(no subject)
Apparently I never posted my write-up of the 2014 MIT Mystery Hunt...
Preparation
best_ken_ever started poking me in mid December, had I started preparing for hunt yet?
Um, should I have? Apparently my captain's duties are starting to become old hat as other than registering the team (which I did within hours of registration opening), not really anything that needed doing. While somewhat involved in the early years, at this point Mystery Hunt planning all long since taken care of and distilled down to a bulleted list that I can print and execute in the week leading up to hunt. Don't tell my team, but even my e-mails are pretty boilerplate at this point. I'd feel guiltier about it were it not for the fact that they never actually read them (interestingly, despite this they still worry if they don't receive them).
As I'd like to think that at least some of the information contained in these emails is important I like to occasionally test for reading comprehension by throwing in some sort of a random request. This year that took the form of suggesting that anyone who planned to sleep nap in our second room should "bring a tent".
I would have found it strangely disappointing to have so little hunt prep that needed to be done were it not for the fact that there were other activities to keep me busy. Chief among these was an invitation to Death's prehunt practice session, the highlight of which was James' amazing reproductions of famous art on the whiteboard.
I'm not sure who was most surprised by our ability to identify them though it's nice to see that that art history class I took in college is finally coming in useful, though I'll note that I had less success with the more modern masterpieces, this no doubt a result of the fact that I stopped going to class halfway through the semester.
Indeed were it not for the grad class I was taking I would have been completely calm and collected heading into the final week. Alas said class was kind of a train wreck and after a very stressful few days I dropped it in a rage, a decision that improved my disposition significantly.
Spent Tuesday evening packing, Wednesday running errands (important errands like grocery shopping) and by the time Thursday arrived all was in readiness.
Thursday
I swear that the Thursday before hunt is one of the longest days of the year, by which I mean that the eight hours between 6:30am and 2:30pm are amongst the longest of the year. isithuntyet.info which had been happily ticking away at a satisfying speed all year seemed to suddenly grind to a halt, each number pausing for far longer than a second before grudgingly turning into the next. Why does it taunt me so? (I suspect that that site's hit rate for the month of January is very amusing in comparison to the hit rate for the rest of the year.)
Got out of work just before 2pm, picked Jess up from work, and headed to my house to pack the car and deal with prep cooking. Even this has apparently been reduced to a science and the food was done and the car was packed long before Mike got out of work.
As the pile of supplies has been getting bigger every year, some concern that it wouldn't all fit, but I am a tetris genius and got it all into the car with room to spare.
Set off for Boston as soon as Mike arrived, this year I remembered to drive slowly enough that even Jess' heavily laden beast of a car could keep up (and when I didn't, the surrounding traffic remembered for me). Since we definitely needed both cars, I'm clearly going to have to make a pact with Jess to ensure that if she ever gets a new car, she at least gets a station wagon.
best_ken_ever and Kyle had gotten in on an early bus and as they'd had time to spare had already arranged the furniture to my liking (I had provided them with a handy diagram, because OCD). So back and forth to the cars with the wheelie cart and just time to unload it all before people started showing up for dinner.
Kyle wasn't actually interested in dinner so left him to hold down the fort and headed over to Cambridge Brewing Company with 19 people in tow (3 of whom weren't actually on my team but were interlopers from other teams who had convinced me to invite them along since their teams don't do a pre-hunt dinner). Dinner was both tasty and fun and then back to HQ (and after a short wartron business meeting, since we were all in the same place), finished setting up.
Jess had kindly put up my tent for me and quite amusing to walk into our sleeping napping room and find it sitting happily in the corner. Even more amusing once Mike and Jess pitched their tent, as theirs was significantly larger, and funnier still when jagheterlelle pitched hers as it was more of a house than a tent. Clearly I'm the only one who goes kayak camping.
This year, in hopes it would take them more than 24 hours to consume them, I'd thoughtfully provided TWO 6lb bags of gummi bears and best_ken_ever of the opinion that with two bags, it was hardly necessary to wait until hunt started before opening them.
"Took a nap" when everything was done.
Friday
One of the advantages of staying at MIT (as opposed to driving in in the morning) is the opportunity to sleep a little bit later than I would otherwise be able to. Well, in theory at least. In practice I was instead rudely awoken at 6am by a voice over the intercom that proceeded to inform me that they were about to test the fire alarm system. As I was snug and happy in my little tent, quite relieved when the voice went on to tell me that I didn't have to leave the building, but that was the only redeeming feature of the whole exercise and by the time they declared the exercise over an hour later I was feeling a tad bit cranky.
Managed another hour or so of sleep but that was all. Dressed (so that I wouldn't horrify people in the hallway), showered and dressed (properly) and then into HQ to make sure all was in readiness. Grabbed rccap's ID as soon as he arrived and headed upstairs to prepare the first round of sandwiches and pasta salad so that it would be ready when we returned from kickoff.
Finished preparing the food just in time to head over to Kresge auditorium and joined my teammates for the walk over.
Amused to find that it was Tim the Beaver's 100th birthday, and rccap very pleased to acquire a celebratory T-shirt to commemorate the occasion. (So much for his plans of improving his wardrobe now that he's a post doc.)
Said hello to Phil and Todd as we entered the auditorium (and retrieved our famine game flag) and then made ourselves comfortable.
On the stage someone was reading aloud, but as the microphones were turned off we could only guess that the book she held in the hands was (the entire text) of Atlas Shrugged. As the lights dimmed and the microphone turned on, we confirmed that this was in fact the case, and we were very glad that the sound person had waited until she made it to the last paragraph before turning up the volume.
Her book finished she welcomed us all to the 33rd Annual Conference on Maturing Young Scientific Theories: Emerging Resolutions for Yielding Heuristic Unphysics using Noncomputation Techniques and then welcomed our first speaker, Mr. John Galt who was scheduled to deliver a plenary lecture entitled "Unphysics of the Atlasphere".
