(no subject)

[rhysara]

Thursday 12 January 2012

Spent the day bouncing off the walls and just generally getting excited about hunt. In preparation for ivo_b's visit from the Netherlands, I had spent the previous week packing up team supplies and getting organized so that everything would be done prior to his arrival so that we could (for the most part, and with the exception of Thursday night) spend our time exploring the Boston area.

This early packing led to some confusion amongst my students, particularly those who tried to sharpen a pencil in the days leading up to hunt. "Where's your pencil sharpener?" more than one of them asked. "Um, it's on vacation, it will be back in a week," I replied sheepishly. Every spare surge protector my department owns also on "vacation".

ivo_b had expressed interest in seeing my fancy new laser cutter in action and with hunt on the brain, what better use than to make a giant cipher wheel out of some scraps of wood. Fortunately with everything prepared ahead of time, playing with the laser cutter a perfectly appropriate use of our Thursday afternoon.

Off to the store when the wheel was finished to acquire food stuffs for the evening. ivo_b quite keen to see the inside of Sam's Club if this was the place where Americans went to get things in bulk.

After our first disastrous year, team morale never far from my mind so as bringing in a legitimate healthy lunch each day had worked well the year before, the plan called for doing it all again. As such, purchased sandwich and pasta salad supplies and headed home to spend the evening doing as much food prep as I could. It's funny of all the skills I would have expected to learn from Mystery Hunt, catering was not among them.

Friday, 13 january 2012

Leapt out of bed when the alarm went off at 8am. Set ivo_b to loading the car while I assembled the first tray of sandwiches. So nice to have an extra set of hands to help and I finished my task just as he finished his.

Uncertain if we would be picking up Jessica or if Mike would, so, miraculously, despite the fact that I had the majority of the team supplies, we managed to save a seat for her. Quick call determined that she was already sandwiched into Mike's car, so no need to leave all that room after all. Extra space quickly co-opted though ivo_b still forced to hold the sandwich tray on his lap.

Arrived at MIT, just as Mike, Jess, Alex and Jessica did. Quite amused by the sardine like confines of the vehicle. Apparently four people, lots of sleeping bags and a ton of network and computer gear, a bit more than his car can reasonably accommodate. This not enough to stop them however.




While shunning Mystery Hunt in favor of grad school applications, bubblebabble still willing to loan us a cart, so quick work of unloading the vehicles. Handed Jess the diagram of the room set up (what, doesn't everyone have a diagram of how hunt HQ needs to be set up?) and wandered off to move the cars and stash the sandwich and pasta salad ingredients in rccap's fridge.

Room mostly set up by the time we returned. So Mike to work setting up our wireless network and printers and me to nitpick and fine tune things. Everything in readiness with time to spare. Solve board all ready to go and name pins arranged by category based on who was due to arrive when, created a new category (People Who Don't Love Us) for people who weren't planning on attending.







Even better, people were arriving! We had a team! Headed over to kick off with a group 13 strong. Wow! It was almost enough to make us feel legitimate, so very different from the year I attended kick off alone. And as the opening skit was fabulous, my teammates seemed convinced that taking the day off from work quite worth it!

Click to view

As expected the teaser sent to us earlier in the week was a red herring. Borbonicus and Bodley turned out to be new names for Bialystock and Bloom from "The Producers" and they were back at it, only this time instead of producing one terrible musical, they planned to produce LOTS and they wanted our help to do it.

Headed back to HQ and pulled up the hunt site only to find a count down timer ticking away to the actual start of the hunt. As no two timers quite the same, quickly determined that they were based on our system clocks. Was this possibly the first puzzle? Nope, changing one's system clock simply resulted in the message that the hunt would be going live soon. Settled down to wait.

Had sent sauergeek off to feed meters and he returned with the tray of sandwiches from my car. As eating a healthy lunch seemed like an ideal pre-hunt activity, everyone dived in. After last year's injuries, all quite pleased to see that this year I'd used safety toothpicks.

sauergeek had also brought us vegetables, including a package of "surprise" peppers.




