offer than what the people working on it had gotten.

Around this time, I finally went with the others to open the bags for Carb Pool, which devjoe took the lead on solving noticing the lengths of the unsmashed set. I had thought this was an estimation puzzle of some sort from the time projectyl had first brought the bags back and I was glad it did turn out more or less to work that way. I didn't stay to keep working on this though since I didn't think they needed another person for this.

Somewhere around this time I went to work on General Knowledge answering the questions before we pretty soon realized the connection to the Major General's Song. We got confused about the answer extraction though and this wouldn't get solved until later. After we unlocked Get Your Dog Back..., I decided to work on this puzzle and found I rather liked it. For a while, I thought I was actually entering in the artist names completely backwards instead of backwards word by word (since I didn't quite realize at first that the titles were taken wordwise back to front), but once projectyl pointed that out, sin_vraal and I made pretty steady progress through this puzzle.

The first puzzle in Sheila Sunshine I ended up working on was Disorder of Operations joining Rajeev, Harley, and Ethan on it. One of them pointed out that the first instruction looked alphabetized, but I pointed out that it's actually almost an alphabetization of ALPHABETIZE (though my idea at that point about why some of the letters was missing was wrong). From there, we started to gradually get the idea of how to apply the rules to form a chain and from there got pretty steadily to the answer.

Around this time, our team had a momentary glitch where the system was telling us there was nothing more to unlock; I'm not sure how that happened but multiple people saw it before we went back to having another unlock time appear.

From there I ended up joining the effort on Curiouser and Curioser. Early people working on it had noticed the acrostic of various cat names and it made me want to associate them with Cats somehow, but I think someone else saw how to relate the clue answers to the cats on Cats, so I joined the effort to add some of the cat names to the things we had entered in as answers for some of the clues.

From here, I ended up working on Letter Head with sin_vraal and zebraboy3, which went pretty smoothly to its answer; sin_vraal had worked out most of the initial letters that needed to be added to the first set of clues, but I pointed out that T-Pain was the name of a rapper and we gradually got more matches until we made it to the answer. From here, I ended up going on to Argh. rpipuzzleguy and Brad had listened to the audio and transcribed a lot of it, but then left it, so ertchin and I looked at it and he made the connection to The Eye of Argon after googling the name that appeared in two of the responses. So I ended up looking up the text and he ended up listening to the samples to try to match up the mumbly audio part with the text. This was kind of interesting, but it was taking a long time and I wasn't too sure about staying on this so long so we eventually moved on even though we hadn't finished this.

Around this time, I think it was Rajeev (but I might be wrong) who had gotten the idea of JFK SHAGS A SAD SLIM LASS; I remember I went over to their table and he explained to me what he was inputting as the answer and I agreed that it sounded totally reasonable as something to try.

Sometime after this, I ended up walking projectyl down to the interview for Rats. I did spend a little bit of time looking up rats for Rats when the second part of the puzzle came back, though I didn't stick to working on this too long. Around this time, we were starting to close up meta solves, leaving just Ben Bitdiddle, Sheila Sunshine, and Watson 2.0 as unsolved metas.

I spent some amount of time looking at Now I Know My ABCs and answered a bunch of clues, but somehow even though we actually had the right idea, we got confused because we actually didn't recognize the ones that I was choosing to play and so stopped but it turned out we should have kept going since it was the right idea. motris and veep who picked up the puzzle later had the same idea, but they actually managed to recognize some of the melodies and carried this to the end.

So at this point it's already 7:45 PM and we only have three metas unsolved: Ben Bitdiddle, Sheila Sunshine, and Watson 2.0. Work is ongoing on all three and solving Now I Know My ABCs brings our proposed Watson answer up to -L-FF-U-, though we're not quite sure what that might be.

Around 8:30 PM, we worked out that we thought we were looking for palindromic Morse code words that fit in the categories of the Ben Bitdiddle answers (from the DROME part of the clue since we never figured out how to get both sides of the message). The people on site were making progress on getting some of them, but coreyplover was the one who found WINTERTIME (at about 8:50 PM) and TOPKNOT (at around 9 PM).

Around the same time, zebraboy3 finally got the right idea for Screen Test pointing out that in Wall-E, they are watching Hello Dolly (I had spent some time earlier working on this without any real idea). Right around the time they were finishing this up (about 9:30 PM), we finally finished Sheila Sunshine. Solving Screen Test had gotten our Watson phrase up to -L-FFOU-.

Around 9:50 PM, Dart pointed out that ertchin noting again that the critic answers seemed to be specifically designed to annoy that specific critic (something I'm not sure we had paying enough attention to in our guesses for the Watson meta at that point)). At around 10:10 PM, Dart came up with the idea for ALT F FOUR as the Watson answer bringing us down to just Ben Bitdiddle for which we had worked out a good chunk of the right side of the message (including that one of the things clued by a type was FLUID though we didn't have the matching Bitdiddle answer for it), but we still didn't know how to obtain the left side of the message... but it wouldn't eventually matter since around 10:30 PM Dart had typed in the answer to the meta as a guess from his searching on Longhorn Speedway and it was correct.

Right around the same time, the message reporting the coin had been found appeared on the main page, though it linked to a broken page, so we were unsure what was going on with that. That was a little disappointing given the timing, but perhaps not all that surprising given that we had put ourselves in the queue to do a performance for Phantom of the Operator some time before that but still hadn't received any call back for an appointment and I had been a little suspicious of that. A bit before 11 PM I put in another request in the queue, this time for Mayan Fair Lady, and not too long after we finally got a call back telling us that our appointment for Phantom of the Operator and Mayan Fair Lady would be consecutive appointments at 12:30 AM (which convinced us to schedule our appointment for Ogre of La Mancha right away even though it wasn't finished being written at that point yet).

So since we already knew a team had won and we weren't even going to get an appointment until 12:30 for our performances, some people went to Miracle of Science for a drink (I didn't, so I don't know if this is where they actually went).

Finally, when our performances were over around 12:55 AM, we got a call and moved on to the Let's Put on a Hit stage, of which were both parts were solved pretty quickly (around 1:20) and we found out we were going to have to wait another 45 minutes to do the next thing (I did wonder a bit later if this 45 minutes was built in or not, since at the time I hadn't quite realized we were supposed to do a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar Wars so maybe it was built in, but it might possibly be that they had Too Big to Fail there).

We used the time here to find the things in the reviews (we found four of them before we got there, but hadn't worked out Betsy's or Ben's). At the schmoozing thing, we had already worked out four of the letters before we got there, but we reasonably quickly got the two we didn't have (I pointed out the letters LORFEO we got from Ben's are the name of an opera, which for some reason other people didn't quite as immediately see).

So we went to our performance of Jesus Christ Superstar Wars, which was pretty much ad libbed. I gathered from other writeups that at least two other teams didn't really prepare this performance either, so I'm glad we're not the only ones.

So we went into runaround. The runaround involved first the Building 7 phase, which involved finding something on each floor of Building 7; this part went relatively okay, but after solving the paper, we went to 24-317 and weren't really sure what to do there for a bit (though when I asked Mapmaker if to enter in the room number, I had meant the whole thing 24-317, apparently he had entered in just the room number 317 and I think 24317 without the dash, but I hadn't realized that was what he had entered so I didn't push him on that until after a bit of time had passed on that).

So we went to Kresge. It was really, really cold outside so people pretty much didn't want to wander around outside the building. We went in the building, which we weren't supposed to do (It was supposed to be locked). A bunch of us wandered around inside for a bit before we were told by the Codex rep with us that we're not really supposed to be inside Kresge. So someone went back around to the back of Kresge and found the paper coin (well, and someone found the device and brought it over, too). We finished around 4 AM.

I didn't particularly like or dislike the runaround; it was not much of one really. I do like runarounds, so I guess I was disappointed this hunt didn't really have much of one.

Winning Conditions: For the most part, I like interactive type puzzles and I liked the idea behind this one a lot.

Snap Judgment: We might have actually finished this puzzle if it hadn't come in while I was sleeping. Our team was quite a while stuck on the early step of noticing the places are building names, something which I know a good number of, but I think our team members in general don't know that well. By the time I got back to HQ, though, we'd already worked out enough of the letters in Mayan Fair Lady that we didn't really need this answer so I never really looked at this puzzle. So when canadianpuzzler flagged me over when Michelle finally made the connection (after we'd solved our last meta), I suggested the puzzle probably involved going to the locations to look for QR codes (since that's what I would do if I had written this) and so some people actually went to look for them and gradually progressed through the latter stages of the puzzle (after we had already finished the runaround).

The Answers Are Somehow Connected, Carb Pool, Get Your Dog Back..., Disorder of Operations, Letter Head: I rather liked these puzzles, but don't have any particular comments on them.

Slash Fiction, Picture an Acorn: I didn't work on these puzzles at all during Hunt, but looking at them in retrospect, I rather like them.

Ben Bitdiddle: I wasn't really sure how to slot this into the recap section since I don't remember when Martin talked to me about it, but our team had various problems when we were trying to solve it including that someone had soldered something together in the wrong direction, so there was some question as to whether we should request another of the affected component while they were trying to undo it (they ultimately got the piece off only breaking off the sixteenth pin so we never did request it). Given that we never figured out how to get both sides of the message in this meta, it is perhaps notable that we were really lucky to have put the device together in the way that it gave us the right side of the message, since there is pretty much no chance we would have solved this meta with just the left half of the message, but the right side of the message had enough.

William S Bergman: I think the team's strongest meta solve was of this one by motris, which got solved with just three of the critic-specific answers from it (COSMO SEX QUIZ, VIDKUN QUISLING, and NEVER REMOVED FROM BOX (so the T-A---R- in that half of the message). Admittedly at that point, I think we had all the show answers for the meta. While we did eventually go on to later forward solve Coming to a Location Near You, I wonder if we should have been trying harder to backsolve the other puzzles in this round (like Manic Sages seems to have) to open up newer puzzles faster, but to be honest, I don't know that how feasible that is given the size of our team (I don't think we had a shortage of puzzles at that point).

So overall, I had a pretty good time and congratulations to Manic Sages; I'm looking forward to seeing what they do for next year.

Favorite albums of 2011

dalryaug — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 06:33:29 GMT

Some last minute album listening ended up moving two new albums into my top ten list, but I guess this is the list for the submitted for 2011. My actual list may change later.

11-20 in alphabetical order

Acid House Kings - Music Sounds Better With You
The Antlers - Burst Apart
Death Cab for Cutie - Codes and Keys
The Dodos - No Color
Friendly Fires - Pala
Maritime - Human Hearts
Owl City - All Things Bright And Beautiful
Smith Westerns - Dye It Blonde
Starfucker - Reptilians
TV on the Radio - Nine Types of Light

10. Lykke Li - wounded Rhymes
Get Some
Sadness is a Blessing

9. Penguin Prison - Penguin Prison
The Worse It Gets

8. Butcher The Bar - For Each A Future Tethered
Bobby
Cradle Song

7. Holy Ghost! - Holy Ghost!
Hold On

6. Foster The People - Torches
Helena Beat
Pumped Up Kicks

5. New Villager - New Villager
Black Rain
Rich Doors

4. The Last Bison - Quill
Switzerland
Quill
Setting Our Tables

3. Wolf Gang - Suego Faults
Lions in Cages
The King and All of His Men
Nightflying

2. Florence And The Machine - Ceremonials
Only If For a Night
Shake It Out
Heartlines

1. Oh Land - Oh Land
Sun of a Gun
Human
We Turn It Up

Favorite EPs
3. Body Language - Social Studies
2. Sky Ferreira - As If!
1. Alcoholic Faith Mission - And the Running with Insanity

Favorite albums listened to the first time this year but released before 2011
5. Jeremy Fisher - Goodbye Blue Monday
4. Hellogoodbye - Would It Kill You
3. David Vertesi - Cardiography
2. Muchuu - Adventure We Go
1. Pete Yorn - musicforthemorningafter

Other favorite songs this year not on my favorite 10 albums (alphabetical):
Airlines - Burial Grounds
Alcoholic Faith Mission - Running with Insanity
Benjamin Francis Leftwich - Atlas Hands
Gentleman Hall - Gravity Will Break Our Bones
James Vincent McMorrow - Sparrow & the Wolf
Joywave - Golden State
The Seedy Seeds - Verb Noun
Strange Talk - Climbing Walls
Urban Cone - Urban Photograph

Battle of the 3s

dalryaug — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 23:35:15 GMT

It's been a bit of time since both DASH 3 (April 30) and BAPHL 3 (May 14), but I still wanted to write about them a bit. It was interesting having both of those events here just two weeks apart.

For those who don't know, DASH stands for Different Area, Same Hunt; it's an event that's run on the same day in a number of different cities. It's a linear event meaning that each team gets and solves a puzzle and then determines from that where to go next to get the next puzzle. DASH uses the same puzzle set for all cities so all the people are solving the same puzzles, but of course since solvers are in different cities, the places that they visit and other add on activities are different.

BAPHL stands for Boston Area Puzzle Hunt League. I've heard that it was inspired by DASH, but to me the ancestor of BAPHL has always seemed to be the MIT Mystery Hunt. While DASH is reminiscent of BANG/SNAP which was derived from the Game in the Bay Area, BAPHL's format always made me think that it was inspired by the Mystery Hunt, which isn't really a surprise given that the Mystery Hunt is pretty much the main focal point of the year for puzzlers in the Boston area. In any case, BAPHL is a mini-puzzlehunt. It is not linear; teams will at times have multiple puzzles available at once. BAPHL is also a site specific event; there is usually at least one puzzle that makes use of something in the local area.

I've said before that in BAPHL, team management is much more important. In DASH (and well most linear events), all the solvers on your team are sitting down and looking at the same puzzle at the same time. In BAPHL, you need to coordinate your team members going to different places to work on different puzzles at the same time.

This year we ended up with a BAPHL a mere two weeks after DASH, which to be honest was a little odd for us. My group hadn't even realized a BAPHL was coming until just under four weeks before the event (and less than two weeks before DASH) and to be honest, I wish we had had a little more heads up that an event was coming down the tube (even if we didn't have a precise date) especially since this event was being held in such close proximity timewise to DASH.

Anyway, my team Plugh happened to win both Boston's edition of DASH and BAPHL. devjoe, Brad Friedman, and I did both events with Bowen being our fourth in DASH and Mapmaker being our fourth in BAPHL. Brad was actually someone that we picked up just a few days before DASH. Our original fourth for DASH dropped out the week of DASH so when the organizers mentioned that someone was looking for a team, we agreed to take him on. Then, during DASH, we asked him if he wanted to do BAPHL with us and that's how we ended up with him for both events.

DASH 3 was a lot of fun; the last DASH I did was the first one in Boston (I wasn't at any of the sites for DASH 2 and didn't end up doing it). Our route started at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Boston Common went west through the Common and then north and then east hitting various "parks" and then going to various squares in Boston before ending us at the Wharf District Park. Our route did hit one or two similar spots that I remembered from DASH 1 (admittedly the closest overlap was one stop that was at the other end of a square that I remembered stopping at in DASH 1).

Since I understand that different cities had different extra activities (apple bowling, etc), I'll mention that ours was a "make a team flag" activity. We stopped at one of those small parks and were asked to make a team flag using provided paper, construction paper, and other tools. Meanwhile, we were provided with a snack of applesauce if we wanted it. The other extra answer was given to us at the very beginning of the event in the introduction about how to use the map (they told us to write it in for the waiver puzzle), though we never went to the site designated for that answer on our map.

In Boston, the puzzle order was Rumpelstiltskin, Chicken Little, Three Little Pigs, make a flag activity, Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk, Hansel and Gretel, Three Musicians from Bremen, Cinderella, and then the meta. Overall, our team did pretty well solving the puzzles. We were the first team to leave the starting point and got through Chicken Little and Three Little Pigs smoothly (I'd later see on the scoreboard that we had the fastest overall time on Three Little Pigs, which did sort of surprise me since I hadn't realized we'd solved that puzzle that fast). Rapunzel went quickly for us, too.

We were stuck a little while on Jack and the Beanstalk at the extraction step after building the jigsaw though we did eventually figure out what to do. Then we hit Hansel and Gretel, which for our team was the puzzle we were stuck on the extraction the longest. We got through the various steps pretty reasonably, but it took us a long time to see how to get the actual answer. Three Musicians from Bremen went much more quickly, though we actually more or less anagrammed the answer out instead of seeing how the chain formed.

After Three Musicians from Bremen, we were made aware that there we should take a break since we were ahead of Game Control for the next site. That's fine of course, since DASH bases its scores entirely on time spent solving (GC checked us in and out of each site). So we walked up to Quincy Market and got food there before heading down to the site for Cinderella. This was another puzzle where we had a little more trouble thinking that the extraction was more than it actually was.

Finally, we reached the last site where we worked on the meta and apparently based on the scoreboard were one of the fastest teams to solve that.

