Hunt 2008: Mystery Mystery Hunt
Jan. 24th, 2008 07:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jedusorFirst off, the Doonesbury thing, because I'm ridiculously happy about it. Garry Trudeau, the creator of Doonesbury, has mentioned the Mystery Hunt in the context of one of his characters attending MIT. When Palindrome, my Hunt team and this year's constructing team, had just won the Hunt and was discussing possibilities for this year, someone mentioned this and suggested that we contact Trudeau to ask if he wanted to be involved. I don't remember who that was, but I ran with it and e-mailed him. I didn't figure I had much of a chance of getting a response, but a few weeks later, he e-mailed me back expressing tentative interest and asking for more information.
I had helped with another Hunt puzzle (see below), but Cramerica had pretty much done the puzzle-y part of it and that was the extent of my experience with puzzle constructing, so I brainstormed with Zebraboy (one of the puzzle editors) for the Doonesbury puzzle. I think most of the ideas I ended up using were mine, but he definitely helped me feel confident that I was on the right track and able to do it. We talked about the possibility of actually having a puzzle appear in the comic strip, but ended up not doing that for various reasons. Instead, I asked Trudeau to give me a detail about the character Earl (the answer the puzzle needed to yield) that would appear in the strip on Friday, January 18th, and I constructed the puzzle around that.
The puzzle's title is "World of Comics." It consists of mixed-up panels from various comic strips with some letters missing and the flavortext, "Where would Batman be without Robin? The Lone Ranger without Tonto? The Tick without Arthur? Something would be missing." The strips are all of the ones that appear in the Boston Globe's comics section daily with the exception of Doonesbury (and the single-panel strips), all from January 18th of various years. When they're arranged in the order in which they appear in the Globe, clued by the puzzle's title and flavortext (the section of the Globe in which the comics appear is called Sidekick), the missing letters spell out CHARACTER WEARING SUSPENDERS, with Doonesbury missing. In Friday's Doonesbury, Earl was wearing suspenders.
I spent a lot of time taking answers from teams, so I heard the answers they were reaching. A bunch of them got stuck at CHARACTER WEARING SUSPENDERS without figuring out the Globe part, and just started calling in guesses of comic strip characters that wear suspenders. I think most of them got it eventually, though. Once we started hinting more heavily, I nudged them in the direction of thinking Boston-centrically, which got most of them to the "aha." And five of them got it right on their first guess, according to the puzzle stats on the website, which isn't at all bad.
The other puzzle I helped construct, sort of, was "Hack Writer." I think it was Artistry who originally said, "You know you have to write a slash puzzle for this Hunt, right?" I fully agreed, and approached Cramerica about it. We bounced around a bunch of ideas, including actors' names and canon titles. Eventually, we (and by "we" I mean Cram) came up with the idea of drabbles in which the characters aren't named, with the names transadding to words in the drabbles and the extra letters spelling out the clue to the answer. So the first drabble was about Eli and Logan from "Veronica Mars," including the words "idle" and "lagoon," in that order, making the first two letters of the clue D and O. You end up with DOUBLE ONES SLEEP TWO, which clues BEDS. Cram worked out the transadditions, but I did write some of the drabbles and I added the flavortext when testsolvers kept getting stuck. My drabbles were Veronica Mars, Harry Potter, Lost, Lord of the Rings, and the Simpsons.
Other puzzles I was slightly involved in: I came up with the idea of a puzzle centered around lolcats, but Tyler was the one who actually wrote "Little Rascals." Also, I found the San Francisco word for "Nationwide Hunt." Given that this was my first time ever being involved in puzzle construction of any kind, I think I did all right.
Last year was my first time ever being on a Hunt team, and I jumped on at the last minute (seriously- I thought on Monday, "Hey, everyone I know is going to the Mystery Hunt, maybe I should go too," and then stepped onto a train on Wednesday). So when we won, I was still very much a Hunt newbie, and tried to stay out of the way of the Hunt '08 construction for the most part. The theme decision was confusing and not a whole lot seemed to be happening for a few months. Then we finally decided that we needed a team leader and elected one. He seemed to have the logistics under control, and the structure was being created, and some people were writing puzzles, and we had three puzzle editors to take care of them, and everything seemed to be going swimmingly.
