Larry Hosken: New: 2013

Photo: Niantic Ave If you walk from San Francisco to the Daly City BART station, you could pass this. ...
Book Report: Professor Moriarty: the Hound of the D'Urbervilles What if there were sequels to a bunch of pulp books I never read in which their protagonists confronted Professor Moriarty (of the Sherlock Holmes stories)? Those Sherlock Holmes stories that I thoug...
Better decorating through anagramming From a crafty blog post on making a sign of hanging letters: I would have spell Hanuka the “normal” way, Hanukkah, but I ran out of scrapbook paper since I kept having issues until I figured ou...
>> The @Shinteki logo, before it was a triangle, was a seated discus thrower. (Specifically, it was a mash-up of Rodin's Thinker and Discus Thrower statues.) That was pretty funny because ha ha who thin...
>> New-to-me Golden Gate Bridge overlook by Battery Godfrey ...
not exemplary I laughed at @sec_reactions so much that I decided to make a Tech Writing Reactions tumblr. But then I realized that would take effort, so instead I just captioned one Star Trek photo. ...
Book Report: The Work Revolution We hold these truths to be self-evident: Company dress codes encourage workers to spend time thinking about their dry-cleaning. That's weaksauce. Incentives that reward time spent in process instea...
Jotting Notes on Linda Holman's GC Summit 2012 Presentation: Resurrecting Aquarius It's Linda Holman talking about Resurrecting Aquarius. (If these "jotting notes" blog entries make no sense to you, that's because I'm jotting notes based on watching videos of lectures. That link ba...
Link: Drawing versus Writing Pencils If you doubted my sharp-pencils-aren't-so-great rant, check this out: Drawing versus Writing Pencils. Focus on the user; the ideal pencil sharpness follows the user's intent. ...
Resources for nerds who want in to MIT #MysteryHunt ? I'm working on an online puzzle trail for newbs. Along the way, I try to point the newbs at, y'know, real puzzlehunts where they can put their new-found knowledge of Morse code to use. I'd like a pag...
Book Report: The Mongoliad Book Two Several characters flung across Eurasia. I wonder the authors are going to tie up all the loose ends. ...
Link: Alice's Puzzle Page This was a fun puzzle trail. Trail? Extravaganza? Set of interlinked puzzles? You know. One of them things. Give it a whirl. New blog post: One of my favorite #puzzles! Alice's Puzzle Page vroospeak...
>> Have you gotten around to ordering @MazeofGames yet? It's gonna be a puzzly choose-your-own-adventure book. Like The Dextrus of Tempus, only moreso. (But I bet if you know what The Dextrus of Tempus ...
Link: advice for running a Mystery Hunt art team It's a lot like design+art other web app projects but everyone's a volunteer and you also have to worry about, e.g., spoilers in your stylesheets. ...
Book Report: Just Kids Before Patti Smith was a rock-and-roller, she was a poet. Well, she was an artist in search of a medium. So was Robert Mapplethorpe—they were a couple. And when they stopped being a couple, the...
Book Report: Tubes It's a book about the physical structure of the internet. So you'd expect that I couldn't put it down. But oh man. Early on in the book, there's a sentence I share all these quotidian details of tr...
Milestone: 22 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 18 (edit: can you tell I "wrote" the intro to this post by copy-pasting an old post?) 22 millionth hit. (Not as impressive as it sounds. It's hits: someone loading a page that sh...
RFP: Request for Location-Based Puzzles from Your Hometown I encourage you to send me a location-based puzzle from your hometown. Or a few, even. The online-puzzle-trail-in-the-making Order of the Octothorpe now has some location-based puzzles... but they...
Steam for Linux: a thing that exists I set it up so that I could play @DoubleFine's The Cave... though it turns out that the Linux port of that game hasn't materialized yet. So that part didn't come together. Nevertheless, I got to play...
>> The people of Brisbane, California, decorate the town's fire plugs. When a fire plug wears out, they don't want to discard their art, so they have a plug preserve. ...
App Engine Programmers: Go just got practical (versus just plain fun) tl;dr someone wrote some code that showed me how to speed up a game, so I'm happy. If you're a Pythonic App Engine programmer, then you know that AppStats and NDB make your life a lot easier. AppSta...
>> This tech talk about election software http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBSiuVGQECs shows politicians can't cooperate. In theory, it's a UX programmer talking about how he and other geeks worked with t...
