(no subject)
As people at the post-Hunt team dinner commented, "you know it was a good Hunt when we're only complaining about the lack of *plot*." XD Fun theme, great interactivity, and tons and tons of really well-written puzzles. Though Albert and I spent about as much time *not*-Hunting as we did actually puzzling, because this was our chance to see our Boston friends again... so I'm recording the non-Hunt bits, and then at some point I'll try to write up about the puzzles in a later entry (in my now negative free time, thanks to having to start teaching duties again with the vet school's spring semester...)
Also, we had to explain what the heck the MIT Mystery Hunt was to our friends (multiple times for multiple sets of friends) and pretty much unanimously, we'd get back the response "wow, that seems like a lot of work"... XD;;;;; Yes, but it's FUN! (Well, a certain type of person's idea of fun, anyway.) Kevin chipped in his experience with the Husky Hunt, which is apparently like a high-stress, high-stakes version of the Mystery Hunt where you actually win prizes like round-trip tickets to anywhere in the world. So people are super hard-core and intense about winning, apparently to the detriment of the actual fun-ness of puzzle solving. And he commented that the Mystery Hunt sounds like a lot more fun and a lot less stress... which it is :P
So we left the cat in the pathology intern Estehela's care, and headed out earlyish Thursday morning... except it turned out that sometime between Albert checking in (two nights ago) and us waking up that morning, we had been bumped to flights that were an hour earlier than expected. OOPS SHIT. Good thing I always plan for 2 hours of leeway for airports... Albert 飆車 down the highway to Kansas City Airport, and we made it in time yay.
So we arrived an hour early in Boston (after a layover in Detroit, which took us over some stunning Midwestern snowscapes) but that hour got eaten by Flightcar being super inefficient =_=;;; And then we'd planned to go drop our stuff at Kevin and Erica's (who were now living in a house in Dorchester south of Boston with Kenny, Vicky, and Vicky's boyfriend Ray) but what ought to have been a ~25-minute drive turned into over an hour and a half as we got bogged down in rush hour + new snow (+ possibly Boston protests) + multiple accidents on the highways traffic. HORRIBLE. WELCOME TO BOSTON, FUCKERS. So we changed plans halfway and went straight to pick up Suniko and Kiki and head for the restaurant where we had dinner reservations, and everyone else met us there - Dee, Erica, Kevin, Kenny, Angelo, Winnie. The restaurant was a place where Suniko worked (bartended) and it had a sushi buffet and a raw bar! Soooooo much sushi.
(Oh and when we went to pick up Suniko and Kiki - Suniko lives on a first-floor apartment, so we threw snowballs at her sliding glass doors till she opened it and snarked at us for being creepers XD And when we hopped the balcony fence and got into her apartment, I promptly started petting and playing with her cat, and she commented "The *cat* gets more attention than I do??" XD;;; )
And then we dropped Suniko and Kiki back off and got back to Kevin/Erica/Kenny/Vicky's house (henceforth "Partyhaus") and got a tour, mysteriously setting off the basement smoke alarm in the process. And since all the smoke alarms are wired together, that set off all the OTHER alarms on each floor >_< And this happened a couple more times over the next couple of days, until Kevin finally figured out that one alarm's batteries were low, so it'd trip and take all the other ones with it =_=;; And then we played Smash! They had a new Wii U so we played the new Smash with a bajillion fun new characters - I'm normally always Kirby but now I'm partial to the Duck Hunt dog XD Just as cute, and does more damage lol.
Friday: we had breakfast with Kevin, Erica, and Kenny at a fancy tasty breakfast place north of MIT, but we had gotten kind of a late start so we had to cut it a bit short to hurry over to MIT to make kickoff (at 12:17 because everything had to be scheduled on something 7-y because Random Team (calling themselves One Fish Two Fish Random Fish Blue Fish as they were last year when they won the Hunt and OMG it only just hit me how thematic their name was OMGWTF lol) was running the Hunt this year and Random Hall (what they're named ater) is number 7 I think? or something about 7 being the most random number IDK). ANYWAY so what was really confusing was that kickoff wasn't in Lobby 7 as we were accustomed to it being, so Albert and I parked and sprinted to Lobby 7 and were like... it's empty other than few scattered random tourists, wtf. Where is kickoff??? frantic phone-interneting and searching through emails - oh it's in Kresge Auditorium. Where is Kresge Auditorium?? Find it on the internet and sprint to it... and kickoff hadn't started yet even though we were way late. PHEW.