Meanwhile tarapinn had arrived brining us a special treat, fluffer-nutter sandwiches! (Or, "fluffier utter" sandwiches according to autocorrect.) This "delicacy" was actually my vengeance and poor ivo_b (who had forced me to eat a chocolate sprinkle sandwich (chocolate sprinkles and butter (to act as glue) sandwiched between two pieces of bread) when I was in the Netherlands this past summer) was now expected to eat our "local" sandwich of choice. As tarapinn had used wonder bread the whole effect was particularly vile. ivo_b assured me that my vengeance had been suitably acquired and seemed surprised when a few of our teammates voluntarily ate the remaining fluffernutter sandwiches.






Decided that as we had some time to kill, we should take a "before" team picture as no doubt this would differ significantly from the "after" picture.




E-mail from jiggery_pokery in the last moments before the puzzles went live, he wasn't going to be on shift all weekend after all and if it wasn't too late, could he possibly join us for hunt? Sure! Sent him the requisite information and went back to pacing excitedly. He had one or two friends who might also want to participate, would I be willing to add them too? Sure, the more the merrier.

Puzzles unlocked eventually and hunt was on. Our first production/category "A Circus Line".




I took a few minutes to set up the solving board and then as I adore spacial logic puzzles, sat down to look at BLACKOUT with a two of my teammates. Grabbed the thermometer section of the puzzle and while it seemed fairly obvious that the final output would involve braille letters, quickly obvious that there wasn't much traction to be had on the puzzles otherwise. This frustrating as while I was 99% positive that the puzzle was going to involve braille (certainly the 3 shaded sections of each puzzle must and probably the other boxes as well) there was no certainty that this had to be the case and this was Mystery Hunt, they'd been known to throw us for a loop before. Waffled for awhile. Certainly if they were braille letters that would add more information in the forms of constraints to the puzzle, and the puzzle needed more information in order to be solved. But, I just couldn't do it. They were logic puzzles. The whole point is that as you figure them out you know that you're right, there is no doubt, ever, and assuming that it would use braille constraints was adding one giant piece of doubt to things. It broke me and I just couldn't bring myself to do it, abandoned it to less over-sensitive people and wandered off to figure out what else I could do to help. (I should note that now that hunt is over and I know for a fact that the puzzles resolved to braille, I'm really looking forward to solving it. Apparently I can't handle uncertainty in my logic puzzles.)

Meanwhile my teammates had been busy. They'd figured out that 1207 1370 was an Alice and Wonderland themed puzzle and that to solve it they were going to have to number every word in the book. They'd gained some traction on PURE AND SIMPLE and identified a number of the items in MIDDLE-SEE and a whole group of them were wagging a battle over FIGHT CHOREOGRAPHY

Alex (another former student of mine) was a new addition to the team this year and as he'd never before encountered a cryptic, quite entertaining to watch his brain slowly explode. Also amusing to watch rccap get excited about cryptics for the first time (this because, fed up with our appalling lack of ability to solve a cryptic I had designated him as our official cryptic person the previous summer (when he solved two lines from one for our application to the World Henchmen Organization Game) and as a symbol of his new found position, bought him a how to solve cryptics book. Apparently he'd been practicing. Even more shocking, somewhere along the line he'd started to LIKE the damn things.

It was a slow slog but eventually we managed to pair our pictures with our cryptics and extract a series of letters and left over words. The extracted letters spelled "YOUR ANSWER" but here we got stuck for awhile having no idea where to go next. It seemed certain that we were going to have to change the second word as well but so many options as to what they could become. Brainstormed for awhile, noticed that while each of the images had a red box with jagged edges around them, that these shapes were different. As we had failed to notice a similar detail in a puzzle ages ago quite convinced that this was important and proceeded to count the jags. Not unique numbers so it wasn't an ordering and the numbers too high to use as an index. It seemed too important to just discount however, after all if it wasn't important other than as a random red jagged box, wouldn't they have just used the same shape for all of them. Perhaps they assembled somehow? It seemed unlikely and nobody really wanted to do the cutting so shelved that idea for awhile.

Meanwhile people were still hard at work. rccap had written a program for the thermometer BLACKOUT puzzle and sent it off to process on a server farm he had access to. Probably not the best use of our tax dollars, but quite amusing none-the-less. Mike had done something similar for the nurikabe as without more info those were not solvable puzzles and everyone else having the same problem making a unconfirmed guess on a logic puzzle.

