Larry Hosken: New: 2006

Book Report: Beyond the Hundredth Meridian On the one side: snake-oil salesmen selling land, politicians seeking more consituents, consultants boosting their chances at government grants with Pollyannish lies of a land of plenty in need of s...
Book Report: Fortune's Formula William Poundstone wrote Prisoner's Dilemma, one of my favorite books ever. That book convinced me to look more closely at the prisoner's dilemma, and that in turn changed the way that I think about...
Book Report: People's History of the United States Reading Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States is hard work. He writes about some parts of USA history which I didn't know about. Some of these pieces of history were pretty disturbing...
Book Report: the Zero Game I just got back from a business trip to New York. I stayed in a corporate apartment. When I entered the apartment and looked around the living room, I saw that previous tenants had left some books to...
Book Review: Copies in Seconds It's a history of the invention of Xerography. Eh, it was okay.Labels: book, ok...
Link: BillMonk, Billing for the People I was just checking out BillMonk, a web site that allows people to keep track of the money they owe each other. You and five friends go out for lunch and you need to deal with the bill? Let one guy ...
Site Update: New York Travelog I went to New York for a couple of weeks. I didn't emerge with any exciting anecdotes. But you can read the travelog anyhow. The main thing I got out of the trip: the best New York pizza is not so g...
Book Report: Cravan In honor of Wondercon (which I'm not attending (yes, I am lame)), a comic book review: How often do you finish reading a comic book and think, "I wish there was a bibliography."? Arthur Cravan was a...
Book Report: Krakatoa Krakatoa was a volcano that got bigger and bigger until it blew up. Krakatoa was a book that got longer and longer until I just didn't want to hear any more about volcanoes, the Reuters news service...
Book Report: Last Crossing It's pancake day, and I'm sick with a cold. Normally, I love pancakes, but today my body craves only soup, gruel, and tea. So be it. There will be other opportunities to eat pancakes. Today, I st...
Book Report: Nightwork It's a book about MIT pranks, with photos. Including some color photos. It was nice. Web sites can be more comprehensive, but are not so easy to read on the streetcar. Thus, I was glad to read th...
Book Report: Remaking the World This is a collection of essays by Henry Petrowski about engineering. I suspect that he was paid by the word. The first essay is about the engineer Charles Steinmetz. But Petrowski wants an angle on S...
Book Report: Robotika #1 This comic book makes no sense, but it's so pretty that you don't mind. Huge swaths of black, good lines suggesting graceful motion. OK, it depicts a future world in which cyborgs fight by means of ...
Link: The Apprentice The Mystic Fish team of space mercenaries has signed up as contestants on The Apprentice: Zorg!. Oh, I hope we get in. Oh, I'm on tenterhooks. Or maybe those aren't tenterhooks. Maybe I just consu...
Link: Google Page Creator I have been playing with Google Page Creator, a new service which hosts web pages and gives you a WYSIWYG editor for them. It's pretty neat. My favorite part: there are pretty templates available. ...
Site Update: McGuffin Ho! The Burninators ran a Bay Area Night Game last weekend, and I wasn't there. Looking at the BANG 14 puzzles, it was pretty awesome. What was I doing instead? Well, I was working on writing about a ...
Book Report: Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans It's a collection of humor pieces from the McSweeney's web site. When I ride the bus in the morning, I don't have a net connection. Or sometimes I do, except that I didn't bring my laptop. Or some...
Book Report: How to Hack a Party Line The "New Economy" wasn't just a snake-oil story to extract venture capital money from gullible investors. It was also a snake-oil story to convince newly-wealthy tech CEOs to give lots of money to P...
Book Report: Mixed Reviews Somedays your quality of life is mixed, but a good discovery can brighten everything. Yesterday morning, my streetcar was late, my bus was late, my bus filled up, I had to sit on the floor of the bus...
