I had nothing to do with the MIT Mystery Hunt this weekend; I had bigger things going on, and the last time I sacrificed a puzzle event (Which would've been my first live one, actually) to a Bigger Thing, I came out the better for it ( Read more... )

(Edit: Sorry about the doublepost, needed to set whoview=none so it'd be a little harder to cheat)

(Round 1 was a long time ago)

Poll Treasure Hunters, last week

You may use the Internet for research.

So, um, got a Cryptex thingy from the aformentioned Da Vinci Code thingy. 'Twas the prize for the 10,000 finalists who were the fastest to, um, watch a video. Admittedly, I'd already watched the video (The ones for previous iterations of that challenge were all on Google Video and started with "The Da Vinci Code: Meet", so a search was sufficient ( Read more... )

Puzzels! So far, have solved four five, know what to do with a fifth, and probably know what to do but am really bad at actually doing it with a sixth.

All right, so based on the input of the voter in my poll, I'll provide some context for "metapuzzles" this time around. So if you're confused about Cliff Johnson, 3 in Three, A Fool's Errand, At The Carnival, System's Twilight, or Praser 5, read on:

( Read more... )

So I keep saying I'll try to participate in the next halfway decent online puzzle contest thing where I'm not jumping in 8/10 of the way through and thus at a significant disadvantage. I was expecting the next PQRST to do the trick, except, of course, now that the date's been announced I know I'll be leaving town halfway through the week. If it'd ( Read more... )

http://puzzleratings.org, a site for rating entrants in a certain subset of puzzle competitions, stipulates that its competitions be both language-neutral and culture-neutral, such that anyone would have all the information necessary to solve it when the instructions are translated to the ( Read more... )

Current obligatory LJ topic is the new Harry Potter book. I'm about 400 pages in.

For the second one-question quiz:

( The answer )

Since the last one-question quiz died, I'll try a different format for intriguing trivia, which I tentatively call Quiz Shows Versus LiveJournal- posting random/interesting questions from quiz shows and see how well LJers do on them. No reason not to guess for either one, since the formats of both shows mean that you've taken on the risk before ( Read more... )

I'm a few days behind in hinting, partially because this one's harder to hint and partially because I've been more distracted lately than usual. Because of the first part, I won't make retroactive hints, so all you get is:

( Hint the second the second )