Mark and Liz had garnered applause for solving THE WICKED SWITCH but other than that we were getting nowhere. This hunt was brutal. Well into Friday evening by now and we only had one solve? Sent an e-mail to Nyren, the captain of IdM, relieved to hear that his team was in the same boat. Ok, so at least we weren't the only dumb ones. Somewhat mollified we contented ourselves with Indian Food and kept working.

Had determined that the second set of words in FIGHT CHOREOGRAPHY must be fighting words from comic books but this didn't seem to work (it would be another day before we determined that we just had a few of the words wrong and managed to extract an answer).

Meanwhile people had done great thing with STAR SEARCH, finding first the names of a series of actors and then a bunch of anagrams of their names in the word search. Left over letters gave us yet more letters and while we were positive that we would have to turn those words back into the names of other actors, quite unable to do it. This despite sauergeek and lyadann spending hours reading IMDB and trying every likely combination. (Once again it would be another day before we realized that we'd paired our words wrong and managed another solve.)




A new round of puzzles opened up at some point, this one a Critic by the name of BETSY JOHNSON and one of the puzzles involving making arrangements to pick up a bag of adorable laser cut CATERPILLARS from "the prop room".




Said room turned out to be about as far from our team headquarters as it was possible to get so sauergeek and I had a lovely walk. "What team are you?" they asked when we knocked on the door. "Left as an Exercise for the Reader," we responded promptly. "Is that a puzzle or your team name?" they inquired.

Headed back to the room and I spent the remainder of the evening happily playing with my caterpillars. Said caterpillars were a bright orange color with a cheerful face on one side, a detail that seemed intended to denote which side up they went (a necessary detail as without it there would be too many possible ways to combine them).




Had a lovely time attempting to get them to cuddle and at one point managed to make the letter "J" appear which seemed quite promising. Too bad the rest of the caterpillars didn't want to fit.

As (other than keeping up team morale) my other stated hunt goal was to not get sick (until it's over), said goodnight to the caterpillars and my teammates and headed to bed around midnight. As two members of our night shift were already sleeping and both ivo_b and jagheterlelle were going to want to go to bed soon, quickly realized that there wasn't really going to be room for me at the hotel so opted instead to stay at rccap's house.

Moved my car to my favorite weekend parking spot (which shall remain a secret) and then climbed into bed.

Saturday 14 january 2010

Awoken in the morning by a phone call from rccap. He wanted to go to bed but he had some puzzles he wanted to turn over to someone first. Dutifully got dressed and headed in. Some progress overnight but we were still struggling as never before. We'd had two more solves (BLACKOUT and MARCH MADNESS), both delivered by one of our remote solvers and while we were certain we were really close to a few other answers, we weren't getting anywhere. As people started to trickle back in it was clear that despite the motivational posters cheerfully delivered by Codex, morale was low.

Spent the first part of the morning playing team captain by organizing things and checking in on our progress in various areas. It seems we were ridiculously close to a solution on 1207 1370 or at least we would be except that our source text was mysteriously missing 25 words. This was frustrating to say the least. Somebody, somehow, managed to recover 24 of them but at the end we were left with one missing word and inconveniently it was the very one we needed to solve the puzzle.

So very, very frustrating.

Determined to do something useful, started working on MATCH GAME with ivo_b. This puzzle consisted of a bunch of little squares of paper that we quickly determined needed to be cut out and overlapped to form words. As doing such a thing against a window clearly the optimal method, once we had everything cut out we headed out into the hallway to sit in the bridge between our building and the next and sort the pieces there.

First time I'd done something useful all day, and while we might not be doing anything more complex that overlaying sheets of paper, it certainly seemed like a more productive use of my time than anything else I could think of. Made fairly quick work of overlaying the scraps of paper and before we knew it we had reduced it down to sets of 5 words.





As it was nearly time for the swimming event by this time, delivered the word lists to our teammates and went to get changed.

