in seattle, Puzzle Safari, etc

I don't have a lot to say about this week actually. The weirdest thing may be that Chris went to Comiccon and I had to actively seek out random people to eat lunch with. Also I made a cool Stig one-page programming sheet thingy. And D&D was a loot session. And I went to see Singin' in the Rain on Thursday night on the big screen! It was really neat and they had a pre-movie short film segment with interviews with Debbie Reynolds and Donald O'Connor and such.

Anyway, I am right now in Seattle, at Carl's place. It's Saturday night and it's already been a pretty crazy trip. Friday, I got delayed but got into town and got to Rock Box JUST in time for our 5-7pm reservation. Carl got there about 20 minutes after me, so I had a little bit of warmup time and then more singing. Oren also dropped by, and unfortunately we had the really tiny 1-2 person room, so he sat on the floor and hung out in the AC basically. Lots of good singing though, I got through trying M and Fushigi and Minato Uta and some other stuff. Shrug. Then we did dinner at Taste of India for old times' sake, and I had too much chai and lots of paneer palak masala and all. Yum. Afterwards, we tried to see Oren's dog but failed... and then came back here to hang out.

Today I did Puzzle Safari at Microsoft. I kinda want to write a long entry about it but I never have the energy for those anymore. The upshot is that Mike, Ryan, Adam and I entered as Liboncatipu and we GOT SECOND PLACE! Which means we got real prizes and called up front and everything. Wacky. After Safari we met up with Andy and got dinner at Red Robin, then I got a ride back here with Adam, hung out with him and Rehana and Carl for a while, and now I should sleep soon to go to Tacoma tomorrow morning.

But... more Safari:

So we showed up and I got to see several old friends, like Kevin B, Andy Y, Derek L, the Silly Hats, some of our interns from our PH playtest last summer, etc. Yay. They had mispelled my name on my visitor badge as "Runin" and bizarrely Martyn came up to apologize to me -- I kind of keep forgetting sometimes that people actually know who I am now. And then even crazier, during the opening ceremonies -- err, the closing ceremonies, this was Timeline-Reversal themed -- when they were saying all the "Who is playing in their first Safari today?" and so on, and then "Who flew in from out of town for this?" and I raised my hand and nobody else did, and Martyn's like "...Deanna! Now see, that is the dedication I have been lacking from the rest of you!"

But anyway, so we got our puzzles and went back to our room and pretty much blasted through them. I did nothing but solve, snack, drink, and pee, for about 2.5 hours straight. By my count afterwards I was sole responsible for 21 solves, plus 3 activities and a meta -- not too bad I suppose, and that's not even counting partial contributions. In the first round I did a word find shaped like a perfume bottle with time words, a double-letter word arranger, a balance-the-scales thing with algebra, a short airport codes puzzle, a word find of also finding proverbs and extra words with a dr. who twist, a maze with no end (you had to find the loop in it and it was hourglass-shaped), a typewriter puzzle, a word logic puzzle that was more spammable than anything, a cities/capitals puzzle, a food/city puzzle, a binary/morse puzzle, a stupid index-into-colors rainbow puzzle, and I basically did a Boggle meta and helped with a comics meta.

We solved 36 out of 37 puzzles in round 1. No joke. There was exactly one we did not solve, though I'm unclear on how many stamps we actually got. (For Safari, you don't only solve puzzles, you have to take a physical log book to locations all over MS and stamp the books with the appropriate stamps for the appropriate puzzles.) Ryan was running and I think he got a LOT of them though.

After the mid-day break, we set out for Round 2 with the idea that Ryan and I would do activities, Mike and Adam would start off solving, and then Mike would run once we got back with activity stickers. So, that's how it went. The activities were decent, not as memorable as in past years I suppose though. One involved me having to describe paintings to Ryan but I couldn't say certain words. The other one he did involved hourglasses. I did the other 3, one of which involved identifying songs that were playing backwards, another that involved doing something in a minute (for us it was stacking cups and cards and then pulling the cards out so the cups would come together), and then I did "timestamps", which was a puzzle involving a fake logbook supposedly left behind by "this year's champions" or whatever... to which I said "This year's champions? You mean the Brute Squad?" and they're like "no! Reverse the Polarity won, everyone knows that!" It was actually the only activity that required solving, you had to separate the letter stamps by color and they spelled out a message ("Stamp third letter of your team name"), you had to find the right letter stamp, and got your sticker for that.

