Larry Hosken: New: 2012

Comics Report: Torso, Goldfish It was a good holiday season. My cousin-once-removed Paul was in town, and once again wanted a treasure-hunt game. And once again, he wanted to be on Game Control, not just playing. So he and his dad...
Follow Twitter in Google Reader Bookmarklet Update: the version of the bookmarklet described on this page no longer works, sorry. You want the updated version which works instead. Twitter changed their UI and now I can't find any tweeter's RS...
Joined goodreads I joined goodreads, yet another site that recommends books to read based upon books that you liked. It's been around for a while, but I didn't join. Amazon.com's recommendations were fine! But then A...
Book Report: Closure: The Definitive Guide This book is about computer programming, specifically about how to use the Google Closure Library and Google Closure Compiler. I learned things that I didn't learn from Google's own documentation for...
Book Report: Super Crunchers It's a book about working with Big Data. Considering some of the projects I've worked on, you think I'd be pretty excited. But my experience made me kind of picky about the details. At first, this bo...
WHO SF Bay Area re-run Writeup By the time you finished playing the World Henchmen Organization game a couple of months back, most of the mysteries had been wrapped up. Which supervillain betrayed Big Boss. Who was Big Boss? Can t...
Soon I will be insufferable. I switched groups at work. Instead of working with the internal training group on [confidential] [confidential] [confidential], I'm working on something I can actually talk about! Unfortunately for y...
ArtGameLab, Super Going @thacher has been interesting lately if you're a San Francisco person who likes pervasive games. (That's not unusual. If you're even halfway into ARGy stuff, yawta follow her.) She mentioned that the...
Book Report: Moonwalking with Einstein So as I walk in, I'm thinking This is dumb. Who puts an art gallery in a sporting goods store? But as I walk out, I'm paying for $40 bucks of tube socks and ch– What? Book? Oh, right. Moonwalki...
kinda-Puzzle-Hunts are everywhere, even SFMOMA I went to SFMOMA today to play their ArtGameLab games that I mentioned a couple of days ago. Though I only actually played the Bedcannon Game, a fun scavenger hunt in the permanent gallery plus a hi...
>> Crossword Compiler is a Windows application. The last time I tried running it on Linux, a few years back, it didn't work. But today it works. Kinda. Far enough to fill in a grid with words, which is ...
Mechanics' Institute Library Remember a while back I screamed that USA legislators wanted to make a local censorship service a la China's Great Firewall? They're still at it. Lots of folks are protesting it today. You can, too. ...
Crossword Compiler Noob Diary Unsurprisingly, creating mediocre crossword puzzles is easy but creating good crossword puzzles is hard. Mind you, I don't feel pressured to create great crossword puzzles. For puzzlehunts, I only ne...
Book Report: The Gollywhopper Games It's young adult fiction answering the question: What would happen if there was a puzzle hunt in a toy warehouse that was magical like Charlie's Chocolate Factory? On the one hand I wanted to read th...
>> The new ice cream parlor a few blocks away has a backstory: during prohibition times, bartenders were out of work. So they went to the soda fountains and sophisticated-itized them. I felt like a n00b...
Book Report: The Art of Intrusion It's a book of hacker anecdotes. "Kevin Mitnick" is the author name on the cover, but these are stories from other hackers. They're good stories. They're not all true stories; some of them have par...
>> Todd Etter: best day job ever? ...
More Tyro Crossword Construction ramblings Some days ago, I posted some noobish thoughts about crossoword construction. I'd figured out that Nutrimatic's default word lists were good for Nutrimatic's use case, but not so great for a list of c...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even inside Puzzle Hunts The MIT Hunt had an amazing recursive puzzle. @Prestemon blogged his solve so you can experience the majesty without having to bust your own personal brain for eight hours. (Well, as I post this, he ...
>> Each morning, a food truck pulls up behind the San Francisco opera house. Its car horn plays the bugle tune First Call. A night at the opera meets a day at the races. ...
Book Report: The Seventh Level It's more puzzle-hunt young adult fiction by Jody Feldman. You remember how I liked her Gollywhopper Games book, aside from the magical realism parts? This book has a school that's also somehow the h...
Book Report: Hackerspaces: the Beginning Oh, I heard a mouse chewing above my head. I sure hope it doesn't figure out how to get into my apartment from my neighbors' apartment and... uhm, but I didn't want to talk about gnawing-spaces, I wa...
Book Report: The Information Yay, no mouse sounds latetly; I guess the mouse didn't stick around. Kinda like me when I tried to read the book The Information. DNF. This book is about information theory. It talks about symbols, l...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, so I'm traveling to DASH again Remember how last year I had a blast in NYC helping run DASH there? I'm doing something similar this year, but this time St Louis. Once again, I put myself into the hands of fate and said I'll volunt...
Book Report: The Red Blazer Girls: The Ring of Rocamadour It's more young adult puzzlehunt fiction, so you won't impress your grown-up friends for having read this. But it was fun! A group of friends at a NYC catholic school team up to solve a long-forgotte...
Comic Report: Cuba: My Revolution What was it like living in Cuba as it changed from a kleptocracy to a paranoiac batsh*t-insanocracy? It was bad. The protagonist of this comic got shot at, imprisoned, tortured, watched her family in...
