“He after honour hunts, I after love”
Note to Emily - if you’re reading this early, we’ll be calling you tomorrow to wrapup - so avoid the spoilers
So Monday was my 23rd birthday and today was the celebration.
Something was clearly up with Mari and Patrick - I was to keep this afternoon free to do… something…, and after Lindy on Sproul, they hand me a CD case, the cover being a lot of blank spaces and a USB drive and say “here it is!”
Unbeknownst to me, in the past 3-5 days, Mari, Patrick, Bryan, Chantae and Emily put together a full mini-hunt for my birthday party, complete with antepuzzles, a proper round of 5 puzzles, and a meta.
Sadly, I couldn’t scare up much solving help at Lindy on Sproul.
At the end of it all, it was a lot of fun! And I have awesome, smart friends! The party itself was only so-so, but the solving was worth it.
Spoilers and the full hunting story after the jump
Spoilers begin here.
So the USB key contained a mixtape audio file - listening to it provided songs and band names which fit nicely into the blank lines on the CD case, providing in the one specified vertically aligned row “TAIFXUL” (had a little trouble getting the X) but as I pointed out halfway through “well, with nothing else to go on, I betcha it’s a Twitter feed”
(It was clear that this was designed for me, so a lot of little stories or preferences of ours showed up from time to time. Such as using Twitter)
The Twitter feed required campus knowledge I didn’t have; but looking around Flickr found the answer: Taif Xul - which is Fiat Lux reversed (the UC Berkeley motto) - appears under the awning of the Campanile.
So Mari (who’s been following me) and I go there, meet Patrick, who hands me two sheets of paper (Paper Puzzles, or PP as I refer to them later) and that three other puzzles will appear in the Twitter feed (Twitter Puzzles, TP).
And so I begin to hunt. Mostly alone.
I get pretty far on my own, with the authors around me bouncing and trying not to spoil anything. Bryan has the great idea that I should be momentarily uncertain of the answers, and to call them in via Twitter (which seemed fitting)
The Paper Puzzles
PP1 (designed by Emily) was Shakespeare (and one Alexander Pope) identification, which was pretty straightforward. They were all “interesting” names in that they were fairies or other ethereal creatures. As it works out, they are also the moons of Uranus (a great twist moment!) and the one “major figure” missing from the “literary firmament” is the one missing major moon… OBERON
PP2 (designed by Chantae) was “Poetry in the Information Age” - quickly I identified the text as Jabberwocky - with errors. So I start to look at the errors. One word doesn’t match in length, and that’s clearly the “magic” word, with errors. All the errors provide a nice set of letters… which happen to be associated with letters on a phone (eg, only A, B, and C will be switched with each other). This provided a great moment when I made the connection (by drawing lines between the sets) and yelled out “PHOOONES!” (prompting rounds of “KHAAAN!” and “STELLAAAAA!”)… a quick regex search for 6 letter words with these replacements through /usr/share/dict/words yielded WELKIN
Twitter Puzzles
TP1 (designed by Bryan) was the Freebase puzzle. Seen in the Twitter feed, it was a check written out with conspicuous replacements - a lot of the numbers were in hex, prepended with 0s and the owner of the check was “RDF” - These are clearly Freebase GUIDs. Looking them up gave you a set of things that referred to weird sayings (to wit, an odd Earl aka “Bell the Cat”, a song called “Don’t Cry Wolf”, a particular kind of “sour grape”) - this was, also the best funny/punny/groaner puzzle they came up with, in particular, a reference to the stock ticker LION (”lion’s share!”). And just to make me pull out the MQL, the date on the check is a full timestamp, of the creation of a link from “Injury” to “Insult”. All of these are sayings that come from fables, in particular, AESOP.
TP3 (designed by Patrick and implemented by Mari) was the most MIT-hunt like puzzle. It was letter substitution (letters to numbers) into dates/numbers of webcomics I read, and associated pictures from those comics with the text blacked out and one word underlined. The underlined word fits with the greek letters that follow. Following the flavortext, (a reference to the Bob Dylan song “Desolation Row”), where the other thing Einstein does is “recite the alphabet” - you recite the GREEK alphabet, this spells something in the mapping. Doing the same for the letter substitution earlier gives you a Questionable Content comic, the title of which (combined with the phrase in the greek) refers to Frances FARMER
… and it was here that people were arriving for my party. So we party for a bit, but invariably people start to ask about what’s been going on so far in this mini hunt. Now I have help!
Finale
All that remains is TP2 and the overall meta.
so TP2 (designed by Emily), which I looked at only briefly, seemed to be, at first, merely Lorem Ipsum text repeated. But there seemed to be extra things added, particularly a stray C. So, finding a “canonical” Lorem Ipsum on Wikipedia, Roger (now I have help) insisted that I diff the puzzle text agains the canonical text. There are purely Latin insertions in the text, which indicates the right track. Each set of insertions, looking up the definitions online, clue what seem to be illness symptoms. When we get to the very last one (A butterfly rash) Laura calls out “OH! That’s a symptom of Lupus!” We all look at her funny for a second and she explains she recently has been reading a story where someone exhibited this symptom. So we look up the symptoms of Lupus and sure enough these are the symptoms. So I tweet in LUPUS, but the proper response (other than the latin clue) should have been “It’s never Lupus!” - Chris turns around and says “Oh, so in English, that’d be WOLF”
So now we have OBERON, WELKIN and AESOP, WOLF and FARMER. Everyone is crowded into my office by this point. This only took 10 minutes with people, most of it just me at the conn. Googling “aesop wolf farmer” (Twitter puzzles) eventually gets to an Aesop fable: “The Wolf, the Farmer and the Plow”… so “Plow” is a good working term. As for the Paper Puzzles, Oberon and Welkin, well, Google clues Shakespeare again, so I grep for it in my digital Shakespeare, and Oberon says “welkin” once… “The starry welkin cover thou anon”. Plow. OH. There’s the local Berkeley bar, “The STARRY PLOUGH”.
The plan initially was to be done by 7:30 - assuming I had help - and to have a drink there before the party. (1) They underestimated their writing talent! It was genuinely hard! and (2) I had no helpers for most of it. They’ll still buy me a drink there soon.
Crossposted from photonzero