BAPHL 3 kicked off with a group puzzle with each team getting jigsaw puzzle pieces that fit together into one large piece that then needed to be fit together in one large jigsaw puzzle. After that, we started to get more puzzles, but this BAPHL didn't quite follow the format of the last two BAPHLs where you kept getting more puzzles (generally two more at a time) each time you solved a puzzle until you got them all.

This time BAPHL's first five puzzles (1, 2, 3, 4, and M) were released in that pattern we'd gotten to use it, but at that point the last of this five puzzles that we received was a walkaround puzzle that we had to solve before getting anything else, because solving this puzzle led to an interaction where we had to make a decision about whether to save the world or help destroy it.

After that we got puzzle 5 and after we solved that, we were told by GC that we were too far ahead of what they could handle so we ended up getting some food before coming back to work on puzzle 7 on the speaker on the street (and to be honest, I thought working on an audio puzzle on a speaker on the middle of a somewhat busy street sidewalk was kind of weird). After we solved that, we got puzzles 6, 8, and 9 at the same time and then eventually got puzzle MS after solving one of those (though they didn't give us the M packet for the MS meta until a bit after we had already started working on the meta).

Anyway, so in this BAPHL, there was a choice point in the interaction event where we had to pick whether to save the world or destroy it and this determines which meta that we got at the end (labeled MS or MD on the website). In essence, in one version of the meta, the given answers contributed to a meta and in the second version (the one we did) we had to apply answer modifications to the answers and then solve a meta.

Anyway, so we were the first team to finish and we had chosen to save the world. Overall, we generally worked pretty smoothly on the puzzles for this event, though we did have some trouble understanding what the answer to puzzle 2 Global Conspiracy was even though we only had one letter missing because it was not a particularly well known phrase. Eventually, when we got puzzle M, the walkaround, Nick and Joe went off to do it while Brad and I finished puzzle 4 Venomous Snakes and Ladders. Puzzles 5 (I Spy) and 7 (The Horrors to Come) we worked on all together as one group, but Nick and Brad did the Scavenger Hunt (6), while Joe tackled Bean Count (9) and I did Scene of a Quake (8). The puzzle that most intrigued me was puzzle 9, Bean Count, the estimation puzzle in which we had to estimate the values of different things. We'd been told that we were not allowed to use the internet at the beginning of the hunt so we had to rely on visual or mental estimation or asking people for help. This puzzle was actually pretty difficult and was the final answer we got.

I hear there's another BAPHL being run this summer and I'm looking forward to it assuming it happens when I'm available since I have no idea when it will be.

Hunt 2011: Our princess is... somewhere else

dalryaug — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 05:05:36 GMT

I haven't really been certain what to write about this Mystery Hunt (whose plot followed the kidnapping of Peach at Mario and Peach's wedding and tours through the world of Mario, Mega Man, Zelda, Civ, and Katamari Damacy with a final stop in Portal) to be honest. Among my team, it seems to have sparked different opinions that range the gamut, some positive and some not as positive. I'd been wondering if a survey beyond one that just points at favorite and least favorite puzzles is being done this year, because part of me feels that some of their comments are worth being said (and I've encouraged some to make their opinions known), but I'm not sure those team members are going to bring it up on their own and I don't think the already done survey covers some of the things that would be said (I'll add at this point that some seem to have started saying something in the time since I started actually writing this).

[I'll note that the recap section of this entry in the middle is rather long, but there is a section commenting on specific puzzles beyond what I bring up in the recap at the end.]

As for me, there were definitely a number of things I liked about the hunt. I personally like hunts that are interesting structurally and I thought the idea of focusing on metas and supermetas was generally good. I liked how the meta structures in each world reflected the game that it was meant to represent. I thought the production work on the hunt (in terms of its infrastructure and software improvements to change things like entering in the answers), its kickoff, and wrapup was great.

The biggest complaint then lay in the puzzles themselves and a number of people on my team complained about them the day after the hunt after seeing the solutions (The biggest offenders from the team members I talked to were Recombination, Rocky Horror, The Crypt, Counting the Ways, and The Writing on the Wall. I'll note that these do not fall in the category of things that I think my team as a whole are perhaps not generally quite as good at as other teams; I accept that the hunt will have puzzles of this sort). While I did some amount of time working on some of these, there were team members who spent a lot more time working on these and some of them left this hunt a bit dissatisfied (one team member mentioned that he spent 23 straight hours trying to forward solve puzzles that our team either did not ever eventually solve or would end up abandoning and backsolving). I think the unlocking structure this year kind of exacerbated this because unlike past years in which answer checks were used only at the very end so only teams who reached the endgame were affected, here you actually wanted to solve these puzzles because they would help you unlock more all the way up to the Test Center. Also, because old puzzles were worth just as much as later puzzles, the priority of the old puzzles didn't go down the way they did the last two years when a world (equivalent) was done, so people more than usual continued to try to work on puzzles in a world in which we had already solved the supermeta when they could have been more freshly looking at newer puzzles.

Our team's first big difficulty came in the Mega Man round, which is when our team first ran into problems with solving puzzles. I think that some of these were our fault as opposed to the puzzles'; I'm still not sure how it is that we just could not get the connect to dots aspect to Where's Antoinette work out even though that was exactly what multiple people (and me) tried to do, but I think this is the round that really wore on our team because of its individual puzzles and where a number of people's complaints came from; there was a point in this round when almost everyone was there and we still went a number of hours without a single solve and when I saw that happening, I knew that it was likely that we were falling behind (not a bad thing all the time... my two prior victories had both been on teams that were not progressing quite as fast in general unlocking, but I had suspected that keeping pace was important to win a Plant hunt).

It didn't help also that because the meta groups in this world were so small, if the team inexplicably couldn't solve some of the puzzles, there weren't many other puzzles to attempt to solve to get an answer in the meta. Stagecraft Man was our team's biggest issue in that we only ever solved one puzzle in this round and while I'm willing to say that I think maybe we should have been able to solve Pointillisme and Where's Antoinette, I don't feel the same way about the other two puzzles in the round, Rocky Horror (which was okay up until the ending) and The Writing on the Wall.

That being said, I do think that the team's most inspired solve in this hunt probably was backsolving the Minus Man meta answer from the supermeta. We solved it after solving the supermeta in this round knowing the word Bebop transformed into was something of the form H-LI-A- and sin_vraal suggested that maybe it had something to do with the periodic table (while trying to think of a transform that would actually increase the length of the word) which was enough to get others to get that yes this really probably is the change, but what kind of change was it? Well, it's sort of an ALPHA DECAY. Well, hm, our two answers for this round (INEQUALITY and JOSEPH) have an AL and PH, and hey, wait, oh, that meta must work like this (leading to the backsolving of the other three answers).

The Zelda round also gave us some trouble largely because after our team solved the Fellowship meta and noted that REGAL RING is an actual Zelda object, we thought that the other two meta answers would also be Zelda objects (since the Mario meta answers were things in Mario and the Mega Man meta answers were weapons, but this turned out not to be the case). Our team had thought of what turned out to be the answers to the other two metas as possible answers but never really thought those would be the answers until much, much later (after the coin was found).

motris commented in his entry on how we got all 20 of Katamari's puzzles at once when we got that round open; it is true that seeing that was a little discouraging to me; it made me think that either we were rather behind the leaders (I mean, I knew we were likely still somewhat behind already, but it's hard to gauge how much) or that this hunt's opening scheme really seemed to open up a lot more than past hunts and catered to a much larger team than ours (it certainly gave me pause when I would after hunt hear that Codex opened Civ with 21 of its regular puzzles at once, because that sort of informed me there was almost no way my team (and I doubt any team of around my size) would ever have won even if we had performed better in Mega Man). I didn't communicate this discouragement to my team, but I know others wondered if this unlocking was correct (rpipuzzleguy wrote in to HQ about it).

So how did the hunt go for my point of view?

When hunt first started and World 1-1 had opened up, I ended up looking at Cut and Paste with sangwich and the remote solvers. It was projectyl who pointed out what the puzzle was really about. leading to our team's first solve (and it sounds like the quickest solve from open to solved in the hunt overall). After that I transitioned over to starting working on Toad's List again with the remote solvers; projectyl noticed the Magic aspect of the first item, but I pointed out the last item seemed to be the Golden Fleece and Mariko noticed Sting making this a general item identification puzzle. I kept working on this for a bit until eventually motris interpreted the final clue. Around this time, we solved the 1-1 meta with the four answers we had (PAR---L).

After that I moved onto Photo Album, which was a rather cute puzzle that I liked. After that I looked for a bit at Mountain Pass without really making any progress on that. Meanwhile, 1-2 was solved with the five answers we had at that point (P-R-NHA) and soon after 1-3 was solved from the three answers we had at that point (P-L---S).

The runaround people finished and we unlocked Mega Man at about 5 PM. After we passed into the Mega Man, the first puzzle I worked on was Redundant Obsolence. sin_vraal wanted to know if there were any places nearby where we could read some of the media and we ended up at Haydn where we watched the video for the semaphore. Of course, that alone wasn't enough for the final answer; I didn't stay with this puzzle though and other people worked on getting the other pieces of media read. Somewhere in this area, I pointed out to the people trying to finish Famous Faces that it might be a phone number based on the arrangement (though it would end up being phone spell). Eventually, I would spend some amount of time looking at Pointillisme without ever really getting what I was supposed to be doing. I also spent some amount of time working on Where's Antoinette? with zebraboy3 and Artistry; I noticed the connection of the mentioned days with specific years of the Tonys. We eventually got to recording all the theaters where they showed but we were having trouble getting these to draw letters that anyone could read even though we were doing what seemed to be clearly clued in the puzzle (we never got the answer to this puzzle even though we were doing the correct thing). I also spent some small amount of time at some point on Basic Knowledge understanding the basic premise of the puzzle, but not realizing they were all from textbooks until Harley pointed that out. I didn't spend long on this puzzle. I also spent some amount of time staring at the data we had collected for Games, though this would also be a puzzle that we would not forward solve. As the night continued to wear on, people finally realized what was going on in Good Vibrations. Around the time I was going to bed, people were discussing making the video for Vive la Différence.

I got back to HQ at about 7 AM; we had unlocked all the puzzles in Mega Man and canadianpuzzler and Jasters were out doing the runaround to unlock Zelda. In the overnight period, we had solved Blackberry Man and then Craps Man. When I settled in, someone asked me to look at One More Try, which had a completed grid and 9 pairs found but no idea what to do with them. I looked at this for a bit without really coming to any conclusion. Meanwhile, I spent some time looking at the Bio Man meta without coming to any real conclusion (I wanted to put letters at the line intersections because of the diagram).

Eventually, we solved Bebop Man and then just backsolved One More Try. Not long after a bit before 8 AM, the runaround people were done so we opened up Zelda with 5 puzzles. We knew from the person playing Link that other teams had unlocked Zelda and we also knew that teams had had it open long enough to get confused about the three answers aspect of the puzzles in this round.

I spent a little time in discussion with the people working on The Light World before deciding I would be better doing something else. I helped for a bit picking out the state nicknames in The Word (though it would be some time before we got the non-book answers from this puzzle, which projectyl got not long after we got this puzzle).

I ended up drifting over to helping devjoe, sin_vraal, Martin, and Mike B finish Build Your Own Acrostic. They had done most of the acrostic part of the puzzle, though I helped a little with the final assembly of the last few pieces and the identification of the source and acquiring the PRERINSE answer. Eventually we realized what the hint was pointing at and pretty soon got the other two answers.

Somehwere around this time I opened the spreadsheet that had been made for Song of Birds, which I had been keeping tabs on. I'd suggested that Harley and Rajeev look at it after Harley got in that morning mentioning that I thought it might use course numbers and they had put in guesses for many of them, but they hadn't noticed that a swath of the ones they had put in seemed to spell something as letters (though the beginning set were wrong), so we went back to that to try to correct that to get our first answer for that. After that, we reasonably quickly found the other two things to use to get the remaining two answers for this puzzle.

Around this time I started looking at the work on The Crypt. One answer had already been extracted, but I never figured out where they might come from. Eventually, we got the answer DIORAMIC from Dungeon 2, giving us -EG-L-I-G for Fellowship, which got us to actually guess REGAL RING allowing us to backsolve three other answers. I'd eventually start looking at where were on Rocky Horror; a lot of work had been done here, but it wasn't clear what the hold data was for (and thus even if what we had been collecting about the data was correct). I didn't make any progress on this.

Around this time, the people playing around with the Mega Man supermeta hit upon the right set of words to get something promising out of it and pretty soon this supermeta was solved. This gave us enough to backsolve out the Minus Man meta (as described earlier) and then backsolve out the three missing answers we had from that round.

This gave us the next runaround and eventually got us into Civ at about 5 PM. The first puzzle I ended up trying in this round was Crowd's Chant, which I didn't really get the gist of. So I went to get some pizza where devjoe and Dart had finished the tile part of Racking Your Brains, but had stopped there. While I was getting pizza, devjoe explained to me what they had done and handed me a sheet of paper that showed what was on the triple letter squares and I read off the answer.

When we got the second set of puzzles open in Civ, zebraboy3, Artistry and I worked on Painted Potshards, which went quickly. After that I spent some time on Sufficiently Advanced Technology with jedusor, devjoe, and eventually Rock* identifying Magic cards (but we would never ultimately get the idea of what this puzzle would actually be about). Eventually, I ended up really trying to work on ordering the song snippets of Crowd's Chant again with zebraboy3 and Artistry by the song, which sangwich had clued me in on. We got part way through that but found it hard because of the minor aspect and because of the key changes. We ended up abandoning this part way through since we knew even if we did get this order right that we still didn't know what we would be doing with the clues. I spent a short amount of time looking at Part of Speech because I like those sentence diagramming diagrams before deciding that I wasn't going to be a lot of help on political speeches and didn't really want to spend a lot of time looking them up. So I actually spent a lot more time on The Sport of Princesses and made good progress identifying the My Little Ponys with Mike B and Rock*. Unfortunately, after identifying most of them we had absolutely no idea what to do with this data. Around this time Space Elevator got solved leading to the backsolving of the UPKEEP and AMERICAN answers. With AMERICAN, I ended up returning to St. Andrew's Links and thinking about it some more; canadianpuzzler had snagged me to look at it earlier when I had gotten back after abandoning Crowd's Chant the final time and I returned to it again thinking it over. We had spent some amount of time thinking about the fact that the holes on that course have names, but that didn't seem to go anywhere and just indexing using the pars seemed kind of lame, but I finally realized that of course BADMINTON has a birdie which is a golf term that indicates earned score. I got people to help me with identifying what the matching terms were for our other answers and eventually got the answer for this meta.

Around this time (3 AM), we got visited for our spaceship and at about 3:40, Katamari Damacy opened for us with all twenty puzzles. In Katamari, the first puzzle I jumped to was Plotlines even though I wasn't very helpful on this one; I did think since we identified movies first that they would be all movies and never got beyond that idea (even though this didn't turn out to be true), but we identified enough to guess the answer. After this, I moved to E Pluribus Unum, which others had gotten the idea of but were requesting more eyes on. I wasn't able to add any more ideas though I did appreciate the idea of the puzzle. I eventually moved on to Unnatural Law with zebraboy3. We quickly got the amendment aspect, but we missed the scientific law aspect (though others who worked on this later after we stopped caught this aspect).

At around 5:30 AM, we got the Test Center open, but were more or less still plowing through puzzles in this round. We'd worked out the connective tissue of the various sets of answers, but didn't really have enough answers yet to have an idea what the meta answers would be yet.

Next was when we heard the coin had been found. At that point, it wasn't clear to me that we would finish before the 3:17 PM deadline. It seemed possible that we could, but we still had Zelda and Civ metas and supermetas to finish and we still had most of the whole Katamari round to do. A good chunk of the team was also going to bed and well, I had been awake for 23 hours at that point and had to make a decision for myself what to do. I ended up sticking it out and working longer as did devjoe, zebraboy3, Veep, Dart (though he would go to bed eventually after the Zombies event), and Jasters (remote solvers motris and projectyl stuck on with it as well). Others who were asleep when the coin was found did eventually start coming back from sleep a couple hours after this, but there were definitely times in those morning hours when there weren't that many people there (especially when Dart and zebraboy3 went to the Zombies event).

So after the coin was found, I spent some time on A Representative Sampling since previous solvers had stalled at the end, but it was projectyl who identified the last step. After that I spent time on the Small Katamari meta and had managed to pick up on the right idea, but was still somewhat under the impression the answer might be something Katamari related so even though I had -OS-B-D at one point and saw the eventual answer, I didn't actually try it (Also, I have to admit, the negative exponent prefixes really made me think that indexing from the end made a lot more sense).

So at around 7 AM we ended up discussing what to use the coins to buy. We were considering buying an answer out of Zelda since that was where we had stalled with two metas unsolved and also seeming like we probably were not going to realistically forward solve out any of the remaining answers. We ended up buying the Inspiration answer from Making the Possible Impossible and this did eventually get us to clear up the impression we were under that the triforce answers would be Zelda items (something we had been clearly operating under for that many hours) getting us the Inspiration meta answer and also to submit the Holiness meta answer and after not too long of working on the Triforce, getting the Zelda supermeta (about 8:45).