Even SF Japantown Who else wants to play @realegame? It's ~1.5 hours long with about an hour of team puzzling in SF Japantown. They're running a few sessions, so you can choose when you want to play. Most of those ses...
animated gif zombocom logo The internet is not yet complete; there are still gaps. For example, today I tried to find an animated GIF of the zombo.com animated "flower" logo and couldn't find it. So I made one (with some bla...
>> Someone solved the 2-Tone Game meta yesterday, ~6 months since the previous time someone solved it. Hmm, just a few days after I mailed the Real Escape Game info-line to say "You should play this gam...
Book Report: Tic Tac Toe and other Three-in-a-Row Games I vaguely remembered that there were some three-in-a-row games that weren't tic-tac-toe, but I couldn't remember what any of them were called, so internet searching yielded nothing. Then I thought to...
>> Nice writeup of Shinteki Disneyland in Wired http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/02/shinteki-disneyland/ ...
>> I annotated a geographical location in Pinwheel.com. It might or might not be a good way to pass information for games that happen out in the world. It's new, so I'm sure it will change. For now, jus...
Book Report: Crossworld You'd think that I'd like to read a book about competitive crossword-puzzle solving featuring a first-hand report on playing in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Crossworld is such a book, fr...
Comic Report: Cages This comic is famous and arty and not my thing. The characters are artistic types; they feel trapped, they must make art to be free... Wow, deep themes. I definitely felt like a philistine for not en...
Link: Going Cardboard I enjoyed this documentary about boardgames and boardgamers, Going Cardboard. If you don't already think boardgames are fun, this movie probably won't convince you otherwise. But I think they're fun ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere Is [some of] your team hoping to head to Portland for The WarTron Game? If so, I'd like to tag along as an "embedded reporter". I.e., I'd play the game with y'all and write it up afterwards. Folks ar...
Book Report: Ignition! It's a book about the history of the development of rocket propellants. I'm not a chemist, but this was still fascinating because it talks about really dangerous stuff. The whole point of rocket prop...
Link: Ranking Wikipedia Pages This puzzle nerd has ideas on how to rank Wikipedia pages for notable-ness. Similar goals to Nutrimatic, but taking advantage of more data. Some of you folks might have some good ideas on things he c...
Book Report: Glued to Games It's a book about the psychology of games. Why do we enjoy them? It's all very well to say that "Games are fun." You could say "Paper clips are fun," but then folks would tell you that you need to be...
Comic Report: Madwoman of the Sacred Heart The plot was not so interesting but the art was awesome. Rest in peace, Mœbius. ...
>> If I win my bet, then these guys have to poke around in wolf poop. Or something like that. Petridish.org is like Kickstarter for science instead of art. ...
Book Report: Jay's Journal of Anomolies The Breatharians were not the first fasting hoaxsters, nor will they be the last. Flea circuses have a history. This book is a collection of Jay's Journal of Anomolies, essays on bits of history of s...
Pencil Bandolier progress is as difficult as you make it Look, ma, no pins! You may recall a few months back I'd attached an over-heavy counterweight to the pencil bandolier with vague intent of letting some of the extra lead weight. Today, I got around to...
Pencil Bandolier: the new configuration Before: After: I tested out the pencil bandolier at the Real Escape Game. You ask: How did it go? I say: That's why we test. Perhaps the bandolier's boldest feature were the colored carpenter penc...
Spoiler-Free Real Escape Game Notes Team Sharkbait was there! Well, they played the session before us. Rock on, Team Sharkbait. The toughest thing I did all night was give up a spot on the team with people I knew. Leading up to the ga...
Book Report: Version Control by Example For a hobby computer programming project, I used a revision control program called Veracity. It works fine. One of the Veracity programmers wrote a book about revision control; I found it cheap, so I...
Book Report: West of the West A newspaper reporter does some journalizing about whatever he likes. Since he likes California, especially the San Joaquin Valley and Fresno, the results are some pretty interesting stories... uhm, t...
Book Report: Mind Games It's a book of short stories by Richard Thieme. I saw a recording of an interesting talk he gave at DefCon. So I read this collection, which turned out to be largely about UFO sightings and the paran...
Book Report: The Timetables of History It's a summary of world history, presented as a timeline. It's a few hunded pages. The rows are years. The columns are different, uhm, sectors of culture: art, science, etc. I hear tell that this is...
Sorry About That So as Team Mystic Fish sat down at the finale of the role-playing-intense The Game earlier today, someone seated behind us cracked a joke: "Oh, you're sitting in the front row. So you inherit ou...
Book Report: This is not a Game Thanks to a Snoutcast interview, I learned of the existence of This Is Not A Game, a non-fiction book about Alternative Reality Games by Dave Szulborski (not to be confused with the novel This is Not...
Book Report: No One Thinks of Greenland It's literature. It's fiction but it's not genre fiction and it's not about undersea telegraph cables, so you'd think I wouldn't like it. Oh, there's a brief nod to the history of electronics with th...
Book Report: Maphead @KenJennings, funny Jeopardy champion, writes about maps and geography. He's into maps; he talks about why he likes them and why other people do, too. But that's not all. He talks with geography soci...