Fast-forward to November. No one had heard from our leader in months. No one knew anything about if and how the logistics were being handled. We didn't have server space. We didn't have a budget plan. We didn't have a coin. A quarter of the puzzles had not been handed in. The puzzle editors were trying to make decisions, and Trip had been forced into a leadership position he didn't want. An e-mail went out stating matter-of-factly that without the aid of a miracle, the Hunt was not going to take place. That miracle appeared in the form of Eric Berlin, who stepped in and scooped up the nigh-impossible responsibility of organizing the event. Somehow, some way, he pulled it off.
At the pre-Hunt preparations get-together at Hathor's on Thursday night, we all learned that the coin's location, indicated by the beautiful runaround, was situated in Team GroovyTron's HQ. Whoops. I thought it was a grand idea to let the winning team stampede into the room and produce the coin from under another team's nose, but I was outvoted, and the runaround was rewritten to accommodate a new location.
At noon the next day in Lobby 7, the Hunt began. Fuldu, as our esteemed leader Dr. Otto Awkward, hopped up on a platform and introduced himself. Holding up the coin, hot off the mint, he announced that as soon as he hid it, the Hunt could begin. He exited the room. I surreptitiously accompanied him, pulled a bottle of fake blood from my pocket, and aided him in his quick costume change while Trip vamped to the crowd and "Girl from Ipanema" played on the speakers. (I guess I was the one who killed Dr. Awkward, then, huh?) Soon, Dr. Awkward reappeared and stumbled to the platform, revealing to the crowd the stab wound in his back. Oh, no, our leader was dead! And he was the only one who knew where the coin was! Dearie me! Police officers Hathor and Ed showed up to take teams' information and hand out the physical Little Black Books which would aid them in discovering the true identity of the murderer. So far so good.
Back at HQ, Palindrome pondered how long it would be before the first team called in an answer. Twelve and a half minutes, guessed Ucaoimhu. Eight minutes seventeen seconds, bet I. The first sign of trouble: over forty minutes passed by before we got a correct answer. I manned the phone queues a good portion of the time, which was fun- I'll talk about some of the more amusing calls in a minute. The next thing I specifically would be needed for (anyone could man the phones) was the warrant scene, which would occur when each team opened Dossier 4 and was themselves accused of the murder of Dr. Awkward. I intended to get some sleep in the evening before my first shift as a cop, which was to begin at midnight, but only ended up napping for about twenty minutes before heading back to HQ. When it got to be eleven o'clock the next morning and no team was even close to Dossier 4, I went back to the quiet room to snatch a nap.
I awoke to the news that the Evil Midnight Bombers What Bomb At Midnight had been searched by Hathor and Ed, and Codex Bodley was nearly ready for me and Tyler to deliver their warrant. This was around two or three PM on Saturday, much later than we had anticipated. Tyler and I stormed into Codex's HQ, happily dug up a planted murder weapon and left with dire threats. Great! Only... uh... forty-three more teams to go. Hmm.
There was a timed release schedule for the dossiers, and Dossier 4 was scheduled to go out to all teams at nine PM, by which time only two more teams had opened it for themselves. (Ed and I did those two. Doing the scene with Ed was awesome because I got to be the bad cop and yell at everybody.) Faced with the prospect of conducting the search scene with several dozen teams at once, with one of our four cops sick and one busy with Abigail Freebie e-mails, a decision was made to send out the warrants electronically and "find" the knife during the arrest scene when the teams got to that point.
Around seven on Sunday morning, team GroovyTron threw a dance party for stress relief. Bowen and I stopped in, ostensibly to deliver a "What A Mystery Is Art" result but really to see if they'd been kidding or if they were actually throwing a dance party. Nope, not kidding. It was fabulous. We only stuck around for a few minutes, but I wish I'd been able to stay longer.