When we had gotten word prior to the hunt that there was to be a swimming event, response was mixed. While most people were willing to participate if necessary a few were dead set against it, refusing to come if I put them on the "swim team". As I myself was quite gung-ho for anything involving water, this suited my purposes fine. (I personally had my fingers crossed for an underwater obstacle course.)

While I was probably the most enthusiastic member of the LAAEFTR swim team, jagheterlelle and Liz had also volunteered and as ivo_b had made the mistake of telling me that he had "swimming certificates", he rounded out our group of four.

E-mail from IdM just before it was time to head to the pool. All but one of their swim team members were home sick. Offered them jagheterlelle and sent her off to get changed.

Headed over to the pool and soon it was time to begin. The event turned out to involve playing Duck!set. Which is to say that a flock of rubber duckies were set loose in the pool, each ducky concealing the symbol from a set card underneath it. In order to get points, you had to assemble a "set" of three ducks, the trick being that each duck in the set had to be presented by the member of a different team.

I'm fairly decent at set, finally a puzzle I could solve. Jumped into the pool and got right to work wrangling ducks. The early approach seemed to be to herd the ducks into a corner, find a set of three, grab one and thrust the other two at whoever was nearest. This approach didn't last long however as very shortly a couple of "sharks" entered the pool, so differentiated from normal swimmers by their chant of "one man one duck!" and the fact that if you attempted to touch more than one duck at a time they would quickly whisk them away from you. This made things more challenging, though I adapted quickly and actually did fairly well. I realized the event may have pushed me a bit over the edge when I thrust a duck at some poor unsuspecting fool and then proceeded to pull him through the water by said duck, so eager was I to claim another point.

Hunt organizers apparently hate me, or my team, or at least our name, as evidenced by the groaning I received each time I announced it. Apparently it's a bit long.

Three rounds of duck set, I participated in the first, ivo_b took part in the 2nd and as I had apparently made more sets, I was sent back in for the final (elimination round). Final round far more challenging as as each point was counted, the corresponding ducks were thrown out of the pond. We ran out of ducks very quickly and I was forced to pluck my last one from the head of a passing shark.

That was fun! Can we do it again?!?!?!? All mystery hunts need swimming puzzles! Even better, we could stay and swim for a bit if we wanted to! (huzzah!) and when we were done there were free cupcakes. Things were looking up!

Swam and played in the water for a bit before the guilt started to get to me. It was past 3pm by this time and I hadn't yet fed my team. Had inconveniently left my dry clothes back at team headquarters so forced to walk through the cold in my wet swimsuit. Very unpleasant.

Fortunately, there were rewards to be had back at HQ. Not only had my team solved a puzzle in my absence, sauergeek had shown up with a plate of bacon. Team morale significantly improved.

rccap had returned and was hard at work (did he actually sleep?) so borrowed his keys and headed back to his place to shower and make lunch.

This time I had a helper and between us Jessica and I assembled a vat of pasta salad and a pile of sandwiches. Even more usefully, she helped me carry them back to HQ.

Quick call to IdM. "Come to the dark side, we have sandwiches." "For lunch or for the rest of the hunt?" they asked me. "Either," I replied.

Apparently on a recent visit, they had been encouraged to consider merging with another team (as indeed had we) and as our two teams had actually considered merging prior to the hunt, combining forces seemed logical.

"How many puzzles have you solved?" they asked. "Four." "We've managed three but we're really close to done with a fourth, we'll come over once we solve it."

My teammates were quite pleased to see the sandwiches.

Went back to playing with my caterpillars. And then a miracle happened. We solved something, and something else, and something else... Indeed in the course of 5 minutes we solved 4 puzzles. All of a sudden things were looking up.

5 minutes later IdM walked in - they'd just solved their 4th puzzle. Slightly chagrined to learn that we'd just doubled their number but they were as frustrated as we were and so a change of scenery and some new people sounded like a good idea to all of us.

Called Codex to find out how we should go about merging, and told to simply call in the other team's answers under one of our names. As we were ahead, ended up using our name for the answer submissions but from then on in insisted on answering the phone with "Left as an Exercise for the Muskrats," much to the amusement of whoever was on the other line.