Comic Report: The New York Four It's a soap opera of young lady university students making their way in NYC. One of the protagonists prefers to interact with the world through her phone instead of face-to-face. People give her a ha...
Book Report: Kobold Guide to Board Game Design Professional game designers write essays on topics in Board Game Design. Along the way, they get into project management, prototyping, usability, playtesting, and other good stuff. As a professional ...
Book Report: The Theory that would Not Die It's a book on the history of Bayes' Theorem. Bayes' Theorem is, roughly, a handy tool for practical probability problems. Suppose you are an email system's spam filter. You see a new email message t...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere: Embedded Reporter Seeks Team I still dream of playing with your team for the WarTron game and then writing about it. If you're up for that, please let me know. Ideally, let me know before application day (just a few weeks away!)...
Book Report: The Scarlet Pimpernel Jolly English noblefolk rescue French fleeing-aristocracy from the bloody French Revolution. Hapless heroine follows her cooly competent husband around. Oh jeez, there I go judging a book from back i...
Book Report: In a Sunburned Country Bill Bryson travels to Australia and writes about the place. He's pretty funny, and Australia gives him a lot to be funny about. This is partly because Bryson is given to self-deprecation and Austral...
Book Report: Digital Forensics with Open Source Tools It's a book about how to look over a hard drive and find out "what happened here?" This is a useful skill for computer security—you might want to figure out how a virus or hacker took over a ma...
Book Report: Semper Peter Dudley wrote a book! (You might remember Peter Dudley if you worked at Geoworks back in the day.) It turned out pretty darned well. It's young adult fiction, but there's nothing wrong with read...
Book Report: Falling to Earth It's Al Worden's autobiography. Al Worden grew up a farmboy, but became an Apollo astronaut. He didn't walk on the moon. He was a pilot, excited about piloting spaceships. He was pretty excited to pi...
>> Just read @jfagone's @wired article about The World Henchmen Organization Game. (It's available on Kindle as part of the magazine.) Fun stuff! ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhen in San Mateo Because the dream of the 80s is also alive at Paine Memorial High School, here's a write-up of the Doctor When Game, a pretty amazing weekend-long puzzle-hunt time-travel-story game a bunch of folks ...
>> Thunder, lightning, tornado warning sirens, golf-ball-sized hail, rain... most adventurous DASH ever! ...
Potential Puzzle Hunters are everywhere, even St Louis While I was in St Louis to volunteer for DASH, I did some shoe-leather investigation in search of potential puzzlehunters. I had a lot of fun helping at DASH... but we only had two teams this year. T...
Books Report: Paranoia T1 Stay Alert; S1 Reality Optional; Y1 Traitor Hangout These are novels based in the world of the Paranoia paper role-playing game. I used to play this paper RGP called Paranoia. It was pretty fun. Most RPGs put emphasis on surviving: making smart tactic...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even St Louis You must enjoy this St Louis travelog, aka how I traveled to DASH4. And it's also my report on DASH4 itself. Remember when I micro-blogged about tornado warning sirens? I wasn't kidding. ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even the Sunset District Shinteki Decathlon 7 was awesome, so you might wonder: why is my Shinteki Decathlon 7 Writeup just a couple of photos and a few paragraphs that don't say much? Hey, gimme a break. It's been an e...
+1 415 868 4629 is still my phone number In case it wasn't pathetic enough that I bought a phone marketed to men compensating for something, that phone is now powerless. I don't know why it doesn't start up; this has never happened to me be...
Book Report: Too Big to Know We know a lot, and nowadays we know that we know a lot. I read a lot of books. But I read only a teeny-tiny fraction of the books that get published. And books are, in turn, just a teeny-tiny fractio...
>> Rest in peace, Uncle Dave. I miss you. And to the rest of my family: Please take it easy on the medical crises. There have been more than enough recently. ...
Site Update: Updated Resume After a four+ year job hunt, I landed a new job. Thus, I updated my resume. To save you the trouble of clicking through: I quit Google; I started at Twitter. Frequently anticipated questions: Q: OM...
Book Report: By Blood By Blood is literature but nonetheless pretty darned good. It's by Ellen Ullman so I picked it up hoping that there would be cool stories about stricken computer nerds. But it's straight-up literatur...
Pencil Bandolier: Subtle Counterweight During puzzle hunts, I run around wearing a bandolier to hold my pencils jauntily across my chest. Pencils don't weigh much, but they weigh something. Thus, I put a counterweight on the back of my ba...
Book Report: Private Wars It's been a thrilling time. I switched ISPs last week, and in so doing I b0rked my outgoing mail. But I didn't realize it. For a week, I've been thinking that I was sending mail when really I was bas...
The Wooly Pig Cafe is better than Ike's (Sorry, out of towners, this blog post is only of interest to San Franciscans.) The best sandwich place in my neighborhood is the Wooly Pig Cafe. They put together some awesome sandwiches from ingre...
>> Now that's Tronsta: Clipped some glo-sticks to the pencil bandolier. Snapping a photo because, uhm, they might not stay attached very well, so I might not be able to run around and have these thin...
Link: Your free software website I am a technical writer. Within technical writing, as with other kinds of writing, there are genres. Genres are defined by rules. If you want to write the web page for an open-source project, these a...