This went on about as you would expect for a few minutes before the speaker was interrupted!
Who would dare such a thing you ask? A cat! And not just any cat! A pink and purple striped cat! THE CHESHIRE CAT!
Apparently there was a problem. More specifically holes had been created between our world (MIT) and their world (Wonderland) and things and people and puzzles were leaking through. While this might not sound like a tragedy to most of us, John Galt was decidedly anti-puzzle. The cat went on to suggest that we should try using bait to lure her friends into helping us out (and that maybe if we solved some puzzles) we could figure out what bait to use.
I'm sure there was more to it, certainly John Galt had more to say once the cat was gone, but by that time the most delightful cheshire lol cats had appeared on the screen and the entire audience stopped paying attention to anything else.
Sent rccap to pick up the information (and first aid kit) from the running team (now renamed Alice Shrugged) and headed back to team HQ. Once there we found the puzzle server up and running and the first three puzzles waiting for us. Needless to say my team dove right in, so much for a healthy nutritious lunch. At least I tried, indeed I even waved the pasta fork around threateningly for a few moments but my team ignored me and I gave up when Tal helped herself to a handful of gummi bears and declared them to be just like eating fruit salad.
The initial rush was a bit overwhelming, particularly as we had nearly our whole team in attendance and only three puzzles to work on. Apparently this year the first aid kit contained an actual puzzle (SAFETY FIRST) and a whole group of people had it well underway on one of the tables. This was actually our first solve at 1:00:57. Our next solve came at 1:38, and then another a minutes later. Indeed for awhile there the solves were coming fast and furious. As each solve was also opening up a handful of new puzzles, I kept finding myself in the position of needing to take care of captain's duties (mainly sorting and updating our progress board) and as a result I was having a lot of trouble actually getting involved with a puzzle.
Usually this doesn't bother me (at least not in the beginning of the hunt), but I very much wanted to work on BUILD YOUR OWN SUDOKU and I was getting interrupted so often that I wasn't able to keep up with what was going on and instead was serving mainly as a sanity checker (and error locator). In retrospect I realize that this was probably an artifact of the manner in which puzzles unlocked. As opposed to unlocking the whole round all at once, we were given only a few puzzles at a time with each solve leading to a couple more. As such I couldn't just set the board up once and be done with it for awhile, but instead had to constantly stop what I was doing every time we solved a puzzle and new ones were released. From the point of view of a small team, this was a great mechanic as we were never overwhelmed, from the point of view of the person in charge of team organization, it was horrible as it took me away from what I otherwise wanted to do.
I thought this hunt was fantastic, really well written and executed but all along I've been feeling a bit frustrated with myself. This because while I worked on lots of things over the course of the weekend, I didn't feel like there was ever a puzzle that I completely immersed myself in and I wonder now if some part of that was the constant need to look up and deal with newly released puzzles. Certainly at one point on Saturday night I felt like I was just sitting there pressing reload but my team was so close to solutions on a handful of things that it felt silly to start something new when I was just going to have to stop and deal with organization again.
bubblebabble hated the team leadership aspect of things and always just wanted to be able to just show up and solve, tacotortoise has expressed similar sentiments to me (which is part of why he abandoned his team to join IIF). I've never quite understood what aspect of things bothered them so much but this year for the first time I started to understand. All I wanted to do was to immerse myself in a puzzle but the release system never left me alone long enough to really let me focus.
Is this a problem? I don't know, for the captains, it may be. I suspect I'm probably the only person on my team to have a complaint with the puzzle release system and had I been a mere solver, it would have been completely fine. There have definitely been years where we've been completely overwhelmed by puzzles and it's surprising how demoralizing that can feel. On the whole I think I liked this method so maybe I need to find a way to take myself out of the equation. I think our puzzle organization board has worked really well for us for a number of years but maybe we're at a point where we've outgrown it and it's time to think about a digital solution. Certainly it might be time to find a solution that doesn't require so much of my time.
But I digress.
Things were well underway and I was feeling useless. As I also had a horrific headache thanks to the early morning fire alarm I decided that maybe the thing to do would be to take some tylenol and curl up in my little tent for an hour or so.
Wandered off to do just that and while I was gone the solves continued to pour in. When I returned about an hour and a half later, it was to discover that my team had solved three mini metas (with resulting character interactions) and opened another round.
Took a few minutes to make sure the board was accurate and then looked around for something to do. In one corner of the room two of my teammates were cutting out pieces for CUT AND TAPE. As this was about the level of thought my brain was capable of having just woken up, grabbed an exacto knife and sat down to help them. When we were done we had a pile of small oddly shaped pieces in 5 different colors. As it seemed clear that we next had to assemble them, set about doing just that. Slow going at first as there were so many unremarkable looking pieces but by focusing on one color at a time, things started to come together.
When we were done we had another sheet of shapes that needed to be cut out and assembled although this time it seemed certain that the assembly would involve folding the shapes into 3D objects. Took up my knife once more and while I cut, a few of my teammates started folding. Clear to see that the 3D objects would in turn assemble together to form a final object and before we knew it we were done.
But what was it?
Threw some ideas around, was it a dog? maybe a bear, or a puppy? Tried calling something in but it clearly wasn't right. Held it up with the demand that the rest of the room take a look and tell us what it was and one of our other teammates came through. "Is it Snoopy? I think he's wearing his flying Ace Costume?" Called it in and very relieved to find they were right.
After that things just sort of become a blur. This is strange to me as despite the sleep deprivation I usually have a fairly good recollection of the order that things happened and the basic timeframe in which they happened. (Yes even at hunt.) That said, usually I keep slightly more structured hours but my Friday afternoon nap had thrown everything off. Indeed my usual approach to the weekend is to go to bed at a reasonable hour on Friday night and then once I wake up on Saturday, to stay up until the whole thing is over. Not this year. I haven't a clue what time I went to sleep on Friday or if I even did and as a result I find myself quite incapable of giving a linear rundown of the rest of the weekend.