On dragged the Hunt, and solving was slow. Sunday afternoon, Eric and the editors disappeared into a room and reemerged with a disappointing but entirely appropriate revision of the entire end of the Hunt. Originally, when a team had solved all but one of the metas, one team member was arrested and thrown into a jail cell with the remaining suspect, a mechanism intended to eliminate the usual problem of the unsolvable meta. Once the team member had gotten that suspect's information, there would be a trial scene at which the entire team would be present. They would have a public defender, Ucaoimhu would play the judge, a messenger would burst in with a package from a testsolver of the ostensible Hunt (the one for which Otto Awkward was hiding the coin when he was murdered), more puzzles would be solved, there would be another trial scene, then the team would get to the runaround. Had we kept to that plan, the Hunt would not have been over until late Monday. The new ending consisted of Alan Caster, another "suspect," joining the solving team to get the police off both of their backs. It cut out a good deal of plot, but it had to be done.
The Evil Midnight Bombers What Bomb At Midnight (who apparently are now asking that their name be shortened to Evil Midnight rather than Bombers) solved the last two metas simultaneously, and off went Trip as Alan Caster. Eric made an unpleasant discovery about the difficulty of the runaround, and sent Uc to join them and make sure that it wouldn't take too horrendously long. Only then did we realize that there were three people who knew the new location of the coin: Trip and Uc, who were with the solving team, and Jeremy, who had long since left. Again, whoops. A couple of people dashed off to pick up the runaround partway through (fortunately they got to the end before Evil Midnight did, which could have been mildly embarrassing) and the majority of Palindrome swarmed upstairs. The closest open door led to an office containing some poor guy who was working late and meekly agreed to allow twenty-odd excited puzzlers to share his somewhat limited space. I elected to remain at HQ to play any necessary female suspects on the phone, along with the guys still manning the phone queue for the few teams who were still pounding away. Soon, though, we received the information that Evil Midnight was close to the end, and I left the phone to the mercy of male voices (did any of you guys have to try to do Samantha Oriflamme's prissy little British accent, by the way?) and lay in wait with the rest of the team. Evil Midnight found the coin, everybody clapped, the documentary crew wandered around sticking camera lenses in people's faces, and we were done. We had intended to let a few more teams reach the end, but it was too late by that point. The e-mail went out that the Hunt was over and we all packed up.
It seems that Bowen organized some of the teams who didn't get to do the runaround, and they went to MIT and did it tonight. According to an e-mail I got from Jeremy, 80 people showed up, and it sounded like they had a good time. I wish I could have gone, but I'm back in California now.
Shitty stuff:
Yeah, this Hunt was pretty much pulled together in two months, and yeah, it shows. A lot of bugs that got fixed on the website apparently reverted or something, and there were some others that didn't get caught at all. When viewing the puzzle pages, there was supposed to be a way to tell what page you were on, and that didn't happen at all. The entire bottom page of "Underpants Gnomes" was cut off completely. "Guilty Pleasures"... well, no, that wasn't a website bug. That was That Guy- you know, the one who insisted on calling in RUIN THE GOD for the Round Eight meta last year because it's an anagram of ROUND EIGHT; the one who submitted puzzle propositions like "a sports puzzle" with no further details; the one who constantly walks the line between being put up with and being kicked off the team. That Guy. He walked out sometime on Sunday after a hissy fit involving somebody's food at a restaurant, which was great for us, but not soon enough for us to be able to replace "Guilty Pleasures" with a good puzzle. Sorry about that, solvers. Especially you, the girl who spent all weekend on that one puzzle and never got it, and you, the woman who told me when she called in the answer that her team had gotten a hint from another team but didn't want to cheat and so forced her to do it all by herself before they would call it in.
As for the other puzzles- they were too hard. Palindrome's goal was to create a Hunt that no one expected from Palindrome- an MIT-centered Hunt, with lots of science and math and tech puzzles and fewer NPLish word puzzles. Clearly, that was taken to an extreme.