>> Now that's Tronsta: Identity Disc from Microsoft Puzzle Hunt 11.0. It still lights up! ...
Book Report: In the Plex Why do I keep reading Steven Levy books? They're full of mistakes. He interviews people who know a lot... and then somehow still gets it wrong. I read In the Plex because, golly, he talked to all the...
Tron and WarGames: really thick doors I'm "researching" for WarTron. I.e., I'm watching movies while waiting for batteries to recharge so that I can bring lots of batteries. I re-watched WarGames and Tron. Looking for elements in common....
Link: Robot Apocalypse http://what-if.xkcd.com/5/ #wartron Randall Munro does not fear our hypothetical robotic overlords. ...
Everything is the Same There The Tektronix business park is in Silicon Forest, not Silicon Valley. But. But they named a street after Terman nonetheless. ...
Book Report: The Mysterious Benedict Society It's a young adult adventure novel that starts out with a puzzly quiz. Kids who do well in the quiz team up to battle an evil conspiracy. This book is science fantasy, and the fantasy lost me. It's t...
>> The vacuum museum turned out to be about vacuum cleaners, not vacuum memory. In a search for retro computeriana, this is what the point of diminishing returns looks like. ...
>> (#wartron) I paused just inside the arcade's front door to let my eyes adjust. Adjust to the low light; adjust to a new intensity of purpose. I was in an arcade. There was an arcade in Tron. GC had t...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Portland #wartron was pretty superb and Team Los Jefes was a great team to play with. Portland has some great locations, so there was a lot of "wow" as we piled out of the van. (I'm not sure that I recommend ...
Book Report: Taking People With You It's a management book. It was written by a guy who worked at Pepsi, so you probably don't want his advice about what things are worth doing; he chose to sell sugar water instead of change the world....
Comic Report: Papercutter 15 I was up in Portland for the WarTron Game, but I got into town a couple of days early to visit with relatives and ask them to think of locations that might be used in the WarTron game. I was especial...
Book Report: Ready Player One It's a fun little story about some gamers. Some folks are really into this book and love it and will talk your ear off about it. Some folks have backlashed against that and will talk your ear off abo...
WarTron Spoiler Warning: this post contains a WarTron spoiler. Actually, it's even worse than that, because this post will spoil the surprise of a puzzle but won't even give you the answer. What this is... This is a...
Book Report: Homicide This week, teams are playing in the Ravenchase Great America Race, solving puzzles day after day, driving from city to city. And thus I've been outed: Team Bloody Boneless Smoking and Burning spotted...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even London DASH, the pan-USA puzzlehunt, is coming to London next year. So next year when I ask the DASH GCs "What city could use another volunteer? Tell me where I'm going on vacation this year." I might end u...
Book Report: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close I'm thinking about folks being brave today, so here's a book report about a story with a brave protagonist. My mom knew I'd like this novel: It's about a puzzlehunt. Or, rather, it's a sort of myster...
Link: Nordic Larp Won the Diana Jones Award! Good to see careful documentation of far freaking weirdness get some recognition! ...
Book Report: Bunny's Alphabetical Misadventures It's a color art book that's only available for Kindle—so if you don't have a color Kindle, this one might not be so great for you. But if you do have a color Kindle, this book has cute bunny d...
Milestone: 21 Million Hits It's the site's 21 millionth hit! (As usual, this isn't as impressive a number as you might think at first: these "hits" include, e.g., one for each graphic on each page loaded, visits from search-en...
The Bible Repairman and Other Stories It's short stories by Tim Powers, the guy who wrote The Anubis Gates, Declare, and On Stranger Tides. If you liked those, you'll probably like these. ...
Link: Ravenchase Great America Race writeup A team of west-coast puzzlehuntists played through the whole Ravenchase Great America Race last week, solving in cities from Washington DC to Boston. They blogged the race, mostly posting a writeup t...
Book Report: Solaris Humans try to communicate with alien intelligence and wacky tragedy ensues. Some science fiction authors use "first contact" scenarios to point out things about humanity; but you never really believe...
Pencil Bandolier: Overloaded The other day I'm walking along and thinking Well it was quite a coincidence running into her here because (1) when am I ever in the Mission and (2) she moved to Switzerland which would normally be e...
Book Report: The New New Thing It's a biography of Jim Clark, a high-tech entrepeneur. This book talks about a period of his life after he helped found SGI and Netscape, when he was working on health-service software and designing...
WarTron Photos I took photos at The WarTron Game. Other folks took photos of the WarTron Game. Please enjoy these photos of the WarTron Game. Special Bonus: also my Portland travelog of the stuff I did before WarTr...
Book Report: The Cowboy and His Elephant It's a biography: The original Marlboro Man wasn't a ranch hand; he was more of an oil-tycoon-heir who dabbled in ranching. He's the "cowboy" in the title. I wasn't expecting the Marlboro Man, but I ...
Link: Anagramr anagramming game This is me with the high score at an anagramming game: Leaderboard: @lahosken:170 @stalefries:111 @nwerneck:67 @ixpu:56 @ckolderup:55— An Anagram Game (@anagramr) August 30, 2012 You might wo...
Book Report: The Restoration Game It's a scifi thriller whose protagonist is a game designer. This book was fun. ...
