Larry Hosken: New

2013-06-18T00:01:14

Returned safely to San Francisco. Sketching out plan of restorative burrito consumption for next few days.

2013-06-12T02:14:04

Wow, a third of my theoretically-Shinteki Decathlon photos this year are actually of things that happened on the way to Shinteki Decathlon. That's a little silly, but that's how it goes. Of course, none of my photos covered the time after the puzzlehunt ended because I was just a big sleepyhead by that point.

DASH LAX 2013 photos

2013-06-02T20:18:11

DASH5 was a couple of weeks ago, remember? I went to LA to help out. Along the way, I took some photos: DASH LAX 2013. One of the folks there, Francis Hsu, was volunteering in Los Angeles and then volunteered the next week in DASH London. Dude is hardcore.

You might expect more of a travelog beyond DASH photos, but that didn't happen. Since I was scouting puzzle locations for Octothorpean, most of the rest of my travelog was just "I went to [redacted] and took photos of things that had words on them." Or "I went to LACMA, but didn't get any anecdotes out of it." Or "I went to the Hotel Bonaventure and took two photos that turned out OK."

2013-06-02T05:21:32

OMG you guys, one of Leon's neighbors in "Midnight Madness" is Wally THORPE. If I can just find seven more Thorpes in Puzzlehunt-related media, I'll be well on my way to creating a thematic octothorpean clue and–

excitedly searches IMDb

Aw, nevermind.

2013-05-29T05:23:34

Like @TheUriah says, "If you want to destroy part of the urban landscape, base a game on it."

Yesterday, on my way back home from the Fendels', I changed trains at the Embarcadero. I checked up on the 2-Tone Game's Embarcadero puzzle, which you recall got messed up when a post went missing. I'd reworked the last stage of that puzzle to use another feature of the Embarcadero, a certain line-of-sight between the reacted and this little reacted. And the Embarcadero's pretty big, but wouldn't you know it—as of yesterday, someone had put a little planter in place. Not a big planter, just a little one. But big enough to block that line of sight.

I don't know why the tourists thought I was standing in that spot staring slack-jawed at a planter, somehow interpreting the planter as a personal setback.

Anyhow, The Institute Movie was good for Jejune Institute nostalgia. And in the after-movie discussion, the creators mentioned that if we visit the movie's web site and look over some of the extra footage, there's a rabbit-hole for some other game.

2013-05-27T22:34:13

Playtesting continues apace.

A small subset of the DRT (Demonic Robot Tyrannosaurs) tore through many, many puzzles, as you might expect. Of course, it was tricky figuring out how to transform their feedback for a puzzlehunt aimed at n00bs. Like when there was a puzzle with dozens of unintentional red herrings, but with some flavor nudging in the right direction if you noticed that flavor as you waded through the herring… Yeah, the DRT's didn't object to that, though I suspect a n00b would have kicked me in the shins.

Joe Fendel's kids solved some codes. On the one hand, they're just kids so you might expect them to get stuck. On the other hand, they hang out with Joe. So there were exchanges like
"OK, so, you see what's going on here is that these are sema—"
"Oh, it's that thing with the flags!"
"Uhm, yeah. You know this?"

How many codes did I know when I was 10? Not that many, I bet.

Now I have a long list of things to fix: puzzles to edit out*, puzzles to fix. (*The good news is that there's not a gut-wrenching feeling of "mudering darlings" to remove a few un-fun puzzles when there are scores of puzzles left in.)

Want to Playtest the Octothorpean Game puzzlehunt 5/25, 5/26, 5/27 or 6/2?

2013-05-25T23:32:09

Update: OK, that's enough responses to keep me busy for now. Thank you! (If you're from out of town, and June 2 was going to be a rare chance for you to do bay area stuff, then you should still talk to me. But if you're an SF local, you probably want to wait a few weeks to do anything.)

It's a great way to get your team "in shape" for Shinteki.^*

Experienced teams welcome! (In the past I only wanted n00bs, and n00b teams are still welcome playtesters. But experienced teams are also OK.)

You should be in the San Francisco Bay Area and have a place in mind to play—whether that's your living room or a cafe convenient to you or what-have-you. You should be a team or an individual. I'll show up and tell you to interact with a web site containing a whole mess-o-puzzles. You and your team will use your laptops and wits to solve puzzles. Some puzzles will be pretty easy; but as you progress, you will encounter some Real Puzzles®.

Interested? Yay! Talk/email/semaphore/something me.

^*This claim has not been verified.