I personally was very disappointed that I didn't get to arrest anyone. I'd been looking forward to that, and it would have meant I would get to do the runaround with the winning team. I had my lines memorized and everything.
Another personal disappointment: I missed most of the wrapup due to college visits, having assumed that it would happen on Sunday and I would have Monday free. I wanted to be there, but I wanted to get to my Clark interview more. I did show up for a little while and got to see Trip wearing the Subservient Chicken head. And I interrupted to make sure everyone realized exactly how "World of Comics" worked- getting Garry fucking Trudeau on board for my first-ever puzzle, IMHO, gives me some level of bragging rights.
Finally, and I know a lot of people are unhappy about this, the answers aren't up and won't all be up for a while. This sucks, but the choice was between getting the answers up right after the Hunt and finishing the Hunt itself. I believe Debby is trying to get the puzzles themselves up this weekend, and is aiming to have all the answers up within a month.
Awesome stuff:
There were a few great moments on the call queue. My favorite was when I dialed a wrong number for a team:
Me: Hello, is this Grand Unified Theory of Love?
Guy: Um... what?
Me: Sorry, I think I've got the wrong number.
Guy: No, hang on. Tell me more about this theory of yours.
"Special Delivery" yielded the phrase WHO HERE SPEAKS MANDARIN CHINESE?, and one team called in NO ONE as their answer.
A team called one of the suspects and asked to commit adultery with them. We're not sure where that one came from.
I got a complaint about "Hack Writer": it contained spoilers for Heroes. There were about six people in the queue, but I couldn't resist leaving them for a minute to call Cramerica and tell him about that. (Sorry about getting off the phone so quickly, Cram- those callers were really piling up.)
Evil Midnight started off the weekend cheerily answering the phone, "Evil Midnight Bombers What Bomb At Midnight!" Sometime early Saturday morning, I called them and got, "Evil Midnight Blomeraggle bleh myeh who are afraid of heights." The next time I called, they answered, "Bombers."
The team Donner, Party of 30 kept decreasing in number throughout the weekend. By Sunday evening, I think they were answering their phone, "Donner, Party of 21."
I got to judge several "What A Mystery Is Art" submissions and was present for three scavenger hunt submissions. (The best scavenger hunt moment, which I wasn't actually present for, was when an Asian guy dropped his pants for the requirement "Chinese junk.") My stints as a judge, the opening scene, and the karaoke event were really the only times I got to see the teams. I meant to stop by several teams' HQs to say hi and see how they were doing, but I only ended up getting to Illegal, Immoral and Fattening. They seemed to be having fun, though. In fact, despite the long Hunt and difficult puzzles, most of the teams seemed in good spirits throughout the weekend, which was heartening for all of Palindrome.
Speaking of the karaoke event, half the teams were told to bring food and half were told to bring drinks. One of the drink teams brought vodka. I suspect it was Setec Astronomy, upon whom Dr. Awkward declared war last year on the grounds that they had all the booze and we just had soda pop.
A Man, A Plan, A Canal- Suez submitted an e-mail that made us all laugh a lot. Something along the lines of, "Hey, we understand about you guys accusing us of murdering Dr. Awkward- if someone else hadn't already done it, we'd certainly be considering it about now."
Thank you so much to everyone involved! In particular, Eric deserves recognition for his astonishing feat of event organization. Fuldu, Zebraboy, and Trip, thank you so much for pushing on through when there wasn't a leader, and for the innumerable sacrifices you've made for the team. Debby and Sofiya, thank you for handling the computer stuff. Hathor, thank you for taking charge of all the theatrics and scripts, and also for dealing with suspect e-mails on top of everything else you were doing. Ucaoimhu, thank you for your puzzle-constructing prolificacy, and for coming up with and developing the theme. Katatak, thank you for being our MIT person and getting funding and room reservations and all that together. Everyone on Palindrome, thank you for the various contributions you've made to making this Hunt happen, despite its apparent determination to make all our lives difficult. And thank you to all the solvers for staying optimistic and having a good time despite all the reasons you had to bitch.
