Firstly: Thank you to the Manic Sages for running the 2013 Hunt. It is crazy difficult to do, and this was your first year doing it. You made an impressive number of puzzles. You struggled through technical difficulties and the most critical nerds in the world, you survived, and you've passed the torch on. No matter what criticisms I add below ( Read more... )

In Mediawiki, is there a special page that lists which users have most/least contributions?

One of my team members for the MIT Mystery Hunt this weekend was planning to fly from DC to Boston tomorrow, but, ya know, snow. They've already told her her flight is cancelled. She trying to rebook to Thurs, but if it's not possible, she'll be looking for either advice on how to get to Boston in such weather, and/or a carpool ( Read more... )

"Doctor of Thinkology" (MIT Mystery Hunt 2010) had a bunch of questions about bizarre things, often things that didn't -couldn't- even exist. In each one, there was a single misspelling ( Read more... )

These days, every MIT Mystery Hunt has a theme, and the kickoff at 12noon on the Friday of Martin Luther King Jr. Weekend always presents the story of the theme. This year, it was a futuristic Sci-Fi convention (Zyzzlcon 3009) with guests of honor the crew of the Brass Rat, that got sucked into the region of space called Zyzzlvaria. The only way ( Read more... )

Now in Puke-O-Vision!

Click to view

(if the embedding don't work for you)

( Cut for girly stuff that's related to the Hunt )

I'm going to start chronicling some of what went on at the Hunt. Rather than having a single absurdly long post, or else lose steam and never post it (like happened last year), I've decided to do it in installments. This one is about the spaceship competition, and a bit of team history.

( Spaceship Competition )

I have returned to LJ-land after a fun weekend of puzzle-solving. Please let me know if I missed anything you posted and want me to know, since I doubt I'm going through everyone's posts.

Today I picked up three $2-bills. I saw them in the lunch lady's cash drawer Friday but didn't have any spare money on me. I'd forgotten them by lunch today but when I saw them again and realized I had the spare cash I traded them in. When I started examining them I saw that they were printed in 2003, immediately prompting me to suspect they ( Read more... )