So this year's Hunt was "20000 Puzzles Under The Sea"! Steampunk yay. Puzzly stuff later, suffice it to say that we puzzled all the way till like midnightish XD Oh, and I went on the meta-meta runaround that night... or rather, the first 3 stages of it (out of 8) and then I was like, screw it I'm going home XD;;;;; So Albert and I got back to the Partyhaus, and the others (Kevin/Erica/Kenny) got back from Winnie's place while we were showering... and then we played that Super Mario Land or whatever game, where people can control up to 4 characters and there's a lot of dying and "teamwork" and mostly people getting in each other's way and getting killed and depleting the common fund of lives lol. And then we all fell over and went to sleep.
Oh, and also for all of Friday and Saturday I wore our fox kigurumi :D And got lots of compliments and people wondering what it was lol. And I wore it on the mini-runaround too (it's MIT, they're used to seeing strange things in the halls lol) and got super sweaty x_x
Saturday: I woke up earlier in the morning and caught up on Facebook and current Hunt status, and eventually Albert woke up and we moseyed over to our team's HQ around noonish - bought our own food from a Vietnamese food truck thing, or rather I sent Albert to buy it while I carried our backpacks to HQ lol. Puzzly, puzzly, Peter (BP's Peter) dropped by at some point, and then around 6-ish we left to go pick up ingredients for hotpot/KBBQ and also Raph and Shawn who met up with us at H-mart. MASSIVE FOOD ORGY WAS HAD. And then I continued puzzling (and solved my first solo puzzle ever, eeeee!) and also played some Smash. Had a nice chat with Vicky too, never actually really got to know her till now, come to think of it.
Sunday: Woke up to find that Luck (what used to be Beginner's Luck and this year was named Luck, I Am Your Father) had won the hunt at around 5 AM. Inquired as to HQ status, learned there were still a few people plugging away at the remaining puzzles and metas... Doris came up from New Haven in a bus, but it was delayed because it was going very slow due to icy roads (freezing rain) and many accidents including a 10-car pileup o_o;;; (Doris: "It's a really good thing you guys didn't drive down.....") So we gathered at Central station or thereabouts with Peter and had lunch at Thelonious Monkfish, which hilariously Albert and I have had their food multiple times because we'd order it from Foodler with Josh and Caitlin at their apartment, but we had never actually visited the physical site of the restaurant XD Lots more sushi! Tasty. Also a very interesting appetizer which was lychees (like, the canned ones) stuffed with ground spiced meat and other niceties... very tasty, but Doris and Peter refused seconds because the texture clash was too much for them. Honestly I never thought about stuffing the canned lychees with items other than the pineapple chunks that some canned varieties come with, lol.
And then we walked back to MIT, where I showed Doris our Hunt HQ (it had filled up with all the rest of our team's members in the meantime, all whanging away at the last metas and meta-meta lol) and explained to her some of the puzzles and such. Albert and Doris started setting up her new phone and migrating all her stuff over and all. Albert had already started the transfer between my old Verizon and new soon-to-be-Ting phone last night, but weirdly enough it seemed like both phones were more or less working except calls and texts would still get routed to the old Verizon phone instead o_o;; But whatever, we'd deal with that later. So it took a long time to get the phone stuff set up, and Doris wanted to go to a museum that was about 10-15 min away by car (~35 min by subway) along with an old high school friend, so we drove her there posthaste afterward and she had exactly 40 minutes to see the whole museum lol. Apparently it was a small museum though, with large portions of it cordoned off for renovations or whatever, so that was about the right amount of time to actually see it lol. And then she went back to New Haven by bus again by herself, since Albert and I had already returned to MIT. Yay for good public transport.
And then! Our team finished the final meta-meta with like an hour to spare! So we got to do the runaround! Which was totally awesome! omg! (Random team were incredibly good sports because like 4 or 5 other teams also last-minute finished and wanted to go runarounding almost simultaneously so they had to do some very tricky team-wrangling to get the scheduling to work, and they had to stay way past their HQ end time to get everyone through... mad props) And so Albert and I went runarounding :D And then afterward we had our traditional team dinner at Mary Chung's... in the middle of that, Mom Skyped me saying Doris had been trying to get ahold of me, both of her phones don't work anymore o_o;;;; She had been using the bus wireless to Line us, except I was in the middle of dinner so I hadn't noticed. We figured that we'd skype once she got back to her dorm and Albert and I got back to the Partyhaus... when we got back to the Partyhaus, the others were cooking steaks and vegetables. Apparently Ray's workplace lets him acquire chicken and steaks for really cheap - the 6 (big thick) steaks they were cooking only cost him like $13. (My comment: "Albert just came in his pants." Room's reaction: O_O;;;;;;;;;;;; ) And so I set up Skype and had Albert walk Doris through whatever phone magic they needed to do - apparently my phone didn't have this problem because it was essentially brand new/unused, but Doris's phone had been activated once briefly before and so that was screwing with her activating it for herself, but there were step-by-step instructions on Ting's website on how to rectify that. And then Albert drove Raph and Shawn back up to Allston or wherever, and he came back and played Smash with Kevn and Kenny but I fell over asleep lol.