Comment on GFPuzz's WarTron writeup I tried leaving a comment on GFPuzz's WarTron writeup, but then LiveJournal told me my comment had been automagically marked as Spam. (I dunno why. Maybe because I use an OpenID account on LJ?) Anyho...
>> My high score on @anagramr didn't last long. Pretend you're surprised. ...
Book Report: Steve Jobs About twenty years ago, I switched from using a Macintosh to Windows. I was surprised at how much easier the Windows machine was to use. I was a Mac user, I'd listen to a bunch of other Mac users all...
Closed my LinkedIn Account Happy Labor Day. Last week, one of my ex-coworkers pointed out that I hadn't gotten around to updating my LinkedIn profile to reflect my new job. And I thought "Why would I update my profile on that ...
Book Report: The Four Steps to the Epiphany You're trying to put together a new product. Steven Gary Blank, author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany, doesn't want you to give the early version away. His test for a viable product isn't "Will pe...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Chicago @rocketlass took some awesome photos of a puzzlehunt at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo which was maybe called "The Case of the Fabulous Fauna" or maybe that was just a clever name for the photo set. Don'...
Book Report: Founders at Work It's a book of interviews with people who founded high-tech companies. It's pretty darned interesting to hear the stories from the horses' mouths, as it were. There's not just one "Founder story". Re...
I'm Jill Stein! Which 2012 USA Presidential Candidate are you? Take this personality quiz and find out! This quiz also says that my opinions are closer to those of Democrats than Greens. Since Stein is the Green Pa...
Book Report: Boswell's Life of Johnson Oh man I only made it like halfway through part 1. People keep recommending this to me. Samuel Johnson was some writer. As such, he produced some interesting work. But at least as near as I coul...
WarTron Spoiler: How We Didn't Enter the World of Tron Once again, I'm writing about something that didn't happen during WarTron, which is the worst kind of spoiler, but sometimes you need to write about things that didn't happen. WarTron was based on t...
Comic Report: Apocalypse Nerd Since Valve is in the news with lots of news about virtual reality, you might think if I was going to review a Peter Bagge comic, it would be Reset. But only if you didn't know how far behind my book...
Geoworks SF Lunch Weds 9/12! Update: This lunch is happening. Originally, this blog post was just checking for interest. There was interest! Huzzah. Zero Zero Wednesday noon. Trolling for interest: Any ex-Geoworks folks up for ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even San Jose BANG 33 will be a good puzzlehunt; you should register to play it September 29. It's a re-run; I played it some weeks ago. The good part about remembering it is that it makes me smile. The bad part a...
Book Report: The Vanishing Violin It's another YA puzzle-mystery featuring the Red Blazer Girls. (You might vaguely remember that I read the first book in the series a while back. This time, the puzzlehunt story is a bit more believa...
Link: Cosmo, the Hacker "God" Who Fell to Earth This article about an identy thief is pretty amazing. Perhaps 25% of its amazing-ness comes from the story itself: how on earth does a 15-year old kid get so good at navigating bureaucracy that he ca...
Book Report: Hide Me Among the Graves Tim Powers writes historical... fantasy? Horror? He writes alternate histories as they should have happened if we lived in a world of the supernatural. He writes histories that show how much less unl...
>> From the list of recent edits to Scala School, a tutorial for the Scala programming language, you might guess that puzzle nerds were trying to sneak in some easter eggs: You'd see a bunch of changes ...
Book Report: Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman worked on some of the greatest psychological thingies of our time. Behavioral economics, he was there for that. The difference between things that we think make us happy and really ma...
Link: Where Else? / exploring nonchalance It's a really good write-up of the Nonchalance/Jejune Institute Game. It's a Cardhouse product. That means it's written by someone who's a lot closer to the Nonchalant wavelength than I am; and also ...
Book Report: The Evolution of Cooperation It's a book by Robert Axelrod, who set up some groundbreaking game theory experiment/contests back in the day. He set up a computer program that would run other computer programs. Specifically, it ra...
Link: BAPHL of the Bands! BAPHL of the Bands! Puzzle hunts are everywhere, even Boston, yes indeed. ...
Book Report: Low Life Many quick snippets about New York's criminals and underclass. It was kinda fun, but a few days after reading it, I remember almost nothing. I could say that was a metaphor for New York itself, alway...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Truckee, potentially "I have been working on puzzles for my own race that I want to have in Truckee as a Girl Scout fund raiser." –Dave Rector From the looks of his sample puzzle, he might have been inspired by Sh...
Book Report: The Tangled Web The Tangled Web talks about why web programming is doomed to be insecure for a long time to come. Nothing works quite right: networks, name servers, OSs, browsers, web servers, headers, cookies, form...
>> Three years after the last time, a system upgrade went wrong. This time, I had a backup (thanks, @DropBox) and I hadn't forgotten the password to decrypt my backed-up seekrit files—much less tr...
Book Report: The Mongoliad, Book One Book Two of the Mongoliad ships today so here's a report on, uhm, Book One. I'm a professional technical writer, but I did a stint with some instructional designers. Thus, I was forced to confront t...
>> This week's snoutcast had an interesting tidbit "future events: bikes? Seattle? stay tuned!" And also some thoughts on puzzle-based learning if you're an educator. They're interviewing a math teache...