Book Report: The Nudist on the Late Shift Last weekend, I was working on an art project. Well, not exactly an art project. It was kind of a fake job application. The competition is fierce for this fake job, and some people are jockeying f...
Book Report: One Hand Shaking We Californians believe in the absurd. But it's a pleasant surprise when the absurd reciprocates. Lowell Darling, artist and prankster, campaigned to be Governor of California back in 1978. He cap...
Book Report: The Search Just a few hours ago, my weekend plans were so simple. Put the excellent game PsychoNauts into my backpack so I remember to bring it home from work. On the way home from work, stop off at BlockBust...
"Life" is the Noun Form of "Absurd" The ever-gracious Eve Andersson published my question. To see it, follow the link and scroll down until you see "mysterious envelope". In other news: Snakes on a Plane!Labels: link, pi, teams...
Link: Fire Sings Beauty is where you find it... or make it. Tags: comics | blindness |Labels: comic...
Milestone: 5 Million Hits Good gracious, it is the site's five-millionth hit. That's five million hits in seven years (plus a couple of days). Let's look at the log record for that five-millionth hit: 71.112.234.3 - - [12...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Except When Preempted If you follow The Game/Bay Area puzzle hunt stuff, you might be surprised to see that I posted to this blog this afternoon. I should be with Team Mystic Fish at Menlo Park turning in an application ...
World Addition: Zoe Loftesness Holy moly, Dave and Penny had a kid. Early indicators suggest extreme cuteness. Extra hippy-dippy style points for being born in a tub of water. Extra high-tech style points for being announced on go...
Book Report: 400 Million Customers (Yes, I received some puzzle-hunt-related clothing tips in my snail mail. But aren't you getting a little tired of reading about puzzle hunts? It's been so long since we had a book report. Let us n...
Book Report: First Democracy Last night I went out with a couple of friends to see the band Quasi. This was a good thing. I finally finally made it to a show at the Cafe du Nord, thus checking off one of my life goals. Also, ...
Book Report: The Nautical Chart You may recall that a few weeks ago, my simple plan to play the excellent game PsychoNauts hit a snag when I failed to rent an XBox machine. This weekend, I tried again. I'd asked around about XBox...
Book Report (of a sort): Sucker's Progress (more or less) National poetry month is April. So I'll rhyme all month! Oh yes I will. A book not to read if you're in a hurry? The long Sucker's Progress is by Richard Asbury Its style is both list-y and rambli...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, but where will Zorg start? Yesterday, we of Team Mystic Fish got our collective act together long enough to figure out the time & location of the start of the The Apprentice Zorg game. This was, of course, a puzzle. Or, ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Especially Petaluma. Furthermore, Petaluma generally has it Going On On Saturday, Team Giant Die Protocol played in BANG 15 (BANG Appetit), a puzzle hunt game in Petaluma. Then we played boardgames. These things are more fun to do than to read about, and yet I did a...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even at Big Meetings at Work Today, at work, there was a big meeting. At one point during this meeting, a bunch of students were on stage--specifically, it was a bunch of Anita Borg Scholarship winners. Their names were projec...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Seattle and/or annoying movie promo internet sites. Peter Sarrett enjoyed the SNAP game in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. In tangentially related puzzling news, many people worked on the Google/Sony Da Vinci Code game. At least a couple of them were...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, from coast to coast Puzzle hunts are in Vermont. Puzzle hunts are in Florida, if somewhat clunkily. Puzzle hunts are in my mailbox: Tags: puzzle hunt | mail | philatelyLabels: puzzlehunts...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Including Fhloston Paradise Good grief, it's another game write-up. A few days back, part of Team Mystic Fish played in The Apprentice: Zorg, a fifteen-hour puzzle hunt game in the East Bay. In a lazy bold writer's move, I typ...
Apprentice Zorg: Addenda, Erratum In the weeks since I did that write-up of the Apprentice Zorg game, new facts have come to light. Well, I shouldn't act like anyone was trying to conceal these facts. OK, I think most people involv...