So what did I do? I joined a handful of my teammates for a dangerous quest into the cellars of building 26 where we found the vorpal sword and used it to confront the Jabberwocky (who bore a striking resemblance to the giant inflatable dinosaur that once inhabited rccap's office at LNS). As the sword was long and pointy and the Jabberwocky uninterested in being poked with it, by sparing his life we were able to extract information (and an interesting deck of dragon cards) from him.
Said cards turned out to be a meta that involved arranging the specially marked (dragon) ones in a particular layout so that we could read off the answer. Apparently the Jabberwocky wasn't the monster at all but rather Alice was!
Among my other Friday evening activities I attended a dance party event where participants were asked to join people from other teams to make "lobsters" and then each lobster was asked to perform a series of dances from the chicken dance and the electric slide to more modern fare. We tackled the time warp first and managed it fairly easily, and I showed my age at the macarana, this because my body apparently had no trouble remembering exactly what to do (yes, that was "popular" when I was in high school) but Gagnam style had us stumped. We must have had to dance the song through 3 or 4 times before our uncoordinated efforts were declared good enough to gain us a pass. That song is hard enough to get through once and we were all exhausted sweaty wrecks by the time we finished.
Saturday
That activity ended just after midnight and what better way to cool down than by taking a walk (in the reasonably temperate night) to Central Square to rescue my car from the garage and move it to street parking for the rest of the weekend. As gizmoek, who had also participated in the dancing, was similarly in need of a cooling walk, I had some pleasant company. Unfortunately what I didn't have was the parking ticket. When rccap had given me my keys earlier in the evening he had neglected to give me the ticket. As he also hadn't been very specific as to where in the garage he had parked, a bit of searching necessary before I was reunited with my car. A little apprehensive about my chances of getting my car out of hock without the ticket but it just meant that I had to pay the full day's rate and as I had been there the full day and needed to pay that much anyway, this was not a problem.
Wandered over to visit Death and Mayhem when we made it back to campus (it's interesting to see what kind of doors you can open with homemade ice cream sandwiches) and kind of neat to see another (quite large) team's set up. Amused to note their version of cut and paste laying around on one of the tables, they'd printed the original artwork bigger so theirs was less of a taped mess than ours, but apparently they'd had the same problem trying to figure out what it actually was.
Back at my own HQ I poked around at some puzzles. At some point (the release schedule informs me it was at 3:20am) we opened the white queen's round and after preparing a "red herring" as a gift for her, I went to that interaction. The poor woman seemed so confused (though not nearly as confused as we were trying to find the room she was hiding in).
An hour later, when we released a puzzle entitled OBSESSIVE_COMPULSIVE DICKISHNESS which called for us to pick something up from the same room, I volunteered to head over to get it since I already knew where to go.
The puzzle in question turned out to be a series of pages that featured the sriracha themed comic from the oatmeal. Of course this wasn't something that we were to learn right away, this because upon my arrival in the appointed room the person who was waiting informed me that I was late and proceeded to shred the puzzle before my eyes (well maybe if MIT had a better room numbering system this wouldn't have been a problem).
Dejected I picked the pieces up off the floor and deposited them in a handy plastic bag which had been helpfully provided before returning to my team. I had intended to go to bed, indeed I had even stated that, out loud, before heading off to fetch the puzzle, but as I eyed it now in shards I felt so responsible that I wasn't able to bring myself to leave. Nothing for it but to grab the tape and start reassembling it.
Apparently I didn't go to bed on Friday night.
I did however go to bed the moment the puzzle had been reassembled, stirring only when it was time to make lunch for my teammates.
James and Henry stopped by for lunch (Apparently I've branched out from just feeding my team) and fun to compare notes on how things were going. Not sure what I spent the afternoon working on but as I clearly hadn't had enough sleep, at some point I wandered off to take a mid-afternoon nap in my cozy little tent.
Napping not without its downsides (in this case guilt), so not a prolonged nap.
"Oh, thank god," said jagheterlelle when I wandered back into the room. Apparently it was time to send someone to the last event, an activity to which we had been specifically requested to send two of our best "contraption-makers" and in my absence jagheterlelle had been brow beaten into volunteering. As "contraption-making" is one of my strengths (and not one of hers), she was gleefully happy to surrender her spot to me. But where was gizmoek? No question when we'd seen the event, description, gizmoek and I had this one in the bag. Alas it was not to be and in the end sauergeek and I headed over to lobby 13 to do the cat's bidding.
Apparently in the process of solving all the other puzzle events, we had acquired several paragraphs of words (all written on small plastic balls) and now we needed to sort them out to reveal the final solution. As word sorting is a very precise science, no hand shifting would do but rather we would need to build a series of contraptions to sort the words for us.
Fortunately the cat had done some research and knew just what type of contraption we would need so randomly paired up with a group from another team and assigned to build one part of the contraption.
More specifically each team had been asked to sort balls by either size or weight and we had been assigned weight. To aid us in this process we were provided with 2 cardboard boxes, 4 dowels, a roll of duct tape and some zipties.
Set to work with gusto. While sorting by size was undoubtedly the simpler challenge, sorting by weight not actually all that much harder and quickly decided that our best method of attack was to place two of dowels in such a way that they formed a track that the balls could fall onto. Through careful experimentation we determined the perfect spacing such that light balls would get caught on the track and follow it to one corner while heavy balls would push their way between the two dowels and fall to a lower level from where they were directed to a different corner of the box.
So determined we set to work and soon enough had the system up and running. The only real concern the direction from which the balls would enter the box as nobody quite sure if they'd be coming straight down or from an angle.
