Every Day an Adventure

I got home at 6:30pm yesterday and have pretty much been asleep since. Unfortunately, I still feel like crap.

I came up with this in about an hour on Saturday as a prototype for a possible puzzle, and then our team managed to make a much more complex version in the next few hours, and then we ended up not using it anyway in favor of Jeff and Jonobie's crossword (which was the plan all along and worked out much better, we just wanted to have a backup plan). It's not hard, but I was proud of myself for thinking it up on the fly.


The reverend wants to know when you lined the feed.

A mood faker (4):
Rightens the broom (5):
Dot noun (2):
Plate granite (5):
Gran's couch (5):
Pro nice (4):
Cakes the mall (9):
Reaps off the cane (8):
Bitter Harry (5):
Putts the caper (8):

So, I did Puzzle Hunt this weekend.

Problem is, as usual, there's just too much to talk about.

This year's theme was "Micropolis Superheroes", and so they turned MS into a city out of comic books, and there was this villain called "The Puzzler" who we had to defeat to save "Captain Micropolis".

Overall, in a nutshell:

Our team only had 11 people as one guy ducked out at the last minute claiming to be sick.

One of the guys I consider one of our most valuable puzzlers ended up leaving unexpectedly from 11pm-10am -- I think this set us back quite a bit as well. Last year he was there all night and did a lot of good work.

I slept for an hour total, from about 5am to 6am on the floor of an adjacent conference room.

(Despite no sleep, I still ended up giving Lahut a ride to the airport after PH debriefing, since Drew hadn't slept at all and didn't trust himself driving to the airport)

Quizno's on Redmond Way offered to sponsor the event and had huge discounts for PH teams; I'm not sure they realized that OVER 700 PEOPLE entered, and so when we called them for sandwiches at 2pm on Saturday, they delivered them sometime around 7pm. They must have been swamped.

Several of the puzzles went like this: We figure out the general idea. We figure out the first step. We figure out the second step. We pause. We get clever and figure out the third step. We have the puzzle 95% of the day done. IT STAYS THAT WAY FOR APPROXIMATELY EIGHTEEN HOURS WHILE WE BANG OUR HEADS AGAINST IT UNTIL THE EVENT ENDS unless we decide to start harrassing PH HQ for hints.

One such puzzle had me sitting there staring at "LPTIGHTOUOO" forever until I just totally gave up. After a bit of hinting the guys in my group got it rearranged to "PULOOTGHOTI". I immediately turned it, given an aural "key" we were dealing with, into Parrotfish, the right answer. I was surprised that only like 3 or so of the other 10 people were familiar with that alternate phonetic spelling of fish. Though yes, I thought to myself that "PU, Loot Ghoti!" was a reasonable solution as well. :)

(Speaking of something as a vague corollary, we had two Brians and a Ryan on my team, and during the pregame and during the debriefing I also ran into three separate friends named Brian and another named Ryan; I'm really not making this up.)

At first I was being really sort of conservative with my use of swearwords to describe puzzles, but since Ian was swearing up a storm the entire time, in a most amusing fashion (such as "Congratulations, you just found FOUR FUCKING STARS!" after staring at a constellations grid for ten minutes), I ended up just dropping it all and swearing as much as everyone else. It was sort of funny.

An hour or so into the hunt, as we were coming back from our first puzzle encounter (where we also ran into the "Nondeterministic Pimping" team), Brian Ni, who has been on my last two PH teams, caught up to me in the hallway and was like "Hey, are you the same Deanna who posts to USS Mariner and the other blogs? I thought all summer that your name sounded so familiar..." that was really pretty cool! The good part was that I could also make vague baseball jokes and references for the duration of the event and there'd be someone there to get them!

I did a lot of really good work on puzzles, but since again, a LOT of them had really lame endgames, I sadly can't think of many that I'm totally responsible for, except one -- we had this list of songs and I figured out that the songs were encoding letters in binary (lists like "Love Shack / Too Shy / King For A Day / Aliens Ate My Buick" being the binary number 1110, or 14, because the first song didn't have the "one" sound in it, but the second one had "two", the third had "four", the fourth had "eight"), and then after that figured out they were music notes, like 14 would correspond to "E"... and due to being able to sing and sight-read figured out that the sequence of notes was the opening riff to Rock Lobster.