Book Report: The Battle Over Hetch Hetchy I finished playing the excellent game Psychonauts! It was totally worth buying an XBox just to play this game. Actually, I didn't make it to the end of the game. I made it to the start of the "mea...
Book Report: Cloud Atlas This book was fun. It does playful things with structure. It takes the idea of a nested framing story and twists it around. The result is a sort of ziggurat of prose, each layer a piece of genre f...
Book Report: My Kind of Place As a snack on Saturday, I had some hummus on good bread. For dinner, I had some more. I didn't think to put the hummus in the fridge in between, but I thought It will probably be OK. But it wasn't O...
Book Report: Naked Economics Many people recommended Naked Economics, but I should have paid attention to the details of their recommendation. This book is an introduction to economics. If you took "Economics 101" back in colle...
Book Report: Strange Brains and Genius I'm playing the excellent game PsychoNauts. It's a fun game. In this game, you get to crawl around inside the minds of some pretty insane folks. Insane people can be fun. So you might think I'd li...
Links: Quality Content on the Internets Wow, it's a blog entry with a small pile of misc links. That's so retro. If you're into puzzles, set up your Personalized Google Home Page, and add some content to it. What content should you add?...
Not Exactly a Site Update While my innards re-assemble themselves, maybe I can distract you with some fun email that the site received recently. It's on the comment page, but I'd like to call out the two most recent emails, ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Sveden Shinteki signups are happening. And that is awesome. But if you follow Bay Area treasure hunt stuff, that's probably not news to you. So instead I'll tell you that I sat next to Jonas from Sweden o...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, from Seattle to Siena Some awesome folks in Seattle are contributing to their local Game community by setting up a web site with announcements and forums and stuff. Check it out. I fed their RSS feed into my reader so I...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, including my pager I received this message on my pager with mixed emoticons: :-!:-% :-!:-@ :-$ :-!:-# :-( :-!:-@ :-!:-@ :-!:-^ :-! :-!:-* :-!:-! :-!:-# :-( :-!:-@ :-!:-@ :-@:-@ :-! :-!:-@ :-!:-@ :-% :-@:-% @ :-* :-! ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, So Why Did I Try to Make them Easier to Find? Today, I tinkered with Google Co-op and created a search boost. If you subscribe to it, you can use it to tweak Google web search behavior for certain searches. For now, I set up some boosts relate...
Site Update: Notes on the Construction of the Triclops Headlamp Less elaborate than the Mystic Fish Hat or the Battery Bandoleer, today I made a sort of triple headlamp, and I kept some construction notes. Because the more I thought about it, the more I thought...
Book Report: The Control of Nature I'm still sick, a little. I'm better than I was. This morning I thought I was all better. So I hopped on the bus to work. I had a coughing fit on the bus. And another few during the day at work....
Book Report: Maximum City I hear wild cheering outside. Does that mean that the USA scored a goal in the World Cup match just now? Maybe I should care, but I don't. Which reminds me of Maximum City. I only made it partway...
Book Report: One Billion Customers I could mention that I'm over my cold, but that's not as interesting as the book One Billion Customers. Not even close. It's a book about doing business in China in recent times a la the 90s. Jame...
Book Report: Out of Eden (an Odyssey of Ecological Invasion) (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Invading Species) This is a fun book on a serious subject. Alan Burdick traveled the world, talking to scientists about invading species. Sometimes p...
Book Report: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre I was just expecting a pulpy Western. And this book is a pulpy Western. But it's written well, and also has some interesting musings upon the topic of greed. That quote which is famous for not bei...
Link: Web Entrepeneurs in Full Color Video Can a two-person start-up tell Google how to grow a great user-centered web service? Yes, yes they can. Chuck and Gaurav, the brains behind BillMonk, the social money network web site thingy, came to...