Then on to solving. In the second round I did a word find with clocks subbing for some letters, a pop culture puzzle involving "changed movie timelines" such as being "Harry Petter" or "Groundhog Gay" or "Planes of the Apes", a timeline box search of sorts where you could increment events by 1 year, so had to know that Dos 1.0 was the year after Reagan was elected, or Chernobyl was after BTTF, etc. I did a Bill-and-Ted themed wordsearch with missing letters that was cute, a "magnitude" word-grouping puzzle for things like "small medium large", "finger hand arm", a nicely condensed Digital Times puzzle that involved breaking down times in various ways even such that the colons between the hour/minutes were Braille, a "number crunching" one that just involved describing sequences, and then after that I got into the one that took me the last 30 minutes of solving (by then we weren't knocking off any easy solves anyway), which was basically an unsolvable Nonogram that was a QR code! They gave us a 25x25 grid, and then gave us 5x5 chunks of it, and so we figured out it was QR, and then I just sat and did the entire thing. It barcode-scanned to a location on campus, but by the time we got that done it was slightly after 5:30 and our logbook was already turned in.

So we went to the closing ceremonies, visited friends. I ran into Noelle, who was staffing -- I met her at WHO last year and she was so nervous about puzzling then, and now she actually helped make puzzles for Safari and run the event and seems very psyched about it, so that's great! I bought a Safari 007 shirt because that was my last one before I went to Japan, and it's an embroidered polo shirt, and it's a way I can donate to Safari too. We sat down to listen to the finals and yeah, they first talked about there being a tie between 3rd and 4th except that then in double-checks it turned out 4th had mis-stamped an answer so the 3rd place team really WAS the Partially Gelatinated blah blah team, aka Derek's team! So I was all excited for Derek!

And then Martyn starts saying how "You wouldn't believe how close the 1st and 2nd teams were to each other for a while, since you all can't see the number of solves everyone has. This pair was neck-and-neck the entire time through round 1, and the 2nd place team solved more puzzles but the 1st place team got more stamps. I mean, most of you did very well and we are proud of you, but you have no idea how far ahead these two teams were of everyone, it was quite crazy."

Anyway, so... yeah, we were second place! We got "Time Traveller's Handbook" books and some hourglasses as our prizes. (Derek showed me his 3rd place Dr. Who sticky notes.) Then they announced the first place Brute Squad! They got weird Star Trek noise-makery-like dashboard thingies. And they were SERIOUSLY ahead of us! Like 847 them, 710 us, 615 Gelatinated, everyone else below that. It was pretty nuts. I caught up with Jeff W afterwards and told him how I'd said the Brute Squad was going to win and he laughed like "You always predict that my team will win! But thanks, and good job you guys too!"

We caught up with Ross, an intern from last year who had playtested for us, I talked to him a bit about his puzzles for IG, he wants to get involved with Safari too. Good for him but I hope he doesn't burn out. He did us a favor and took our team photo, too.

Oh yeah, the solutions were out and I green-dotted a lot of them, very few red dots. I thought the puzzles were pretty good, even the duck conundrum that involved time travel and coins, it was just tricky. It was weird seeing people give red dots to puzzles that were just "not trivial", basically. I dunno, though, that's how it goes, red dots usually mean either "I didn't solve it" or "I solved it but it was BAD". Green usually means "I solved it".

Anyway, yay. It's so crazy that we placed so high, though someone did point out that a lot of the more power teams don't do Safari anymore because they can't get together a team of 4 people where 2 are still working at MS and able/willing to run.