Monday (today): Slept way in after having decided that I won't go to Wrapup... was super conflicted, really wanted to go but Albert really wanted to have lunch with Suniko and Dee so figured that it'd be better for us to stick together just in case (for a while was tempted to just go to wrapup myself and then public transport to the airport and meet Albert there but decided against it) plus it was nice to see them again before we left. Ate at an expensive sort of Asian fusion cafe thing, pretty good food though. Just finished the boxed excess on the plane just now lol. And then we returned the car (and at the Flightcar place I was struck by a weird feeling that we had only been there hours before, instead of a couple of days before) and got through the airport and now here I am typing this up on the plane.
(addendum, post plane flight in which the second leg was delayed and also Albert and I stopped for food in Lawrence on the way home so we didn't get home till like 3:30 AM - he drove the first leg from Kansas City to Lawrence and I drove from Lawrence to home so we each could take turns passing out on the passenger side lol. And then I had a full day of work today complete with an afternoon of necropsy, which always physically wipes me out...)
Someday I might even have time to write up stuff about the puzzles, though it's a good thing I watched this youtube video of the Hunt Wrapup before I started typing - I mean, I always put it behind LJ cuts but this time they really don't want inadvertent spoilers. I think it'd be great to buy their puzzle book and shop it around to everyone who was asking us "you're doing WHAT for the weekend??" XD;;
Also this site eeeeeee
http://drnautilus.tumblr.com/
I have to say, though, returning to work post-Hunt was actually not that bad. It sort of wiped the slate clean, took me out of my routine mindset and reminded me that yeah, I actually really love my work. Plus, the Hunt was a reminder that awesome people like those on my team and other teams and the team running the Hunt actually exist, it was like coming home in a way. Or maybe like an 一夜城, a yearly mirage that gathers and disperses. Like a puzzle version of Burning Man? I've never been to Burning Man lol...
Anyway back to productivity.
Also, we had to explain what the heck the MIT Mystery Hunt was to our friends (multiple times for multiple sets of friends) and pretty much unanimously, we'd get back the response "wow, that seems like a lot of work"... XD;;;;; Yes, but it's FUN! (Well, a certain type of person's idea of fun, anyway.) Kevin chipped in his experience with the Husky Hunt, which is apparently like a high-stress, high-stakes version of the Mystery Hunt where you actually win prizes like round-trip tickets to anywhere in the world. So people are super hard-core and intense about winning, apparently to the detriment of the actual fun-ness of puzzle solving. And he commented that the Mystery Hunt sounds like a lot more fun and a lot less stress... which it is :P
So we left the cat in the pathology intern Estehela's care, and headed out earlyish Thursday morning... except it turned out that sometime between Albert checking in (two nights ago) and us waking up that morning, we had been bumped to flights that were an hour earlier than expected. OOPS SHIT. Good thing I always plan for 2 hours of leeway for airports... Albert 飆車 down the highway to Kansas City Airport, and we made it in time yay.
So we arrived an hour early in Boston (after a layover in Detroit, which took us over some stunning Midwestern snowscapes) but that hour got eaten by Flightcar being super inefficient =_=;;; And then we'd planned to go drop our stuff at Kevin and Erica's (who were now living in a house in Dorchester south of Boston with Kenny, Vicky, and Vicky's boyfriend Ray) but what ought to have been a ~25-minute drive turned into over an hour and a half as we got bogged down in rush hour + new snow (+ possibly Boston protests) + multiple accidents on the highways traffic. HORRIBLE. WELCOME TO BOSTON, FUCKERS. So we changed plans halfway and went straight to pick up Suniko and Kiki and head for the restaurant where we had dinner reservations, and everyone else met us there - Dee, Erica, Kevin, Kenny, Angelo, Winnie. The restaurant was a place where Suniko worked (bartended) and it had a sushi buffet and a raw bar! Soooooo much sushi.