After this, I turned to looking at Da Vinci's Workshop. It seemed strange to me that this was the meta where we had first gotten most of the answers and yet it was still sitting unsolved. Previous solvers had gotten the resistor idea early and had been doing calculations without really knowing why. I spent some time looking at this but not really being sure what to do with those either and trying some other calculations. (It turns out that previous solvers had made mistakes on following which lines went where in the diagram (or they somehow didn't order the techs right) meaning our resistors weren't in the right order and I had never checked this aspect of this work. Oops. Admittedly, even if I had gotten this right, I'm not sure I could have made the actual last step on this puzzle). Meanwhile, projectyl pulled out the final answer of Wall Street (motris had been fixing some work on the ordering aspect that earlier solvers had done). Work on Da Vinci's Workshop continued with us wondering how this would produce an actual answer, but we never got this.

I ended up bouncing from this to work on The Path More Stumbled. I saw the progress that had been made getting the original message back. devjoe said that he had tried to make a path like suggested by the text, but he ended up stopping it when all he seemed to be getting were lines going back and forth. I tried starting at the beginning also and saw what he meant, but then after the first two segments, I tried the last one and the one before that and got what looked like a C and a Y and I became confident this actually was the correct approach. So I kept going from the end (admittedly I was a little confused at first by the r and the a (for some reason I kept thinking the a was a lowercase delta at first)), but after staring at the r and a, I realized that is what they were. Since we already knew about the -tera- pattern that should be in this answer, I didn't do the rest of the letter drawing; I looked at a wordlist to see if there were any likely choices at this point and I picked the answer.

Not long after byronosaurusrex finished Palace of Versailles giving us a fifth meta solve for that world. Meanwhile zebraboy3 had gotten the idea of the Civ supermeta and we'd worked out five letters in the answer though we were not very sure about the ordering of the letters. I ended up putting the letters in a word list and saw the actual answer, though we didn't realize for sure how the letters were being ordered until just after that was confirmed (at about 11:20).

Eventually, devjoe did come up with ROSEBUD after we forward solved Charitable Collection also and he actually tried it and got it confirmed for Small Katamari so we proceeded to backsolve the remaining two answers for that round.

At this point, people were mainly looking at Medium Katamari or working on finishing up Unnatural Law. Not long after getting the answer to that confirmed, sangwich got the idea of Medium Katamari and we solved that. Not long after that devjoe saw the idea of Large Katamari and we solved that, too getting that at about 1:35).

After that we started the runaround. Well, the first part wasn't exactly a traditional runaround. We had to wait a bit to get started since MP wasn't quite prepared to have to push two teams through the endgame so close to the end time but were eventually asked for a Skype account to be in contact with us (Huh, it actually just occurred to me that this might be a possible reason captains were asked for a Skype contact the morning of hunt). Then we proceeded to the sort of text adventurish Portal (without a portal gun) runaround via Skype. Mario was given special powers that corresponded to the rounds and we had to instruct Mario on how to navigate various rooms and obstacles. For our team, this was primarily handled by Nick (sangwich and Rock* also offered suggestions and Dart drew a map of what was being described on the blackboard). I liked the idea of this part of the runaround in concept, but in practice I'm not as positive. This may be unique to our team which was reaching this point quite late and which also had to do a considerable amount of solving even after the coin was found to finish, but the nature of this activity (sitting and listening a lot) caused a number of people to nod off, especially those of us who had stuck it out straight through those hours after the coin was found (the people who managed the interaction for us were all people who had been asleep when the coin was found or had gotten sleep after it was found). I find it hard, though, to say that an activity that causes people to fall asleep during the endgame is an unqualified success.

Then we reached the part of the runaround where we went to the room just down the hall from our HQ to meet GLaDOS in 4-163 after which we went on the Portal runaround (sans portal guns). Nick and Jasters took control of this for our team, though they didn't quite get the whole split up aspect of this at first. Eventually our two groups reconvened in 37-212 where we did need direction that the Nerf sword was pointing up but didn't leap to the idea that it wasn't in the room. Admittedly, some people (I think before the people watching mentioned which the direction the sword had been pointing) tried to do things like wave the sword around the people on MP who were there (but who eventually told us they were not actually there)... I'm not exactly sure what whoever wanted to wave the sword at them thought that was supposed to accomplish. Anyway, we did find the already used question box and that was it.

Anyway, for other comments on specific puzzles...

Plotlines, Part of Speech, Zelda warp: Anyway, there were a few puzzles I saw this hunt that were ideas I had filed away as possible puzzle ideas for a future hunt so I'll scratch them off that list. I was pretty happy with the executions of Plotlines, Part of Speech, and the Google Street view runaround of Zelda warp.

Showcase: Actually, though, oddly, there is a fourth one and it's probably a bit more unexpected than the first three. Believe it or not, I have an extensive series of photographs of the models in the display cases of Building 2 that I took in the fall of 2009 (though I did not eventually turn it into a puzzle for 2010). Granted, we didn't use these photos to solve this puzzle since our HQ was close enough that someone could just go there and that's easier and also I didn't even know what this puzzle was even about until someone showed me their work at the very end of the solving process trying to figure out what to call in (since some of their letters weren't quite right).

Pattern Recognition: Oh, and I suppose there was the Bongard puzzle one Pattern Recognition (I didn't really work on this during Hunt though). I'd been considering Bongard puzzles as something to possibly try for a hunt, but I'd never really come up with a way I was happy with executing it. I think this approach was interesting.

Mario Clash: I didn't work on this puzzle for my team, but I do like the overall concept of this even if I think the plotting step is a little too subtly clued.

Redundant Obsolescence: I mentioned this puzzle in the recap part of this entry, but I just wanted to say again that I really liked this puzzle even though I didn't have much to do with us solving it.

Games: Not sure what I think about this puzzle. Our team spent time identifying all the facts but never figured out what to do with that information and well finding all that information wasn't really helpful in finding out what the aha of this puzzle was (though admittedly helpful if that aha was gotten so not completely useless). I spent some time staring at these numbers without getting ideas.

Where's Antoinette?: It still bugs me a lot that we did the right things and then somehow no one could perform the connect the dots aspect and get the expected letter shapes even though multiple people tried. I'm not sure what we could have been doing wrong here.

Good Vibrations: It was a funny moment when the team realized what this was about. It was a good moment, too; I think it helped energize the team a little in a tough section of the hunt for us.

Rocky Horror: I'm kind of eh that the final indexing in this was on the given clue, which was what kept us from finishing this puzzle. This mechanism is kind of similar to The Last of Sheila from 2008, which gave devjoe and I a similar amount of issues when we test solved that.

Counting the Ways: I did spend a little time on this during Hunt though not as much as others and I wish I had spent even less. I don't mind puzzles about things that I don't know anything about, but I wish more had been done to clue what this puzzle was about because it seemed very full of unhelpful solving paths.

The Crypt: I'm sort of curious at how solve data looks on that, the step to get the other two clue phrases just seems weird to me, but maybe that's just me.

A Modern Palimpsest: I didn't work on this for my team, but it reminded me a bit of Quirkology's card trick video. Interesting idea.

Crowd's Chant: I was sort of looking forward to trying this when it came out, but in retrospect I would have never solved the clue aspect of it and this really wasn't a puzzle I personally would ever have solved.

The Baddest Man: I liked this concept, but it just seemed really hard to actually get the story names so I never really considered spending much time on this at all.

Photo Album, Painted Potshards: I liked these; they were fun, I don't have any other particular comments on them.

Meta testing!, Timbales, Charm School: I didn't work on these puzzles for my team, but I do like them.

Coming to the end of all of these thoughts, I realize I haven't said anything about the team itself, though I don't know that there's a lot I'd say here in public other than it was great working with them again. Organizationally, this team functioned a lot better than we did last time we competed in 2009; we learned from and resolved some of the organizational difficulties we had last time we competed.

Oh, and I did want to thank Metaphysical Plant for all they did and for putting on a good hunt and congratulations to Codex; I'm looking forward to next year.

Favorite albums of 2010

dalryaug — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 06:56:33 GMT

This is a work in progress (working on getting this submitted for Hype Machine's list).

This year, it seems my ten favorite albums skewed even more heavily toward electronic music than last year (my picks that ended up at 11-20 are a bit more diverse).

11-20 in alphabetical order:
Delorean - Subiza
Delta Spirit - History from Below
Freelance Whales - Weathervanes
Greg Laswell - Take a Bow
Jamaica - No Problem
Shout Out Louds - Work
Wakey!Wakey! - Almost Everything I Wish I'd Said The Last Time I Saw You...
Washington - I Believe You Liar
Wild Nothing - Gemini
Yeasayer - Odd Blood

10. Caribou - Swim

Favorite songs:
Odessa
Leave House

9. CEO - White Magic

Favorite songs:
Come With Me

8. Phantogram - Eyelid Movies

Favorite songs:
Mouthful of Diamonds
You Are the Ocean

7. Kids of 88 - Sugarpills

Favorite songs:
My House
Cotton Mouth

6. Ellie Goulding - Lights

Favorite songs:
Guns and Horses
This Love (Will Be Your Downfall)

5. Baths - Cerulean

Favorite songs:
Aminals
Hall
♥
Plea

4. Bag Raiders - Bag Raiders

Favorite songs:
Castles in the Air
Sunlight
Shooting Stars

3. Gypsy & the Cat - Gilgamesh

Favorite songs:
The Piper's Song
Jona Vark
Watching Me, Watching You

2. Two Door Cinema Club - Tourist History

Favorite songs:
Something Good Can Work
I Can Talk
What You Know
Eat That Up, It's Good For You

1. LCD Soundsystem - This is Happening

Favorite songs:
All I Want
I Can Change
You Wanted a Hit
Pow Pow
Home

Favorite EPs:
1. Fredrik - Origami
2. Robyn - Body Talk Pt. 3
3. Jinja Safari - Jinja Safari
4. Geographer - Animal Shapes
5. Girls - Broken Dreams Club

Favorite albums that I listened to the first time in full this year but were released before this year:
1. The Lighthouse and the Whaler - The Lighthouse and the Whaler (2009)
2. Kate Earl - Kate Earl (2009)
3. Coldplay - Parachutes (2000)
4. Sea Wolf - Leaves in the River (2007)
5. Franz Ferdinand - Franz Ferdinand (2004)

Favorite albums of 2009

dalryaug — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 06:05:05 GMT

I always think it's kind of weird that Best of the Year things come out in early December since there's still the whole month of December left, but it seems like sites like to ask for your opinion of the best of the year early. Anyway, I guess I can update this if I end up adding more.

My top ten favorite albums released this year seemed to skew a lot towards electronic pop (#10, #8, #6, #5, #4, #1). Maybe I'll get around to writing more about these albums rather than just ordering them sometime (but I've got hunt stuff to do).

11-20 in alphabetical order
El Perro del Mar - Love is Not Pop
IAMX - Kingdom of Welcome Addiction
Lily Allen - It's Not Me, It's You
Local Natives - Gorilla Manor
Memory Tapes - Seek Magic
Mumford & Sons - Sigh No More
Pete Yorn - Back & Fourth
Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
The Temper Trap - Conditions
We Were Promised Jetpacks - These Four Walls

10. Mika - The Boy Who Knew Too Much

Favorite songs:
I See You

9. Elizabeth & the Catapult - Taller Children

Favorite songs:
Rainiest Day of Summer (Daytrotter version)
Race You
Taller Children

8. Owl City - Ocean Eyes

Favorite songs:
The Saltwater Room

7. Bishop Allen - Grrr...

Favorite songs:
True or False
The Ancient Commonsense of Things

6. Miike Snow - Miike Snow

Favorite songs:
Black & Blue
Burial

5. Dan Black - Un

Favorite songs:
U + Me =
Ecstasy

4. Passion Pit - Manners

Favorite songs:
Sleepyhead
Eyes as Candles

3. Fanfarlo - Reservoir

Favorite songs:
Comets
Harold T Wilkins, or How to Wait for a Very Long Time
Fire Escape
Ghosts

2. The Sounds - Crossing the Rubicon

Favorite songs:
Home Is Where Your Heart Is
Midnight Sun
Underground

1. Wave Machines - Wave If You're Really There

Favorite songs:
I Go I Go I Go
Dead Houses
Keep the Lights On

Favorite EPs:
1. Kate Earl - Introducing Kate Earl
2. Delorean - Ayrton Senna
3. MillionYoung - Sunndreamm

Favorite albums that I listened to the first time this year but were released before this year:
1. The Submarines - Honeysuckle Weeks (2008)
2. Coeur de Pirate - Coeur de Pirate (2008)
3. Mates of State - Re-Arrange Us (2008)
4. Hey Rosetta! - Into Your Lungs (And Around In Your Heart And On Through Your Blood) (2008)
5. Owl City - Maybe I’m Dreaming (2008)
6. Mika - Life in Cartoon Motion (2007)
7. Cajun Dance Party - The Colourful Life (2008)
8. Delorean - Into the Plateau (2006)

Hunt 2009: Zyzzlvaria and Back Again

dalryaug — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 21:32:50 GMT

I finally got a chance to finish writing this. So here it is in a similar style as my 2007 account.

I had a lot of fun at the hunt this year. I did rather enjoy the structure that Evil Midnight came up with; I suppose my personal enjoyment was perhaps not that affected by the major bottleneck that our team faced when we largely just had the game to do to get more open since I was actually asleep for a good chunk of that time (I was out of HQ from about midnight to 5 AM Saturday). My understanding is that my team was the first to get all five Inner Zyzzlvaria metas finished, but we were definitely quite a bit behind in actually finding Zyzzlvaria Alpha; from what I've heard, we didn't unlock Outer Zyzzlvaria until a good four to five hours (around 8 AM Saturday) after Codex did (about 3 AM Saturday) and only about an hour or so before Outer Zyzzlvaria was unlocked for everyone.

This year was definitely a different experience for me than two years ago; I spent more time this year working on metas (well, only the Outer Zyzzlvaria ones) and I spent more time this year overseeing the state of puzzles and who was working on what and what our team was focusing on.

When the hunt first started, the first puzzle I got into working was The Thin Red Line with nablacdotu; mammothali joined us later. We got the Freedom Trail aspect quickly but never quite closed out this puzzle since we never figured out how the puzzle connected with the T's red line exactly (I'm not sure if this was backsolved or solved by someone else who had all our partial work later). Various people even reminded us about the red line specifically, but we'd become somewhat mired in the idea that the three letter codes were airports (though they didn't all exactly exist as far as we could tell, which perhaps should have dissuaded us of this notion sooner).

After not finishing that puzzle, I eventually moved on to And Now, a Word from Our Intergalactic Corporate Overlords. Mariko, Martin, and zotmeister were still looking at the puzzle when I joined them. When I saw the puzzle, I quickly came to the idea (after a few ideas that they had already tried) that we should look at who owned the various brands, an idea that they had been dissuaded by because of some of the brand names on the list. However, after I tried my idea on the first few brands on the list and got the beginnings of a clue phrase, I managed to convince them that this is what we should do and we eventually solved the puzzle. By this point we had enough answers to understand the idea behind the answers in this meta, but we hadn't worked out enough to be sure what the answer was.

Sometime around then, I ended up spending a small amount of time helping finish up Plutonic Solids, though when we were trying to identify the dodecahedron's position, nablacdotu thought that the blanks corresponded to a place in Killian Court, but after going outside with it, I was dissuaded by the notion and ended up pointing out that it must be closer to the river to get the kinds of angles needed. After the real location was identified (by Google Maps), the puzzle was solved not long after.

One of the next puzzles I moved on to was Teller's Window, which I worked on with devjoe and Zebraboy and Dart when he came over later. This puzzle went very quickly though I don't think we realized that the two intersecting words were synonyms either at the time.

After this the next puzzle I turned to was Interstellar Basic Algebra for which I was involved in a lot of the identification before I ended up moving on. The next puzzle I moved on to was The Apples in Stereo, which I worked on with devjoe. Dart arrived later and we had gotten to the point where we had won the game and seen that error message and had noticed the error messages for the three other cards when I ended up leaving this puzzle and it got cracked not too long later.

The next puzzle I moved onto was A Message in Space. I got the Dancing Men aspect of it immediately, but nablacdotu and I didn't get the mirror aspect of it so we were confused. When I had Zebraboy look at it, he didn't get the mirror aspect either, but he did notice the pattern of characters and word lengths (from the Mona Lisa flags) and it reminded him of RENAISSANCE MAN, which we eventually decided to call in even though we didn't understand how we were supposed to get it.

Next I worked on Timecop, but I didn't do a whole lot on it. coreyplover quickly noticed the Amazing Race aspect of it while I was finishing off identifying the MIT place locations. Then I ended up looking up the locations where teams were eliminated before deciding I should really head off and get some sleep.