Link: I Troll Econo http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/econotrolls-illustrated-bestiary.html ...
Book Report: A New Culture of Learning It's a book about learning; it's a book about culture. Our culture has brought forth all of these fancy new communications technologies. If there are some facts I need to know, I can probably look t...
>> People are surprised that Barefoot Contessa's at @sfcarts Stanyan/Waller. But "no shoes, no service" law sez she's gotta eat outdoors. ...
Book Report: Distrust that Particular Flavor It's a book of articles by William Gibson; quick essays, book reviews, book introductions. There are some fun ones, there are some clunkers. If you think you'd like a book of Gibson articles, you're ...
>> I used to stop in at the Roastery for the decor. They used Papyrus font despite being across the street from an art school. I always wondered what woke the art students up more: the coffee or the gra...
>> @HollowSF now has @DandelionChoco. nextdoorsweets.com is open and serving boba and gelato. I'm gonna get fat. ...
>> http://ericberlin.com/?p=5066 is Heisenbergian puzzling: the observer gets an answer though it's not a puzzle. ...
Link: Middle-Aged Software Ranty Chris Crawford reminds you that your software project doesn't need a red sports car. And probably doesn't need half the new features that your power users agitate for. ...
Book Report: Republic, Lost When Solyndra was falling apart, Republicans were screaming: these green companies were just boondoggles, false fronts to scoop up government money. It's easy to dismiss their complaints as a bunch o...
>> If you'd asked me what makes a good refrigerator, I would have thought of insulation and, uhm, cooling power. I would not have thought of weight. But oh man it's nice that newer refrigerators are lig...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Joe and Lauren's House in Berkeley A puzzlehunt aimed at beginners, from a beginner's point of view: Cultists of Cthulhu: Part 1, Part 2 ...
>> Smell of burning rubber and sounds of an unhappy motor came from below the refrigerator. I guess the heat wave overpowered it. I'm thinking back and appreciating last night's ice cubes. ...
Twitter is Hiring a Tech Writer ...or maybe more than one. I dunno, @JoinTheFlock is mysterious to me. I didn't even know the listing was up until someone told me. Am I under a non-solicit thingy with you? I.e., do you work at Goo...
Book Report: Leaving Cheyenne Three characters with intertwined fates grow old on ranch land in Texas. It starts in the early 20th century and makes it to mid-century and life gets easier but it never really gets easy. ...
The Power of Type Theory in the Context of Buffoonery In programming, there are types. E.g., if your program says x = 2, it's also useful to say that x has the Integer type. That allows us to organize our functions based on the kinds of thingies they ca...
Book Report: All the President's Men I didn't think I'd learn anything from this book, but I was wrong. I thought everybody knows the story of All the President's Men: Plucky reporters Woodward and Bernstein investigate Watergate; they ...
>> @_dev_joe, maintainer of the MIT Mystery Hunt Puzzle Index,, has announced an update. More puzzles, more organized, plus a tidbit especially interesting to me since I haven't played in the Mystery Hu...
Book Report: Railsea Post-apocalyptic Mevillean steampunk fantasy. Fun little read. ...
>> My high school chums and I used to go to the No-Name Sushi restaurant every so often. We stopped going after it caught fire. (How does a restaurant specializing in raw fish catch fire? Anyhow.) I wal...
>> @ikai pointed out an unintentionally funny article The Real Reason Silicon Valley Coders Write Bad Software. The reason? Because they aren't better English writers. This article made it into the Atla...
Book Report: Broken Ballots A few people want to steal elections. A few billion people want fair elections. How do you make an election un-stealable? It's not easy. Elections do't run themselves; we need election officials. Fol...
>> Tauba Auerbach's 50/50 Floor is on display at SFMOMA. You may recall that Auerbach is an artist who can think like a code-y puzzler though she sidled away from signal and over to noise for a while. T...
Book Report: The Puzzler's Mansion It's the third Winston Breen novel. Thus, it's a YA puzzle mystery. It's pretty awesome having a puzzlehunter protagonist who actually thinks like a puzzlehunter. E.g., he's at a puzzlehunt put on b...
>> You SHOULD know today is World Standards Day. You MAY celebrate. ...
Linux Mint is pretty awesome I switched my main desktop computer over to Linux Mint a while back. I'm liking it a lot. It feels a little silly to say that I like it better than Ubuntu—if I understand what I see in the upda...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Portland *SPOILERS* Do you plan to play a game with Los Jefes? If so, beware of spoilers. I just posted a write-up about playing with them in the WarTron Game. After reading that write-up, you'll lose the fe...
Link: SpliceVine interview with Sara Thacher @thacher is a big name in the @jejuneinstitute game and other TransMedia experience/game/thingies. This site about video editing(?!) interviewed her, and she mentions an early influence: Janet Cardif...
Book Report: Team Geek Ben and Fitz wrote a book about coexisting with your fellow geeks on team projects without going mad. Those of you who are still reading this book report instead of going to Amazon... probably don't ...
Presentation: Tech Writing for non-Tech Writers I'm a rara avis at Twitter, the only full-time technical writer. As such, my life is that of a celebrity: I'm constantly being invited to events, everybody wants to be seen with me, etc etc. At least...