When all the contraption pieces were ready, they were assembled into a whole (which basically means they were organized into sets of three and lined up along the length of one wall). On the top level were the size sorters and below them, the contraptions that sorted either small or large balls by weight.
As we watched the cat took the words that needed sorting and dropped them into each contraption in order until the final phrase was spelled out. We were done and back to HQ just in time for dinner! (I love it when someone else takes care of the food order, though we'd ended up with small pizzas instead of large ones the day before with the result that not everyone had gotten dinner and I was still feeling guilty about that so probably going forward I should take a more active role.)
Poked around at things for awhile and then time to head to the local grocery store to procure the last of the things we needed for the ice cream social I had somewhat foolishly decided to host right smack dab in the middle of hunt.
I can hear you asking, "An ice cream social? really?" Yes of course, I like to feed people remember?
Indeed an ice cream social had been the logical extension of the homemade ice cream sandwiches that we typically bring to hunt (don't worry, we still had those too!) and indeed in its current form with a mere 10 flavors of pre-made ice cream and a bunch of toppings, it was actually significantly less crazy than might have been expected had you heard the plotting in the weeks leading up to hunt. This because I'd initially put rccap, jagheterlelle and tacotortoise (who's not even on my team!) in charge and talk of homemade ice cream sandwiches had led to talk of homemade ice cream and from there to the idea of making liquid nitrogen ice cream and then we'd invited the neighbors and before we knew it we were looking at making ice cream for 70 people. While such a thing is certainly doable, it didn't seem to be the most practical of activities right in the middle of hunt and so with a week to go I had put a damper on the plotting by declaring that we were going to BUY the ice cream.
And so it was that jagheterlelle and I found ourselves walking to the grocery store at 10:30 at night. jagheterlelle had already acquired toppings (a crock pot of hot fudge, caramel, strawberries, bananas, nuts, sprinkles, whipped cream and cherries) but rather than trying to store the ice cream we'd wisely decided to buy it the night of.
Returned triumphant and set about warming the hot fudge and laying out the toppings. In addition to our neighbors we'd invited a few of our friends from various teams with the only caveat being that they bring their own bowl and spoon.
In the end not very many people not on our floor made it, this no doubt a result of the fact that other (real) teams were very, very close to the final meta and as such completely unwilling to abandon what they were doing, even for ice cream. (Sent a text message to James, "remember, if you win, I break your kneecaps". Apparently I'm the violent sort.)
Probably a silly thing to do right in the middle of hunt, but my team seemed to enjoy it (IIF has already said that if we don't throw one next year, they will), and it was nice to have a few moments to chat with people from other teams that I don't normally see. (As it was also extremely easy to put together, it probably will be something we do again next year.)
Sunday
Back to work once I'd finished cleaning up though I can't for the life of me remember what I was working on, though I do seem to remember spending quite a bit of time staring at a series of teacups. dalryaug and one of his teammates stopped by to visit once they'd finished the run around (fortunately not on the winning team or I would have broken his kneecaps too) and then a little bit later, James and Henry when their team finished.
Got to enjoy a wonderful interaction with the Mad Hatter early Sunday morning, Dan Katz was fabulous in the role and very amused when the Swedish tool was presented to the Swedish member of our team.
Wandered off to bed mid-morning, a luxury one is afforded when there is a stated end time, (I know I comment on this every year, but of all the things introduced over the years to make hunt more fun for small teams, this is my very favorite) after first leaving instructions for someone else to make lunch at the appropriate time. Awoken by my teammates around 4pm, we'd finally unlocked a few spacial logic puzzles, did I want to solve them? Yes! Lept out of bed and went to do just that, alas there were two of them and I apparently was unable to focus so instead of solving either of them I ended up solving half of each of them. Another 20 minutes would have made the difference but it was not to be and as 6pm struck we dutifully tidied up our classroom.
As per usual I was struck by the complete inability to communicate verbally the very moment hunt ended. As this has become one of my team's very favorite things to witness, this year experiments were conducted. Apparently while I am completely incapable of stringing words together into sentences (and indeed rarely even manage to use the right words when haltingly trying to speak), I am capable of both reading and writing (even reading out loud), as a result it is possible to communicate if I first write something down and then read it back to someone. While that will no doubt prove handy in an emergency, my ability to do this on the fly not as refined. Which is to say that at some point during cleanup I was standing in the hallway and tacotortoise approached me and asked me a question. I didn't have anything to write with but as I was standing right next to a bulletin board I had a great idea. The entire board was covered with words, all I had to do was find the words I needed and read them out loud to him and I would be able to have a coherent conversation. Turned to the board to do just that only to discover a poster advertising language programs. In big letters at the top of the page it said "Anyone can speak 7 languages" and I'm afraid it broke me as right then and there I personally wasn't capable of speaking one let alone seven. Much to tacotortoise's confusion I started laughing and not just a little bit of laughing, oh no, I was doubled over crying I was laughing so hard. Panting for breath as I basically laid on the floor. "Um, I think your captain's broken."
Yeah, Mystery Hunt has that effect on me. Fortunately at this point my teammates are well aware of it and rccap and jagheterlelle stepped in to make sure that everything was taken care of.
Headed back to rccap's place for some well deserved sleep when clean up was done (I've wisely learned that it's not worth trying to drive home) and collapsed exhausted into bed. Roused in the early hours of the morning by a phone call, it was Game control and we'd apparently called in a wrong answer. Wait what? Why are they still checking answers? Even more confusing was the fact that the wrong answer in question wasn't an answer at all but rather someone's drunken curiosity as to whether or not they were still checking answers. Wow, that's kind of embarrassing. "In future you might not want to let your teammates use your phone number," the caller suggested helpfully. Good plan.
Back to sleep, rousing only when it was time to head back to campus for wrap-up.
Aftermath
So exciting to see the graph of this year's team solving progress, this because while we're still far behind the lead teams, we're above the split! By my estimation that means we're practically a real team now!