>> I dropped my phone, fumbled it while carrying a vegi-sushi burrito from the @we2sushi food cart and tweeting a photo. I make fun of hipsters a lot, but I grant them some respect: their habits require...
Book Report: An Object of Beauty It's a novel about people and their relation to art: loving it, collecting it, selling it. In theory, art exists for beauty; but what if you own a painting that's beautiful and valuable? Maybe you co...
Jotting Notes on Andy Rich's GC Summit 2012 Presentation: MSPH14 Simulcast Post-Mortem It's a talk by Andy Rich, who was on GC for Microsoft Puzzlehunt 14. Well that link is a link to a video of his talk. This here is my notes. [My rambling asides are in italics] and I take some pretty...
>> Before watching the CNY parade, I kibbitzed a bit at the CNYTH. And before that, I swung by the Ferry Building to check on a 2-Tone Game puzzle, make sure its environmental data was still there. But ...
>> The moment of disorientation when you realize you've been wrong... It's just a moment, long overshadowed by the joy of figuring out how to fix it. If you love to solve problems, you will never lack ...
>> I'm just back from GC Summit 2013, in which Game Control folks talk about how to run games without going crazy...crazier than necessary. Folks presented on a cool variety of games this year. Well, th...
Bird Names, part of the new gig It's an exaggeration to say that Twitter's moving from a Big-Ball-of-Mud monolithic RnR architecture to a loose confederacy of services, but after you tone down the hyperbole that's roughly what's ha...
Link: Library Hotel NYC's Library Hotel is arranged by the Dewey Decimal system. If you stay on the 5th floor, that's the 500 section (science); if you're in room 500.001, that's the math room. (Why isn't the math room ...
One San Francisco Octothorpean Puzzle Ahead of Opening Day I'm not a super-duper expert about location-based puzzles. I don't know exactly when the world is going to change and thusly mess up a puzzle. But I know that it happens. This weekend, I found a nice...
Book Report: Java Concurrency in Practice I work with the Scala programming language but Scala runs on the JVM, the Java Virtual Machine. This is pretty important. Java turned out to be an icky programming language, but some smart folks have...
>> The Maze of Games is going to be a book with at least 30-something (I lost count) puzzles by folks you've heard of. These are the last 30-something hours of its kickstarter. So if you haven't ordered...
Link: Can you code better than a fourth grader? What if we're talking about a Vietnamese fourth grader? Neil Fraser went to Vietnam, and since he's a programming/educating nerd, he checked out the local computer science programs. He didn't just ch...
>> Online tax filing could use decent image meme support. In the USA, this should be a fine way to fill in Federal Form 6251: ...
>> I learned two vitally important things today: Google Image Search can now filter for animated GIFs There is a Polish phrase "Not my circus, not my monkey." And thus now this exists: Original m...
Book Report: Flow I got this book on Kindle and kind of wish I'd read the paper version instead. The Kindle version is broken partway through: if you try to read past the first page of the endnotes, you get kicked out...
Syllables from Phonemes: Nothing is E-Z I want to write puzzles that use word-sounds. And by "write," I mean I want a computer to do all the hard work while I stare off into space and think about burritos. But word sounds are tricky for co...
Brave It took all my courage to look up the etymology for "cockchafer" but it wasn't so bad. (The entomology's kind of gross, though.) ...
Book Report: The Best Writing in Mathematics 2012 This was a mixed bag. The good news is that not all the writing in this collection is aimed at mathematicians, since I'm not a mathematician. The bad news is that a bunch of math writing for non-math...
>> I read that the California High Speed Rail Authority filed a lawsuit "v. All Persons Interested," which as near as I can tell is litigation-talk for "Come at me, bro." ...
>> Are you a Seattle-area computer programmer? Do I know you? Do you not work for Google, for which I'm still in the no-poaching time-frame? Would you like to be hounded by yet more recruiters, as long ...
>> My thinking about Java programming dependencies and their exclusions in mvn Original image: Head Like an Orange ...
>> Buying tracks to construct a music puzzle. Don't even want to think about what my Amazon recommendations will look like after this. ...
Link: The International Code of Signals I watched the new Studio Ghibli film, "From up on Poppy Hill" and of course all I could think about was the marine signal flags. In the movie, our heroine, who lives in portside Yokohama, hoists sig...
Book Report: City of Fortune It's a history of Venice back in the days when Venice was a big deal. If you think that Realpolitik is hardass nowadays, go read your history and weep for the soul of humanity. Venice came to power ...