Turns out both teams had solved THE WICKED SWITCH, but they also had answers to REVISITING HISTORY, BLINKENLIGHTS, and JEKYLL AND HYDE. Nice to see the excitement in the room as members of our team jumped on them to see what they'd done to solve one or two of the puzzles, and members of their team jumped on our people to find out how we'd solved things.

More importantly this extended to puzzles we were currently working on, and very quickly members of our team had paired off with members of theirs to discuss some of the puzzles that had been eluding us both. Five minutes later, we had another solve!

Suddenly team morale was looking good for the first time all weekend!






The one problem with having merged midhunt was that we had two separate team headquarters and while we could essentially wave to each other from the window, actually getting from location A to location B proved a bit more effort. (Requiring one to either walk miles out of the way or to first walk down three flights of stairs, cross the road and then up 4 flights of stairs - next time we're totally merging with a more conveniently located team!)

As they didn't want to abandon their headquarters entirely as they had a lot of things there, it was necessary to keep people in both HQ's. Quick conference between myself and Nyren determined that we should have more than enough solves to start work on the meta and that we would send a small team of people who wanted to start working on it over to their HQ while the people who were working on the normal puzzles remained at our HQ.

Spent some time doing administrative things, added the new people to the solve board and polled the room as to who wanted to work on what. Everything sorted quite quickly. (Amused to hear one of the Muskrats announce that we were way more organized than they were. OCD - I has it!)

Speaking of which, two years ago there had been a knitting puzzle that resolved to a circular disk with the letters OCD on it which a friend of our team had knit for us. Last year, magid had taken it home with her and turned it into a hat that she had presented me with upon her arrival. It was fabulous and my team spent the rest of the weekend insisting I wear it anytime I did something particularly OCD (like straightening the cards on the solve board at 3 o'clock in the morning).




After that the evening becomes a blur, albeit one that saw me making the trip back and forth between our two HQ's upwards of 20 times as one thing after another required my attention.

For awhile I worked on GOOD AUSPICIOUS HUNTING in our HQ with Nyren and one of the Sarah's. I remember laughing at ivo_b who was working on IN VIVO (a VI puzzle far more complex than that of the usual one of simply trying to figure out how the hell to get out of that program when you accidently open it).




At another point I found myself walking slowly through the cold babbling incoherently to one of our remote solvers as I relocated the computer to which he was skyping to the other HQ so that rccap could use it to program something to solve the caterpillar puzzle.

At some point I ran into Julia from IIF in the hallway and before I knew it had been roped in to running DASH 4 in Boston. Fortunately nobody tried to kill me when I walked back into HQ and announced this fact to the team.

I kept trying to help with the circus line meta but I seemed to get called away every time things got interesting and I was out of the room, escorting someone somewhere (as other than the actual MIT affiliated people I apparently have the best knowledge of the campus) when that particular meta got solved.

I was in the room however when, in true Borbonicus and Bodley fashion, we used IdM's bupkis to buy the answer to POTLINES and then promptly called it in on the other account. "Oh, so this is how it's going to be!" said the member of Codex who fielded both phone calls. Fortunately he felt certain that this was something that the producers would approve of.

I bounced around some more, helping with this and that, organizing things that needed organizing and just generally playing captain. Got another series of solves in rapid succession. As the person doing the solving was in the other room at the time a bit disconcerting to answer the phone and learn we'd solved something. For the most part quite pleased by these surprise phone calls except for the one that heralded the solution to PURE AND SIMPLE which a small group of people were just finishing up (apparently one of the remote solvers had solved it, fortunately this was the only real duplication of effort between on-site and remote solvers that we encountered).

Rushed over to see the finalized caterpillar puzzle when that solve came through. Apparently that "J" I had really was correct, no matter, I had recklessly vowed that if I solved the caterpillar puzzle, I would buy a full side Tetris cabinet (for my living room?!?!?!), so saved the expense.

Around this time, inkmark entered the room with a perplexed expression on his face, apparently he'd just encountered someone in the hallway who had taken one look at our team sign, screamed out loud and taken off running in the other direction.

This started to make a bit more sense a few minutes later when a whole group of people arrived, somehow convinced that our sign was a puzzle (well yes, but not a very hard one). Apparently they were on the final run-around.