Preparation
best_ken_ever started poking me in mid December, had I started preparing for hunt yet?
Um, should I have? Apparently my captain's duties are starting to become old hat as other than registering the team (which I did within hours of registration opening), not really anything that needed doing. While somewhat involved in the early years, at this point Mystery Hunt planning all long since taken care of and distilled down to a bulleted list that I can print and execute in the week leading up to hunt. Don't tell my team, but even my e-mails are pretty boilerplate at this point. I'd feel guiltier about it were it not for the fact that they never actually read them (interestingly, despite this they still worry if they don't receive them).
As I'd like to think that at least some of the information contained in these emails is important I like to occasionally test for reading comprehension by throwing in some sort of a random request. This year that took the form of suggesting that anyone who planned to sleep nap in our second room should "bring a tent".
I would have found it strangely disappointing to have so little hunt prep that needed to be done were it not for the fact that there were other activities to keep me busy. Chief among these was an invitation to Death's prehunt practice session, the highlight of which was James' amazing reproductions of famous art on the whiteboard.
I'm not sure who was most surprised by our ability to identify them though it's nice to see that that art history class I took in college is finally coming in useful, though I'll note that I had less success with the more modern masterpieces, this no doubt a result of the fact that I stopped going to class halfway through the semester.
Indeed were it not for the grad class I was taking I would have been completely calm and collected heading into the final week. Alas said class was kind of a train wreck and after a very stressful few days I dropped it in a rage, a decision that improved my disposition significantly.
Spent Tuesday evening packing, Wednesday running errands (important errands like grocery shopping) and by the time Thursday arrived all was in readiness.
Thursday
I swear that the Thursday before hunt is one of the longest days of the year, by which I mean that the eight hours between 6:30am and 2:30pm are amongst the longest of the year. isithuntyet.info which had been happily ticking away at a satisfying speed all year seemed to suddenly grind to a halt, each number pausing for far longer than a second before grudgingly turning into the next. Why does it taunt me so? (I suspect that that site's hit rate for the month of January is very amusing in comparison to the hit rate for the rest of the year.)
Got out of work just before 2pm, picked Jess up from work, and headed to my house to pack the car and deal with prep cooking. Even this has apparently been reduced to a science and the food was done and the car was packed long before Mike got out of work.
As the pile of supplies has been getting bigger every year, some concern that it wouldn't all fit, but I am a tetris genius and got it all into the car with room to spare.
Set off for Boston as soon as Mike arrived, this year I remembered to drive slowly enough that even Jess' heavily laden beast of a car could keep up (and when I didn't, the surrounding traffic remembered for me). Since we definitely needed both cars, I'm clearly going to have to make a pact with Jess to ensure that if she ever gets a new car, she at least gets a station wagon.
best_ken_ever and Kyle had gotten in on an early bus and as they'd had time to spare had already arranged the furniture to my liking (I had provided them with a handy diagram, because OCD). So back and forth to the cars with the wheelie cart and just time to unload it all before people started showing up for dinner.
Kyle wasn't actually interested in dinner so left him to hold down the fort and headed over to Cambridge Brewing Company with 19 people in tow (3 of whom weren't actually on my team but were interlopers from other teams who had convinced me to invite them along since their teams don't do a pre-hunt dinner). Dinner was both tasty and fun and then back to HQ (and after a short wartron business meeting, since we were all in the same place), finished setting up.
Jess had kindly put up my tent for me and quite amusing to walk into our sleeping napping room and find it sitting happily in the corner. Even more amusing once Mike and Jess pitched their tent, as theirs was significantly larger, and funnier still when jagheterlelle pitched hers as it was more of a house than a tent. Clearly I'm the only one who goes kayak camping.
This year, in hopes it would take them more than 24 hours to consume them, I'd thoughtfully provided TWO 6lb bags of gummi bears and best_ken_ever of the opinion that with two bags, it was hardly necessary to wait until hunt started before opening them.
"Took a nap" when everything was done.
Friday
One of the advantages of staying at MIT (as opposed to driving in in the morning) is the opportunity to sleep a little bit later than I would otherwise be able to. Well, in theory at least. In practice I was instead rudely awoken at 6am by a voice over the intercom that proceeded to inform me that they were about to test the fire alarm system. As I was snug and happy in my little tent, quite relieved when the voice went on to tell me that I didn't have to leave the building, but that was the only redeeming feature of the whole exercise and by the time they declared the exercise over an hour later I was feeling a tad bit cranky.
Managed another hour or so of sleep but that was all. Dressed (so that I wouldn't horrify people in the hallway), showered and dressed (properly) and then into HQ to make sure all was in readiness. Grabbed rccap's ID as soon as he arrived and headed upstairs to prepare the first round of sandwiches and pasta salad so that it would be ready when we returned from kickoff.
Finished preparing the food just in time to head over to Kresge auditorium and joined my teammates for the walk over.
Amused to find that it was Tim the Beaver's 100th birthday, and rccap very pleased to acquire a celebratory T-shirt to commemorate the occasion. (So much for his plans of improving his wardrobe now that he's a post doc.)
Said hello to Phil and Todd as we entered the auditorium (and retrieved our famine game flag) and then made ourselves comfortable.
On the stage someone was reading aloud, but as the microphones were turned off we could only guess that the book she held in the hands was (the entire text) of Atlas Shrugged. As the lights dimmed and the microphone turned on, we confirmed that this was in fact the case, and we were very glad that the sound person had waited until she made it to the last paragraph before turning up the volume.
Her book finished she welcomed us all to the 33rd Annual Conference on Maturing Young Scientific Theories: Emerging Resolutions for Yielding Heuristic Unphysics using Noncomputation Techniques and then welcomed our first speaker, Mr. John Galt who was scheduled to deliver a plenary lecture entitled "Unphysics of the Atlasphere".