I did a lot of innovative work on puzzles though -- solved a lot of the cryptic clues, figured out the hidden rules to the license plates puzzle, decrypted all of the cyphers (variations on Rail Fence, Playfair, straight crypto, Pigpen, Vigenere, and Square in a cypher riddle, even if I only answered half the riddles properly; helped get the "fill in radioactive numbers" part done in the element maze; did most of the Reservoir Dogs dog-breed word circle, wrote a Perl script to figure out letter frequencies and overlaps, and figured out the subsequent maze memory pattern ("who killed the person who killed the person who killed the person who killed Mr. Blonde?" was the eventual phrase, leading us to think we may be "Who killed the team that killed the team that killed Liboncatipu?" next year if we can fit it), split the Media Engineer puzzle with Lahut (we pretty much did it equally, figuring out letters and phrases and the eventual "Stuff is in Sacramento" theme), finished off the constellations puzzle with Brian after Ian went nuts; did most of the 5->6-letter word expansion unscrambling for the Mastermind puzzle; figured out the music CD was movie themes, and figured out songs for the superhero DVD; played out Clue with Mike for the early puzzles and reverse-engineered the solutions so we didn't have to do all 8 newspaper puzzles... and brainstormed putting the world together. I'm sure I did other things too, but I'm tired and I'm blanking.

All in all, I did contribute a lot, I think, and I did enjoy myself, I think, but I think this was a weaker Puzzle Hunt than a lot of the past ones have been.

There were no baseball logic puzzles; nay, there weren't even any sports-related puzzles at all.

Afterwards I got to run into tons of people at the debriefing. I saw Derek and Eric and their team, and I saw Craig from CMU PH playtest, and he was on Gautam's team, so we hung out a while. Brian G was hanging out there with Andy Yeckel of all people, who I hadn't seen in yeeeeears, so that was cool. It turned out Grunkie was on Sheryl's team, too, which was a bizarre coincidence.

All in all, the weekend was a pretty super social experience for me to be honest, even beyond running into friends pre-game and post-game. I really really really really really adore our team leader Mike, and hopefully he and his wife will come play board games with us sometime between now and the next puzzle hunt. I really like hanging out with a lot of the people on our team, both CMU and non-CMU... they put up with my hyper sense of humor when I was all sleep-deprived, and Amol even said "Wow, you have *talent*" when I was sitting there singing the riddles in the cryptograms and changing the words to be silly. It was good to finally have something to talk to Brian N about since he's so nice. I really like Ian and wish I knew him better outside of PH; we had fun geeking out about videogame music. Ryan turned out to be an excellent new addition to our team, he's a rookie at MS as well, but he was really dedicated and really fucking brilliant, very sharp and knew a LOT of useful stuff.

Sadly the debriefing went to 8pm and since Lahut's plane was leaving at 10:30, we had to skip all going to dinner afterwards. Brian R and Drew and Jason and Lahut and I were originally going to do Cheesequake but that was thwarted; hopefully we'll get to go some other time.

Also, I put up pictures of some of the stuff if anyone wants to see. Mostly it's a few close-ups of solutions and a couple shots of our team working on crap.

I'm soooooooo tired. I'm going to go try to sleep now.

I don't know yet if I'll skip choir to see TMBG play tonight (Monday), but I'm actually guessing I won't bother. I don't know if it's worth the $25 bucks AND skipping choir and the gym, to be honest.

Well, that was fun. I managed to get up early today and go over to Microsoft to help people out with testing puzzles for the CMU puzzle hunt recruiting event in a few weeks. It was sort of like a mini PH for us. They split us into teams and had us work on stuff from about 10am to 6pm.

I can't say anything about the puzzles, of course, but I can say I had a lot of fun. Was on a team with Kevin and Michelle, and Drew, and Jason, and a recent CMU grad named Craig who was really nice. Some puzzles were good, some were bad, either way, any of you still at CMU, I recommend you go do the Hunt when they're there (I think it's November 12th-ish?)

The funniest moment of the day had to be when Drew was trying to figure out some number sequences and he wanted to know if some numbers were prime, and so Kevin says, and I am utterly not making this up,

"Google for 'prime number shitting bear'."

Well, sure enough, there is a web page with an applet with, of all things, a bear, who shits prime numbers. No, really. I could not stop laughing about this for a good half hour, and for the rest of the day when anyone wanted to make me lose it and collapse into giggles, they'd just say something to me about "the bear", and BOOM, I was gone.

After the puzzle testing, we had a wrapup where we gave our feedback. Then, I went to dinner with Drew and Jason, and with Mike Janney, who had shown up late and got put on the other team. Mike's the Fearless Leader of L'iboncatipu, the MS Puzzle Hunt team I've been on the last few years. He's a pretty awesome guy, so it was fun to hang out for a while. I'm really psyched for the real Puzzle Hunt in three weekends. Woooo.

Well, anyway, I'm kinda tired, so I may nap and try to wake up at 2am for what will again hopefully be the last game of Second Stage. Or I might sleep. Who knows! Whee.