Nevermind, team morale was good, we were solving things, the two teams were working well together and people just generally seemed happy for the first time since hunt started. For the first time all weekend I felt like things were well under control and I could stop playing captain for a bit and go help with the BETSY JOHNSON meta. Some initial trouble getting started but the organizing team were being forthcoming with hints and before we knew it we had things well in hand, extracting the necessary words from the given text.

"Common sense", and "reason" fairly straight forward to understand but some confusion as to what might constitute a "wild word". We felt fairly certain that "Joy" must pair with "Jay" as it was the only "J" in the entire document but we went back and forth with all number of things before I made the connection, pairing "poise" with "peace". As this also allowed us to pair "bookworm" and "backroom", well pleased as we'd been determined that those two had to go together. And even better I'd finally contributed something more useful that simply my organizational prowess.

Managed to identify the rest of the words fairly quickly and from there indexed the number of the section of the puzzle into the word we had extracted it from, giving us a series of three letters per puzzle. Alas no luck what so ever on an ordering method but quite certain we were on the right track because our "wild word" letters clearly spelled out the name "Bodley".

Took a break from trying to solve the meta to instead try to backsolve the answer to SLASH FICTION (our only unsolved puzzle in the round) in case those letters might make the difference to the final extraction. Based on the pattern of where the answer words were, were fairly certain that the wild word would have to be in the 5th section but though we took it word by word couldn't quite find something that felt right. In the end we used some of our bupkis to buy the solution and still it didn't help.

Quite late/early by this point and some of the muskrats starting to head to bed so rccap, Nyren and I packed up our things and headed back to the other room to continue working.





Spent some time getting caught up on what everyone had been up to in our absence. Alex and Paul, sounding both angry and pleased with themselves laid out all of the work they had done on SOUNDS GOOD TO ME. Apparently this was a made up language called "Toki Pona", written out phonetically in Japanese. Actually, come to think of it, Alex seemed a little bit crazed as he described the process of translating the text into English. At this point they had a series of short paragraphs each of which described something and no real clue what to do next, other than to find the word that must relate to each paragraph.

Meanwhile Jess had been staring at BAD POETRY (which actually turned out to involve movies and was a puzzle that rccap had been dying to help with earlier in the evening) and Mike had been playing video games!?!?!?! It was legitimate, he rushed to inform me, the puzzle B.J BLAZKOWICZ IN "WINTERTIME FOR HITLER" had apparently been a custom copy of the game Wolfenstein 3D.

rccap was getting fed up with the meta but felt like he had to keep working on it. As this not an approved reason for working on a puzzle, chased him off to do something else. Fortunately Nyren was still interested and determined. Alas no idea where to go next, so another request for help from game control.

At this point I was waffling. If I was going to go to bed, I should do it soon but if we solved the meta we would have to put on a production and we were going to need more than one or two people to accompllish that. Besides, putting on a production sounded like fun and it would mean that we'd progressed through the first round of the game, so quite pleased when we finally solved it.

From the earlier meta we knew that our show had to include "an elephant in a tutu" in addition we know knew that the clearest way to irritate this particular critic was to "throw grammar out the window".

Set to work, our first task to create a suitable elephant costume. Fortunately not only did we have a gray blanket but also a gray rope and a furry gray hat with ear flaps. Used rccap as my model and dressed him up, wrapping the gray blanket around his shoulders and throwing the robe over his head such that his arm in one of the sleeves served as a trunk.

Decided that someone's beach towel that was left over from the swimming puzzle would make an excellent tutu and draped it around his hips. Not a bad look for him!

Meanwhile, jagheterlelle had started writing our show and it was quickly evident that a few props would be necessary. Fortunately we'd had pizza for dinner and the boxes were the perfect material to build things from. As this clearly my area of expertise, created a book (for our narrator to read from) and a window (complete with curtains) that we could throw out of the elephant.

Both rccap and Paul eager to serve as narrator and Paul's rendition more inspiring so used my dictatorial powers to assign him the role. "Wait, isn't this supposed to be a musical?" I asked. Indeed probably we were supposed to produce an altered version of a chorus line. But that seemed like far too much effort at 6 o'clock in the morning when nobody had yet been to bed. Opted instead for an art piece entitled "It takes TuTu Tango: An Elephant's Deadly Dance with Grammar".