This went on about as you would expect for a few minutes before the speaker was interrupted!
Who would dare such a thing you ask? A cat! And not just any cat! A pink and purple striped cat! THE CHESHIRE CAT!
Apparently there was a problem. More specifically holes had been created between our world (MIT) and their world (Wonderland) and things and people and puzzles were leaking through. While this might not sound like a tragedy to most of us, John Galt was decidedly anti-puzzle. The cat went on to suggest that we should try using bait to lure her friends into helping us out (and that maybe if we solved some puzzles) we could figure out what bait to use.
Click to viewI'm sure there was more to it, certainly John Galt had more to say once the cat was gone, but by that time the most delightful cheshire lol cats had appeared on the screen and the entire audience stopped paying attention to anything else.
Sent rccap to pick up the information (and first aid kit) from the running team (now renamed Alice Shrugged) and headed back to team HQ. Once there we found the puzzle server up and running and the first three puzzles waiting for us. Needless to say my team dove right in, so much for a healthy nutritious lunch. At least I tried, indeed I even waved the pasta fork around threateningly for a few moments but my team ignored me and I gave up when Tal helped herself to a handful of gummi bears and declared them to be just like eating fruit salad.
The initial rush was a bit overwhelming, particularly as we had nearly our whole team in attendance and only three puzzles to work on. Apparently this year the first aid kit contained an actual puzzle (SAFETY FIRST) and a whole group of people had it well underway on one of the tables. This was actually our first solve at 1:00:57. Our next solve came at 1:38, and then another a minutes later. Indeed for awhile there the solves were coming fast and furious. As each solve was also opening up a handful of new puzzles, I kept finding myself in the position of needing to take care of captain's duties (mainly sorting and updating our progress board) and as a result I was having a lot of trouble actually getting involved with a puzzle.
Usually this doesn't bother me (at least not in the beginning of the hunt), but I very much wanted to work on BUILD YOUR OWN SUDOKU and I was getting interrupted so often that I wasn't able to keep up with what was going on and instead was serving mainly as a sanity checker (and error locator). In retrospect I realize that this was probably an artifact of the manner in which puzzles unlocked. As opposed to unlocking the whole round all at once, we were given only a few puzzles at a time with each solve leading to a couple more. As such I couldn't just set the board up once and be done with it for awhile, but instead had to constantly stop what I was doing every time we solved a puzzle and new ones were released. From the point of view of a small team, this was a great mechanic as we were never overwhelmed, from the point of view of the person in charge of team organization, it was horrible as it took me away from what I otherwise wanted to do.
I thought this hunt was fantastic, really well written and executed but all along I've been feeling a bit frustrated with myself. This because while I worked on lots of things over the course of the weekend, I didn't feel like there was ever a puzzle that I completely immersed myself in and I wonder now if some part of that was the constant need to look up and deal with newly released puzzles. Certainly at one point on Saturday night I felt like I was just sitting there pressing reload but my team was so close to solutions on a handful of things that it felt silly to start something new when I was just going to have to stop and deal with organization again.
bubblebabble hated the team leadership aspect of things and always just wanted to be able to just show up and solve, tacotortoise has expressed similar sentiments to me (which is part of why he abandoned his team to join IIF). I've never quite understood what aspect of things bothered them so much but this year for the first time I started to understand. All I wanted to do was to immerse myself in a puzzle but the release system never left me alone long enough to really let me focus.
Is this a problem? I don't know, for the captains, it may be. I suspect I'm probably the only person on my team to have a complaint with the puzzle release system and had I been a mere solver, it would have been completely fine. There have definitely been years where we've been completely overwhelmed by puzzles and it's surprising how demoralizing that can feel. On the whole I think I liked this method so maybe I need to find a way to take myself out of the equation. I think our puzzle organization board has worked really well for us for a number of years but maybe we're at a point where we've outgrown it and it's time to think about a digital solution. Certainly it might be time to find a solution that doesn't require so much of my time.
But I digress.
Things were well underway and I was feeling useless. As I also had a horrific headache thanks to the early morning fire alarm I decided that maybe the thing to do would be to take some tylenol and curl up in my little tent for an hour or so.
Wandered off to do just that and while I was gone the solves continued to pour in. When I returned about an hour and a half later, it was to discover that my team had solved three mini metas (with resulting character interactions) and opened another round.
Took a few minutes to make sure the board was accurate and then looked around for something to do. In one corner of the room two of my teammates were cutting out pieces for CUT AND TAPE. As this was about the level of thought my brain was capable of having just woken up, grabbed an exacto knife and sat down to help them. When we were done we had a pile of small oddly shaped pieces in 5 different colors. As it seemed clear that we next had to assemble them, set about doing just that. Slow going at first as there were so many unremarkable looking pieces but by focusing on one color at a time, things started to come together.
When we were done we had another sheet of shapes that needed to be cut out and assembled although this time it seemed certain that the assembly would involve folding the shapes into 3D objects. Took up my knife once more and while I cut, a few of my teammates started folding. Clear to see that the 3D objects would in turn assemble together to form a final object and before we knew it we were done.
But what was it?
Threw some ideas around, was it a dog? maybe a bear, or a puppy? Tried calling something in but it clearly wasn't right. Held it up with the demand that the rest of the room take a look and tell us what it was and one of our other teammates came through. "Is it Snoopy? I think he's wearing his flying Ace Costume?" Called it in and very relieved to find they were right.
After that things just sort of become a blur. This is strange to me as despite the sleep deprivation I usually have a fairly good recollection of the order that things happened and the basic timeframe in which they happened. (Yes even at hunt.) That said, usually I keep slightly more structured hours but my Friday afternoon nap had thrown everything off. Indeed my usual approach to the weekend is to go to bed at a reasonable hour on Friday night and then once I wake up on Saturday, to stay up until the whole thing is over. Not this year. I haven't a clue what time I went to sleep on Friday or if I even did and as a result I find myself quite incapable of giving a linear rundown of the rest of the weekend.