Around this time, it was right around midnight and Mariko and mammothali were planning to go to sleep. I had originally been planning to go to sleep earlier, but I hadn't been tired. I still wasn't tired, but I'd said that I would be at HQ in the wee hours, so I did go to sleep then. It took me about a half hour to get to sleep and I actually overslept my alarm by about an hour. When I woke up, I quickly showered and headed back to HQ around 5 AM to find that a few people were working on the board game and there were a few people trying to backsolve the remaining puzzles in Kronos. I ended up joining the game board people not long after they had gotten to the end of the sample game.

Eventually, tinhorn2 made the key observation about the letters in parentheses matching the game pieces as well as the names of the bold moves and we got the message ALPHA'S OVER OMET-. We did waste a little time at this point since some of us clearly thought the answer was ALPHA'S OVER OMEGA just from that and I eventually became convinced of this, too so we did call it in and after being told it was on the game board, eventually found it there, too.

So around 8 AM, those of us who were there besides canadianpuzzler went to Walker Memorial led by Foggy (who didn't actually know where that was) to find Zyzzlvaria Alpha and found wesleyjenn in the closet. This was only about an hour before the unlocking of Outer Zyzzlvaria for everyone. By this time, though, everything in the first five rounds had been backsolved so I'm glad we got something new.

We opened Virtual Sectors and Combat Simulator more or less simultaneously and set to work on them. coreyplover ended up playing the dice game in order to unlock almost all the puzzles in the round for us, so by the time people were starting to check back in for the day, we had a lot of puzzles open and unworked on.

The first puzzle I ended up trying my hand on was Plan 4 From Outer Space, but I really didn't spend too much time on it (I just did some calculations on one set) before I ended up passing it off. I ended up joining mammothali who was working on The Equipment Locker; it was canadianpuzzler, I believe, who caught the wrestling aspect of the puzzle. When byronosaurusrex came online and said that he knew his wrestling, I ended up leaving the work on this puzzle and byronosaurusrex made quick work of the puzzle.

The next puzzle I worked on was Island Warfare; the first chain I recognized in this set was the Hawaiian island set. I got canadianpuzzler to help me find some more islands and byronosaurusrex also helped. canadianpuzzler figured out how to enter the names on the blanks, but we didn't understand the last step. (devjoe much later figured out that last step and extracted the final clue and the answer).

(Sometime much later (I'm not entirely sure when compared to other puzzles I'd been working on, I ended up providing the key insight into finishing the Virtual Sectors Meta working off the spreadsheet that rpipuzzleguy had made for the round. Good thing he had, too, because the spreadsheet he made had all the wheel space labels on it and hence had spaces between where the sectors with puzzles were (I had been inclined to ignore the spaces and put all the answers and their sectors one on top of the other). I'm not sure I would have realized the significance of the letters that I had extracted without it. We were also missing the answer to Sorry, Wrong Number, but I had managed to figure out what that first letter would be. We were however missing the answers to Showcases and Supercollider also, though, so I wasn't sure what the end of the message said, but I brought people over to where I was working and someone got the name of the captor and projectyl got the BUY A VOWEL message and finished off the first call in to unlock the wheel.)

The Combat Simulator meta did give us quite a bit of trouble. For quite a while we had ten of the twelve answers and rewards but we still hadn't quite worked out what the message might be. When the offer to buy an answer came in, we had Surgical Files and Crossed Wires and the Combat Simulator meta left (as well as a number of Reverse Dimension puzzles and meta still unsolved) and I ended up making the decision to buy the answer to Crossed Wires, a puzzle that a number of people had looked at but we hadn't been able to close out. I'm glad we did buy this answer, because it did allow us to finally finish this meta and allow us to backsolve the answer to Surgical Files.

Orbital Nexus was the next round we opened and it was honestly my favorite idea behind the mini-hunts. I love the idea of puzzles that don't quite stay the same. That being said, it did take us quite a while to understand this facet of the round. For instance, the group of people who were working on Cross Something-Or-Others noticed early on that the last grid was changing (they possibly noticed this early because the moon associated with the puzzle rotated through phases faster than the more outer moons), and had managed to get all four answer words, but we didn't understand yet that we were supposed to call them all in separately. Other people working on puzzles had also noticed that some of the puzzles had changed in the time when we printed them out to the time people were actually working on the puzzles. I noticed among others that puzzles weren't being crossed off.

I was in our small room thinking about the Harvoid meta when I loaded the Orbital Nexus page and noticed that all the phases had been separated out (and I'm not sure what caused that to happen whether that was something we had done or not. So what caused this? Just having solved different phases between different puzzles? We hadn't provided more than one answer for any puzzle yet) and that was when I realized what had been going on and that the Cross Something-Or-Others people needed to call in all four words separately. I then proceeded to get ertchin to resolve the rest of Geek Drama and mammothali to resolve the rest of The Satellite of Love. Anyway, I didn't really work on any of the individual puzzles in this round.

I did spend some amount of time indexing letters out of the answers, though, after devjoe worked out the orrery (I did though suggest finding a Java applet to do the Chinese remainder theorem equations for us, which was something I'd learned existed when I'd test solved his puzzle Gearheads from the 2008 hunt) and after projectyl pointed out that the next eclipses would give different letters I did index all the remaining letters that we got from that and after we got the fifth answer, which was enough to get us the answer.

I don't quite remember when we got the email about Harvoid relative to us unlocking the other rounds, but I think we got it right around the time we had managed to unlock Astro Jail. I didn't really work on any individual puzzles in this round either, though I did end up being the person who entered in most of the codes that our team's geocachers Bowen and jedusor found. We didn't actually send them out until a good number of hours after we got the email announcing the round (I think we sent them out about five or six hours before everyone would get them). I didn't feel it was that critical to send them out too early since we had plenty of puzzles for everyone to work on at that point.

I was the first one to start working on the Harvoid meta after we got four or so answers in the round. I'd noticed the star map and printed it out, but I didn't realize what it corresponded to until I took it into the small room and someone pointed out the similarity to the box cover design that I'd forgotten about. After that, I noticed that the beginning of some of the words in the answers in this round sort of seemed like the beginning of the names of some of the constellations on the diagram, but someone else actually identified the three letter code correspondences after I stopped working on it. Zebraboy spent quite a bit of time on this meta; we spent some time thinking that it might be related to connecting the two constellations in the answer or possibly have something to do with the colors of the stars (since the initials of the puzzle titles gave the mnemonic that corresponds to colors). Eventually, though, he caught on to the correct method (though he was somewhat confused at first forgetting that we were missing the first answer until I pointed out the first word might be EPSILON and then wondered if there was a constellation -RIDANI.).

I don't remember working on any individual puzzles in Astro Jail either and didn't really work on this meta either. This is the first Outer Zyzzlvaria meta that my team got the hang of and the first one we solved also. A lot of the answers to this round were backsolved, though a number of the puzzle answers were still legitimately solved when we still needed more answers and still needed to open up more of the grid. We started the backsolving process when we had just four answers, the ones to Star-crossed, Space Ghosts, Coast to Coast, Nesting Instinct, and Track Meet. We used those to backsolve Bad Eggs, Suspicious Material, Croctograms, and Calling You From My Cell. We did then end up forward solving Sweet Cheeses!, The Space Race, Reflections on a Milky Steed Who's Quite Amphibious, Indeed (at least I think we forward solved this one), and I Can Haz Zyzzlburger? before we ended up backsolving a few more, getting the meta's answer, and backsolving the remaining two. At the end of the day, I believe we forward solved 8 of the 16 puzzles and backsolved the other 8.

We had the first set of Lazyr Zone puzzles for a while before we really started making much headway in this round. I remember by the time we were starting to really close down on the number of open puzzles left in the rounds before this one being slightly concerned that we hadn't even unlocked anything new in this round and getting people to shift to unlocking the rest of the puzzles in this round. Granted, at this point, I don't think we fully grasped the nature of the Reverse Dimension round and that new Companion puzzles would unlock once we started getting answers so I didn't know yet that we had two rounds still with puzzles to unlock.

In this round, I spent some amount of time on The Spotlight Dance; Liz had managed to put all the spotlight locations on the diagram that had appeared as the spotlight for that Friday, but she wasn't sure how to read a message out of it. I spent some time trying to find a way, too. Finally, sin_vraal suggested trying to put the top half in an anagram solver and we finally spotted three words that could be a clue phrase, which we knew was right when the other side spelled out the other message. We quickly used the answer MITER to get the right dance JIG to open the third part.

While a chunk of the team spent time working on Our Crew Is Replaceable. Your Package Isn't., I ended up trying I'm Your Magic Man and not getting anywhere on it. Luckily, though, the others got through Our Crew Is Replaceable. Your Package Isn't., we got the dance CHARLESTON (on the second try) from that answer SMITHERS, and we unlocked the fourth set.

We also got the dance FANDANGO from the fourth set after just REVENGE; we essentially backsolved the other answers in that set.

That left us with the dance floor and the pawns. While others had thought the answer words were important, I'd been convinced from the beginning that the four categories were more important. I don't think we really had much clue what to do though, until we go the email that sent us to read what the social director says at the end. Things came pretty quickly after that. projectyl pointed out WATERWORLD was in the grid; I noticed that the numbers on the pawns corresponded to directions to move and that each pawn corresponded to one of the things we were looking for. We gradually found all eight things in the grid, but we were stuck a bit on the final step of extracting the letters, which those of us working on it all ending up getting the meta's answer at about the same time.

The last meta that we really got going on was Reverse Dimension. It took us quite a long time to call in our first correct answer in this meta. We'd understood that there was a paired nature to this meta after a while of having this, but we hadn't managed to call in a correct answer for this meta for quite a while coming closest with the His Alien Barbarian Girl and Her Robot Dog and The Energetic Man Sporting a Very Long Scarf pair, but it took us a few times to finally get the MIDDLE EAST answer confirmed (midday Sunday) and pretty soon after we called in the answers to the other two pairs that were given at the start to unlock all the Companions in the round.

I worked on a few puzzles in this round; tinhorn2 and I sat down and worked on His Shopgirl pretty early on and got through it pretty quickly. I believe someone joined us partway through, but I've forgotten who. I spent a brief amount of time on His Botany Student when it first got released helping it get started, though I got pulled away and never came back to it (and this puzzle turned out to part of the pair that we didn't get the final answer). I also spent some time on His Troubled Teen after devjoe and Kyle had already managed to work out the answer to The Professorial Fellow Playing the Spoons, though it was ultimately projectyl who spotted the location of the hidden question in His Troubled Teen.

Then there was the meta for this round. We spent far too much time on The Buzz-Cut Man in a Leather Jacket when we already had the message that we were supposed to get out of it. We had laid the grid of letters out on the board and noticed the message that comes out of it. Even when we decided we were supposed to put it on the Schwartzchild wormhole, I think we thought there was something more to understand than reading the words that would appear around the center of the center of the wormhole.

Eventually though we caught on to how the double letters worked along with the answer SPAMALOT to put it on the interior of the game board and how we could possibly trying to generate a checkers game. I pointed out that we'd probably want the letters that we land on rather than the letters we jump over and we got our answer.

This brought us to the runaround. I thought the idea behind this runaround was interesting. It sort of reminded me of my puzzle Race Around the Block from 2008 in also involving cell communication, but getting stuck at an outpost for reasons that were not entirely our fault was a bit lame especially since it did strand various members of the team at random locations around campus for about an hour (Kyle had taken Algernon's spot at Strobe Alley, rpipuzzleguy and cramerica were at the first floor of building 14, and ertchin was on the eleventh floor of Green, though he was joined by nablacdotu when his phone died while we were stuck at Outpost 4) (For completeness, mammothali and Mariko were left in the third floor of building 7, devjoe and canadianpuzzler at Lobby 10, and tinhorn2 at Stata). That being said, I did like the way the runaround was presented and I liked the route selection (and wow, the snow was falling thickly at that point while we were doing the runaround).

Anyway, after gathering up the team after the last stop of Building 5, we followed the runaround to Walker and back to the same hallway where we'd found Captain Blastoid. The camerawoman Kaitlyn handed us the paper map, which we overlaid onto the gameboard. We found Walker on the map as well as Stata and another location (I wrote the names of the two characters on the map) and overlaid the locations where they had been in on the game board and we found the location of Outpost 9 and went there where wesleyjenn put a clue on the floor when we reached the locked room indicated on the map. This clue clued another location sending us to the Core Reactor in building 13 where we found the coin!

Now that I've written this long account of what happened, here are two general thoughts.

I liked the structure of Outer Zyzzlvaria with each round as its own mini-hunt. As I mentioned, I especially liked the idea behind Orbital Nexus.

I was not expecting the hunt to last as long as it did at all. I should have gotten a bit more sleep on Saturday or Sunday but didn't. That being said, I didn't have a problem with the length of the hunt and besides the few hours of bottleneck, our team was always working on something and so we usually felt like we were making progress. This isn't to say that I would aim to make a hunt this long; I wouldn't. I didn't have a significant issue with the hunt lasting this long, though.

10 albums of 2008

dalryaug — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:38:24 GMT

The Hype Machine wanted to know what people thought the top ten albums of the year were. I listened to a lot of albums this year for the first time, but I needed to prune that down to just the ones that were released this year; I think I did that right. This was the list I submitted. I don't have time just now to offer explanations, but I may come back and expand on it later. (This list was edited after the submission to include other albums that were listened to the first time this year after the submission date.)

Greg Laswell - Three Flights from Alto Nido

The Virgins - The Virgins

Mystery Jets - Twenty One

Friendly Fires - Friendly Fires

Owl City - Maybe I'm Dreaming

The Hush Sound - Goodbye Blues

Priscilla Ahn - A Good Day

Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - Pershing

Grand Archives - The Grand Archives

Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes

Honorable Mentions:
Coldplay - Viva La Vida or Death And All His Friends
The Dears - Missiles
Goldfrapp - Seventh Tree
Jack's Mannequin - The Glass Passenger
The Kooks - Konk
MGMT - Oracular Spectacular
Oppenheimer - Take the Whole Midrange and Boost It
The Rosebuds - Life Like
Santogold - Santogold
Sunny Day Sets Fire - Summer Palace
The Ting Tings - We Started Nothing
Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
We Are Scientists - Brain Thrust Mastery

EPs
Cassettes Won't Listen - Small-Time Machine
Stars - Sad Robots

These are my favorite albums heard for the first time this year but released before 2008:

Minipop - A New Hope

Air Traffic - Fractured Life

The Weakerthans - Reconstruction Site

Shiny Toy Guns - We Are Pilots

The Pigeon Detectives - Wait for Me

This year's NPL Con

dalryaug — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 03:07:08 GMT

This account is rather long.

I wasn't really sure what to expect coming in as early as Tuesday, but I have no regrets. There really weren't that many people there that early and I'm not sure that I would suggest it for everyone unless you have some sort of reason for coming out that early. I did have a reason, though, that didn't quite end up working out as expected. I actually ended up spending a good chunk of this day recovering from being up for most of the past twenty-four hours, though this day also included my first sighting of people playing Dart's Lexagon and then playing Sixth Sense myself and I certainly don't regret that since Sixth Sense turned out to be my favorite thing I played at Con.

I slept in Wednesday morning and didn't do much that day until heading out to the picnic (was waiting for someone to turn up who finally did!) in the early afternoon. We got a ride by the hotel shuttle to the light rail station and then traveled by light rail and tmcay's mother's car to the park.

The picnic was fun; the food was good and selinker's game was fun. I'd liked playing Ladybug the year before and seeing the game turned into an actual boxed game was neat. After the picnic, I tried out playing Dart's Lexagon game for myself (rather than watching) and then after that got a bunch of people to play Dart's Sixth Sense game (which I highly recommended after playing it the day before). Later on that night, hooligan finally made an appearance and so I ended up playing a game of Chrononauts with her and some others until I decided I had to go up to bed to get up early for the trip the next day.

The trip to Rocky Mountain National Park organized by saxikath was overall a good trip even if it involved getting up before 8 on Thursday and even if it didn't end up quite as expected. The trip up to the park was pretty uneventful. I was in the car with hahathor, pinecone_4, and Noam. The views heading up to that park are really quite beautiful and as we went further and further up in elevation, the views became even more and more spectacular. We reached the visitor's center near the peak around midday where we ate lunch by the benches there. I'd bought a turkey and munster cheese at the grocery store that we'd stopped at on the way up that was really quite good though it maybe had more Dijon mustard than I would have liked.

After lunch, we hiked up to the top of the mountain up a trail with steps cut into the mountain. The high altitude made this more difficult than it might seem at first glance (it wasn't really that long), but the great views from up top made it worth it.

On the way back down the mountain after a bit of time driving around the curly roads, I was starting to get tired and I drifted to sleep, but I woke up when our car stopped and I realized that the people in the car with me were concerned. It wasn't until after I'd gotten out of the car and could actually see what happened that I had any idea something happened.

See, a truck perpendicular across our side of the road was not what I was expecting to see. In the area, we were driving the mountain climbed to the right, so the truck had driven in essence into a wall of earth. The front left side of the truck was smashed.