By the way, did anyone get a decent picture of me in the cop outfit? I meant to have someone take one so I could update my Puzzle Police icon, but it slipped my mind.
I had helped with another Hunt puzzle (see below), but Cramerica had pretty much done the puzzle-y part of it and that was the extent of my experience with puzzle constructing, so I brainstormed with Zebraboy (one of the puzzle editors) for the Doonesbury puzzle. I think most of the ideas I ended up using were mine, but he definitely helped me feel confident that I was on the right track and able to do it. We talked about the possibility of actually having a puzzle appear in the comic strip, but ended up not doing that for various reasons. Instead, I asked Trudeau to give me a detail about the character Earl (the answer the puzzle needed to yield) that would appear in the strip on Friday, January 18th, and I constructed the puzzle around that.
The puzzle's title is "World of Comics." It consists of mixed-up panels from various comic strips with some letters missing and the flavortext, "Where would Batman be without Robin? The Lone Ranger without Tonto? The Tick without Arthur? Something would be missing." The strips are all of the ones that appear in the Boston Globe's comics section daily with the exception of Doonesbury (and the single-panel strips), all from January 18th of various years. When they're arranged in the order in which they appear in the Globe, clued by the puzzle's title and flavortext (the section of the Globe in which the comics appear is called Sidekick), the missing letters spell out CHARACTER WEARING SUSPENDERS, with Doonesbury missing. In Friday's Doonesbury, Earl was wearing suspenders.
I spent a lot of time taking answers from teams, so I heard the answers they were reaching. A bunch of them got stuck at CHARACTER WEARING SUSPENDERS without figuring out the Globe part, and just started calling in guesses of comic strip characters that wear suspenders. I think most of them got it eventually, though. Once we started hinting more heavily, I nudged them in the direction of thinking Boston-centrically, which got most of them to the "aha." And five of them got it right on their first guess, according to the puzzle stats on the website, which isn't at all bad.
The other puzzle I helped construct, sort of, was "Hack Writer." I think it was Artistry who originally said, "You know you have to write a slash puzzle for this Hunt, right?" I fully agreed, and approached Cramerica about it. We bounced around a bunch of ideas, including actors' names and canon titles. Eventually, we (and by "we" I mean Cram) came up with the idea of drabbles in which the characters aren't named, with the names transadding to words in the drabbles and the extra letters spelling out the clue to the answer. So the first drabble was about Eli and Logan from "Veronica Mars," including the words "idle" and "lagoon," in that order, making the first two letters of the clue D and O. You end up with DOUBLE ONES SLEEP TWO, which clues BEDS. Cram worked out the transadditions, but I did write some of the drabbles and I added the flavortext when testsolvers kept getting stuck. My drabbles were Veronica Mars, Harry Potter, Lost, Lord of the Rings, and the Simpsons.
Other puzzles I was slightly involved in: I came up with the idea of a puzzle centered around lolcats, but Tyler was the one who actually wrote "Little Rascals." Also, I found the San Francisco word for "Nationwide Hunt." Given that this was my first time ever being involved in puzzle construction of any kind, I think I did all right.
Last year was my first time ever being on a Hunt team, and I jumped on at the last minute (seriously- I thought on Monday, "Hey, everyone I know is going to the Mystery Hunt, maybe I should go too," and then stepped onto a train on Wednesday). So when we won, I was still very much a Hunt newbie, and tried to stay out of the way of the Hunt '08 construction for the most part. The theme decision was confusing and not a whole lot seemed to be happening for a few months. Then we finally decided that we needed a team leader and elected one. He seemed to have the logistics under control, and the structure was being created, and some people were writing puzzles, and we had three puzzle editors to take care of them, and everything seemed to be going swimmingly.