So what did I do? I joined a handful of my teammates for a dangerous quest into the cellars of building 26 where we found the vorpal sword and used it to confront the Jabberwocky (who bore a striking resemblance to the giant inflatable dinosaur that once inhabited rccap's office at LNS). As the sword was long and pointy and the Jabberwocky uninterested in being poked with it, by sparing his life we were able to extract information (and an interesting deck of dragon cards) from him.
Said cards turned out to be a meta that involved arranging the specially marked (dragon) ones in a particular layout so that we could read off the answer. Apparently the Jabberwocky wasn't the monster at all but rather Alice was!
Among my other Friday evening activities I attended a dance party event where participants were asked to join people from other teams to make "lobsters" and then each lobster was asked to perform a series of dances from the chicken dance and the electric slide to more modern fare. We tackled the time warp first and managed it fairly easily, and I showed my age at the macarana, this because my body apparently had no trouble remembering exactly what to do (yes, that was "popular" when I was in high school) but Gagnam style had us stumped. We must have had to dance the song through 3 or 4 times before our uncoordinated efforts were declared good enough to gain us a pass. That song is hard enough to get through once and we were all exhausted sweaty wrecks by the time we finished.
Saturday
That activity ended just after midnight and what better way to cool down than by taking a walk (in the reasonably temperate night) to Central Square to rescue my car from the garage and move it to street parking for the rest of the weekend. As gizmoek, who had also participated in the dancing, was similarly in need of a cooling walk, I had some pleasant company. Unfortunately what I didn't have was the parking ticket. When rccap had given me my keys earlier in the evening he had neglected to give me the ticket. As he also hadn't been very specific as to where in the garage he had parked, a bit of searching necessary before I was reunited with my car. A little apprehensive about my chances of getting my car out of hock without the ticket but it just meant that I had to pay the full day's rate and as I had been there the full day and needed to pay that much anyway, this was not a problem.
Wandered over to visit Death and Mayhem when we made it back to campus (it's interesting to see what kind of doors you can open with homemade ice cream sandwiches) and kind of neat to see another (quite large) team's set up. Amused to note their version of cut and paste laying around on one of the tables, they'd printed the original artwork bigger so theirs was less of a taped mess than ours, but apparently they'd had the same problem trying to figure out what it actually was.
Back at my own HQ I poked around at some puzzles. At some point (the release schedule informs me it was at 3:20am) we opened the white queen's round and after preparing a "red herring" as a gift for her, I went to that interaction. The poor woman seemed so confused (though not nearly as confused as we were trying to find the room she was hiding in).
An hour later, when we released a puzzle entitled OBSESSIVE_COMPULSIVE DICKISHNESS which called for us to pick something up from the same room, I volunteered to head over to get it since I already knew where to go.
The puzzle in question turned out to be a series of pages that featured the sriracha themed comic from the oatmeal. Of course this wasn't something that we were to learn right away, this because upon my arrival in the appointed room the person who was waiting informed me that I was late and proceeded to shred the puzzle before my eyes (well maybe if MIT had a better room numbering system this wouldn't have been a problem).
Dejected I picked the pieces up off the floor and deposited them in a handy plastic bag which had been helpfully provided before returning to my team. I had intended to go to bed, indeed I had even stated that, out loud, before heading off to fetch the puzzle, but as I eyed it now in shards I felt so responsible that I wasn't able to bring myself to leave. Nothing for it but to grab the tape and start reassembling it.
Apparently I didn't go to bed on Friday night.
I did however go to bed the moment the puzzle had been reassembled, stirring only when it was time to make lunch for my teammates.
James and Henry stopped by for lunch (Apparently I've branched out from just feeding my team) and fun to compare notes on how things were going. Not sure what I spent the afternoon working on but as I clearly hadn't had enough sleep, at some point I wandered off to take a mid-afternoon nap in my cozy little tent.
Napping not without its downsides (in this case guilt), so not a prolonged nap.
"Oh, thank god," said jagheterlelle when I wandered back into the room. Apparently it was time to send someone to the last event, an activity to which we had been specifically requested to send two of our best "contraption-makers" and in my absence jagheterlelle had been brow beaten into volunteering. As "contraption-making" is one of my strengths (and not one of hers), she was gleefully happy to surrender her spot to me. But where was gizmoek? No question when we'd seen the event, description, gizmoek and I had this one in the bag. Alas it was not to be and in the end sauergeek and I headed over to lobby 13 to do the cat's bidding.
Apparently in the process of solving all the other puzzle events, we had acquired several paragraphs of words (all written on small plastic balls) and now we needed to sort them out to reveal the final solution. As word sorting is a very precise science, no hand shifting would do but rather we would need to build a series of contraptions to sort the words for us.
Fortunately the cat had done some research and knew just what type of contraption we would need so randomly paired up with a group from another team and assigned to build one part of the contraption.
More specifically each team had been asked to sort balls by either size or weight and we had been assigned weight. To aid us in this process we were provided with 2 cardboard boxes, 4 dowels, a roll of duct tape and some zipties.
Set to work with gusto. While sorting by size was undoubtedly the simpler challenge, sorting by weight not actually all that much harder and quickly decided that our best method of attack was to place two of dowels in such a way that they formed a track that the balls could fall onto. Through careful experimentation we determined the perfect spacing such that light balls would get caught on the track and follow it to one corner while heavy balls would push their way between the two dowels and fall to a lower level from where they were directed to a different corner of the box.
So determined we set to work and soon enough had the system up and running. The only real concern the direction from which the balls would enter the box as nobody quite sure if they'd be coming straight down or from an angle.