Publishing News: Cyanotype HOWTO My friend Elizabeth Graves is a photographer, but she's also a chemist. She experiments with with alternative photographic development techniques. She's created some neat images, and some of them mad...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhen, even before Midnight Madness I have finally seen the movie Midnight Madness. Well, not quite all of it. I just paused it in the end credits. I'm looking at this: Certain Game Techniques inspired by DON LUSKIN &...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, and entangled with life Yesterday afternoon, I was loitering in a Berkeley coffee shop with friends, and the conversation was pretty interesting: they had just got married. A few weeks back, they're talking about maybe get...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, but not where I am Four conversations at work yesterday, vaguely remembered: Avani the intern and me: Me: Yeah, that phone conversation I had yesterday must have sounded pretty weird to you. All that stuff about "War...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere I Go Long day at work; long bus ride back to my neighborhood; I blearily walk along Irving Street, thinking about dinner. But then I recognize the map-festooned jacket ahead of me. It's Dwight Freund, f...
Puzzle Hunts Were Everywhere, and So Shall they Be Again I was sick for the XXTra Online/Paparazzi game, stayed home, missed it. But through the modern medium of blogovoxology, I think I kinda understand what happened. CKL: Palms Down Ian: Paparazzi l355...
Book Report: 109 East Palace July 4th is a holiday in the USA, celebrated with fireworks. On July 5th, I was looking at a stretch of road next to Candlestick Park on the southern edge of San Francisco. It was covered with card...
Book Report: 4 Dada Suicides Dada is not art; art is dada. Before I talk about the book 4 Dada Suicides, I want to plug an art show I saw yesterday, by the artists' group Fiber Dimensions. As you might guess from the name, thes...
Book Report: the Book of Illusions Wow, this novel is certainly literature. There are echoes and themes throughout the work. There are worlds within worlds, with parallels between the worlds; the obsessions of creators appear as sha...
Book Report: Bury the Chains If you're from the USA, then happy Independence Day! I can't think of a less appropriate day to publish this book report on Bury the Chains, which has charming stories about slaves in the American wa...
Book Report: The Collected Castle Waiting Castle Waiting was one of the best comics ever. It's by Linda Medley. It's set in the world of fairy tales, but it's so smart and so funny. It's not scary like fairy tales are scary, because it's n...
Book Report: The Google Story Now I've read two books about the history of Google: The Google Story and John Batelle's The Search. Of the two, I recommend The Google Story. It picks up on some things which Batelle overlooked. ...
Book Report: Hidden Order It's a economics book aimed at non-economists. It introduces terms and sets up some interesting thought experiments. E.g., what is a good way to divvy up chores between roommates if those roommates...
Book Report: Mathematical Snapshots I just went out to see that crossword puzzle movie "Wordplay" with my parents and their friend Carol Kare. Carol is a crossword puzzle enthusiast, but she wasn't always. But the first time she picke...
Book Report: Out of Control Interesting reporting and interviews about bottom-up organization, order from chaos, and emergent behavior. Plus some talk about What It All Means. Unfortunately, it doesn't take much talk about Wh...
Book Report: Political Fictions In theory, American politicians choose policies which will find favor in the eyes of the electorate. In practice, American politicians choose phrases which will find favors in the eyes of the electo...
Book Report: Servants of the Map If I were king, I would declare a national holiday: Andrea Barrett is Awesome Day. If I were king, I'd be a cruel despot; soon a resistance movement would form. One of their pet causes would no dou...
Book Report: Spam Kings The Shinteki game was fun! But I'm not going to write about that now because (a) I couldn't post it now, since more people are going to play, and shouldn't have their surprises foiled and (b) if tod...
Book Report: The untold story of the THE TRUE VALUE OF PI Today I tagged along on the Google Intern Scavenger Hunt. But I am sworn to secrecy about on that topic. So I will not write about that. It wouldn't work to say, "Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, incl...
Curtiss H. Anderson += 3 I typed in three more articles by Curtiss H. Anderson: Chutzpah by the Bay Crashing Willie Brown's party Fun with Words double entendres Something about governors brings out irreverence... Tags: s...