Fast-forward to November. No one had heard from our leader in months. No one knew anything about if and how the logistics were being handled. We didn't have server space. We didn't have a budget plan. We didn't have a coin. A quarter of the puzzles had not been handed in. The puzzle editors were trying to make decisions, and Trip had been forced into a leadership position he didn't want. An e-mail went out stating matter-of-factly that without the aid of a miracle, the Hunt was not going to take place. That miracle appeared in the form of Eric Berlin, who stepped in and scooped up the nigh-impossible responsibility of organizing the event. Somehow, some way, he pulled it off.
At the pre-Hunt preparations get-together at Hathor's on Thursday night, we all learned that the coin's location, indicated by the beautiful runaround, was situated in Team GroovyTron's HQ. Whoops. I thought it was a grand idea to let the winning team stampede into the room and produce the coin from under another team's nose, but I was outvoted, and the runaround was rewritten to accommodate a new location.
At noon the next day in Lobby 7, the Hunt began. Fuldu, as our esteemed leader Dr. Otto Awkward, hopped up on a platform and introduced himself. Holding up the coin, hot off the mint, he announced that as soon as he hid it, the Hunt could begin. He exited the room. I surreptitiously accompanied him, pulled a bottle of fake blood from my pocket, and aided him in his quick costume change while Trip vamped to the crowd and "Girl from Ipanema" played on the speakers. (I guess I was the one who killed Dr. Awkward, then, huh?) Soon, Dr. Awkward reappeared and stumbled to the platform, revealing to the crowd the stab wound in his back. Oh, no, our leader was dead! And he was the only one who knew where the coin was! Dearie me! Police officers Hathor and Ed showed up to take teams' information and hand out the physical Little Black Books which would aid them in discovering the true identity of the murderer. So far so good.
Back at HQ, Palindrome pondered how long it would be before the first team called in an answer. Twelve and a half minutes, guessed Ucaoimhu. Eight minutes seventeen seconds, bet I. The first sign of trouble: over forty minutes passed by before we got a correct answer. I manned the phone queues a good portion of the time, which was fun- I'll talk about some of the more amusing calls in a minute. The next thing I specifically would be needed for (anyone could man the phones) was the warrant scene, which would occur when each team opened Dossier 4 and was themselves accused of the murder of Dr. Awkward. I intended to get some sleep in the evening before my first shift as a cop, which was to begin at midnight, but only ended up napping for about twenty minutes before heading back to HQ. When it got to be eleven o'clock the next morning and no team was even close to Dossier 4, I went back to the quiet room to snatch a nap.
I awoke to the news that the Evil Midnight Bombers What Bomb At Midnight had been searched by Hathor and Ed, and Codex Bodley was nearly ready for me and Tyler to deliver their warrant. This was around two or three PM on Saturday, much later than we had anticipated. Tyler and I stormed into Codex's HQ, happily dug up a planted murder weapon and left with dire threats. Great! Only... uh... forty-three more teams to go. Hmm.
There was a timed release schedule for the dossiers, and Dossier 4 was scheduled to go out to all teams at nine PM, by which time only two more teams had opened it for themselves. (Ed and I did those two. Doing the scene with Ed was awesome because I got to be the bad cop and yell at everybody.) Faced with the prospect of conducting the search scene with several dozen teams at once, with one of our four cops sick and one busy with Abigail Freebie e-mails, a decision was made to send out the warrants electronically and "find" the knife during the arrest scene when the teams got to that point.
Around seven on Sunday morning, team GroovyTron threw a dance party for stress relief. Bowen and I stopped in, ostensibly to deliver a "What A Mystery Is Art" result but really to see if they'd been kidding or if they were actually throwing a dance party. Nope, not kidding. It was fabulous. We only stuck around for a few minutes, but I wish I'd been able to stay longer.