Post about Post-Post Situation Part of a 2-Tone Game puzzle used to be something like, "Look south-by-southwest for an easily recognizable post; on the sidewalk beneath it is a quote; the letters on the corners of the quote form a...
>> A resident addressed me: "It would be interesting to set up a time-lapse camera here." I was walking at Waldo Point Harbor in Sausalito, a big houseboat area. Specifically, I was stepping off a tempo...
Another San Francisco Octothorpean Puzzle Ahead of Opening Day [Update: Don't play this puzzle; playtesting reveals that it wasn't actually fun.] I'm revealing another San Francisco puzzle from the Octothorpean Order online puzzlehunt: Bunny. No, the Octothorpe...
Looking for Group: Ravenchase Great America Hunt Are you putting together a team for Ravenchase's Great America Hunt? I wanna play. You should pick me for your team. The good news: Scurrying around all day solving puzzles seems normal to me. The ...
I played The Cave and it was pretty good All those good things you read about The Cave are true; you should go play it. All those good things you read about The Cave are probably more interesting than anything I'd write; there are a lot of ...
Jotting Notes on Lars Nerback's LARP talk: Three Ways to Make Games More Inclusive It's Nordic LARP Talks Oslo 2013, specifically Lars Nerback presenting three ways to make games more inclusive. (Thanks to Sara Thacher for pointing out that these talks are online) It's not a GC Sum...
Jotting Notes on Jana Pouchl�'s LARP talk: Welcome to Larp. Let�s Play It's Nordic LARP Talks Oslo 2013, specifically Jana Pouchl�'s talking about how to make LARP more accessible and welcoming to newbs. It's not a GC Summit talk; LARPing is not The Game; but I'm jotti...
Book Report: Subversives (The FBI's war on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise To Power) This book about Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement was pretty amazing. It was also a slow read. Usually you say "So good I couldn't put it down," but in this case I might say "So good that I pu...
Things Will Shortz doesn't want to do …perhaps revealed via this New York Times job posting for a Director of Games, which I found out about thanks to the excellent Octothorpean playtest team WBYeats. Optimize games for discover...
>> I attended a talk by some folks from Odyssey Works (the inaugural talk of the Adventure Design Group Meetup). O.W. presented about their art: situations, each with an audience of one. It works like ...
Taking Shape (where the shape is #) Months ago, excellent partly-puzzlehunt-naive team Drop_Table was the (brave!) first playtest team of the Octothorpean Game. It took a long time to incorporate their feedback. The game has many, many...
>> 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 puzzl...
>> 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 mirt...
Link: that Jejune Institute Movie 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 whatev...
Want to Playtest the Octothorpean Game puzzlehunt 5/25, 5/26, 5/27 or 6/2? 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...
>> 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...
>> 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 t...
>> 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 octothorp...
DASH LAX 2013 photos 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 vo...
>> 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, n...
>> Returned safely to San Francisco. Sketching out plan of restorative burrito consumption for next few days. ...
NYC and LI photos A week ago, I was in NYC and Long Island. I took photos. Some interesting things happened. I hope someday to write some of them down. July, maybe? Let's say July. ...
>> Listened to Snoutcast discussion on puzzle-y activities to keep a team enthused during the months between hunts. Does it make sense to create a wiki listing puzzle extravaganzas? Is puzzle extravagan...
>> I listened to the "Famine Game Reaping" snoutcast and then posted a question in the form of a personal failure of imagination: What if you were a GC running an application process and you wanted some...
>> Link: The tale of this year's E3 Booth Bros from the perspective of @MylesNye the game designer ...
>> Those New York photos from a few weeks back now have some words attached. But I didn't emerge from this trip with so many anecdotes. When it's hot, I just kind of shuffle around, whine, and don't do ...
Lumber Party: a Quick Online Puzzle Hunt If you enjoy puzzles, you might set aside some time on the 21st (a Sunday) for Lumber Party. It'll be a chance to solve a self-contained arc of puzzles from the Octothorpean Order (which continues to...
>> It's Afternoon at Isotope a.k.a., one GC member's write-up about about #terngame 2013. I don't know how coherent it is, but by golly if I don't write it down now, I bet that this week's going to expu...
>> The Secret Puzzle Hunt Cabal is a treasure. You can tell 'em "I'm thinking of running a hunt on the 13th" and, between them, they know when the MS Intern Hunt is, the NPL convention, the MS Puzzle Sa...