However, the main reason we stopped and lingered was because one of our cars had been sideswiped by the truck. This was the car with Eddy, canadianpuzzler, Pebbles, and Jim.

I don't remember the last time I'd ever been on the scene of a car accident. It's definitely been a while and it was strange being so close to an accident site.

Of course, one unfortunate part about the accident was that it separated our groups. See, the car that was hit was the second one in our group and the first car was so far ahead that no one in that car knew what had happened. The cell reception in the park was not good and so there was no way for us to let them know what had happened.

I kept falling asleep on the ride back. I think this was a result of the growing heat in the car. I was glad to get back to the hotel and grab a shower. La Do La Li/Ti flagged me in the lobby so I ended up having dinner at the Spotted Dog along with zundevil along with Groucho (who ZD had brought along over to us. I'm not sure why). Yeah, the free tacos weren't that great (with a two drink minimum) and I only had one drink (too), but it was something to have before the main program started.

The mixer this year was based on Set and it was sort of an interesting premise... but didn't feel that successful to me as a mixer. Granted, I'm not exactly sure what a good mixer is to be honest. Last year's mixer at my first con was interesting in that I got to interact with a bunch of people, but I don't even really remember who I interacted with and certainly didn't really get to know anything about them from it. This year's information gathering stage had an interesting premise, but distilling the information down to a group of letters, made for an interaction that was largely just a group of letters since it was faster to do it that way.

This was followed by Hog the Glory, a trivia offering by thedan based on the after-hours game last year. It was a fun game even though somehow I ended up with two hog the glory rounds where I couldn't even crack in to know any of my three answers. Anyway, our team of jangler_npl, Delirium, and me didn't do so well. The event was well done, though, and fun.

After this was the qualifying test for the World Series of Wordplay (which was a fun little quiz) and then we were done with the main program for the night. Later that night before going to bed I played Kul-len and Touch and Go (which I've already written about). I also spent some time watching people play Quick on the Draw before heading up to the room for the night.

I slept in late on Friday and didn't do much of consequence until I ended up flagging down projectyl before dinner to start our pairs cryptic (Elfman's). We didn't start too much before dinner, though, so we didn't really finish at that point.

Friday night was a nice introduction to the hotel dinners, which were quite good. I especially liked the cheese ravioli in pesto sauce. This dinner was when we found out that hathor and pinecone_4 had just gotten engaged.

That night the main program was mainly World Series of Wordplay, which was fun to watch. Building the diorama flat was interesting, too. I ended up working with devjoe to build one. The special item that had been set on our table was toothpicks and devjoe thought they could make CALTROP. So we were trying to come up with something that could be paired with that. Our initial idea was something like a letter bank with LT. CORPORAL, but when we looked online, we realized that there is no such rank as the LT. CORPORAL, so then I said that CALTROP made me think of the word TROPICAL and our diorama became of a TROPICAL CALTROP.

Later that night, canadianpuzzler and I ended up doing Trick's cryptic.

Saturday I woke up earlier than the day before (but not very early) so that Yeardley and I could work on Wombat's cryptic. Wombat's cryptic was fun and we got through most of it before the paper portion of that day's events that afternoon. We actually finished it during that session after our pair finished early the puzzle page in which we had to fill the pyramids of boxes with letters to spell words. The Sphinx flats were amusing, too.

Next we had the diorama flats from the previous night to solve. I worked with projectyl on these and we did a good job solving most of the flats, but not well enough. I'll admit that I rather enjoyed this flat competition; I found these flats easier than their verbal counterparts.

Then, we had the picture and I'm so far in the back that you can barely see me in the Con picture.

Meanwhile, projectyl and I were finishing our cryptic, which we finally did before dinner. However, as I was in line for dinner, ennirol came up to me and told me that the cryptic Yeardley and I had done hadn't been accepted because our coloring wasn't correct. After I finished dinner, I went to her and we looked at the grid and realized what we had done wrong and fixed it. I turned that in after the talk.

Next was the extravaganza, which was fun. The teams this year were randomly assigned so I ended up working with rubrick, squonk_npl, and Witz. We did decently as a team, though we had problems with that puzzle that was basically a 4x5 grid, because we didn't understand what to do to get the final answer and this proved to be our bottleneck as it didn't get finished until it was the only puzzle we had left open. Our team ended up finishing twelfth.

After the extravaganza, I flitted around and watched various games (a game of Catchphrase that involved speakers playing in paris with the people in each pair had to say alternate words in the sentence cluing whatever and a game that was sort of like that activity where you write stories as a group by being passed a piece of paper where you can see what the prior person wrote and have to continue the story... except instead of writing a story, you're writing a trivia question.). Also, I helped out with one round of tmcay's Touch and Go.

Sunday was the day most people were leaving, but I was leaving Monday so I didn't worry about leaving. I did say a bunch of goodbyes that day. Zebraboy and I went out to get something to eat in the very early afternoon. We ended up eating at a Thai restaurant near the nearby shopping center. We walked back to the hotel (trying to go on the near side, which was definitely the wrong side to be crossing under the bridge). I ended up taking a shower and then found out that people were intending to go out to dinner at the a microbrewery in Denver. Artistry drove a group of us to a light rail station and rode into town where we met up with the others (and kept on waiting for the rest of us) in a bar before heading out to the microbrewery for a fun dinner. After dinner, we took the light rail and car back to the hotel.

The next morning, I went with cazique, Teki, and Sanit back to the airport where I eventually found out my plane had been delayed. On the plane, I discovered that toonhead_npl and jeffurrynpl were on my flight with toonhead_npl also on my connecting flight from JFK to Boston. The delay on the first flight was a bit worrisome, but it worked out fine in catching the second flight. We pretty much started boarding the second flight minutes after we had gotten off the first flight (and walking a really minimal distance to the gate).

Then, I caught the Silver line to South Station and caught a train.

"Hello, I'm calling to verify your answer on..."

dalryaug — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 02:50:35 GMT

This writeup largely does not include my work on Race Around the Block or A Mind-flexing Exercise, which both have their own entries.

Okay, this is the real writeup. When I decided to join Palindrome for my first hunt in 2007, I never conceived that we would win. There are people who say that they'd been waiting to win the hunt so that they could try to implement the puzzle ideas that they'd been building up; this wasn't true for me at all. In the summer of 2006, I had joined with devjoe's team to win SEKKRETS and after being invited to write for SEQQUEL, well, a few of my first ideas for hunt-type puzzles had gone into that already so I entered the process of writing for the 2008 hunt without really any preconceived notions of specific puzzles I wanted to write.

Because I had another outlet, though, I realized that I wanted to spend at least part of my time on puzzles that would really only fit at this hunt thematically through ties to MIT or Boston (which is why just under half of my puzzles fall into that category - 4 out of 9). I knew that a good chunk of the team lived outside of Boston and most were not tied to MIT in any way, so I knew that it wasn't likely that we would have too many puzzles associated with Boston or MIT. (Also, the fact that I'd written my puzzles with MIT in mind actually influenced some of my puzzles that were not inherently MIT-based. Both At Sea and A Mind-flexing Exercise had at least one MIT-based clue and in fact the word fill for the grids of A Mind-flexing Exercise was also selected keeping MIT in mind.)

That being said, having another outlet left me feeling conflicted at times as in where I should try to put a hunt type idea. After the initial round of submissions, we were told by the editors what ideas were already decently represented and so what we should avoid to prevent duplication. There were ideas I had that I held onto that I knew were strong, but knew would have trouble making it past the hunt editors based on the fact they used at least in part what they said we should try to avoid and I often felt unsure whether I should bother submitting these ideas to the hunt editors because while they could potentially find some way to make it go around whatever would be deemed too similar, if they couldn't then the idea is sort of "out of the bag". I found that I didn't really like the process of having to work around designs in place that I didn't already know about.

Granted, this situation was sort of unavoidable given my role and the system we had in place; we had editors who knew what all the puzzles entailed and I was needed for test solving so I had to be kept in the dark about what the other puzzles included. I honestly found I didn't really like being in that position, though.

All of this isn't to say that I minded working under constraints based on knowing what else was out there; I wouldn't have started discussing variety word puzzles with coreyplover (leading to the writing of A Mind-flexing Exercise) if I hadn't heard that we were surprisingly low on them. I don't think we would have even gone in that direction had I not heard what I had.

Let's see. That brings us to test solving. Well, I did find test solving interesting even if it was extremely time consuming, especially since I did spend time on quite a number of the puzzles. In a lot of ways, it was like being in hunt puzzle solving mode all the time and being involved in test solving gave me points of view on a lot more of the puzzles in a way that I would have never experienced when solving at the hunt. During the hunt, each of us has time to be involved in solving such a small fraction of the puzzles in the hunt and so I did like the fact that I had the opportunity to spend time trying to solve each of the puzzles; I have solving stories about a much higher proportion of the puzzles this year. devjoe and I worked together a lot when either of us alone couldn't get all the way through the puzzle, which happened quite a bit.

That being said, I do feel like on the test solving side that I probably should have offered more feedback about the things that we never successfully solved. I remember sitting in HQ discussing Roleplaying Game, which devjoe and I had had a lot of trouble with and ultimately never solved. Given that it had been solved by other test solvers and based on its position in the Little Black Book, I had assumed it was supposed to be an easy puzzle and I remember hearing other people being surprised that the puzzle was proving as tough as it was for the solving teams... but I wasn't surprised at all. Granted, at this point, I still had absolutely no understanding of how the puzzle worked and even after an explanation of what we were supposed to do, I tried to solve it but still had trouble because as it turned out devjoe and I had managed to misidentify some of the people that we thought we had.

Anyway, we knew going into the event that it's not always easy to tell if the experience of the test solvers would directly translate to the experience of solvers at the event. I do feel at times though that we needed to try harder to communicate how hard we were finding certain puzzles. devjoe and I knew just how hard Mystery Rallye was even though it had been successfully solved by one member of our team. You know that devjoe and I had spent upwards of thirty or forty hours on the puzzle and still had 2 of the 14 answers wrong?

That being said, even arriving in town for the event I still had no idea how the event would run. I still didn't know how most of the puzzles that I failed to solve in test solving worked. I still had no idea what certain puzzles that were not on the server actually were. I did know that I was concerned.

In retrospect and now knowing more about the puzzles I didn't know about before, I would have dialed down the difficulty slightly for No Strings Attached, At Sea, and Campsite; I would have left Race Around the Block, Propaganda, These Ain't No Underpants Gnomes, Method to the Madness, A Mind-flexing Exercise, and X Marks the Spot alone.

If you spent any amount of time answering phones to get an answer called into HQ, there's a decent chance that you talked to me. During the event, I spent quite a bit of time on the phone; I actually rather liked it even when I had trouble understanding what people were saying and that happened at times especially with people using things like Skype or something where I'd be listening and the program would cut off the beginnings and ends of anything not said continuously, which isn't the easiest thing when you're asking people to spell out an answer. In general, I think I did a decent job here; the answer I had the hardest time understanding I didn't even have that excuse for though. That was when someone from IIF was calling in the answer "theta x" for The Son of the Realm of Unspeakable Chaos and for some reason I thought the first letter he was saying was "g", which completely threw me off since he was speaking as if the answer was something I should recognize, but when the first few letters I'd typed into the answer field were "gheta..." you may understand why I was really confused and it took me asking him four or five times before I realized what I was supposed to be entering in.

So. It was definitely quite an experience being part of the team running the hunt and I realized something in retrospect. I really loved being on the team running it. Yes, there was a lot of stress and there was a lot of work and a lot of behind the scenes action that went into making the event, but I realized that I actually liked being on that side of it and that I would love to run it again. I'm not exactly sure what that says about me with regards to the future with this team because I feel like Palindrome isn't interested in running the hunt anytime soon.

So I definitely learned a lot in that year writing for the 2008 hunt and I'm taking that experience into account as I get back to working on getting SEQQUEL written (with fellow Palindrome members devjoe and coreyplover and non-Palindrome members projectyl, canadianpuzzler, sin_vraal and others). Is there where I admit that of the puzzles I've ever written, my two favorites are in SEQQUEL?

No Strings Attached: This took most of two days of shooting and parts were reshot during two later days. The orange and green lines were shot on Saturday by devjoe. This day included a lot of walking since a lot of these stops were fairly close to each other. Sunday was shot along the red line with devjoe and Catherine. This part of shooting was done before the shooting for the Suds puzzle later that day. jennifer reshot a few pictures on Monday and Catherine on Wednesday. All in all, it was a lot of effort traveling to get the shots, but it was a lot of fun and I had an interesting time walking around trying to figure out what I might be able to use a picture of. I also had fun seeing parts of Boston that I just had never seen before.

Some people wondered if Nationwide Hunt was a Google Maps puzzle... well, no. This one was the Google Maps puzzle as some teams realized. Of course, Google Maps hadn't debuted when this puzzle's photographs were taken or when this puzzle was designed.

Propaganda: I'd been looking for a MIT-inspired puzzle concept and this was what I came up with after a bit of research. Of course, the idea of basing a puzzle around something Caltech-related appealed to me since I am an alum. I'd made the entire puzzle while the Caltech news server was still a bit spotty, though, and so I was surprised when this puzzle went into test solving and the entire text of the articles had made its way online since it had not been available when I first wrote it. That being said, it worked out in the end with the difficulty being where it was, though I had intended it to be harder for non-MIT associated people.

These Ain't No Underpants Gnomes: This was one of my favorite puzzles to write and I was so happy with the way it came together with the cluing and the flavor text. One funny thing that happened was that apparently the big confirmatory clue in the flavor text completely slid right under the radar screens of Matt (whose meta round it was in) and Zebraboy (who'd edited it) and neither of them realized what it was until hahathor (who had been part of test solving it) mentioned it. (And what better way is there to sneak in a confirmatory clue in a completely innocuous seeming way...). Unfortunately for me this puzzle got broken when it was HTMLized and I never caught it until way too late. Ugh.

Method to the Madness: I was a bit uncertain what kind of reception I'd get to this puzzle honestly since this was my niche knowledge puzzle, a puzzle on the difficult side to dig your fingers into if you didn't know already what the puzzle was showing you... though our test solvers did seem to manage just that. That being said, this puzzle wasn't very important to the round it was in (contributing just one letter to the metapuzzle) so I was happy with where it was. I was glad to get a good reception it got from the people who came up to talk to me about the puzzle after wrapup. The funny thing was when I was invited to ring with them and I admitted that I wasn't local and when I said I was currently in Connecticut, one of the places they suggested was... Kent... yeah. Heh (that's where I went to high school right on that campus with that belltower).

At Sea: I went for a puzzle inspired by plate tectonics and was pretty happy with the puzzle though in retrospect, I should have done more to get people off the idea of putting one letter on each node and moving around the grid spelling things. devjoe suggested that early on in our test solving, too.

Campsite: This is probably my least favorite of my puzzles personally and the indexing mechanism I tried definitely wasn't my favorite. It took test solvers a while to get it, too, and I did offer to change it though that offer was waved off ultimately (and I had other things to attend to anyway). I also agree though with comments that some slight more should have been done to get people to the show.

X Marks the Spot: I was going for another Boston-themed puzzle presenting an idea I'd seen before in a very different way.

In any case, that brings me to one of my favorite pictures of me ever taken. It was taken by devjoe, though ultimately had to be rejected from being used in No Strings Attached (wrong shirt!), but it's a great picture.

On the making of Race Around the Block

dalryaug — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 20:52:52 GMT

The idea that got Race Around the Block started got pitched very early; I'd always liked the concept of a runaround-type puzzle that required more than one group to solve and so I pitched a runaround-type puzzle where the instructions of each path used information from the other path. Some of the feedback that came back early from the concept was that a puzzle of this sort had appeared in the 2006 Haystack, something that I had heard about but hadn't remembered when I was writing the initial idea. How could I make this idea my own though in the twisty halls of MIT?

Of course, I was still living in California when I pitched this idea and I knew when I was doing this that I wasn't sure that I could legitimately write this since I'm not the most knowledgable person of MIT's campus and because I wasn't sure when I would have the opportunity to do this. In fact, this puzzle kind of languished for a bit as I left it untied from an answer word for quite a while.

It wasn't until one of the editors was trying to assign answer words near the end of the summer to those puzzle ideas being pursued that still didn't have answer words tied to them. He tried to offer me the answer LOSS LEADER (that ultimately ended up with Picture Store), but it was really around this time that I made the decision to take advantage of the dual path aspect and style the instructions of this puzzle using out-of-order numbered sections reminiscent of Choose Your Own Adventures such that groups would have to use information from both paths to identify which instruction to go to next. With that in mind, the most natural way to extract an answer word that would be inherently unique to this style of presentation was to attempt to make various sections of the instructions performed in both paths and use those steps to clue an answer. So I requested a shorter answer word and ended up with EDIT in devjoe's sudoku meta (which I would later end up anagramming into the used answer word).