Curtiss H. Anderson: Three more / Lea W., one for the Road I continue to type up these Curtiss Anderson essays which fell into my possession. Today, three of his travelogs: Kyoto Paris New England Speaking of travelogs, you might remember that the first ...
I Don't Know as much Braille as I Thought Today Google announced Google Accessible Search, which favors web pages which are compatible with web browsers that visually-impaired people use. You might think that's pretty awesome, a great step ...
Link: Lectures on Authorization Based Access Control If you're a programmer, you might be interested in watching some lectures about Authorization Based Access Control. Some folks from an HP research lab lectured at the GooglePlex about better & e...
Milestone: 6 Million hits Today, this website enjoyed its six-millionth hit. That hit was all about Amazingly Big things up in the Seattle area. I'm talking about the Pier 86 Grain Terminal and Microsoft. Let's take a look...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even at Work (Maybe Especially at Work) The other day at work, I caught up to my mentor on the way to dinner. He was asking Wei-Hwa why Wei-Hwa wanted to borrow a baseball bat. And I'm looking around the table, and it's mostly folks from...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even New Zealand Again Ages ago, I went to New Zealand and observed that Puzzle Hunts are everywhere in New Zealand or at least Christchurch and Nelson. Now it looks like some outfit wants to run a Big Game in New Zeala...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Redmond I'm still working on that Shinteki Decathlon write-up. I got a draft ready, sent it out to my team-mates. Emily wrote back with a bunch of cool jokes that I'd forgotten. Yeah, I forgot plenty; usu...
Site Update: The Curtiss H. Anderson File Lately, I haven't done anything worth writing about. Instead, I typed up some essays hand-written by someone else, namely Curtiss H. Anderson of Roseville, California. I've got a bunch of these han...
Three More by Curtiss Anderson I typed in three more of Curtiss Anderson's essays: From the "Small World" Department He Met the Challenge Progress--Inch by Inch! Labels: site...
Two More by Curtiss Anderson I was out late last night at the Ozric Tentacles/Particle concert. I only stuck around for one song by Particle, didn't like it, and it was past my bedtime. This morning was the AIDS walk. Drivers...
Two More by Curtiss Anderson I typed in two more of Curtiss Anderson's essays: Same Time Next Year? Water Runs Uphill! Labels: site...
Book Report: Eight Skilled Gentlemen Must pack. Must pack for Hogwarts playtest. Meanwhile, you can consider this book report for Eight Skilled Gentlement: It's a novel. It's swashbuckling fun set in a fantasy world based on kinda-...
Book Report: Fun Home If my earlier snarky, whiny post about folks organizing a multi-day puzzle hunt in New Zealand made you think, "Ordinarily, this is just the kind of thing that would interest me, but Larry has talked...
Book Report: Girl Genius vol 4 (Agatha Heterodyne and the Circus of Dreams) Tonight is Sleater-Kinney's last concert before they "go on indefinite hiatus." I tried to get tickets, didn't try hard enough. But you know, it's not the end of the world. Each of the Sleaterians...
Book Report: The Great Wave (Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History) Sometimes prices go up. This has happened before and will happen again. This hurts poor people more than it hurts the rich: poor people already spend most of their money. When prices go up, they can...
Book Report: The Human Dilemma Concrete is a superhero. He can withstand gunfire, climb mountains, lift cars. But what can he do against global overpopulation? Now he teams up with a pizza company executive in a campaign to con...
Book Report: Introduction to the Practice of Statistics Today, I'm playtesting the Hogwarts Game. This game is going to be kind of unusual in that Game Control is providing transportation. They warned us not to pack our stepladders, copy machines, cooler...
Book Report: Little Star It's a family drama about new parents making tough choices between family life and career. Ah, it's OK. It has pretty Andi Watson art, which helps a lot. Tags: comics | kids | art |...