Book Report: Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China Deng Xiaoping steered China out of the disaster of the Cultural Revolution; he seemed pretty enlightened until June 4, 1989 when the military cleared Tiananmen Square of protesters. How did it go so ...
Please... Hold Your Applause Sometimes you need an animated GIF of Midnight Madness' Leon presenting a la: If that describes your situation, please enjoy this larger, uncaptioned version: ...
Milestone: 23 Million Hits It's the site's 23 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...
>> This isn't jotting notes on @writerguygames' presentation at the Adventure Design Group meetup hosted by the lovely folks at The Go Game. Rather, this is notes on the conversation afterwards. Because...
Book Report: Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore Like every novel-reading San Francisco bay area tech worker, I enjoyed Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. Its computer and code bits are more science-fantasy than hard science fiction, but they support...
Link: Puzzle Pile interview about Lumber Party In which we find out that The Octothorpean Order is partly about puzzles but also partly about instructional design, human cognition, and the limited power of written instruction to inspire action. T...
Link: Truckee Puzzle Hunt The puzzle hunt in Truckee? The one coming up August 17? It has a blog. It's had one for a while, apparently. I could'a sworn it used to just be an announcement or something. ...
>> This happy chart illustrates a web server not falling over as twenty-something teams pile on to play Lumber Party: That's requests-per-second. The spike shows the time around 10:30am, when everyone...
Book Report: Salvage and Demolition A tightly-knotted time-travel novella. A secret society, a secret book containing a more-secret message about even-more secret magic, this story wraps up plenty of fun stuff in the snarls of its loop...
Urban Morphology is Everywhere, Even Truckee Dave writes: "I wanted to make a puzzle using the parking meters but they changed while I was developing the puzzle and the new look has much less information." That gets a sympathetic chuckle from ...
>> A few of the usual puzzle-huntists played SCRAP's 1000 Treasure Hunters today; I was one of them. (SCRAP is the organization behind the Real Escape game.) We had a lot of fun! As is usual for SCRAP-i...
>> Someone finished the 2-Tone Game yesterday. It doesn't happen often. Nowadays, most of the activity is folks showing up, playing the example puzzle, then giving up when they see the first "real" puzz...
>> If you don't want to be bored, you can keep seeking out the next article to read, the next channel to watch, the next feed to follow, the next, the next, the next. Or you could surround yourself wit...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Amazon.com Sounds like Amazon has a puzzle hunt, as nicely chronicled in this blog post: Amazon Puzzle Hunt 2013! Sounds mostly conference room-ish. I haven't found much else about it. Searching the interwebs f...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Santa Clara Yesterday, Mystic Fish playtested Elevate Tutoring Puzzle Hunt 2. We had a lot of fun! …[pause as I try to think of something non-spoilery to say]… We had a lot of fun! ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere from Pittsburgh to Chicago It's the Great America Rac— I mean it's the Quest for the Iron Raven! And puzzlehuntists you've heard of are going to blog it! ...
Book Report: Alif the Unseen A fantasy novel swirling together the 1001 Arabian Nights with the Arab Spring. Along the way, we have a secret book containing a more-secret message about even-more secret magic. ...
Jotting notes on Odyssey Works' talk at the Adventure Design Group, 2013 A few months back, some folks from Odyssey Works gave a talk about their art. I heard about it from the Adventure Design Group meetup. Though I scribbled my thoughts afterwards, if you weren't there...
Book Report: The Code Busters Club It's young adult fiction in which young adults solve a Real Crime by solving some common codes. Set in the alternate universe like this one, but if you want to get a message to nice people without th...
>> While I was off observing a REDACTED playtest, Dave Schweisguth was finishing off the 2-Tone Game. He even figured out the UI by which winners can send a taunting message to Game Control (a feat even...
>> Vertical garden, Hickory Alley ...
>> Of course the main thing that will strike you about this mural photograph is the total lack of octothorpes: For a while, this wall had an Octothorpe and an Octothorpean puzzle. The excellent Bonel...
Book Report: The Hydrogen Sonata Maybe it's a science-fiction novel by Iain Banks, set in the far-future intergalactic universe of the Culture. Maybe it's a reflection on the nature of truth, especially when intertwingled with histo...
