And while it may not have been a huge feature of Hunt for you, you made a certain 5 year old feel like he was making real contributions to puzzle solving, and he's still talking about it :)
OK, I thought I was hearing kiddoes on the video all weekend but never thought to ask :) (I did pop my 3 week old on the screen every so often though :) )
On the Road: So huh, the intended break-in to the (final draft of) the puzzle really was just "someone recognizes some of these as street names"? Wow. If I hadn't gone to grad school in Philly, we would have had no hope.
Trubled Monicas: Yeah, we had a bunch of misinterpretations about the nature of the transformation of the final clue string, partly because of interpreting ANKK as the star name ANKAA rather than the word AND, and partly because of a few wrong identifications of what number went with what clue. (The Utah Starzz aren't just a WNBA team-it's the former name of a WNBA team, whose name is now the San Antonio Stars, spelled correctly. The team is no longer even on the first page of Google hits of STARZZ for me!) Actually, if you don't mind me mentioning it, those wrong identifications are arguably indicative of a flaw with the puzzle; Allen, our team's principal graphic-design guy, said a lot of the numbers didn't match the design of the logos they were trying to clue very well
( ... )
Re: On the Road, my wife and I were the ones who got the A-ha on that one. I don't think it's too far out that we would take some of the weirder names on that list (America's Cup, Terra Firma, Oligocene) and Google them with the associated cities. It took about three tries with the weird ones for us to go, "Oh, these are all probably street names in these cities." However, I always hate the "locations on a map spell out a letter" type of puzzles. It never is as nice or as straightforward as it could be. We did about three cities and couldn't make heads or tails of the weird zigzags we got, and had to backsolve it. :(
We had a huge issue with Man on the Moon. We never got grin because, as you said, CRTCH AKA POWERIZE to grin was just too far of a leap for us to make. The crossword was great, but I feel like Luck didn't do enough testsolving or editing to let that extraction slip through like that
( ... )
The worst part is that on Codex, we managed to come up with a sensible misreading of the Man in the Moon clue that still produced a meta-appropriate answer.
(We interpreted "CRT CH AKA" as a set of abbreviations. What's a cathode ray tube-- i.e., terminal-- character that could also be known as powerize? CARET, which even happens to be "CRT" when disemvowelled. And "A" in the Moon alphabet is shaped like a caret!)
Edited to add: Oh, yeah, I forgot about how we ended up going even further down that wrong path. After CARET turned out to be wrong, we called in CONTROL, because control characters are a thing, "control" could also mean "powerize" in a sense, and the caret symbol is used as shorthand for the control key. Then, when *that* failed, we tried CTRL, because clearly the use of abbreviations in the clue had to be significant...
The thing about the Man in the Moon extraction is that it was sort of a "do the same thing again" mechanism... Except not actually! If the weird clues in the puzzle had also been missing matching letters it would have made more sense...
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David
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Trubled Monicas: Yeah, we had a bunch of misinterpretations about the nature of the transformation of the final clue string, partly because of interpreting ANKK as the star name ANKAA rather than the word AND, and partly because of a few wrong identifications of what number went with what clue. (The Utah Starzz aren't just a WNBA team-it's the former name of a WNBA team, whose name is now the San Antonio Stars, spelled correctly. The team is no longer even on the first page of Google hits of STARZZ for me!) Actually, if you don't mind me mentioning it, those wrong identifications are arguably indicative of a flaw with the puzzle; Allen, our team's principal graphic-design guy, said a lot of the numbers didn't match the design of the logos they were trying to clue very well ( ... )
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(We interpreted "CRT CH AKA" as a set of abbreviations. What's a cathode ray tube-- i.e., terminal-- character that could also be known as powerize? CARET, which even happens to be "CRT" when disemvowelled. And "A" in the Moon alphabet is shaped like a caret!)
Edited to add: Oh, yeah, I forgot about how we ended up going even further down that wrong path. After CARET turned out to be wrong, we called in CONTROL, because control characters are a thing, "control" could also mean "powerize" in a sense, and the caret symbol is used as shorthand for the control key. Then, when *that* failed, we tried CTRL, because clearly the use of abbreviations in the clue had to be significant...
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Btw was the name of that puzzle entirely random?
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