(no subject)
Busy weekend, but mostly good.
Saturday night my Mystery Hunt team did a trial run of a new software setup for solving the Hunt remotely, and it was so, so good to solve puzzles with those awesome people again. Our software setup is going to be a bit convoluted- because of feature compatibility with our custom puzzle tracker, we're using slack for text chat and discord for voice chat- but solving puzzles together with the discord voice chat was so much fun and it felt like a pretty satisfying percentage of the actual experience of solving a puzzle in person with Palindrome, though we'll see how that scales to the actual Hunt. Even though it's going to be frustrating to have to log off for Shabbos (normally when I'm on-site, I can still help with puzzles over Shabbos by looking over someone's shoulder or doing physical puzzly stuff like runarounds that doesn't involve writing), I'm really looking forward to Hunt now. We did some more puzzling Sunday night, not because we needed the testing, just because we wanted to keep working on puzzles together.
For new people, the MIT Mystery Hunt is a puzzle competition that's taken place at MIT over their winter break for the past forty years, whose objective is to solve puzzles revealing where a coin has been hidden somewhere on MIT's campus. It started as a challenging but relatively constrained set of puzzles, but over the past decades it has evolved into a massive undertaking drawing thousands of people to MIT to solve typically ~150 inventive and challenging puzzles over the course of a weekend. Puzzles span the gamut from crosswords to jigsaws and feature many unique puzzles types developed just to challenge the people who come to Mystery Hunt- "Chaos" puzzles involve teaching yourself the grammatical features of an invented language in order to find the hidden clues in a text in that language, "Duck Konundrum" puzzles involve following elaborate step-by-step, deliberately obfuscated instruction sets to find clues revealed by the instructions.
I've been competing at the Hunt on and off since 2006, and I felt a mixture of sadness and relief when the news came out this summer that Hunt would be going remote. Obviously it is not safe to host a massive puzzle competition right now, and I am very glad that the organizers are acting responsibly while still offering a puzzle competition. But I am going to miss the experience of being on campus for Hunt.
There was also a big staff meeting for Discon 3 on Sunday, discussing possible changes to the convention's timing. If you are considering going to Worldcon next year, either virtually or in person, please fill out this survey. They are trying to get as much input as possible before making a very difficult decision.
Survey on changing the date of Discon 3
And in and amongst all that, I worked a full day on Sunday, on a side project my boss is very hopefully may become my main project sometime next year.
I have fallen a few days behind on Daf Yomi as a result but will start catching up tonight, and writing up the dafs I have learned. This entry was originally posted at https://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/364877.html. Please comment there using OpenID. There are
comments.
Saturday night my Mystery Hunt team did a trial run of a new software setup for solving the Hunt remotely, and it was so, so good to solve puzzles with those awesome people again. Our software setup is going to be a bit convoluted- because of feature compatibility with our custom puzzle tracker, we're using slack for text chat and discord for voice chat- but solving puzzles together with the discord voice chat was so much fun and it felt like a pretty satisfying percentage of the actual experience of solving a puzzle in person with Palindrome, though we'll see how that scales to the actual Hunt. Even though it's going to be frustrating to have to log off for Shabbos (normally when I'm on-site, I can still help with puzzles over Shabbos by looking over someone's shoulder or doing physical puzzly stuff like runarounds that doesn't involve writing), I'm really looking forward to Hunt now. We did some more puzzling Sunday night, not because we needed the testing, just because we wanted to keep working on puzzles together.
For new people, the MIT Mystery Hunt is a puzzle competition that's taken place at MIT over their winter break for the past forty years, whose objective is to solve puzzles revealing where a coin has been hidden somewhere on MIT's campus. It started as a challenging but relatively constrained set of puzzles, but over the past decades it has evolved into a massive undertaking drawing thousands of people to MIT to solve typically ~150 inventive and challenging puzzles over the course of a weekend. Puzzles span the gamut from crosswords to jigsaws and feature many unique puzzles types developed just to challenge the people who come to Mystery Hunt- "Chaos" puzzles involve teaching yourself the grammatical features of an invented language in order to find the hidden clues in a text in that language, "Duck Konundrum" puzzles involve following elaborate step-by-step, deliberately obfuscated instruction sets to find clues revealed by the instructions.
I've been competing at the Hunt on and off since 2006, and I felt a mixture of sadness and relief when the news came out this summer that Hunt would be going remote. Obviously it is not safe to host a massive puzzle competition right now, and I am very glad that the organizers are acting responsibly while still offering a puzzle competition. But I am going to miss the experience of being on campus for Hunt.
There was also a big staff meeting for Discon 3 on Sunday, discussing possible changes to the convention's timing. If you are considering going to Worldcon next year, either virtually or in person, please fill out this survey. They are trying to get as much input as possible before making a very difficult decision.
Survey on changing the date of Discon 3
And in and amongst all that, I worked a full day on Sunday, on a side project my boss is very hopefully may become my main project sometime next year.
I have fallen a few days behind on Daf Yomi as a result but will start catching up tonight, and writing up the dafs I have learned. This entry was originally posted at https://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/364877.html. Please comment there using OpenID. There are
comments.