Put in our request for a performance time to game control and made our final preparations. In the end, jagheterlelle ended up as the elephant, Paul as the narrator and rccap and inkmark our Chorus. Nyren was left to mind HQ while we were gone and as I had injured myself (a nasty glue gun burn) in the course of assembling our props, and couldn't stand to remove my finger from a cup of cold water, I was given the task of filming our masterpiece.

Given a 7am performance appointment and headed over to Building 1 somewhat slowly as jagheterlelle was in full costume.




Funny, while I certainly hadn't thought it was a good play, I hadn't realized just how bad it was until I watched it in front of a stranger (the critic). Fortunately the critic had nice things to say about it (wheeeeee scripting) so I had a bit of time before I had to tell my teammates the truth.

Downloaded the video footage as soon as we made it back to hunt HQ and all agreed that it hadn't gone over quite as well as we'd intended. Perhaps more rehearsing might have made the difference?

Starting to feel poorly at this point so wandered upstairs to a grad student lounge to nap on the sofa. Alas the room was freezing so gave it up fairly quickly. 9am by this time and both rccap and I reduced to mindlessness so bid everyone else farewell and headed back to his apartment, promising that we would send reinforcements back to relieve them (as Nyren too looked only barely functional, curled up in a chair rocking slowly back and forth as he banged his head against yet another puzzle).

Freezing cold outside, and what an effect. Just enough to jolt us back into awareness and make us realize just how bad our performance had been. Laughing hysterically by the time we reached his door, not so much because our show was awful but because up until that moment we had both firmly believed that our production had some redeeming merit, and while we knew it was bad we had thought it was both watchable and witty.

Wow! Just wow.

(In fact, so bad is it, that I can't bring myself to embed it. It is here if you really want to watch it.)

Everyone else in the apartment woken by our entrance as we made quite a sight, falling down laughing and only barely comprehensible as we tried to explain the irony of the situation. Jessica agreed to head back to HQ to relieve the night shift and the rest of them only just behind her so rccap and I collapsed in exhaustion, not stirring until my phone rang 4 hours later. Only an hour and a half left, if there were any puzzles we wanted to finish, this was our last chance.

So tempting to simply roll over, but you can sleep when you're dead and this was Mystery Hunt! As brutal as this year's had been, I'd been waiting all year for it, I couldn't not go back.

Threw on clothes and headed back.

Walked in to find quite a number of people in the room, far more than we'd ever before had on a Sunday afternoon. Wow, this must be what a being on a "real" hunt team is like.

We'd received more Bupkis in the early morning hours and as we had quite a number of the answers in the Okla-holmes-a! round, decided to use it to acquire two more answers in the hopes that we might be able to solve one last meta.

Mike was still playing wolfenstein 3D and a few other people had pet puzzles they were desperate to solve so left them to their own devices and gathered around the answer board to brainstorm. Had some interesting insights and had just determined that it was "Elementary!" when time ran out.

Took a final team picture, funny, we'd thought the team would look different at the end of hunt, but perhaps not THIS different.




Sent the muskrats to clean up their own room and made short work of packing up gear and cleaning up. About an hour to spare before wrap-up so headed back to rccap's as a group and made one more round of pasta salad as we shared initial impressions of the weekend.

All agreed that it had been a brutal start but that things had improved enormously over the course of the weekend and that with 21 solves, 5 events, 2 metas and a production, we should be feeling pretty good about ourselves.






Headed to 26-100 for wrap-up and really enjoyed the format of this year's event, set up as it was as a reward show. Nice to see some of the highlights of the weekend and to have a few puzzles highlighted without having the event simply run on forever. Just like kick-off, they'd done a fabulous job.

As I was only barely functional, opted out of the post hunt-party and headed home. Take-out soup from Panera bed for dinner and bed at 9pm. Despite that, still only barely functional the next day. Sleeping in until 1pm, bestirring myself long enough to shower and make breakfast before plopping down on the couch and proceeding to nap for the duration fo the afternoon.

All of the 2012 MIT Mystery Hunt Puzzles.