Larry Hosken: New: 2014

Book Report: Virtual Love Virtual Love is a romance set in Google's early days. The author, Kim Malone Scott, worked at Google back in those days, wrote this. She wasn't so pleased with how it turned out, and left the manuscr...
>> Some folks are playing @octothorpean during #mysteryhunt and that's OK. Puzzle Hunts are everwhere and, between them, welcome folks of all puzzling experience levels. When Octothorpean opened up a co...
>> Have you ever volunteered at a puzzle hunt? Have you not-yet filled out Deb's survey of such volunteers? For goodness' sake, fill it out. Especially the part about things Game Control can do to make ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere and Sometimes Well-Defended Back in the Justice Unlimited game, we stepped off the end of a pier to retrieve a puzzle atop some pilings. But you wouldn't pull that stunt nowadays, of course, it's too dangerous. Those pilings ar...
Notes on "Presentation and conversation with Nonchalance" Adventure Design Group Meetup I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to keep secret some things I learned at Nonchalance's presentation at the Adventure Design Group hosted by the lovely Go Game people. But I'm not sure exactly what; not a...
Book Report: The Ludic City Mostly, an academic jots down observations of people goofing around in cities' public spaces. Pedestrians waggle their arms. Buskers and street crazies accost passers-by. Bicyclists ride in perhaps-s...
Link: Broken Age, Part 1 I played a computer game Broken Age, Part 1. It was pretty; it was fun; it was pretty fun. You might like it, too. ...
Link: 2014 #mysteryhunt IT and Infrastructure It's a blog post by an Alice Shrugged team member about keeping their team-puzzle-state server up and running. We need jargon for this. HintOps? Solutions Reliability Engineering? ...
>> We escaped the @realegame Time Travel Lab room! @Hungrynerd assembled a crack team; the team's puzzlers were so strong that I could just wander around ransacking…even though it turns out I'm n...
Book Report: Exploding the Phone There are plenty of little articles about phreaking floating around; this book does a good job of pulling lots of little bits together into a flow of history. Along the way, I learned some things. E....
>> To try a game prototype where the "map" depends on where you physically play, go to Amnesia Fortnight, pony up a few bucks, vote for "Buried Metropolis," and hope for good luck. That's the skinny. H...
ClueKeeper Looks Awesome I tried out ClueKeeper to see how it was coming along. tl;dr: pretty darned nicely. Cluekeeper's an answer-checking program for puzzlehunts, reminiscent of Shinteki's LEON—and in the most recen...
OK, I've tried Ingress now It's another location-based game; Egnor finally nudged me over into trying it. By checking in at one spot and then checking in at a nearby spot, I drew a line segment on a map between those two spots...
>> If you lost count of the recent NSA citizen-snooping outrages but figure there are enough to justify nudging your legislators, The Day We Fight Back is a web site to guide you through that. ...
Book Report: Worm Do I call it a "Book" report if it doesn't exist in book-ish form? Oh sure why not. Worm is a novel-length story posted online. It's about superheroes. What if there were thousands of superheroes in ...
How to be sure a site is GPS-friendly? How do I know if a place is "glitchy" for GPS? I thought it was enough to just glance at my phone-map for a few seconds, but now I don't know what to think. The other day, I met friends downtown. I ...
>> Suppose octothorpean.org had photos of you and/or other puzzle nerd teams at various puzzle-y places. Where would be a good place for those photos? Soon-ish, Octothorpean will reward you for sending...
Book Report: Confluence, Tech Comm, Chocolate I'm a technical writer. I understand that folks don't always appreciate technical documentation. Sometimes the docs are bad. Sometimes the docs are good…at bearing bad tidings. Tech writer Roz...
>> Link: "It's My Party," a memoir about some Jim Propp puzzle parties, written by David "Pablo" Cohn who it turns out isn't in Antarctica all the time. ...
Link: godep Go Dependency Management talk video A while back, I went to a local GoLang meetup to see some quick talks about the Go Programming Language. Keith Rarick gave an interesting talk about godep, a tool to manage dependencies. The regular ...
Book Report: Operation Mincemeat It's about WWII spies. The central thread is a plot by English counterspies to fool the Nazis into thinking that the invasion of Sicily would actually be an invasion of Greece and Sardinia. It's a gr...
Is this like Puzzled Pint for RebusRally folks? If I knew Swedish, maybe I'd know whether RallyPub is like Puzzled Pint for RebusRally fans… or not. I don't know Swedish, so all I can do is toss around tautologies. ...
>> Updated a photo of McGrouther-Conradi tacks with an informative message I got about their history. ...
Book Report: Shady Characters Thursday afternoon, talk at work turned to punctuation. Since work uses a lot of @s and #s, this should not surprise you. Someone hazily remembered that Shakespeare had invented “modern quotati...
Book Report: Little Brother Remind yourself it's fiction: after a terrorist attack, the DHS goes police state on San Francisco. That part's all too believable. The less-believable part: our hero is a teenaged computer programme...
Link: confirmation A blog post in which a puzzler reflects on the lack of utility of knowing trivia for Mystery Hunt. …people wanted confirmation. They didn’t trust my knowledge while there was a way to confir...
My modeling career continues At first I wasn't sure it was me in this image from the excellent (recently redesigned!) Shinteki puzzlehunt website. I recognized Dan and Jesse sure, but the guy behind Jesse is pretty grayed out. ...
Jotting Notes on Ian Tullis' 2014 GC Summit Talk "Advice from (and for) a Puzzle Snob" It's a "Advice from (and for) a Puzzle Snob" a talk by Ian Tullis, who writes Shinteki puzzles. This here is my notes. [My rambling asides are in italics] and I take some pretty egregious summarize|r...