Link: that Jejune Institute Movie

2013-05-21T02:42:26

I'm back in San Francisco. That Jejune Institute Movie is coming back to San Francisco, too. I want to see it this time. Especially since it looks like I won't have to stay up past midnight or whatever to do so.

2013-05-17T00:43:36

I asked the nice lady at the Preservation Society if she knew about any buildings that had # as a prominent design element.

She laughed.

Even when my puzzles don't come together, I still bring mirth to all around me.

2013-05-15T05:21:12

I played a @mastermindhunts public pub hunt and it was fun! I got to play with Tiffany Dohzen and Andrea Burbank. (I kinda think maybe Mystic Fish has been thrown together with Andrea's on some puzzlehunt; she seemed awfully familiar from somewhere? Anyhow.)

Some puzzlehuntists at work had gotten to talking, and then yesterday I noticed a tweet:

May's Mastermind Pub Hunt is tomorrow night! We'll be exploring the Hayes Valley/Civic Center area of SF. Please... fb.me/HQBKiGvv
— Mastermind Hunts (@Mastermindhunts) May 13, 2013

Wow, a chance to try one of their games, two blocks from the office. Co-worker Tiffany was game to try it and her friend Andrea was going to visit to play board games... but we wheedled her into puzzlehunting instead.

This was not so difficult. Andrea's a puzzlehuntist. (Her husband proposed to her via a puzzlehunt, something which I've stopped thinking of as super-unusual, but rather as sweet. As someone wise once said, a hunt with an audience of one isn't a totally new idea.)

And so we trundled over to Civic Center plaza with its many flags. The Masterminds, Rob and, uhm, the guy who I didn't talk to as much as Rob told us the deal. They were going to give us a sheet of paper with four puzzles and a meta. Each of the regular puzzles solved to a location and had instructions on data to gather from that location.

They told us that usually the end location was a pub; whichever team finished first had a round on GC. This time, the end location wasn't a pub, but they thought we might like it anyhow.

They gave us puzzlesheets. They loaned us clipboards and pencils. And the frenzy was upon us.

I did some anagram-and-add-a-letters to get a street intersection; or rather the first three letters of each of the two streets. We Googled to get some trivia that turned out to be about Fulton; our instructions told us an address to go on that street. I wasn't involved with the other two puzzles: some tricky wordplay that would only work for the right street intersection; so you had to look over the neighborhood map to figure out streets that would fit the constraints. And, given three crosswordish clues, guess three rhyming words; cross them out of a big string of letters to reveal a location in the remaining letters.

The first location we went to was a photography exhibit in the library basement. This turned out to be lucky: the data we gathered here was about half of what fed into the meta.

I should explain the meta. This was important. This was like a wordsearch, except you found words bogglewise. The leftover letters would spell out our end location.

Andrea figured out our end location based on the half of the data we'd got from the library. This meant we could be smart when we picked out our route for the next locations: we knew where we wanted to end up.

(Did I mention that over the weekend I did Mastermind's Riddles of Pier 39 Treasure Hunt? Except I didn't go to Pier 39. Instead, I backsolved from the metapuzzle with the aid of the puzz wordsearch solver. I was kind of glad that the Hayes Valley hunt was handed to us instead of downloaded; it forced us to get out and about.)

Andrea's meta-solving didn't just get us moving in the right direction, it also got us moving faster. We were suddenly rather motivated: the end location was Smitten Ice Cream. At least two of us weren't drinkers, and ice cream sounded a lot better than some pub. We actually wanted to win now. After all Smitten was special, a place to drag visiting out-of-towner ice cream fans.

So we were back in the frenzy, walking fast, trying to figure out when traffic would let us cross busy streets. Hustle, hustle. Get to the spot, find the data, cross it out in the grid. Hustle, hustle. Do it for ice cream.

Reader, we came in first. It had taken us about 45 minutes. (Thus, while it was fun, I was glad that none of us had, say, driven an hour from south bay just for this; if you're going to travel from a distance, probably want to plan to have dinner in the neighborhood or something so you don't feel like you're spending all your time traveling. Tell your SF friends that they should take you out to dinner or something.)

We had a chance to chat with the organizers as we ate our hard-hustled-for ice cream. I asked about corporate team-building hunts. Did companies ever want any psychological team-building stuff? Any specific team-ish things to concentrate on? (I was remembering playtesting a Dr Clue activity which was supposed to point out the value of some particular aspect of teamwork.) But no, most teams just wanted an excuse to get out of the office for a few hours.