Geoworks Lunch photos I found a couple of photos from the ex-Geoworks Lunch Sep 2012 that I'd snapped with my phone. Don't worry; the the food hadn't arrived when I snapped these photos, so you won't see nerds eating. ...
Book Report: Slayground, Plunder Squad, Butcher's Moon It's action novels in which Parker the ruthless amoral thief. He is pursued into an amusement park that's shut down for the winter. And then a lot of ruthless people die. He gets involved with an art...
Twitter -> RSS bookmarklet updated I wrote a bookmarklet so that if I was visiting someone's twitter page, I could bring up the feed of their twitter stream in Google Reader. But the feed URLs moved, so I had to update my bookmarklet....
SF folks want to see Jejune Institute Movie Nov 9? Do I know you? And do you want to see The Institute, a mockumentary about the Jejune Institute? Do you want to see it at San Francisco's Roxie Theater on Nov 9 (a Friday)? I kinda want to see it. But...
Book Report: Positively Fifth Street I liked Word Freak, a book about a reporter who studies up and becomes a champion Scrabble player. And I told some automated recommendation services that I liked it. Thus, those automated recommendat...
Scala, part of the new gig Bumped into @kberg and @adamsah yestere'en. We talked about work. They said interesting things which I won't repeat because oh man what if one of them accidentally let slip some confidential informat...
Jotting Notes on Corey Anderson GC Summit 2012 Presentation: Running Someone Else's Game It's a talk by Corey Anderson, a survey of this year's talk theme: games run more than once. Simulcasts, replays, and the like. My rambling asides are in italics and I take some pretty egregious summ...
Book Report: The Elements of User Experience This is a book with a great premise and then problems in the details. The story behind the book is this: Jesse James Garrett made a great diagram about how to organize... let's say it's about how to ...
>> Why are you reading this instead of staring at http://xkcd.com/1127/? ...
>> Windows Phone event setting up at San Francisco @BillGrahamCivic, preparing for major crowd control. ...
>> Human flesh search engine comes to San Francisco. I am impressed; it helps when the target posts to Facebook. ...
>> Pretty sure that @GoogleArt lets me see this intricate old astrolabe more closely online (if I zoom in) than I could in the "live" museum, where it would be in a glass case. And what are the chances ...
Open Source, part of the new gig It feels like Twitter has open-sourced a bigger fraction of its software than Google has. I haven't scientifically measured that; and even so, I hedged with "fraction"—Google has open-sourced a...
>> A day late, I figured out my Hallowe'en costume. On me, it's pretty scary. On someone of your sterling judgement, dear reader, it would be less so. ...
Book Report: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality @hpmor is Harry Potter fan fiction...no, wait, don't run away. I'm serious. It's funny because in this book, Harry Potter doesn't just let himself get pushed around by the plot. He thinks things thro...
Link: The Animator Letters Project The Animator Letters Project publishes letters from experienced animators, letters exhorting young animators to keep at it, hone their craft, etc etc. It's inspiring; it might be especially inspiring...
>> Speaking of "what's this kind of puzzle called?", what is "Put together the letter-triples ION ISS NSM TRA to form a word"? It's kind of an anagram, but easier since you've got three triples instead ...
Jotting Notes on Jett Jones GC Summit 2012 Presentation: WHO Re-Cast, Creator's Perspective It's a talk by Jett Jones, who was on GC for the original Seattle WHO game and, with a few members of GC, flew down to NorCal for the San Francisco re-play. My rambling asides are in italics and I ta...
>> A Braille printing company wants someone who knows Morse code for an "event." Too bad I'm nowhere near Louisville, because that sounds like it could be the best event ever. ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even NYC New York's opening-soon Museum of Math is holding a puzzlehunt December 16th. On the one hand, I'm theoretically not interested, since the hunt is targeted at teen novices. On the other hand, MoMath ...
>> Saw a Hash House Harriers pack run past, my first time seeing a live pack instead of just leftover chalk marks on the ground. At first I was kind of disappointed. I thought "If I were the hare, I wo...
Book Report: Claudius the God The people of the United States of America came together to elect a man who would turn this nation into a panopticon—choosing him over another man who was all that plus bigotry. Bigotry was vot...
Link: Life and #LIPA after Sandy Sad read about NY electricity not coming back http://bit.ly/SSKBz2 ...
Jotting Notes on Fundamentals of IRL Game Design It's a seminar by @jettstein. (You think I'm typoing "GC summit talk by Bob Schaffer" really badly, but no: instead of watching a GC Summit video today, I did something else.) I attended Fundamentals...
Wanted: Wanna-Be Puzzlehunters near SF You've had this conversation. They ask you what you did last weekend. You say you puzzlehunted. They say OMG that sounds amazing, I wanna play. You encourage them to look at some MIT Mystery Hunt puz...
>> #ThankYouForYourService Morning Plan: write flavortext doggerel until 11, then two minutes of no-doggerel silence. If you've seen my poetry, you know you're thankful for those two minutes. ...
Message to Puzzlehunter Wanna-Bes Someone smart asked for some draft email text they could to a San Francisco-area puzzlehunter wanna-be. So I wrote this: Playing in puzzlehunts is fun, but can be kinda like diving into the deep en...