I was still a bit concerned about whether I would have enough time to write this puzzle, though. I had already more or less booked time in Boston to shoot the pictures for No Strings Attached, but I was really uncertain how much time it would take to design a route for this runaround puzzle and write the instructions for it. At one point, I was almost convinced that I would have to give it up for not having enough time in Boston to do it, but situations worked out that I thought it might be possible. I asked the team if there was anyone who would be willing to help me design a route, but no one emerged so it really came down to me.

When I made it to Boston that weekend in October, I spent quite a bit of time wandering around campus part of the time with devjoe after some amount of time and it was that Saturday after we had done a day's worth of shooting pictures for No Strings Attached that I mentioned to devjoe in the halls of MIT that I was thinking of making the path of this puzzle a loop such that the starting points of the two paths were the end points of the opposite paths.

When I had this idea in place, the path started to come together in my mind. I deliberately steered the path around the sites that I already knew were part of Suds and Wise Guys and that Monday, I started nailing down this route. I spent a good chunk of the afternoon and night taking photos along the route as well as sketching out a path map marking out where I had taken the photos.

The next day I took more pictures along a certain portion of the path (the portion that I had decided at the last minute to add (this is the section from the third floor of 32 through the basement of 26)).

Then with all that information in hand I left town.

The next step to writing this puzzle was to actually write out both of the entire paths. It was really only after that had been done that I finally picked the sections of the paths that I would use in both sets of instructions. It is true that I had two specific parts of both paths in mind for this already (the arrows in buildings 35 and 10 and going down to where you've been before in buildings 6 and 14), but I hadn't entirely figured out what the other two would be. I knew that I could use tricks to allow myself to use one set of instruction in two places (by allowing branching path instructions within an instructions), so I hadn't been extremely concerned about nailing this down while I was still in Boston. In the end though, I was able to find somewhat more natural places to put these repeated steps without having to resort to that.

After this was done, I needed to choose checkpoint locations and figure out what information would be reasonable to pass. I went through my notes and looked carefully at the pictures I had taken to help me finalize these choices since I wanted to pick checkpoints that were reasonably spaced out on the paths.

Then I started breaking the instructions into numbered chunks and writing the instructions that would allow people to figure out what instructions to go to next. I did my best to write instruction choices that would allow it to be possible for as wide a range as possible of the instructions to be calculated as the instruction that should follow. I did my best to incorporate the pieces of information that had were along both paths or near the other path's most recent checkpoint (There's nothing like thinking you've finished this construction step and then realizing at some point that you just made two steps with the same number and have to make adjustments to change things around, which is easier said than done since a number of instructions actually depended on the number of an instruction earlier in its path sequence).

I gave the puzzle its title and its flavor text last. I knew that I didn't want to hide the answer extraction (after all that would have already been done at that point), so I wrote the flavor text with fairly strong cluing as to what to do to get the final answer.

Then it was written and I submitted it (admittedly later than I had intended). No one really approached this puzzle in test solving until about a week before the hunt when Bowen finally got a group together. Initial test solving revealed, however, that there were significant issues with the writing. A good chunk of this was my fault; I really ought to have run the instructions myself after they were written to make sure that I could follow them, but of course, was not even in Boston to do that. I had written the instructions in a style that led some of the test solvers to take movement actions extremely literally. This in combination to my having missed certain features (for instance, a staircase in building 1) caused people to realize that the instructions were likely going to need some reworking.

Luckily for me, Bowen agreed to do this and I owe him a lot for this, because I don't know that this puzzle would have run without his stepping in. It took him some five hours to walk the route himself and make the necessary adjustments to the instructions. This included having to adjust one of the checkpoint instructions since the salient feature at the checkpoint I had chosen in 66 had changed in the time since I had developed the path so instructions needed to be changed to adjust for that. Bowen sent the rewritten instructions to the test solvers and this time Ucaoimhu and Catherine completed the paths. They both sent suggestions to Bowen (as did I) and he finalized the instructions.

You'd think this story is over; it is not. So the hunt started and the opening presentation was done and I did a first shift of an hour or two on the phone (calling teams and verifying answers) and after that Bowen approaches me and mentions that the part of the puzzle's route was now really under construction and closed. He had noted previously in email that the third floor hallway of 16 was supposed to be closed but he was still able to get through when he was reworking the instructions and the test solvers also had been able to that weekend, but right that moment during the hunt, that part of the route was now closed.

Now, this puzzle was on the back of page 4 and no team had gotten past the front of page 2 at this point, so we both felt pretty safe that we could manage this edit before anyone unlocked this puzzle. We printed out a copy of the puzzle and headed out to 66 to figure out how to rewrite the affected section route. Luckily for us, the affected area was not an important part of the route; people just had to pass through the area.

It was while we were heading out to 66, though, that I carefully looked at what had been printed out and realized that I was looking at the first version of the instructions before Bowen had worked on it. I asked him about this and finally realized that Bowen hadn't really known about the wiki system for getting the puzzles edited. He had sent the revised instructions directly to people and thought that would be enough. I don't know what happened from there after he sent it, but it became clear to me that we would have to get nonelvis to change the puzzle's text when we got back from making the route change.

The change we made to the path was pretty trivial; in the original version of the path, the first team traveled back from building 66 back through building 56 and 16 along the third floor. The first team would have already traveled from 16 to 56 along the fourth floor. In the end, we decided it was easier just to make the first path travel back along the fourth floor; we agreed it was less optimal to make them travel back along the same corridor they had used to get there, but it was the easiest change to make to the instructions and I didn't want to mess too much with the instructions at that point. We walked the path and figured out what changes would need to be made to the affected instructions and then we headed back to HQ and edited Bowen's text and then got Bowen's revised instructions to nonelvis who copy and pasted the instructions in individual paragraph by individual paragraph (and this puzzle had a lot of paragraphs).

After she was done, I did get copies of the puzzle and Bowen's text printed out and I double checked the changed part of the path with the instructions as well as double checked with a fine-toothed comb that all the instructions had been copied over correctly to the site (in retrospect, if I had done that with all my puzzles I might have caught the problem on the site with one of my other puzzles).

No teams got this puzzle before the mass release at 20:00 on Friday. GroovyTron called in the first answer just over 2 hours after the puzzle was released. 21 teams called in the correct answer to this puzzle.

GroovyTron - Friday, 22:03 - 02:00:56
A Man, A Plan, A Canal -- Suez - Friday, 23:13 - 03:10:55
Project Electric Mayhem - Friday, 23:42 - 03:39:24
Metaphysical Plant - Friday, 23:50 - 03:47:39
Codex Bodley - Saturday, 00:02 - 04:01:05
Monastic Onanists - Saturday, 00:25 - 04:24:02
Evil Midnight Bombers - Saturday, 00:29 - 04:27:29
Left Out - Saturday, 00:33 - 04:30:47
Duck Soup - Saturday, 02:07 - 06:05:13
Setec Astronomy - Saturday, 02:08 - 06:05:05
Smallish Momenta - Saturday, 02:55 - 06:51:46
Hella Minerals - Saturday, 03:04 - 07:01:50
Too Much Clue - Saturday, 03:33 - 07:30:04
Manic Sages - Saturday, 04:12 - 08:09:42
Frumious Bandersnatch - Saturday, 05:33 - 09:31:41
Up Late - Saturday, 09:25 - 13:22:05
Just for the Halibut - Saturday, 21:01 - 1:00:59:17
Central Services - Saturday, 22:44 - 1:02:42:37
Team Unwanted Pregnancy - Sunday, 01:20 - 1:05:17:06
Silly Hat Brigade - Sunday, 03:31 - 1:07:30:43
Interdisciplinary Masochists - Sunday, 11:49 - 1:15:48:25

A handful of teams had trouble seeing the mechanism for ordering the repeated instructions so a number of the wrong answers called in were the anagrams of TIED: DIET and TIDE were called in. Death from Above called in 16 wrong answers never calling in the correct answer (their closest called in answer was IED). Piranhas in a Bathtub were the only other team to guess and never get the answer; they called in MOBIUS STRIP.

On the making of A Mind-flexing Exercise

dalryaug — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 03:38:55 GMT

A Mind-flexing Exercise

The suspect told me that there are four ways to flex my mind, but only one worked for me.

Row Clues

Lighted anew / Made up of two chambers
Harmful / Refrigerator
City scenes / Surgical locations (2 words)
Delicately / Flatmates
Combine / Home of Friendship (3 words)
Jack the Ripper, for instance (2 words) / Type of galaxy (2 words)
Collapse (2 words) / Storage facility
300th anniversary / Converts back
Drilled a burr hole / Fully exposed in Britain?
Isolate / Shakespearean sprite
Noisy quarrels / Trap for catching crayfish
Hindering agents / Topic studied in Course 16
Making less significant? (2 words) / Like
Allocating jobs / , and
Arouse again / Punctuation symbol (2 words)
Australian city / Short term investments (2 words)
Purchase for moving cross-country (2 words, hyph) / Replace book
Sports déjà vu (2 words) / Tiled
Small communities / Things of distinction
Forceful prevention / Ursa Minor (2 words)
Speedy González y Bender, por ejemplo / Stewards
Cause disturbance / Exceeded

Final Clues

Defunct French automobile
Girl's name
Greek deity
Municipality of Switzerland

Bloom clues

White

Flat cap
Fluttered
More rectangular
Brass band instrument
Position indicator
Italian director Vittorio
Large property
Knight of the Round Table
Vest material
Most recent
Full of spirit
Irritate
Shakespearean Duke
Superficial exterior
Spanish coin
Precipitated
Forest protector
Appraising
Employs again
Soft noise
Military engineer
Appeasing
World record holder for static apnea
Slopes
Small upright piano
Voice of Governor Ratcliffe
Exhaustively searches
Unexpected victories

Grey

Stiff bristle
Roman orator
Profanity speaker
Refusal
Fills with optimism
'Metamorphosis' artist
Chlorofluorocarbons
Lubricate
Ancient vessel
Crippling
Cloak
Sugar-rich liquid
Aristocrats
Started a speech
Nobel Laureate Harold
Metal covers?
Phone button
Completed again
Mechanical fasteners
Eleventh Hebrew month
One who influences
Sixpence (colloq.)
King of Iron Fist video game
Spatula

Pink

Stellar
Round loaves
Limits
5-spot
Count of Monte Cristo
Gift recipients
Ipecac, for example
Place name not used by locals
Show of respect
Impart gradually (Brit. var.)
Instructive example
Personification of wealth
Wall paintings
Gather
Sorrow
Distant
Dwell
Directionless magnitude
Type of acid from rowan berries
More concise
Conclude (2 words)
Diaereses
Fearful
Oscitated

A Mind-Flexing Exercise was one of the later ideas submitted to the hunt (submitted in late September). I'd been wanting to get coreyplover as author of at least one of the puzzles in the hunt since he didn't already have one yet and we'd been discussing possible puzzle ideas. He'd submitted an idea earlier, but it'd been turned down due to overlapping in type and mechanic with already accepted puzzles.

We had been discussing a different puzzle type altogether (that you may still see since Corey and I are both part of the upcoming SEQQUEL project, which is why I'm keeping mum on it) when our discussion came to the flexagon and Corey thought of the idea of using a Rows Garden or a Some Assembly Required to somehow clue a strip that could be folded into a flexagon that would read messages when folded into its various faces. I thought that this idea was really interesting and it came at a really interesting time because I had recently talked to one of the puzzle editors and asked him what puzzle type was a bit underrepresented in our hunt and he had responded that it was (surprisingly perhaps for this team) the variety word puzzle. After a bit more discussion of possible concepts of how such a puzzle might work, we decided to pitch this idea to the puzzle editors.

After the initial response from the editors, we ended up having to move off the possibility of the Some Assembly Required (due to the existence of Picture Puzzle). We'd also been tentatively assigned an answer word and I'll be honest, I wasn't sure how in the world we would go about cluing the 8 letter answer word (it was my least favorite of the words we'd suggested possibly taking in our pitch).

It took a lot of discussion over the next few days before Corey came up with the great idea that ended up getting used of having two 18-letter strips and a mini-grid with 6 bloom entries that correspond to the words/phrases on the faces of the folded hexahexaflexagon. At this point, we pretty much locked in the idea of having to use a pair of Rows Garden puzzles and, well, our idea was set.

I was admittedly a bit concerned at this point about the fact that the two strip approach for a hexahexaflexagon divided the 6 words that appear down the middle (three appear on one side of the strip and the other three appear entirely on the other), though my concern for that lessened as construction of this puzzle continued (and the Siamese aspect got added).

After all, was this construction that we were proposing even possible? We needed to choose 6 6-letter words for the blooms of our mini-grid that would clue our puzzle's answer. We needed to sort these words in order to make two 18-letter strips (not including an X that would get used as the tab) that would not be unreasonable to extract from two Rows Garden puzzles. Keep in mind that the strips intersect both row answers and bloom answers, so we needed to get 6 6-letter answers on the flexagon faces that clued our answer word that would form usable trigrams and bigrams of letters in the Rows Garden grids.

Did I mention that neither Corey nor me have ever made a Rows Garden puzzle in our entire lives?

I give Corey a lot of credit here; he did most of what I consider the hard part of the construction of this puzzle, which was building the two grids. This construction included creating two strips that would work and look promising for bloom and row answers as well as choosing row answers so that we could make the highlighted triangles read the messages that we decided we wanted to include to help clue what to do once the grids were filled in. Sure, I kept an eye on the grid at all times helping to move us off of unusual words that I'd noticed that were used in other puzzles that I'd test solved (such as At the Beach... you know, we almost had SALMAGUNDIS in our grid?), but Corey did the main grid work here many times offering up options and letting me select what I thought would work better in the grid.

Corey built the top grid first (the one with the BETWEEN THE XS message), though in retrospect, we probably should have done the longer FOLD LIKE TUCKERMAN message first (But guess what? We hadn't finalized what the message on that side of the grid would be yet) since that grid would be more constrained due to the need to make sure we had more letters to highlight.

Then, of course, we had to make some more decisions about how to present this puzzle. Corey and I had long been discussing the possibility of making this puzzle a Siamese puzzle due to the fact that we were presenting this puzzle as two identical-sized Rows Gardens. I also knew that I really wanted one of the grids to be a grid with rows in reverse order to make the element of putting the two grids back to back more natural and I thought it would be really interesting if teams had to figure out that one grid had reverse row ordering. Of course, the question that arose in both of our minds was... is this puzzle still solvable with these various twists?

One of the features that we had discussed earlier, I think, helped bring this puzzle down from being off-the-charts hard. We had made a decision early on to color the blooms of the two grids differently. Corey had wanted to even out the number of bloom clues of each color that there were and I thought it was a good idea. One of the effects of this, of course, was that this puzzle wasn't quite a true Siamese puzzle in that as long as you had enough blooms, you could realize which grid a row clue would go in (and that you could actually realize that the second grid has reverse row numbering because of this, too, because you'd try to fill in an easy row answer and discover that your trigrams from your row answer fit better with different color blooms. The disadvantage of changing the color scheme between the two grids was that the grids weren't quite symmetrical anymore, which we weren't sure would make the idea of putting the grids back to back as clear (since now you wouldn't be putting blooms of the same color back to back).

In the end, we decided to go with the differently colored grids and the Siamese-type clues and hiding the row numbering (making figuring out the reverse ordering of the lower grid necessary). With the choice of the Siamese cluing, we chose to put the bloom clues in alphabetical order by answer since we thought it might be too difficult otherwise. We clued the rest of the row clues keeping in mind that we wanted there to be enough entry places to get a foothold into the puzzle. I wrote the puzzle's title and the puzzle's flavor text and we sent the puzzle into testing not really knowing how difficult people would find it.

When devjoe saw the puzzle, he instantly made the connection to the flexagon; he was also the first to complete the grids, though he decided to input the lower grid in an upside down orientation as opposed to the intended reverse row-ordered orientation. Jigsaw and tinhorn2 managed to correct his entering in of the second grid so that the highlighted letters on the lower message read coherently after which devjoe extracted the answers off the faces of the folded hexahexaflexagon and tinhorn2 and Jigsaw finished the final mini-grid and finished this puzzle in test solving.

devjoe offered feedback on a few of the clues (which was quite valuable to Corey and me since neither of us is particularly experienced at writing crossword-type clues), which we accommodated and so the puzzle was set.

And that was how this puzzle was created.

No team got this puzzle until the release of the entire dossier on Sunday at about 07:10 mainly due to the fact this puzzle had been slotted behind three puzzles with difficult to obtain answers. A team would have needed to solve two of Confession, Radio Waves, Son of the Unspeakable Realm of Chaos, Give Me an M, and Big Musical Number and no team ever managed to solve both Confession and Radio Waves (which I think were the two easiest puzzles of the five).

This puzzle was solved by three teams. The first were the Evil Midnight Bombers at Sunday, 10:21 (solve time of 03:11:26), second was Left Out at Sunday, 18:22 and third was Codex Bodley at Sunday, 19:41.