Book Report: A Perfect Red Blogger just enabled full editing of templates in the new Layout system. It's different from the old Blogger template system. I played with an early version of it, and I like it a lot better. It wa...
Book Report: The Squirrel Mother Well, after those relatively content-free photo posts, I'm sure you're glad to see I'm returning to my mainstay: informative and insightful Book Reports. Here is my Book Report on The Squirrel Mothe...
Book Report: Us and Them A conversation with my office-mate as I took out my ear-phones: me: I sure am glad I brought this little audio-recorder dealie along on that treasure hunt game, it made it easy to take good notes. ...
Books Report: Visual Explanations, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information I worked late tonight for no good reason. My deadlines are all self-imposed. I just got a little excited, missed the reasonably-timed buses, caught a late bus back. Mother Nature abetted my bad be...
Out on the Bay Today, Yay! (1) On the ferry to Angel Island. I'm holding the camera tilty, sorry. That line of low yellow buildings behind me--that's Fort Mason. Tags: photo | nautical | foreshadowing |Labels: f...
Out on the Bay Today, Yay! (2) On the Hornblower California sunset cruise. That's the sun in the background, washing out a lot of this photo's color, sorry. You can see Fort Mason behind me if you squint into the virtual light....
Out on the Bay Today, Yay! (3) Can I claim to be "out on the bay" if I wasn't on a boat? If I was just on a dock? I was at Fort Mason for a game play-test. Beforehand, I went out on a dock, and I was certainly above the bay. ...
Out on the Bay Today, Yay! (4) How awesome is sailing with friends? Sailing with friends is so awesome that maybe before you set out, you're demonstrating how to work the pump-toilet and the pump-toilet isn't working quite right...
Puzzle Hunts are Everything I Read About, Even When They Aren't Saturday, there was a lot of puzzlehuntish activity on the peninsula. I wasn't playing in it. Well, not much. I knew that a bunch of folks were gathering for that PerplexCity hunt--people would ru...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere as Is Music Yes it is the Shinteki Decathlon II report, in which team Underlying Metaphors ("We will not be understood until it is TOO LATE") sweats a lot. Fair warning: there's not much in there abou...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even New York City This write-up of the recent Midnight Madness game in NYC has the title I never dared to use: Some serious nerd-ass shit. There are strange things afoot in Toronto, which are perhaps only tangentiall...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Santa Barbara I didn't know that people were allowed to think very hard in Santa Barbara, but I may yet be proved wrong. Tags: puzzlehunts | just kidding santa barbara | jeez you're so touchy&...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Auburn Pete extracted some more Shinteki Decathlon II photos from his camera, and I posted some of them in the write-up. In other puzzley news, Eric Harshbarger's running a puzzlehunt in Auburn in Sep...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere / Sad News If you've played in bay area puzzle-hunt games, you might have met a sweet dog named Libby. She traveled in the company of Alexandra Dixon, captain of Team Mystic Fish. Libby died on Friday night; s...
Shinteki Write-up Addendum: More Photos Pete came through with some photos, which I sprinkled into the Decathlon II report. Now the truth is revealed: I was carrying a clipboard, rocking a headlamp, and wearing travel pants with zip-off l...
Three More by Curtiss Anderson I typed in three more essays by Curtiss Anderson: Magic Island in the Mist The International Exposition on San Francisco's Treasure Island Stories from the Island of Nias off the coast of Sumatra O...
Book Report: The Algebraist I walked several miles today so that I could fail to see a calligraphy exhibit. In theory, it has some work by Tauba Auerbach. In theory, it was open today, but a sign on the door said it was close...
Book Report: BAE05: Andrea Barrett's "The Sea of Information" Early Saturday morning, my friend Tom Lester drove me to the Emeryville Amtrak station from Berkeley. He pointed out the bakery called Sweet Adeline, and said that they had good cookies. My memorie...
Book Report: BAE05: Ellen Ullman's "Dining with Robots" The Best American Essays 2005 contains two essays which pay homage to the then recently-deceased chef Julia Child. One of them is by Ellen Ullman. Ellen Ullman is a geek; she writes about software ...
