We had a huge issue with Man on the Moon. We never got grin because, as you said, CRTCH AKA POWERIZE to grin was just too far of a leap for us to make. The crossword was great, but I feel like Luck didn't do enough testsolving or editing to let that extraction slip through like that.
We felt that was the theme of the overall Hunt, "more editing needed." We got the Pam Ewing solution fairly late, again, because of the lack in consistency between the cluing. Arthur was also hard for us, because Codex has low MIT-student/alum membership, and a huge chunk of us are remote. We would have also preferred that this be spread out throughout the Hunt.
The Endymion solve was also really hard for us, because we felt that some of the design trappings could have been done away with. We spent forever on constructing what we called the "Sheep Clock" because we were absolutely sure that the different rotations and mirrors of the sheep had something to do with the ordering or some answer transformation. This is something that should have been flagged up during testsolving as, "This could lead people astray."
The worst part is that on Codex, we managed to come up with a sensible misreading of the Man in the Moon clue that still produced a meta-appropriate answer.
(We interpreted "CRT CH AKA" as a set of abbreviations. What's a cathode ray tube-- i.e., terminal-- character that could also be known as powerize? CARET, which even happens to be "CRT" when disemvowelled. And "A" in the Moon alphabet is shaped like a caret!)
Edited to add: Oh, yeah, I forgot about how we ended up going even further down that wrong path. After CARET turned out to be wrong, we called in CONTROL, because control characters are a thing, "control" could also mean "powerize" in a sense, and the caret symbol is used as shorthand for the control key. Then, when *that* failed, we tried CTRL, because clearly the use of abbreviations in the clue had to be significant...
The thing about the Man in the Moon extraction is that it was sort of a "do the same thing again" mechanism... Except not actually! If the weird clues in the puzzle had also been missing matching letters it would have made more sense...
Yes, this is exactly what bugged me about the final extraction-- that it wasn't an exact parallel to the similar bits from earlier in the puzzle. There was nothing to suggest that even one half of the clue phrase would be missing a letter, much less *both* halves.
I think Codex did even consider "crotch a.k.a. powerize" as an interpretation at one point, but of course that didn't turn up anything meaningful, so we abandoned it. It never occurred to us that "powerize" could have been missing a letter as well. (And I helped solve an earlier puzzle that clued "powder" as "power" with an added D, even!) "Powerize" just sounded too much like a word that was meant to be taken verbatim.
We felt that was the theme of the overall Hunt, "more editing needed." We got the Pam Ewing solution fairly late, again, because of the lack in consistency between the cluing. Arthur was also hard for us, because Codex has low MIT-student/alum membership, and a huge chunk of us are remote. We would have also preferred that this be spread out throughout the Hunt.
The Endymion solve was also really hard for us, because we felt that some of the design trappings could have been done away with. We spent forever on constructing what we called the "Sheep Clock" because we were absolutely sure that the different rotations and mirrors of the sheep had something to do with the ordering or some answer transformation. This is something that should have been flagged up during testsolving as, "This could lead people astray."
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(We interpreted "CRT CH AKA" as a set of abbreviations. What's a cathode ray tube-- i.e., terminal-- character that could also be known as powerize? CARET, which even happens to be "CRT" when disemvowelled. And "A" in the Moon alphabet is shaped like a caret!)
Edited to add: Oh, yeah, I forgot about how we ended up going even further down that wrong path. After CARET turned out to be wrong, we called in CONTROL, because control characters are a thing, "control" could also mean "powerize" in a sense, and the caret symbol is used as shorthand for the control key. Then, when *that* failed, we tried CTRL, because clearly the use of abbreviations in the clue had to be significant...
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Btw was the name of that puzzle entirely random?
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I think Codex did even consider "crotch a.k.a. powerize" as an interpretation at one point, but of course that didn't turn up anything meaningful, so we abandoned it. It never occurred to us that "powerize" could have been missing a letter as well. (And I helped solve an earlier puzzle that clued "powder" as "power" with an added D, even!) "Powerize" just sounded too much like a word that was meant to be taken verbatim.
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