Briefly...

dalryaug — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 05:47:27 GMT

Well, I leave the Boston area tomorrow and I'll leave with a handful of Hunt souvenirs including one of the Little Black Books that we handed out to each team at the start of hunt, a 2008 Hunt coin (instead of one large coin, we made many small ones and since the winning team was small, we each got one), and my very own Where's Waldo book. Did I ever mention that I got a grand total of 8 hours of sleep during the 56 hours or so the hunt went on?

For people who can recall the puzzles by name, I wrote (in order of release) No Strings Attached (with the assistance of photographers devjoe, Catherine, and jennifer), Race Around the Block (with a crucial assist by Bowen Kerins), Propaganda, These Ain't No Underpants Gnomes (which I'm not sure what happened to that puzzle since it apparently wasn't all on the site when hunt started and I never caught this until I'd been asked to hint a team late Sunday and looked at my own puzzle and didn't understand why there were only ten sets of clues...), Method to the Madness, At Sea, Campsite, A Mind-flexing Exercise (with coreyplover), and X Marks the Spot. I also wrote the will metapuzzle. I also ended up providing the Chinese text for bourbon_cowboy's Special Delivery puzzle.

From the logs, solve time in hh:mm:ss

No Strings Attached, first solved by IIF at Friday, 18:34, fastest solve by Smallish Momenta in 04:20:30.
Race Around the Block, first solved by Groovytron at Friday, 22:03, also fastest solve in 02:00:56.
Propaganda, first solved by Smallish Momenta at Friday, 22:43, also fastest solve in 00:43:01.
Method to the Madness, first solved by Metaphysical Plant at Sunday, 01:43, also fastest solve in 01:26:08
At Sea, first solved by Codex Bodley at Sunday, 18:49, also fastest solve in 17:50:14
Campsite, first solved by Evil Midnight Bombers at Sunday, 16:43, also fastest solve in 10:46:16
A Mind-flexing Exercise, first solved by Evil Midnight Bombers at Sunday, 10:21, also fastest solve in 03:11:26
X Marks The Spot, first solved by A Man, A Plan, A Canal -- Suez at Sunday, 09:02, also fastest solve in 01:51:25

I'll talk about the puzzles in greater detail when there's actually something to link to. I do have a lot of thoughts about this experience and this hunt and the way it ended up, but I'm leaving it to later to write some of it up.

By the way, my favorite puzzles in this year's hunt were (in no particular order) Global Coolness, The Bottom Line, Tragedy, Chimera, and God's Gift to Cartooning.

Book tag clouds

dalryaug — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 04:54:35 GMT

Amazon.com recently released a feature called the Concordance on its recent revamp of the site. According to them, the Concordance is "an alphabetized list of the most frequently occurring words in a book, excluding common words such as "of" and "it." The font size of a word is proportional to the number of times it occurs in the book. Hover your mouse over a word to see how many times it occurs, or click on a word to see a list of book excerpts containing that word." Well, I love statistics, so I found this new feature (which can be found linked to on each book page if it exists for that book) kind of fascinating to look through, though I'll note that not every book has one so far.

Here's the one for a copy of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard (I removed the actual links to Amazon.com, though you can still hover over the word to see the number of times it occurred).

again alfred away barrel behind boat claudius coin come course day dead death direction does down downstage end england enters even ever face first get getting give go goes going good got guil guildenstern gull gum halts hamlet hand heads himself holds home king know last leave left let letter life light little looks lord makes man matter mean might move must nothing now oh pause play player point polonius put question quite remember right ros rosencrantz round say see should sir something stands starts still take talking thing think thought time tragedians turns two upstage without words yes yet

That brings me to the point of this entry. I have placed the tag clouds (since face it, that's more or less what they are) of the Amazon.com Concordances of 25 different books in this separate file (I would have done it here in this entry, but when I did I was told the post would be too long). In each tag cloud, I have taken the word that appears the most times in the book and replaced it with [x]. For each of the 25 books, try to name the book and what the missing word is (Feel free to guess one part if you don't have both!). Links have been removed, but you should be able to hover over the words to see how many times it appeared. Comments are screened. Good luck!

As one note that may or may not help you (depending on how well you know me)... I have read all of these books.

Back from Con...

dalryaug — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 07:29:03 GMT

Well, I'm back from Ann Arbor. I had a great time at Con even with what else was going on (which wasn't bad by any means, but I mean, there's so much going on at Con that I had to admit that I sometimes felt a bit like I was missing things because of what was going on on the side (but let's not get ahead of myself since I'm not even going to talk about that yet.)).

It was great seeing the people I knew again; I also met a lot of people for the first time and it was good finally meeting projectyl in person who I've seen around online quite a bit this past year after we started that project last year. He, devjoe, and I teamed together (the representatives of team SEQQUEL at the Con) to finish second at the extravaganza (a Saturday night hunt-like puzzle event). I liked the way the teams combined into changing two-team tables that worked on a round's puzzles together and the use of snacks was pretty cool, too. I tried my hand at co-solving cryptics and did finish Harth's with Atlantic and thedan's with devjoe, but persona and I ended up not being able to find each other early enough on Saturday to finish Ucaoimhu's before the start of the extravaganza. Oh, well.

The trip in was smooth; I met Elfman at the airport and we shared a ride to the hotel park and eventually had breakfast being joined by Panther. I ended up hanging out with them in the lobby for a bit longer joined by Teki. I ended up heading back to my hotel to crash a bit before the barbecue.

I can't say I saw much of Ann Arbor outside of the hotel park where we were based out of. There are a whole group of hotels right around where the Sheraton where the convention was being held (and I was staying at one of the neighbors) and I didn't really make it outside of that hotel park besides to the barbecue on Wednesday, the fun trip to the Ethiopian restaurant, the Blue Nile, on Thursday, and the walk to the University of Michigan campus that Zebraboy and I made on Friday.

The barbecue was fun and I talked to a variety of people including Lilith who flagged me down. There was no nom tag, though, waiting for me, which would have been nice to get at that point since I have a rather difficult nom to remember and spell and it's harder for people to make sure they've seen your nom when your nom isn't something they would ordinarily be able to recall or associate with anything else. devjoe and Lilith and I ended up working on the sidewalk puzzle set together and we got pretty far though we didn't actually finish it.

The Thursday dinner was fun. I'd never had Ethiopian food before and the company was good, too. I ended up at a table with mamagotcha, Hot, jedusor, rpipuzzleguy, hahathor, pinecone_4, and Zebraboy, though I mainly talked to Hot and mamagotcha since we were on the same end of the table.

I did the U of M campus walkaround thing with Zebraboy on Friday afternoon. We walked into town from the hotel after we missed the 16:00 shuttle there, but the walk wasn't so bad. We ended up eating at Jimmy John's (which was pretty good) before doing that walkaround and then eventually walking back making it back without too much time to spare before Friday night's events (I did Wrybosh's listening thing with devjoe, projectyl and Stax).

Let's see, I liked playing tmcay's Coordination game in which players had to attempt to identify the places in images that correspond to answers of questions. I was at the table with Banterweight who earned the lowest score in the room for the event (the rest of the table was Pebbles, Arbutus, Ruth, Avidan, projectyl, and devjoe. I had teamed up with Pebbles, Arbutus, and Ruth for the newspaper scavenger hunt event.). Banterweight and I paired together to form a perfect match coordination for both of us identifying the correct coordinate for where to fill the gas on the Ford Model T.

Some of you probably know that I have a vast love for party-type guessing style games (not a coincidence that I said that Pictionary was my favorite game at the Con introduction thing) so it's probably not a surprise that I really liked playing both Ladybug and Say What?

Ladybug (Slik's game) is a game involving shouting out words that fit each round's category that start with the letter that ends the word someone else just said. That may sound like a familiar concept for a game you've heard of, but in this version of the game there are 26 letters in the center of the table and so you can only say an answer that begins with the active letter and ends with the active letter or one of the letters still on the table. So it becomes gradually harder to come up with answers as each round progresses as more letters are used up.

Say What? (Murdoch's game) is a game that involves using a fairly limited selection of magnetic poetry tiles to clue things that people would have to guess. This game was really a lot of fun as it's really quite challenging to clue many words with the word selection that was there. Granted, this is an NPL crowd so people are able to make good guesses anyway, but having a limited selection of words that you're able to put on the board made the challenge of cluing words fun. The hardest thing that I had to clue (and I love trying to clue really challenging things) was the word "mutiny" (which I ended up eventually needing to play NO LOVE FOR PERSON, MACHINE ON WATER, and SOUNDS LIKE NO SPEAK (though I only went with this last clue after the people guessing were having trouble getting the connection I was trying to make with the first two)).

I'd have to say Say What? is probably my personal favorite of the two at the moment.

I didn't really play many of the after hours games besides Slik's and jeffurrynpl's Jeopardy (and I sucked at both of those since I'm too slow, but I had fun anyway).

Let's see, I made it through a number of the various convention handouts that people left in the hospitality suite, but I really didn't have enough time to look at all of them while I was there so I'll probably be glancing at them when I have a free moment sometime in the future.

Anyway, today was departure day and so here I am all the way back in my apartment.

On the video and the history of these sort of experiments

dalryaug — Sun, 20 May 2007 04:55:13 GMT

This post is about the video posted last Thursday and gives the background to work done on this sort of topic in cognitive psychology experiments. I also discuss the video and aspects of it in particular so if you haven't watched it, I suggest you do so before bothering to read the rest of this entry (feel free to vote in the poll, too, though the results as they are now are what is being used as the informal sample).

The video is a good example of what has been known in the field of cognitive psychology as inattentional blindness, though more specifically in this case as change blindness. Change blindness refers to the inability to notice things change if you're not actively paying attention to them. It occurs even if the changes cover a large part of the visual field or even if the changes are right in the center of the visual field.

One of the most dramatic experiments in this field was performed by Simons and Levin (Simons 1998). In this experiment, a person would approach people on the street and ask them for directions. While this person was being told the instructions by the subject, two more people would walk between the first person and the subject holding a door. While the door was completely blocking the subject's view of the first person, that first person would switch places with a fourth person who had been walking behind the door so that the subject wouldn't see him. So essentially, over the course of the experiment, the subject would be approached for directions, have a door block his view of the person who asked, and then would see a different person in the same place after the door was gone.

Now, you might think that people would notice a change like this, but what the experiment actually showed was that subjects only noticed that the person whom they were giving directions to had changed 50% of the time.

Similar experiments in inattentional blindness have shown similar results. Inattentional blindness refers to just the inability to notice something (as opposed to notice a change in particular). In one experiment conducted by Ulric Neisser, observers were asked to watch a video of teams of players passing basketballs and were asked to press a key whenever members of one team made a pass while ignoring the other team (Neisser 1979). Some people were given practice trials doing this and others were not before they were shown a video with an unexpected event. In this video, a woman walks across the screen with an open umbrella in hand partway through while the other action continues. For the people who hadn't had practice, only 21% of the subjects reported seeing this woman while 48% of the people who had had two practice runs beforehand reported noticing the woman. (You can watch this video for yourself in a Java applet.)

This experiment was later conducted again by Simons and Chabris and the task was similar: counting basketball passes (Simons 1999). Some people were asked to count the number of passes while others were asked to count the number of bounce passes and aerial passes separately. In all cases, people were asked to pay attention to just one of the two teams. Now, in the videos that these subjects watched, one of them included a woman carrying an umbrella like in the Neisser experiment and another included a woman wearing a gorilla costume. Since in the Neisser version of this experiment the people in the scene were transparent, both transparent and opaque versions of the scene were used so as to see if the unnaturalness of the transparent effect made a difference. (Again, Java applets of the transparent umbrella woman video, the opaque umbrella woman video, and opaque gorilla woman are available.)

After watching the video and providing the counts to the task that had been instructed, subjects were then presented with an additional set of questions: "(i) While you were doing the counting, did you notice anything unusual on the video? (ii) Did you notice anything other than the six players? (iii) Did you see anyone else (besides the six players) appear on the video? (iv) Did you see a gorilla [woman carrying an umbrella] walk across the screen?"

So what did the results show? Overall, 54% of 192 subjects noticed the unexpected event. Only 45% of the people who had been performing the harder task (keeping track of types of passes) noticed the unexpected event compared to 64% for the easier task (just counting the total number of passes) so the difficulty of the task did make a difference. The transparent effect was shown to make a difference since more people noticed the difference in the opaque case (67%) compared to the transparent case (42%), but the experiment did show that a significant number of people didn't notice the unexpected event even in the opaque case.

So, people in general are just not that good at noticing things that they're not specifically paying attention to. Now, let's talk about the specific video I asked you guys to watch.

One of the things that most impressed me about this video in particular is that almost everything in the visual field of the video changes color at some point in the video. However, the changes are of different color combinations and cover different amounts and locations of the visual field.

Now, when I had watched the video the first time, the only change I had noticed was the backdrop changing from navy blue to red. I thought perhaps I had noticed this because the red is a bit eye-catching, but I couldn't rule out that perhaps it seemed more noticeable because it is the element that covers the most of the screen of the four changes. So I was curious... what would other people find noticeable?

Well, our informal poll showed that just 50% of the people noticed at least one difference (8 of 16). The most noticed difference was the one I had noticed, the backdrop change (6). To a lesser extent, people noticed that the people's clothes were changing color (2 noticed the man's shirt; 3 noticed the woman's shirt). The thing that I found particularly interesting though is that no one noticed the tablecloth change. I'm still sort of curious why this one in particular wasn't noticed by anyone. Also, I found it interesting just 3 people noticed more than one difference.

I got a variety of feedback from the task. Some of the feedback that I got from the task was from people who were surprised that they hadn't noticed one of the changes in particular. Yeah, I know how that feels. Another piece of feedback I got was that he only noticed the man's shirt color after noticing the backdrop change color and then thinking back. I sort of wonder if the fact that I kind of pushed him to take it kind of influenced the fact that he thought that there was a particular reason that I wanted people to watch the video that was out of the ordinary!

If you have any other feedback or thoughts on the video or what you noticed, feel free to let me know. Thanks again for watching the video to those of you who did!

References

Neisser U. (1979) The control of information pickup in selective looking. Perception and its Development. A Tribute to Eleanor J Gibson Ed. A D Pick (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates) 201 - 219.

Simons, D.J., & Levin, D.T. (1998). Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 5 (4), 644-649.

Simons & Chabris (1999). Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception, 28, 1059-1074.

Card changing trick

dalryaug — Thu, 10 May 2007 08:41:43 GMT

Ahem, I'd like to ask everyone to watch this video or at least the first minute and a half of it.

After you've watched it, I'd like you to take a poll, but don't look at the poll until after you've watched the video.

At about 1:36 left in the video, you see four numbers in circles indicating four differences. The second question refers to these changes by number.

View Poll: Attention

Pick each change that you noticed for the second question (4 being the backdrop, etc.).

I'm curious to see your results.

30 songs in 7 minutes

dalryaug — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 08:51:49 GMT

Well, really 7 minutes and 25 seconds.

So this has gone around in different variations before, but now I've done one of my own.

This audio file consists of clips from thirty different songs. All you have to do is identify the artists and titles to as many as you can.

There isn't really a common theme to the selection of songs, but I will say that it was made entirely from mp3s that have come into my collection on September 17, 2006 or later so the selection is weighted towards songs from the past few years. Oh, also, none of these songs have ever been posted to this LJ before. Good luck! Comments are screened.

[It is now possible to stream this mp3 directly from this entry.]

This is what happened as best as I can remember it.

dalryaug — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 08:20:48 GMT

So I guess I join the ranks of hunters who were on a winning team on their first MIT Mystery Hunt? (I'd guess that the fraction of first time hunters on our team was in the one-fourth to one-fifth range) (Some spoilers within)

Being on Dr. Awkward was an interesting experience since I didn't really know most of the people on the team ahead of time; I'd heard about the team from devjoe. I joined the team back about two or three months ago before I'd hear that our team was likely picking up a few people from the dissolved ACRONYM team and then it seemed like we just kept picking up a few more people here or there. So the team ended up bigger than I was expecting; I think the count ended up at about 47 including the few remote people we had, though all people weren't there the whole time.

My trip to Boston wasn't too eventful. My plane was delayed so I got into Boston later than I was planning. I dropped my things off in the hotel room and I ended up spending that morning catching up to some degree with my email and LJ since I knew I wouldn't have much of a chance of that during the hunt.

The hunt this year was based around regaining our souls from the devil. At the hunt opening, all the team leaders had to sign a contract (nominally to join this easy 5 step program "How to win the Mystery Hunt by Being Really, Really Awesome" and be able to finish the hunt in 5 puzzles), but what was revealed later after solving the first meta (which had those five puzzles) was that in fact on that original contract in 1 point type was something revealing that the contract actually also signed the team's souls to the devil.

The rest of the main rounds of the hunt were based around the lesson themes "How to Succeed at __ by being Really, Really Evil". Each round came with a DVD that showed that round's "lesson", an about three minute video that often included clues necessary to solve that round's meta, which would give us instructions for some task we needed to perform for each round.