When all the contraption pieces were ready, they were assembled into a whole (which basically means they were organized into sets of three and lined up along the length of one wall). On the top level were the size sorters and below them, the contraptions that sorted either small or large balls by weight.
As we watched the cat took the words that needed sorting and dropped them into each contraption in order until the final phrase was spelled out. We were done and back to HQ just in time for dinner! (I love it when someone else takes care of the food order, though we'd ended up with small pizzas instead of large ones the day before with the result that not everyone had gotten dinner and I was still feeling guilty about that so probably going forward I should take a more active role.)
Poked around at things for awhile and then time to head to the local grocery store to procure the last of the things we needed for the ice cream social I had somewhat foolishly decided to host right smack dab in the middle of hunt.
I can hear you asking, "An ice cream social? really?" Yes of course, I like to feed people remember?
Indeed an ice cream social had been the logical extension of the homemade ice cream sandwiches that we typically bring to hunt (don't worry, we still had those too!) and indeed in its current form with a mere 10 flavors of pre-made ice cream and a bunch of toppings, it was actually significantly less crazy than might have been expected had you heard the plotting in the weeks leading up to hunt. This because I'd initially put rccap, jagheterlelle and tacotortoise (who's not even on my team!) in charge and talk of homemade ice cream sandwiches had led to talk of homemade ice cream and from there to the idea of making liquid nitrogen ice cream and then we'd invited the neighbors and before we knew it we were looking at making ice cream for 70 people. While such a thing is certainly doable, it didn't seem to be the most practical of activities right in the middle of hunt and so with a week to go I had put a damper on the plotting by declaring that we were going to BUY the ice cream.
And so it was that jagheterlelle and I found ourselves walking to the grocery store at 10:30 at night. jagheterlelle had already acquired toppings (a crock pot of hot fudge, caramel, strawberries, bananas, nuts, sprinkles, whipped cream and cherries) but rather than trying to store the ice cream we'd wisely decided to buy it the night of.
Returned triumphant and set about warming the hot fudge and laying out the toppings. In addition to our neighbors we'd invited a few of our friends from various teams with the only caveat being that they bring their own bowl and spoon.
In the end not very many people not on our floor made it, this no doubt a result of the fact that other (real) teams were very, very close to the final meta and as such completely unwilling to abandon what they were doing, even for ice cream. (Sent a text message to James, "remember, if you win, I break your kneecaps". Apparently I'm the violent sort.)
Probably a silly thing to do right in the middle of hunt, but my team seemed to enjoy it (IIF has already said that if we don't throw one next year, they will), and it was nice to have a few moments to chat with people from other teams that I don't normally see. (As it was also extremely easy to put together, it probably will be something we do again next year.)
Sunday
Back to work once I'd finished cleaning up though I can't for the life of me remember what I was working on, though I do seem to remember spending quite a bit of time staring at a series of teacups. dalryaug and one of his teammates stopped by to visit once they'd finished the run around (fortunately not on the winning team or I would have broken his kneecaps too) and then a little bit later, James and Henry when their team finished.
Got to enjoy a wonderful interaction with the Mad Hatter early Sunday morning, Dan Katz was fabulous in the role and very amused when the Swedish tool was presented to the Swedish member of our team.
Wandered off to bed mid-morning, a luxury one is afforded when there is a stated end time, (I know I comment on this every year, but of all the things introduced over the years to make hunt more fun for small teams, this is my very favorite) after first leaving instructions for someone else to make lunch at the appropriate time. Awoken by my teammates around 4pm, we'd finally unlocked a few spacial logic puzzles, did I want to solve them? Yes! Lept out of bed and went to do just that, alas there were two of them and I apparently was unable to focus so instead of solving either of them I ended up solving half of each of them. Another 20 minutes would have made the difference but it was not to be and as 6pm struck we dutifully tidied up our classroom.
As per usual I was struck by the complete inability to communicate verbally the very moment hunt ended. As this has become one of my team's very favorite things to witness, this year experiments were conducted. Apparently while I am completely incapable of stringing words together into sentences (and indeed rarely even manage to use the right words when haltingly trying to speak), I am capable of both reading and writing (even reading out loud), as a result it is possible to communicate if I first write something down and then read it back to someone. While that will no doubt prove handy in an emergency, my ability to do this on the fly not as refined. Which is to say that at some point during cleanup I was standing in the hallway and tacotortoise approached me and asked me a question. I didn't have anything to write with but as I was standing right next to a bulletin board I had a great idea. The entire board was covered with words, all I had to do was find the words I needed and read them out loud to him and I would be able to have a coherent conversation. Turned to the board to do just that only to discover a poster advertising language programs. In big letters at the top of the page it said "Anyone can speak 7 languages" and I'm afraid it broke me as right then and there I personally wasn't capable of speaking one let alone seven. Much to tacotortoise's confusion I started laughing and not just a little bit of laughing, oh no, I was doubled over crying I was laughing so hard. Panting for breath as I basically laid on the floor. "Um, I think your captain's broken."
Yeah, Mystery Hunt has that effect on me. Fortunately at this point my teammates are well aware of it and rccap and jagheterlelle stepped in to make sure that everything was taken care of.
Headed back to rccap's place for some well deserved sleep when clean up was done (I've wisely learned that it's not worth trying to drive home) and collapsed exhausted into bed. Roused in the early hours of the morning by a phone call, it was Game control and we'd apparently called in a wrong answer. Wait what? Why are they still checking answers? Even more confusing was the fact that the wrong answer in question wasn't an answer at all but rather someone's drunken curiosity as to whether or not they were still checking answers. Wow, that's kind of embarrassing. "In future you might not want to let your teammates use your phone number," the caller suggested helpfully. Good plan.
Back to sleep, rousing only when it was time to head back to campus for wrap-up.
Aftermath
So exciting to see the graph of this year's team solving progress, this because while we're still far behind the lead teams, we're above the split! By my estimation that means we're practically a real team now!
