let's stumble towards success and pack some snacks for little breaks

I wrote this parody as a potential idea for my team's WHO application video, and we never ended up using it. Posted for posterity:

What do you do with a B.A. in evil?
What is my life going to be?
Four years of study at how to be cruddy
Have earned me this useless degree
I can't go roll heads yet
'Cause I have no cred yet
The world is a villainous place
But somehow I can't shake
The feeling I might make
A dent in the human race

(original lyrics:
What do you do with a B.A. in English?
What is my life going to be?
Four years of college and plenty of knowledge
Have earned me this useless degree
I can't pay the bills yet
'Cause I have no skills yet
The world is a big scary place
But somehow I can't shake
The feeling I might make
A difference to the human race)

WHO was lovely, but I can't tell you guys much about it, since it's going to be run again in the Bay Area in November. So here's the censored version of my photo set from the event, with a few of Carrie's photos mixed in. I've left out all my pictures of locations that were thematic for their corresponding puzzles. (A few of these are oddly sized because I cropped out spoilers.)

( Pictures )

I knew going in that I wasn't going to dive into the MIT Mystery Hunt as wholeheartedly this year as I usually do. For one thing, I was remote. A lot of the appeal of Hunt for me lies in the camaraderie of it, the knowledge that everyone else in the room is also excited and driven enough about the event to forget about sleep and food and the outside world, and that energy just doesn't translate through Skype. For another thing, I just spent four years straight on winning or constructing teams, and I kind of needed a break.

So I wasn't expecting to devote my weekend entirely to Hunt in the first place, and then I got sick right before it started and ended up spending the weekend wrapped up in blankets on the couch with a box of tissues, which did not do much at all for my mental acuity. Still, I enjoyed myself, and I had a reasonably good remote solving experience (thanks in large part to the efforts of canadianpuzzler, who was our official remote wrangler).

The Hunt theme this year, as everyone still reading this probably already knows, was video games. The intro skit (YouTube video here) was fantastic, and dealt with the sound issue beautifully, although unfortunately not in a way helpful to future constructing teams. The Hunt was structured around five video game worlds, each containing separate rounds, which led to some entertaining discussion of "metametametas." The coin (for some Huntspace-specific definition of the word "coin") was a wooden Weighted Companion Cube with characters from each world on the sides. The thematic wrapup video was completely adorable.

I admit I was rooting for II&F to win this year. I spent some time in their HQ during the History Hunt last year, and was incredibly impressed by their organization and morale. (And I'm not just saying that because they dressed me up in the honorary-Dan-Katz duct tape sash and fed me.) Any team capable of winning a Hunt is probably capable of turning out Hunt-quality puzzles, but not every team has their shit together enough to handle editing and testsolving and logistics and communication and all the other work that goes into putting on a successful Hunt. However, Metaphysical Plant did a fantastic job on all that from what I can tell, and there's no reason to assume Codex won't.

Some scattered thoughts:

-The Achievements page was, IMO, the best new idea Plant implemented this year. I really hope some form of it is used in future Hunts.

-I'm disappointed to have missed out on the Events, which looked great. I would have liked to go to Insult Swordfighting, in particular.

-I had a giant gigglefit when my teammates decided that one of the answers had to be BACKSOLVE_ but couldn't work out the last letter, so they backsolved it.

-Recombination is a puzzle that I tried to write for the '08 Hunt, but ended up scrapping because it would be too hard for non-jugglers to determine siteswap heights. Seriously, that exact idea: I was going to present it as a video of a person doing siteswap patterns with different objects, and use the objects along with numbers on the screen for answer extraction. I definitely would have done the extraction mechanism differently, though. (ALLINCLAPC? The hell?)

-Good Vibrations was extremely amusing. I was surprised by the number I knew off the top of my head. I've, uh, read a lot of Savage Love.

-I described The Baddest Man to my older brother, who, like me, grew up reading the books. His immediate reaction was, "WHAT? They SPOILED THEM? Why would they do that?" (I got a similar complaint from a team in '08 about my puzzle Hack Writer.)