(Oh and when we went to pick up Suniko and Kiki - Suniko lives on a first-floor apartment, so we threw snowballs at her sliding glass doors till she opened it and snarked at us for being creepers XD And when we hopped the balcony fence and got into her apartment, I promptly started petting and playing with her cat, and she commented "The *cat* gets more attention than I do??" XD;;; )
And then we dropped Suniko and Kiki back off and got back to Kevin/Erica/Kenny/Vicky's house (henceforth "Partyhaus") and got a tour, mysteriously setting off the basement smoke alarm in the process. And since all the smoke alarms are wired together, that set off all the OTHER alarms on each floor >_< And this happened a couple more times over the next couple of days, until Kevin finally figured out that one alarm's batteries were low, so it'd trip and take all the other ones with it =_=;; And then we played Smash! They had a new Wii U so we played the new Smash with a bajillion fun new characters - I'm normally always Kirby but now I'm partial to the Duck Hunt dog XD Just as cute, and does more damage lol.
Friday: we had breakfast with Kevin, Erica, and Kenny at a fancy tasty breakfast place north of MIT, but we had gotten kind of a late start so we had to cut it a bit short to hurry over to MIT to make kickoff (at 12:17 because everything had to be scheduled on something 7-y because Random Team (calling themselves One Fish Two Fish Random Fish Blue Fish as they were last year when they won the Hunt and OMG it only just hit me how thematic their name was OMGWTF lol) was running the Hunt this year and Random Hall (what they're named ater) is number 7 I think? or something about 7 being the most random number IDK). ANYWAY so what was really confusing was that kickoff wasn't in Lobby 7 as we were accustomed to it being, so Albert and I parked and sprinted to Lobby 7 and were like... it's empty other than few scattered random tourists, wtf. Where is kickoff??? frantic phone-interneting and searching through emails - oh it's in Kresge Auditorium. Where is Kresge Auditorium?? Find it on the internet and sprint to it... and kickoff hadn't started yet even though we were way late. PHEW.
So this year's Hunt was "20000 Puzzles Under The Sea"! Steampunk yay. Puzzly stuff later, suffice it to say that we puzzled all the way till like midnightish XD Oh, and I went on the meta-meta runaround that night... or rather, the first 3 stages of it (out of 8) and then I was like, screw it I'm going home XD;;;;; So Albert and I got back to the Partyhaus, and the others (Kevin/Erica/Kenny) got back from Winnie's place while we were showering... and then we played that Super Mario Land or whatever game, where people can control up to 4 characters and there's a lot of dying and "teamwork" and mostly people getting in each other's way and getting killed and depleting the common fund of lives lol. And then we all fell over and went to sleep.
Oh, and also for all of Friday and Saturday I wore our fox kigurumi :D And got lots of compliments and people wondering what it was lol. And I wore it on the mini-runaround too (it's MIT, they're used to seeing strange things in the halls lol) and got super sweaty x_x
Saturday: I woke up earlier in the morning and caught up on Facebook and current Hunt status, and eventually Albert woke up and we moseyed over to our team's HQ around noonish - bought our own food from a Vietnamese food truck thing, or rather I sent Albert to buy it while I carried our backpacks to HQ lol. Puzzly, puzzly, Peter (BP's Peter) dropped by at some point, and then around 6-ish we left to go pick up ingredients for hotpot/KBBQ and also Raph and Shawn who met up with us at H-mart. MASSIVE FOOD ORGY WAS HAD. And then I continued puzzling (and solved my first solo puzzle ever, eeeee!) and also played some Smash. Had a nice chat with Vicky too, never actually really got to know her till now, come to think of it.
Sunday: Woke up to find that Luck (what used to be Beginner's Luck and this year was named Luck, I Am Your Father) had won the hunt at around 5 AM. Inquired as to HQ status, learned there were still a few people plugging away at the remaining puzzles and metas... Doris came up from New Haven in a bus, but it was delayed because it was going very slow due to icy roads (freezing rain) and many accidents including a 10-car pileup o_o;;; (Doris: "It's a really good thing you guys didn't drive down.....") So we gathered at Central station or thereabouts with Peter and had lunch at Thelonious Monkfish, which hilariously Albert and I have had their food multiple times because we'd order it from Foodler with Josh and Caitlin at their apartment, but we had never actually visited the physical site of the restaurant XD Lots more sushi! Tasty. Also a very interesting appetizer which was lychees (like, the canned ones) stuffed with ground spiced meat and other niceties... very tasty, but Doris and Peter refused seconds because the texture clash was too much for them. Honestly I never thought about stuffing the canned lychees with items other than the pineapple chunks that some canned varieties come with, lol.