Over-engineered Walks: Keep Walking South I walk for exercise. I don't like deciding where to go, though. I set up systems to make that decision for me, so I can enjoy the breeze and the sweet, sweet endorphins. Complicating these systems: I...
>> It's a good thing I didn't know about @ClassicBowling's lovely checkerboard motif a few years back, or I'd probably be trying to maintain a somehow-snuck-in 2-tone bowling puzzle today. That decorati...
>> But if you meet a friendly horse / Will you communicate by Morse? ...
Book Report: Forsada Politics and war in post-apocalyptic Lake Tahoe? Sounds like a great topic for some young adult fiction. Well, I liked it, though I'm not a young adult. Still. This is a sequel to Semper. ...
Link: Real Escape Game giving a talk 10/29 One or more Real Escapists will give a talk on the evening of October 29. Will include a "short puzzle experience". ...
Over-engineered Walks: Dice Around the start of 2012, I started work at Google's San Francisco office. I walked to work, but quickly got tired of walking the direct route day after day. I started walking a different route each ...
>> Tonight's talk wasn't recorded, which is too bad because it touched on The-Game-ish themes. Participants move through space, facing challenges which they overcome as a group. Still, that lack of reco...
I'm Feeling Coincidental A blind man asked me for help boarding the bus, so I helped him board the bus. That almost never happens. A while later, looked down and remembered I was wearing a Braille-Google-logo shirt, somethi...
Over-engineered Walks: Geocache Vicinity When I'm traveling and I want to to do some semi-random wandering, I look for geocaches, little boxes hidden around the world whose lat/longitudes are posted on a website. Except I don't really look ...
Book Report: Uncertainty In Games Greg Costikyan has designed more games than you have, so I pay attention when he writes something. Uncertainty in Games didn't contain any startling revelations that knocked me out of my chair, but i...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Ghost Recon Online oh wait i meant Ghost Patrol Reconstructed, an online puzzle hunt. Folks outside the San Francisco bay area might not know this, but Team Lowkey's Ghost Patrol puzzlehunts are pretty frickin' amazing...
This isn't Even my Final Form In last week's SnoutCast, DeeAnn mused on the recent "save the date" announcement for the Octothorpean Order Opening Day (November 16!): "It's going to be very interesting to see it in its—I ...
Over-engineered Walks: randomized deck from index cards A few weeks back, Brian Enigma posted in response to one of these "Over-engineered walks" posts: @lahosken Or get a set of DiceCards and remove/ignore the ones with a north or diagonal compass. Or ma...
Book Report: Nature Noir It's a memoir by a park ranger about park rangering, but it's not nature hikes and checking trees for moss. It's grittier than that—more about crime and law enforcement. It turns out that plent...
Over-engineered Walks: Munzee Munzee is a game that encourages you to go places, something like Geocaching in the age of smartphones. In Geocaching, you are given a set of lat/long coordinates; you go there, you find a little con...
Link: The Augmented Detective It's an ARG (a story you can play through by wandering around a neighborhood) in Downtown LA with artifacts to admire and videos to watch. Well, it's a potential such thing. So far, it's a Kickstarte...
Link: Audience and Technical Writing E Nashif took some time off from studying to riff about Audience in technical writing. Audience, composition classes, and technical writing Audience, technical writing, ownership, etc (part 2?) O...
Over-Engineered Walks: Munzee Addendum Last week, the Munzee folks must have spidey-sensed that a puzzle-hunt enthusiast was writing about their geocaching-in-the-age-of-smartphones game. We know this because soon afterwards, they launche...
Book Report: Debugging It's a book about debugging, about troubleshooting. It has some good advice and some fun anecdotes. As I write this, it's been a few weeks since I read it, and the anecdotes have all leaked out of my...
Book Report: A Strange Wilderness This afternoon, I thought back on wrong career decisions I've made. I thought about their consequences—totally overshadowed by consequences of things out of my control. It's like the lives of f...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, but all at the same time If you're reading Clavis Cryptica's "SF Puzzle Weekend � Friday" post, you might think that there are always multiple puzzle events going on around here. But it's not so. Except as I type this, I'm c...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Downtown SF That @Mastermindhunts San Francisco hunt was the real deal. Yeah, yeah—they mostly run short hunts for not-so-puzzly people. But but but hey I'm telling you—they also run some more seriou...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywere, so Don't try to Think About Other Things Working on the UI for the upcoming Ghost Patrol game, I took some little breaks. (Part of the UI is a little countdown timer that lets you know how long until the game starts—and eventually tel...