Book Report: The Invention that Changed the World This book was a pretty good general history of the early development of RADAR. It doesn't stop at the end of WWII, but also talks about some of the radio telescope. I learned from this book--from m...
Book Report: The Island of Lost Maps The Island of Lost Maps is non-fiction, a book about a non-descript thief who slices rare maps out of old books in libraries. It was kind of a non-descript book. I can't remember much of it. I rem...
Book Report: The Man Behind the Microchip Lea W. is in town, visiting from Cincinnati. Several folks gathered at Yancy's Saloon on Irving to kick it with Lea. Michael asked the question: "What do you love to do? There are a bunch of things...
Hogwarts Photos A few weekends back, I helped to playtest the Hogwarts Game. Then I went to a few puzzle-construction parties. Last weekend, I volunteered for Game Control for the duration of the Game. I'm workin...
Link: Blinky Light Photo This morning, I listened to audio recordings of the Team Snout Game Control "war room", jotting down notes for a game write-up. It's not so exciting to listen to this stuff after the fact, when the ...
Link: Flowers and P0rn My apartment building's laundry room is currently out of commision; the washing and drying machines are tipped over with parts ripped out and dumped on the floor. This is either the work of wild bab...
Link: Iron Puzzler If you're on the Bay Area Night Game mailing list, then you already know that Iron Puzzler is coming up. So I don't know why I even mention it.Labels: puzzle scene...
Link: Tauba Auerbach images Good visual design, by tautology, is enjoyable to look at. I stumbled upon some letterformy designs by artist/designer Tauba Auerbach. (I was trying out the new MSN Live image search. In Dirk Gent...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Epcot A couple of jobs ago, I worked with this funny programmer guy named Chuck Jordan. Lately, he's been a consulting imagineer for Disney, working on a top-secret hush-hush project. But now he's allowe...
"Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere" is Everywhere JessicaLa researched an old puzzlehunt, and wrote some interesting things about it. I don't have anything to add to that, but in the tradition of boring bloggers blogging about other bloggers bloggi...
Book Report: The Books of Magic [I'm upgrading to a new Blogging service (beta.blogger.com). I wouldn't be surprised if that means that a bunch of my old articles show up as "new" in your feed reader. Or if it results in other li...
Book Report: The Breeze from the East Mostly, I am not reading books. While I work on the Hogwarts write-up, I am not reading books. Mostly. I've posted some book reports in the past few weeks--but I'd read those books beforehand, wri...
Book Report: Cards as Weapons Ricky Jay came to speak at my place of employment today. I brought my old, worn copy of his book Cards as Weapons in, in hopes of getting it autographed. It turns out that he doesn't want to autogr...
Book Report: Cometbus #50 Yesterday, it was too hot. In the evening, the neighborhood finally cooled off--a breeze blew through. My apartment was still too hot. So I applied my Game equipment to writing about the game--I we...
Book Report: Making Comics To me, this was a fun but useless book. This book is by Scott McCloud, the same guy who wrote Understanding Comics. I found UC useful even though I didn't find myself confused by comics--it talked ...
Book Report: Samurai Detective #1 Style versus substance, style versus substance. Last night, I didn't sleep well. Last night, I saw a vacation slide show. It was by Nat C., who had been in a shipwreck. She'd been helping to sail...
Names of Nonexistent Puzzle Hunt Teams I used to think of band names. I couldn't help it. That doesn't happen to me anymore. Now, something else happens. Sometimes on the bus I stop reading, close my eyes, and just think up names for p...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even the Void Today at work, my main machine's monitors kept blanking out. I don't know what the problem is: bad video driver, bad video card, bad aetheric harmonic vibrations in the astral plane. At the risk of...
Site Update: Islais Creek Area Photos I'm still working on that write-up of the Hogwarts Game. Today was a milestone: I finished listening to all of the audio I recorded. I had an audio recorder on me for most of the time I was in the ...