And then we walked back to MIT, where I showed Doris our Hunt HQ (it had filled up with all the rest of our team's members in the meantime, all whanging away at the last metas and meta-meta lol) and explained to her some of the puzzles and such. Albert and Doris started setting up her new phone and migrating all her stuff over and all. Albert had already started the transfer between my old Verizon and new soon-to-be-Ting phone last night, but weirdly enough it seemed like both phones were more or less working except calls and texts would still get routed to the old Verizon phone instead o_o;; But whatever, we'd deal with that later. So it took a long time to get the phone stuff set up, and Doris wanted to go to a museum that was about 10-15 min away by car (~35 min by subway) along with an old high school friend, so we drove her there posthaste afterward and she had exactly 40 minutes to see the whole museum lol. Apparently it was a small museum though, with large portions of it cordoned off for renovations or whatever, so that was about the right amount of time to actually see it lol. And then she went back to New Haven by bus again by herself, since Albert and I had already returned to MIT. Yay for good public transport.
And then! Our team finished the final meta-meta with like an hour to spare! So we got to do the runaround! Which was totally awesome! omg! (Random team were incredibly good sports because like 4 or 5 other teams also last-minute finished and wanted to go runarounding almost simultaneously so they had to do some very tricky team-wrangling to get the scheduling to work, and they had to stay way past their HQ end time to get everyone through... mad props) And so Albert and I went runarounding :D And then afterward we had our traditional team dinner at Mary Chung's... in the middle of that, Mom Skyped me saying Doris had been trying to get ahold of me, both of her phones don't work anymore o_o;;;; She had been using the bus wireless to Line us, except I was in the middle of dinner so I hadn't noticed. We figured that we'd skype once she got back to her dorm and Albert and I got back to the Partyhaus... when we got back to the Partyhaus, the others were cooking steaks and vegetables. Apparently Ray's workplace lets him acquire chicken and steaks for really cheap - the 6 (big thick) steaks they were cooking only cost him like $13. (My comment: "Albert just came in his pants." Room's reaction: O_O;;;;;;;;;;;; ) And so I set up Skype and had Albert walk Doris through whatever phone magic they needed to do - apparently my phone didn't have this problem because it was essentially brand new/unused, but Doris's phone had been activated once briefly before and so that was screwing with her activating it for herself, but there were step-by-step instructions on Ting's website on how to rectify that. And then Albert drove Raph and Shawn back up to Allston or wherever, and he came back and played Smash with Kevn and Kenny but I fell over asleep lol.
Monday (today): Slept way in after having decided that I won't go to Wrapup... was super conflicted, really wanted to go but Albert really wanted to have lunch with Suniko and Dee so figured that it'd be better for us to stick together just in case (for a while was tempted to just go to wrapup myself and then public transport to the airport and meet Albert there but decided against it) plus it was nice to see them again before we left. Ate at an expensive sort of Asian fusion cafe thing, pretty good food though. Just finished the boxed excess on the plane just now lol. And then we returned the car (and at the Flightcar place I was struck by a weird feeling that we had only been there hours before, instead of a couple of days before) and got through the airport and now here I am typing this up on the plane.
(addendum, post plane flight in which the second leg was delayed and also Albert and I stopped for food in Lawrence on the way home so we didn't get home till like 3:30 AM - he drove the first leg from Kansas City to Lawrence and I drove from Lawrence to home so we each could take turns passing out on the passenger side lol. And then I had a full day of work today complete with an afternoon of necropsy, which always physically wipes me out...)
Someday I might even have time to write up stuff about the puzzles, though it's a good thing I watched this youtube video of the Hunt Wrapup before I started typing - I mean, I always put it behind LJ cuts but this time they really don't want inadvertent spoilers. I think it'd be great to buy their puzzle book and shop it around to everyone who was asking us "you're doing WHAT for the weekend??" XD;;
Also this site eeeeeee
http://drnautilus.tumblr.com/
I have to say, though, returning to work post-Hunt was actually not that bad. It sort of wiped the slate clean, took me out of my routine mindset and reminded me that yeah, I actually really love my work. Plus, the Hunt was a reminder that awesome people like those on my team and other teams and the team running the Hunt actually exist, it was like coming home in a way. Or maybe like an 一夜城, a yearly mirage that gathers and disperses. Like a puzzle version of Burning Man? I've never been to Burning Man lol...
Anyway back to productivity.