I have infinity words for you Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers... ...
Book Report: Liars and Outliers It's a book about security. It's a book about how to think your way through security problems. Not just thinking about where to throw up barriers—also about how to think up policies that won't ...
>> Noting the location of a shop that laminates, but a cafe is still my fave way to keep a puzzle dry. ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even SOMA As part of the Come Out and Play festival, the Idryos ran the Black Bart's Hidden Hoard Game. My team conked out early, but I got a blurry photo (and three not-so-blurry ones). ...
Jotting Notes on Bob Schaffer's 2012 GC Summit Talk: WHO Recast, Bay Area Perspective It's a talk by Bob Schaffer, who was "Mister Universe" on GC for the SF bay area re-cast of the WHO game and. My rambling asides are in italics and I take some pretty egregious summarize|rephrase|tot...
Book Report: How to Sharpen Pencils I'm a technical writer. I write instructions. I often team up with a "Subject Matter Expert," someone who's really good at doing something. I ask them what they do and they write it down. You might w...
Richard Benjamin on "The Last of Sheila" The A.V. Club isn't completely worthless without their crossword. They interviewed the actor Richard Benjamin about, among other things, "The Last of Sheila." Mostly stuff that you already knew, sure...
>> 0830 and it's gettin' real at Whole Foods already. Happy Thanksgiving and remember we're all on the same side here. ...
Book Report: Many Subtle Channels in praise of potential literature In honor of USA's Buy Nothing Day, a report on a book that I checked out of the library: Many Subtle Channels It's a book about the OuLiPo. You've probably heard of them: they're a literary cabal in...
>> Almost talked myself into getting a 3D printer: "I could put Braille on everything." But I remembered I like Morse better. ...
Puzzle Hunts finish Everywhere, even SOMA Team Anonymice found Black Bart's Treasure Hoard! Now somebody start pressuring somebody to come up with a writeup. My team conked out early, so I don't have the moral authority to pressure anybody f...
It's going to be OK http://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/importable/20121128.png ...
>> I dunno whether it says more about the state of Mac software or my ignorance thereof, but I have an easier time making Memes at home on a Linux box than at work. ...
Link: Puzzlehunt Pencils In case you've run low on Shinteki graph paper, Eric Harshbarger will sell you pencils adorned with code alphabets. Hmm, they're #2 pencils. For collaborative outdoor nighttime solving, that's probab...
>> I still like my pencil bandolier better than this kid's crayon bandolier. But I have to admit he wears his better. Photo lifted from rentadisco; I dunno if they're the originators or got it from e...
>> Playtest went well. Wow, I figured folks would conk out after an hour or two, but they just kept going and going. Not everything got tested with n00bs; some folks showed up who'd played in puzzlehunt...
We're going to need poems Lots and lots of poems ...
>> A team that started on the 2-Tone game a couple of years ago is making some impressive progress tonight. Oh man, and they just figured out that they're looking for something in the dark in the Sunset...
>> When we figured out that Black Bart's Hidden Hoard would take us to a labyrinth in SOMA, I was certain what GC meant, but wasn't too pleased. Though it turns out I was certainly wrong. On 8th Street,...
Newbie Game RFP There's this sketch of an online puzzlehunt that's aimed at puzzlehunt newbies—it doesn't expect teams to be able to recognize, e.g., semaphore flags. This game would stick around—if, yea...
>> Excerpt from the 2012 Santarchy/Santacon Convocation: Do a tug-of-war, a treasure hunt, take over alleys, take over stoops, driveways, churches, bring snow and have a snowball fight… do somet...
Book Report: Lightning Man It's a biography of Samuel F. B. Morse, the namesake of my favorite puzzlehunt code. So it's about time I read up on the man's life. He wanted to be an artist. He wanted to paint beautiful scenes, n...
Variation on the Newbie Game RFP I'm working on this game that's like a bootcamp for newbie puzzlehunters. Ideally, if a team finishes one or two, e.g., Shinteki-style puzzles, they'd get some kind of a notice "Wow, you're doing gre...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Kickstarter The Puzzazz folks want to send you a puzzle a month, a sort of time-release extravaganza. Or something like that, check it out. Be sure to watch the video for a new entry in your "Wei-Hua Puts His To...
Book Report: The Corner It's a year in the life of an open-air drug market in Baltimore. Most of the folks in the neighborhood are addicts and/or dealers, and thus most of the folks in this book are, too. I didn't finish re...
>> Couldn't think of a good graphic for a Playtester "merit badge". So that page shows an broken-image graphic. That might be more appropriate than any actual graphic could ever be. ...
>> If you want to make conspirators feel sheepish, don't say they're in a "conspiracy." Say they're in a "complot." Oh man, complot. Scheming and machinating never sounded so dull. ...
Jotting Notes on Scott Blomquist's GC Summit 2012 Presentation: Designing Portable Puzzles It's Scott Blomquist talking about Designing Portable Puzzles. This means "portable" as in "works well for simulcasting." As in "If your puzzle doesn't require a giant troll statue under a bridge, ma...
th;dr I was only partway through this book's intro before my wrists got tired just from holding it up. I had to stop reading it. Thank you, Kindle inventors! If it weren't for you, I probably wouldn't hav...