Some early puzzles I worked on included Know Your History (answers of past MIT Mystery Hunt puzzles), This Puzzle Has Been Formatted to Fit Your Screen (pangrammatic criss crosses), The Continental DiViDe (movie DVD identification, though I don't believe our team ever figured out how to index into answers here; we ended up backsolving this one), Disco Inferno (identifying clips of songs with words like "devil" or "evil", etc. in the title), The Stunted Growth Puzzle (Arrested Development puzzle), and Belle of the Ball (NCAA basketball Cinderella story puzzle). Belle of the Ball and the "How to Succeed at Sports by Being Really Really Evil" round was what I was doing when 17:45 or so started to draw around. (For the record, we had already by then solved the Performing Arts meta by this point with rpipuzzleguy and qaqaq and a few others performing the skit that was the required "bad sequel to Wordplay").

Now, qaqaq before the event started had suggested forming a night crew that would go to sleep early on that first night and be active in the middle of the night that first night and I had volunteered to do that (though as I was to discover qaqaq himself didn't do that and slept in the morning on Saturday). So I actually left team headquarters and went back to the Marriott with one of my roommates during the hunt, Zebraboy, who was also doing the same sleep schedule. I met jennifer there and she delivered me some snack foods (which was great! I didn't have much time to bring food over).

We ended up waking up at around 23:30; after quick showers and all, we got back to headquarters to discover that the team had already moved into and past two rounds, the Crime and Writing rounds, though as I recall both metas were solved after we got back.

The first puzzle I worked on after getting back was I Love These 80 in the Getting Rich Quick round. This ended up taking quite a while, but I worked together with others to get all the clips of music videos identified. I ended up stopping working on it after this point was reached and jangler_npl tried to fill in the criss cross, but it wasn't until we had worked out how the meta worked and got restrictions that way on what the answer could be that we could actually identify the answer to this puzzle.

Next up I agreed to go over with the group to the Student center to work on Success Stories. In the aftermath, I have no idea why as many of us who went there went. The first group who went there didn't quite realize they needed to be in the elevator until they had already come back to the team's headquarters and after that I don't know why as many of us went back there the second time around. Just after we had figured out the answer and had left the Student center, we ran into two of our team members who had gone in search of a Twinkie in order to deliver it as the task for the Crime meta.

After getting back from the Student Center, three of us (me along with Artistry and Zebraboy) quickly got through the Aaron Sorkin show puzzle A Few Good Actors and assist with solving the text adventure reconstruction puzzle Embezzler's Quest.

Somewhere around this time, I also led the charge to start solving the Getting Rich Quick meta and was ultimately the one who recognized the FACTOR ME acrostic first (we were missing the F and the T of it) and what the numbers in the answers were for.

Somewhere around this time it was about 4:15 or so and Mark, a sophomore on the team, was looking for people to do the runaround with him. It ended up being four of us that ran the runaround for our team. We got through it in about an hour. I saw members of the Manic Sages while we were doing the runaround, but I'm not sure what we were seeing them doing because the only place we saw them was in that short part of the runaround where the path overlaps itself so I'm not sure if were ahead of them or about an hour behind them. I think knowing that the other team could be behind us did cause us to speed up, which in any case would have been beneficial for us since it meant that we would have gotten us all back on working on the other puzzles sooner.

After getting back, I'd successfully argue against a stubborn team member that the white and black triangles should match on both sides of Negative Ad Campaign (though that's really my only role in solving this puzzle with funny negations of common warning labels and company slogans).

Another puzzle I spent some amount of time on in this interval was the music puzzle Got It Covered (about songs that had been covered at least once with clips that only sang one word of the song), which did prove pretty challenging though our team was definitely helped by my ability to recognize the Scissor Sisters' cover of Comfortably Numb just from the word "Relax" (they thought it was something else).

Somewhere around this time, though, the hunt organizers gave us a phone call. See, it seems that somehow our team had discovered an issue with the site and it had unlocked for us the Pride and Greed puzzles even though we hadn't reached the bold line on those meters yet. We had also successfully managed to solve both puzzles before this was noticed. We hadn't realized that something specifically was wrong (since after all only the organizers are completely privy to what the unlocking mechanism really is) and it wasn't our fault, but understandably we ended up being assessed a time penalty. They would set a time window of the same amount of time from unlocking to solving for both puzzles in which we could not win the event. These two time windows would start after we had solved the necessary number of puzzles that we should have solved in order to unlock each of the two puzzles (in our case, we needed two more greed puzzles and one more pride puzzle before we were supposed to get those puzzles). We were the only team affected by this issue. Luckily for us, we did manage to get the last of the two timers started about an hour before the Envy event started so this penalty had no net effect in the end.

Another puzzle I spent some amount of time on was War Dances, though it took us a bit to make the jump to World of Warcraft dances (which elainetyger discovered while googling for dance videos). It took us a bit to get exactly how the ranks worked, too, but we eventually called it in.

One of the next puzzles I was involved with solving was Manipulating the Masses. We'd worked out that religions went in the blanks but it took Zebraboy to notice how an R, E, and V appeared on most lines of the text and to manage to make the connection to the MIT chaplains. I went with him to the chapel to look for the sign right around the time when first substitutions were being made on our team for the Gluttony event (we ran into our original three on our way there). It actually took us a bit of time to find the paper sign since it was hidden in a corner such that you have to be looking in the right way. It took us a little bit longer than it should have to realize that the numbers were atomic masses (fuldu had to suggest it to us), though, to complete the puzzle.

I suspect though that it was having just come back from solving this puzzle involving the MIT chaplains that made it seem pretty obvious to me that the Lust meta I Need to Connect With You, Baby needed MIT course ordering to order the letters (others had already worked out what each of the sets of dots spelled out though not always correctly) and this meta fell pretty shortly after I pointed that out.

Around this point, a group of us started working on the amusing word puzzle The Only Thing We Have to Fear (identifying a list of made up phobias) and finished that. Sometime around that time thedan came to visit us. I was working on the Gluttony puzzle I Want Some Popcorn and Some Cotton Candy and ... (a spot the differences puzzle full of tricks) at the time and he told us that it was one of his favorites (and after I solved it, it was one of my favorites, too).

I don't remember if it was before or after the Gluttony, but for some reason I was also the one who first observed that THRIVE plus the corresponding TV station call letters could anagram to OVERWEIGHT; I wouldn't have guessed that I would be the first to do so, though I suspect some others might have been thinking that the first letter of the call letters shouldn't be used. After this observation, I went back to looking at other stuff after labeling the video order of the TV call letters on the board, but apparently we managed to solve this meta with just the five out of nine answers that we had at that point.

That left us with the eighth metapuzzle: the law and government one and the Envy puzzle I Wish I Wrote That to solve. Of course, the reason we still had the envy puzzle was because the envy event was the last event and the puzzle wouldn't open until our team had finished that. This puzzle didn't take too long for us to solve though I wasn't terribly involved in this solve.

Thus, we were left with one meta left and the metameta. I was pretty convinced that we needed to solve this eighth meta in order for us to finish (and I was right), though other people didn't agree with me. Thus, we did spend a decent amount of time at this point trying to figure out how the certificates and the dodecahedron worked. We tried to backsolve the missing face, but that proved futile (for obvious reasons if you've seen the solution and I know we confused the Bombers with our call-in attempts at that point [We asked to speak with our liaison and wesleyjenn told us in no uncertain terms at the end of that phone call "There is no liaison. Ever."]).

Thus, we turned back to the eighth meta, the only other puzzle left unsolved. We still had massive issues getting an answer and some people tried some pretty desperate attempts to solve it. At some point wesleyjenn and thedan came to visit us and they noted to us that we weren't alone in being in this situation with the puzzles that we had left to solve. They ended up taking to a few members of our team at that point. After that, we ended up deciding to possibly disperse since we knew that there wasn't a hint coming any time soon and it might be practical to have some people get some sleep then. Of course, it turned out that only about 45 minutes later, someone managed to properly overlay the letters for the meta into the Senate seating chart giving us the answer text for the eighth meta.

Around the time that we were working out the entire string, one member of our team called in that we were on the right track and not too long after we had the answer and had drafted a declaration of war against Setec Astronomy and got the last two certificates, which we could use to complete the last few steps of the hunt: calling for a meeting, going to Hell, having our snowball inspected, having it rejected because they really wanted the one made from hte certificates, making that one from the cut-up certificates, getting that approved, and then throwing it at thedan playing the role of the devil.

We were a bit surprised by how the hunt ended so soon after we put together the dodecahedron and set up the meeting in Hell; I think a number of us thought there would be a more involved runaround right at the end like in past years, but there wasn't and we won.

I slept a good number of hours before that; our team met up back in our rooms to clean them up and then head up to wrap-up. We then went to dinner at Bertucci's with the Bombers after wrap-up... and that's about it.

Oh, and by the way, I see there's now a mystery_hunt community, though it's too soon to tell what might actually end up in there at this point.

Close but no cigar. 50 out of 60

dalryaug — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 09:20:50 GMT

I'd like to thank everyone who helped me on the music challenge that I posted about last week. I got a lot more help from posting that I was working on this contest here than I did from pretty much anything else I did (though that might not be evident from the entry I posted here actually). My contest entry correctly named 50 of the 60 songs on the mp3 file; however, the way the prizes fell, I would have needed 51 titles in order to possibly get a prize (the top 5 scores were 58, 56, 51, 51, 51).

The songs that I didn't get were Heb Je Even Voor Mij by Frans Bauer, Summer In The City by Joe Cocker, FantasMic by Nightwish, Superman by Goldfinger, Mother Earth by Within Temptation, Folsom Prison Blues by Johnny Cash, Call Off The Search by Katie Melua, So What by Miles Davis, Push th' Little Daisies by Ween, and Sonne by Rammstein.

Thanks to shamanix, I had one of just 4 entries that correctly identified DJ Tiesto's Traffic, one of the three least identified songs in the contest (Call Off The Search by Katie Melua and So What by Miles Davis also only identified correctly four times). The other least identified songs happened to be FantasMic by Nightwish (5 people got that right) and Heb Je Even Voor Mij by Frans Bauer (6 people got that).

Sadly, not all the entries correctly identified the theme song to the Smurfs; apparently, instead, the Pink Panther theme, When the Saints Go Marchin' In, and Queen's We Will Rock You were the universally identified songs. The five next songs most commonly named in entries were Survivor's Eye of the Tiger, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Californication, The Beatles' Hey Jude, The BeeGees' Staying Alive, and Maroon 5's This Love (I was actually surprised by this last one; I've heard the song, but I never knew what the name of it was).

Anyway, the full answer list is below; the ones in bold are the ones I didn't get.

Enter Sandman, by Metallica

Eye of the Tiger, by Survivor

Clocks, by Coldplay

Istanbul (Not Constantinople), by They Might Be Giants

Rock is Dead, by Marilyn Manson

Heb Je Even Voor Mij, by Frans Bauer

Wind of Change, by The Scorpions

Crazy, by Aerosmith

November Rain, by Guns 'n Roses

Final Countdown, by Europe

Bring me to Life, by Evanescence

Jerry Was A Race Car Driver, by Primus

Californication, by the Red Hot Chili Peppers

Spring / The Four Seasons, by Vivaldi

Concerning Hobbits, by Howard Shore

Conquest of Paradise, by Vangelis

Africa, by Toto

Hey Jude, by The Beatles

Explosive, by Bond

Summer In The City, by Joe Cocker

FantasMic, by Nightwish

Bad Moon Rising, by Credence Clearwater Revival

Me Gustas Tu, by Manu Chao

Staying Alive, by the BeeGees

This Love, by Maroon 5

The Smurfs Theme, by Hoyt Curtin and Paul de Korte

Holiday, by Green Day

A Forest, by The Cure

More Than A Feeling, by Boston

Pink Panther Theme, by Henry Mancini

Angels, by Robbie Williams

When The Saints Go Marchin' In

Everybody Needs Somebody To Love, by The Blues Brothers

Angel of Harlem, by U2

Wish You Were Here, by Pink Floyd

Time Is Running Out, by Muse

Smells Like Teen Spirit, by Nirvana

We Will Rock You, by Queen

Fur Elise, by Ludwig von Beethoven

Superman, by Goldfinger

Jane Says, by Janes Addiction

Wonderwall, by Oasis

Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life, by Monty Python

Desert Rose, by Sting

Mother Earth, by Within Temptation

Ziggy Stardust, by David Bowie

Boondocks, by Little Big Town

Save Me, by Jem

Paradise By The Dashboard Light, by Meatloaf

Traffic, by DJ Tiesto

Folsom Prison Blues, by Johnny Cash

Quutamo, by Apocalyptica

Wonderboy, by Tenacious D

Rhapsody in Blue, by George Gershwin

Sandstorm, by Darude

Call Off The Search, by Katie Melua

So What, by Miles Davis

Tom's Diner, by Suzanne Vega

Push th' Little Daisies, by Ween

Sonne, by Rammstein

I'm rather impressed by KoLmafia

dalryaug — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 08:11:44 GMT

So I've been making more use of KoLmafia lately for other features than I've written about before so I thought I'd write about what those features are.

One of the newest features that I've been paying attention to is the Store manager. The interface for the feature is quite well done and it does the one main thing that I wanted that isn't that easy in the game: I can pick an item from my inventory and quickly see what the current prices it is selling for in the mall right at that moment. Thus, it's really easy to decide whether to sell something and for what price. You can see the interface in the screenshot below.

Above, you can see an NG, pink pony, and a rockin' wagon on sale in my store as well as how much they are being sold for. Up above, you can see that I've selected my tiny plastic sword from my inventory and after hitting the button with the triangle and exclamation point on it at the right end of the row, the small window on the right fills up with the current prices at the mall. So at the time I made this screenshot, there are 5 tiny plastic swords on sale for 8 million meat. Since everything is all in one screen, this makes it really easy to go back to my item and decide whether to sell it or to go on to another item in my inventory. I can just as easily do the current price checking for the things I currently have in the mall, too, using those same buttons with triangles that appear at the end of those item rows. Nice.

Another feature about KoLmafia that I really like is that I can use it to create items using the things in my inventory without actually doing all in the individual combining or cooking or cocktailcrafting or supertinkering myself. This is really handy if you want to create something that takes a lot of combining and it's also really handy if you're forgetful about which things need to be combined in what order to make something. KoLmafia actually goes through your inventory and figures out what it is that you can create and puts it in the menu along with numbers indicating how many maximum you can make with your current inventory. Below you'll see a screenshot of this interface. For instance, right now, you can see I can create a cherry bomb and a clockwork endoskeleton using the things I have in inventory.

Quite handy.

Badde Manors clan snapshot made by KoLmafia

dalryaug — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 09:48:06 GMT

I recently talked a little bit about KoLmafia and I've been using it a little bit more to see what it can do. One interesting thing that it can do is create statistics for the clan. So I ran that over our little Badde Manors clan and generated the results that it creates. Essentially it seems to create leaderboards like the ones in the Hall of Records, but restricted to our clan. Then it also can create a miscellaneous clan statistics list. It's kind of interesting so I put it online so that the other people in the clan (and others who might be interested in KoLmafia) can see.

Softcore (with each clan member only able to appear once on each individual leaderboard)

Softcore (with each clan member allowed to appear multiple times on each individual leaderboard... in other words the one where SeaEagle appears all over multiple times)

Hardcore (with each clan member only able to appear once on each individual leaderboard)

Hardcore (with each clan member allowed to appear multiple times on each individual leaderboard... in other words the one where Feldermer appears all over the Teetotaler list multiple times)

Miscellaneous information about our clan from what our average PvP rank is (0) to what is the food that shows up the most as clan members' favorite food (4 people have Lucky Surprise Egg as the favorite: beeger, Brandy0101, Mr Yoink, and SeaEagle)

The way that the information is crawled means that pages are available. You'll be able to click on the names on the leaderboards to bring up the member's ascension history, but you won't be able to go anywhere else from there. Also, on the miscellaneous statistics list, you'll be able to click through to individual profiles and see what each member's profile had (that page that shows what is equipped, the current familiar, trophies, etc.) at the time the clan members were crawled, but again no links work from those pages either.

All in all, I think this is kind of nifty, but our clan doesn't quite have the size or individual ascension histories to make it that interesting yet.

What do you recognize in my audio signature?

dalryaug — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 04:49:22 GMT

So there's a program called the iTunes Signature Maker that uses your iTunes profile to make a "signature", which is basically a series of clips of the songs that you have in your iTunes library. Depending on what criteria you choose determines which songs get selected (for example, the most you've played or your top rated songs), how many songs get selected, how many song layers can be playing at once, and how long each clip will tend to be.

Below is one signature that I made and I made this signature in such a way that you may be able to identify the clips individually (if you choose too many layers or too low of a time, the songs start to become indistinguishable, which is a nice effect, but hard to interpret). Go on, what songs do you recognize? [I did convert the file from the original final 10.8 MB WAV file to a 1.04 MB mp3 file]

19 songs in just over a minute (1.04 MB)

(Sorry, no radio.blog. That doesn't appear to work on the servers I use anymore.)