-They got Randall Munroe to write an xkcd strip for Unlikely Situations. *sigh* I'll always have Trudeau.

Here's our quote board, as far as I can tell (thanks to ertchin for clarifying some of the words I couldn't make out):

"This isn't Vegas--you can't be drunk by 10am."
"I can't have Dancing Spear Guy and Blooper Nanny adjacent."
"That's the answer to everything--lick it."
"What's the potato doing?"
"Oh! That's a canonical Grawlix?"
"Just type 'bowtied dork' into Google and see what comes up."
"In the sociology Hunt, you only get credit for solving the hipster meta if no one else has solved it first."
"Mmm... congealy."
"Fancy a spot of death?"
"Finally I made a quote which wasn't fraught with sexual innuendo."
"They were eaten by a female obstacle."
"Or perhaps The Knack's ode to Nikoli: 'My Shikaku'."
"Projectyl's working on it--it's practically solved."
"It's all right... I'm not naked."
"No one wants to know about your love snake."
"I need a stuffed animal biologist."
"BING? What is this crap? I'm changing it."
"If you want to win my heart and earn my monogrammed handkerchief or whatever the fuck, solve this puzzle for me."
(on hearing all of our spaceship explanations) "Well... yeah..."
"The next time you chuckleheads open twenty puzzles at once, I quit." (Note: This was said by Dart, which makes the quote exponentially funnier if you know Dart and can picture him saying the word "chucklehead.")
"Do you know what you have been thwacked with?" "The Corn of Grammatical Justice."

So, Hunt is over.

( I have a few things to say about it. )

An NPL friend and former Hunt teammate of mine, Eric Berlin, is hosting a week-long "puzzle party" on various blogs to promote his new children's book, The Potato Chip Puzzles. You can win a copy of the book or the grand prize, which the website says is "every single one of G.P. Putnam's Sons Spring 2009 children's and YA books, plus advance reading copies of numerous Fall 2009 books."

I just did today's puzzle, the first of the week, and it's definitely easy enough that those of you I've scared away from puzzling with cryptic crosswords and Mystery Hunt links should click through and give it a shot. You never know, you could win a shit-ton of kid lit!

More details about the puzzle contest can be found here, along with links to the blogs that will be posting the rest of the puzzles over the upcoming week. Check it out.

1. Ucaoimhu wrote an AWESOME cryptic crossword based on my weird-ass dream.

2. vito_excalibur wrote an AWESOME poem dedicated to Randall Munroe and entitled "I Fucked Your Mom."

Give them a hand, for they win at life.

I haven't posted about this because everyone who knows Will already knows about it, but it occurs to me that I might have friends who aren't involved in the puzzle community but might be interested in the fact that someone I know appeared on The Simpsons last week. The episode is "Homer and Lisa Exchange Cross Words," and you can watch it here. Will shows up right at the end.

I had an epiphany in biology today: molecular structure is just a bunch of little games of Hashiwokakero.

This is easy.

Knock 'em dead, rpipuzzleguy! Sorry to the rest of you who also have a shot at the title- normally I'd cheer on the one everyone knows is going to win soon or the one who should have won already instead of the reigning champ, but I gotta root for my T-bone. (I'm talking about the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, if any of you non-puzzley folks are confused.)

Good luck with the marathon, shoutingboy, and I hope your preferred stylist is available in the morning so you can look fabulous at the finish line!

And get well soon, chalepa_ta_kala, jelliclekat, zephyrofgod, and anyone else who is currently ailing. The plague appears to have swept my flist. Drink lots of fluids and make sure you're getting lots of vitamin C and that sort of thing, okay?

Last night, I dreamed that I was doing the runaround for a Mystery Hunt, and I missed a cross-country flight. No, not to get to the runaround- that flight was the first step of the runaround. I blame Rhu's kids and Trip.

Speaking of Nationwide Hunt, anyone have any good stories about how your team solved that one?

(x-posted to mystery_hunt)