On dragged the Hunt, and solving was slow. Sunday afternoon, Eric and the editors disappeared into a room and reemerged with a disappointing but entirely appropriate revision of the entire end of the Hunt. Originally, when a team had solved all but one of the metas, one team member was arrested and thrown into a jail cell with the remaining suspect, a mechanism intended to eliminate the usual problem of the unsolvable meta. Once the team member had gotten that suspect's information, there would be a trial scene at which the entire team would be present. They would have a public defender, Ucaoimhu would play the judge, a messenger would burst in with a package from a testsolver of the ostensible Hunt (the one for which Otto Awkward was hiding the coin when he was murdered), more puzzles would be solved, there would be another trial scene, then the team would get to the runaround. Had we kept to that plan, the Hunt would not have been over until late Monday. The new ending consisted of Alan Caster, another "suspect," joining the solving team to get the police off both of their backs. It cut out a good deal of plot, but it had to be done.
The Evil Midnight Bombers What Bomb At Midnight (who apparently are now asking that their name be shortened to Evil Midnight rather than Bombers) solved the last two metas simultaneously, and off went Trip as Alan Caster. Eric made an unpleasant discovery about the difficulty of the runaround, and sent Uc to join them and make sure that it wouldn't take too horrendously long. Only then did we realize that there were three people who knew the new location of the coin: Trip and Uc, who were with the solving team, and Jeremy, who had long since left. Again, whoops. A couple of people dashed off to pick up the runaround partway through (fortunately they got to the end before Evil Midnight did, which could have been mildly embarrassing) and the majority of Palindrome swarmed upstairs. The closest open door led to an office containing some poor guy who was working late and meekly agreed to allow twenty-odd excited puzzlers to share his somewhat limited space. I elected to remain at HQ to play any necessary female suspects on the phone, along with the guys still manning the phone queue for the few teams who were still pounding away. Soon, though, we received the information that Evil Midnight was close to the end, and I left the phone to the mercy of male voices (did any of you guys have to try to do Samantha Oriflamme's prissy little British accent, by the way?) and lay in wait with the rest of the team. Evil Midnight found the coin, everybody clapped, the documentary crew wandered around sticking camera lenses in people's faces, and we were done. We had intended to let a few more teams reach the end, but it was too late by that point. The e-mail went out that the Hunt was over and we all packed up.
It seems that Bowen organized some of the teams who didn't get to do the runaround, and they went to MIT and did it tonight. According to an e-mail I got from Jeremy, 80 people showed up, and it sounded like they had a good time. I wish I could have gone, but I'm back in California now.
Shitty stuff:
Yeah, this Hunt was pretty much pulled together in two months, and yeah, it shows. A lot of bugs that got fixed on the website apparently reverted or something, and there were some others that didn't get caught at all. When viewing the puzzle pages, there was supposed to be a way to tell what page you were on, and that didn't happen at all. The entire bottom page of "Underpants Gnomes" was cut off completely. "Guilty Pleasures"... well, no, that wasn't a website bug. That was That Guy- you know, the one who insisted on calling in RUIN THE GOD for the Round Eight meta last year because it's an anagram of ROUND EIGHT; the one who submitted puzzle propositions like "a sports puzzle" with no further details; the one who constantly walks the line between being put up with and being kicked off the team. That Guy. He walked out sometime on Sunday after a hissy fit involving somebody's food at a restaurant, which was great for us, but not soon enough for us to be able to replace "Guilty Pleasures" with a good puzzle. Sorry about that, solvers. Especially you, the girl who spent all weekend on that one puzzle and never got it, and you, the woman who told me when she called in the answer that her team had gotten a hint from another team but didn't want to cheat and so forced her to do it all by herself before they would call it in.
As for the other puzzles- they were too hard. Palindrome's goal was to create a Hunt that no one expected from Palindrome- an MIT-centered Hunt, with lots of science and math and tech puzzles and fewer NPLish word puzzles. Clearly, that was taken to an extreme.
I personally was very disappointed that I didn't get to arrest anyone. I'd been looking forward to that, and it would have meant I would get to do the runaround with the winning team. I had my lines memorized and everything.