Site Update: Puzzle Hunt Write-Up Thank you for your patience. After months of procrastinating, I finally got it ready: a write-up of the Google intern scavenger hunt.Labels: puzzlehunts...
Book Report: American-Born Chinese [I'm testing out a new anti-spam tool. In theory, I haven't told it to actually discard any mail yet. So in theory you shouldn't see a difference. But mistakes can happen. So if you send me somet...
Book Report: Super Market This comic book has fun art: cityscapes, curlicue clouds, silly signs. I bought this comic because its writer, Brian Wood, has written some good things. But in this comic, I didn't like the plot, t...
Not exactly a Book Report; Not exactly PuzzleHunt-Related If you've always meant to check out the magazine Giant Robot but never got around to it, now you have some more motivation. Issue #44, in stores now, has an interview with Tetsuya Nishio. Yeah,...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Sacramento Team Snout has revealed their secret behind-the-scenes view of The Hogwarts Game. How much planning went into this game? A lot. Go read. And if they spelled your name wrong, you can fix it. Tags...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Oklahoma Oklahoma has it going on. I'm not just talking about Martin Gardner. A Treasure's Trove: A Fairy Tale About Real Treasure For Parents And Children Of All Ages is an illustrated children's book wri...
Science Fiction Book Club Meme I plagiarized the following explanation from someone else who was passing along this meme: This is a list of the 50 "most significant" science fiction/fantasy novels, 1953-2002, according to the Scie...
Site Update: Hogwarts Inside Out I posted a write-up of the wacky fun times I had in and around the Hogwarts Game. Some of you puzzle-hunt freaks have already found this. Typical. Play-testing with Continental Breakfast: As an exp...
Book Report: the Birth of Plenty Most books are boring. Most books about economics are boring. But a few stand out, are interesting. Some reviewers fooled me into thinking The Birth of Plenty would be interesting. Those reviewer...
Book Report: Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide This is a short book report. As if that wasn't bad enough, it's about computer programming. So maybe I should start out by relaying the story one of my relatives told tonight at dinner. It's a stor...
Book Report: Re/Search Pranks 2 I had an interesting phone conversation a few weeks ago. I responded to some spam email offering to optimize my web site so that it would rank higher on web site searches. There are legitimate ways...
Book Report: Soldier of Sidon This is another book about Latro, the soldier who has lost his short-term memory. To remember things, he writes them down, then reads them each morning. Except that sometimes his mornings are too b...
Link: 200 ways to represent words or a message Not exactly puzzlehunt-related... Someone brainstormed 200 ways to represent words or a message: ... 41. classic do you like me, do you love me, maybe note. 42. New car sticker 43. Error message 4...
Link: No Morse Egress Those wacky kids at Coed Astronomy have just announced an upcoming game No Morse Egress. At last, a game in which you just solve Morse puzzles and never exit. That's going to be so awesome. Jessen...
Link: Webster's Online Dictionary Puzzle hunts were everywhere last weekend. Midnight Madness in Hot Springs. Some movie called BHAGAMBHAG set up a promo treasure hunt in Mumbai, sounds big-scale. I didn't do any of that. I have ...
Milestone: 6 Million Hits [Update: I meant seven-millionth. It's seven. I'm not re-celebrating six. Sorry, I posted this in a hurry, didn't proof-read, didn't fact check, sloppy work, sloppy.] Good gracious, it is the sit...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even the Bay Area Save the dates!Labels: foreshadowing, puzzlehunts...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Phinney Ridge I never saw the Team Los Jefes web site before today. I suspect that it's new. I think these people were team "Accio Brain!" in the Hogwarts Game.Labels: puzzlehunts...
Site Update: Contact Info The next time you visit the site's contact info page, you might notice that I got a mobile phone. You're not the only one who noticed. Ron figured it out right away: "Ha! You got it so that you can...