SF Puzzle Nerds: Real Escape talk: I'm thinking puzzlehuntists' Dinner beforehand You perhaps already knew: Tuesday evening (October 29), the excellent Real Escape folks will give a talk. Some of you have already signed up. More Can. The talk theoretically starts at 7. I propose ...
Book Report: The Art of Explanation I'm a tech writer. "Professional Ignoramus" would be a more accurate job title, albeit not so likely to land me fun jobs working with clever software developers. Still, it's what I do. Here's what ha...
Jotting Notes from Kazuya Iwata (Real Escape Game North America) at Adventure Design Group This spoileriffic talk was not recorded. So I'd better jot down some notes. Steering around the spoilers, but that's OK, because the non-spoilery stuff was interesting. Pizza ahead of time was fun. ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even the Virtual Astral Plane I scribbled some notes on Ghost Patrol: Reconstructed. Since my main involvement was setting up the online answer-checker web app thingy, and since the main thing I was thinking about was lessons to ...
Book Report: Griftopia We've had a chance to reflect on the financial disasters and bailouts of 2008. What have we learned? We learned that America's most successful bankers aren't those who are best at computing loan risk...
>> Figured out why a location-based puzzle was broken: a misspelled mural. I'm doing more of a "workaround" than a "fix" for that one. ...
Book Report: The Reputation Society I'm not game control for every game out there. E.g., I'm not on Game Control for this game; I was just passing along word of its existence after I saw it mentioned on a flyer. But I can see why you m...
Link: Some Birthdays are Better than Others A fun blog post in which a team plays DASH, Shinteki, 2-Tone Game, and Puzzled Pint, so west coast USA obvs. Oh wait Northern England wait what? ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere even if I was just in my apartment This was the opening weekend for The Octothorpean Order game. It felt good! 60 teams solved the start-puzzle; 28 already made it as far as solving the big scary meta. Wow, that was fast; I think it's...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even 10.4 N 75.5 W This morning, I had the spirit to look up. Above the usual eye-level was a crudely taped-up laminated message, triva-lly cluing a certain location. (Not my location; I was in San Francisco, USA, of c...
>> Ha it is so amusing: in my apartment, two smoke alarms ended up right next each other ha ha. Rental laws ha ha so droll. Oh wait, how can I tell which of them was occasionally low-battery-chirping...
Milestone: 24 Million Hits As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: everytime a robot visits some page, the count goes up. If a human ...
Book Report: How to Interview a Financial Advisor The author, @choonpiaw, is a computer nerd who made good and didn't squander all his money. Maybe you're a computer nerd who just got lucky with an IPO… and in a few years you would like to be...
>> I added a puzzle to Octothorpean this weekend. It took longer to figure out where to put the puzzle than it did to write the puzzle itself. I wanted to add a puzzle close to the beginning of Octothor...
Book Report: Neptune's Brood It's a science fiction novel. How do financial transactions work in an interstellar civilization which has that nasty speed of light to contend with? How would you defraud such a system? ...
>> The Noun Project sponsored an iconathon to create and compile a collection of little drawings to represent educational topics. Many icons were designed, two of which caught my eye. Games for Learni...
Who is Max Alper Astroturfing For? Max Alper tried to fool San Francisco yesterday. He posed as a Google employee and screamed condescending crap at people protesting high San Francisco rents. Apparently, the folks staging the protest...
Book Report: Beta China I follow many feeds; I used to follow the tech news site PandoDaily. I ignored most of it; modern tech reporting has problems and PandoDaily illustrated plenty of those. But for a while, there was so...
>> The plan was to stick some Munzee barcodes to things. Things did not go according to plan. I tried sticking a barcode under a utility box and the barcode fell right off—the box was covered with...
Book Report: The Magus ARGers and Situationists talk about this novel: its plot is something like that of the movie The Game, a sort of paranoid story in which several people playact around our protagonist, hoping to effec...
>> Starting to send out emails to Octothorpean teams letting them know about new puzzles, puzzles they've missed, etc. In small batches at first: partly so that the earliest recipients can let me know i...
Book Reports are Everywhere: How to Run a Puzzle Hunt Jonobie Ford of Team Liboncatipu wrote about lessons learned running a Microsoft Puzzle Hunt. The instant I heard of its existence on the Puzzalot blog, I knew I had to read this. And from this descr...