Another personal disappointment: I missed most of the wrapup due to college visits, having assumed that it would happen on Sunday and I would have Monday free. I wanted to be there, but I wanted to get to my Clark interview more. I did show up for a little while and got to see Trip wearing the Subservient Chicken head. And I interrupted to make sure everyone realized exactly how "World of Comics" worked- getting Garry fucking Trudeau on board for my first-ever puzzle, IMHO, gives me some level of bragging rights.
Finally, and I know a lot of people are unhappy about this, the answers aren't up and won't all be up for a while. This sucks, but the choice was between getting the answers up right after the Hunt and finishing the Hunt itself. I believe Debby is trying to get the puzzles themselves up this weekend, and is aiming to have all the answers up within a month.
Awesome stuff:
There were a few great moments on the call queue. My favorite was when I dialed a wrong number for a team:
Me: Hello, is this Grand Unified Theory of Love?
Guy: Um... what?
Me: Sorry, I think I've got the wrong number.
Guy: No, hang on. Tell me more about this theory of yours.
"Special Delivery" yielded the phrase WHO HERE SPEAKS MANDARIN CHINESE?, and one team called in NO ONE as their answer.
A team called one of the suspects and asked to commit adultery with them. We're not sure where that one came from.
I got a complaint about "Hack Writer": it contained spoilers for Heroes. There were about six people in the queue, but I couldn't resist leaving them for a minute to call Cramerica and tell him about that. (Sorry about getting off the phone so quickly, Cram- those callers were really piling up.)
Evil Midnight started off the weekend cheerily answering the phone, "Evil Midnight Bombers What Bomb At Midnight!" Sometime early Saturday morning, I called them and got, "Evil Midnight Blomeraggle bleh myeh who are afraid of heights." The next time I called, they answered, "Bombers."
The team Donner, Party of 30 kept decreasing in number throughout the weekend. By Sunday evening, I think they were answering their phone, "Donner, Party of 21."
I got to judge several "What A Mystery Is Art" submissions and was present for three scavenger hunt submissions. (The best scavenger hunt moment, which I wasn't actually present for, was when an Asian guy dropped his pants for the requirement "Chinese junk.") My stints as a judge, the opening scene, and the karaoke event were really the only times I got to see the teams. I meant to stop by several teams' HQs to say hi and see how they were doing, but I only ended up getting to Illegal, Immoral and Fattening. They seemed to be having fun, though. In fact, despite the long Hunt and difficult puzzles, most of the teams seemed in good spirits throughout the weekend, which was heartening for all of Palindrome.
Speaking of the karaoke event, half the teams were told to bring food and half were told to bring drinks. One of the drink teams brought vodka. I suspect it was Setec Astronomy, upon whom Dr. Awkward declared war last year on the grounds that they had all the booze and we just had soda pop.
A Man, A Plan, A Canal- Suez submitted an e-mail that made us all laugh a lot. Something along the lines of, "Hey, we understand about you guys accusing us of murdering Dr. Awkward- if someone else hadn't already done it, we'd certainly be considering it about now."
Thank you so much to everyone involved! In particular, Eric deserves recognition for his astonishing feat of event organization. Fuldu, Zebraboy, and Trip, thank you so much for pushing on through when there wasn't a leader, and for the innumerable sacrifices you've made for the team. Debby and Sofiya, thank you for handling the computer stuff. Hathor, thank you for taking charge of all the theatrics and scripts, and also for dealing with suspect e-mails on top of everything else you were doing. Ucaoimhu, thank you for your puzzle-constructing prolificacy, and for coming up with and developing the theme. Katatak, thank you for being our MIT person and getting funding and room reservations and all that together. Everyone on Palindrome, thank you for the various contributions you've made to making this Hunt happen, despite its apparent determination to make all our lives difficult. And thank you to all the solvers for staying optimistic and having a good time despite all the reasons you had to bitch.
By the way, did anyone get a decent picture of me in the cop outfit? I meant to have someone take one so I could update my Puzzle Police icon, but it slipped my mind.