Puzzlehunts are Everywhere, Even Davis Davis is a ~1.5 hour train ride out of the SF Bay Area; when the Hogwarts Game put folks on a train to Sacramento, that train passed through Davis. Until recently, I hadn't spent much time in Davis; ...
Puzzlehunts are Everywhere, Even Locked in England or something Chris in England started a blog: Exit Games UK. Partly about escape-the-room games in the UK, but also taking in some tangentially-related nerdery. So far, so good. ...
Jotting Notes on Debbie Goldstein's 2014 GC Summit Talk "Caring for Ground Teams" It's "Caring for Ground Teams" a talk by Debbie G, who organizes puzzlehunts and occasionally gets to play in them. This here is my notes. [My rambling asides are in italics] and I take some pretty e...
>> ClueKeeper's got hunts up in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Richmond VA, Washington DC, Philadelphia, and Telluride. I got excited and started playing the San Francisco one. Which was silly, I should have...
Jotting Notes on Greg Filpus' 2014 GC Summit Talk "Surprises and Aha Moments" It's a "Puzzle Design: Surprises and Aha Moments" a talk by Greg Flipus, who wrote the Research Triangle #Octothorpean puzzles along with some feats he mentions in the "background" section of his tal...
Milestone: 25 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 25 millionth it. 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 som...
Book Report: Don't Get Too Comfortable It's essays by David Rakoff. The first few in the collection were so unenthusiastic about everything that I wondered how did this end up on my to-read list? Then I was reminded: this collection inclu...
Happy National Poetry Month I saw a poem this morning: Parent demonstrates-by-example how to look both ways… ...
FAQs, Facts, Drowning in Questions You're a small team of software developers. You make a service|API|tool|thingy used by many, many software developers. They have questions, so many questions. You're drowning in questions. How can yo...
Link: Straightforward Nonchalance Aggravated by past presentations about The Games of Nonchalance because they devolved into woo-woo antics? Sara Thacher and Uriah Findley gave a talk at IndieCade that was, y'know, straightforward an...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Davis Once again, I used the DASH puzzlehunt as an excuse to travel. This year, I site-volunteered for DASH 6 at Davis, California. You can read about DASH at Davis and marvel at photos and perhaps start a...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even San Francisco, leisurely-ly OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG ...
Zine Report: Cometbus, Giant Robot There's a new Cometbus out. It's kind of amazing that I found out, since it's only at Pegasus books. So I only found out because I happened to be walking past, which I almost never do. It's a collect...
Link: MAY ONE Who doesn't want anyone to study climate change? Wyoming's governor, that's who. Wyoming mines a lot of coal. If your re-election money comes from coal, you imagine a federal "war on coal." Most peop...
Link: Burmese Punks Think You're #1 Pogo Dancing in Myanmar (via Giant Robot) ...
Link: Testing Culture vs goto fail Catching software bugs requires testing culture. It's a mix of technology and attitude. Technology should make running tests easy. Attitude should encourage you to write tests—hey, it's easy so...
Book Report: Puzzle Craft "The subtitle's a lie, of course. We can't fit descriptions of how to make every type of puzzle into one book." And yet this book does show examples of many many kinds of puzzles. Along with each exa...
Link: Sewage Treatment Plant Tour San Franciscans: I signed up for the June 14 tour of the Oceanside Treatment Plant (the one near the zoo). As of when I signed up just now, there were still 40+ tickets available. ...
Link: Testing Culture vs Heartbleed It's Part 2 of Mike Bland's article on how a testing culture could have prevented recent high-profile bugs. This time, it's Heartbleed, a darned innocuous bug which is causing umpty-ump percent of th...
>> LiveJournal redesign prompts curious lack of internet backlash. ...
Adventure Design Group: Presentation and conversation with JP LeBreton and Brandon Dillon (Double Fine) I'm up past my bedtime, so just some scribbled notes. They're both game nerds from the computer/video game company Double Fine. They've both come up with project ideas interesting enough such that I ...
>> Started a list of Escape-the-Room games on the Bay Area Night Game wiki. I know the list isn't complete—Tyler Hinman mentioned someplace I hadn't heard of… but of course I already forgot...
>> Dave Schweisguth knew about a couple more Escape-the-Room games, including one whose grand opening is Friday! ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Stanford Campus and/or the Moon This long weekend was all about location-based games, mostly out in the world. Played Shinteki's Stanford Puzzle Tour Failed to Real-Escape the Moon Base Followed a Hash House Harriers trail from th...
>> With current technology, we cannot hope to eradicate feral swine. ...
Link: Testing Culture If you liked Parts 1 and 2 of Mike Bland's Unit Testing vs Heartbleed and goto fail bugs, you'll be glad to know that the rest of the article is up: setting up a unit testing culture, ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Mountain View Want to try some puzzles from Shinteki Decathlon 9 (a.k.a. that puzzlehunt I played in last weekend)? Can you be in Mountain View for a few hours on June 28?* If you missed the recent Shinteki Deca...
Comic Report: Clockwork Game This graphic novel (uhm, I mean, graphic documentary, I guess? this comic) tells the story of the mechanical Turk, the chess-playing automaton historied in Standage's The Turk. Since much of the stor...
>> I updated the downloadable 2-Tone Game source code. More recent versions of the App Engine SDK weren't compatible with this four-year-old (five-year-old? something like that) code. I just wanted to u...
Puzzlehunts are Everywhere, Even Boston Just started reading this GC Writeup from Wartron Boston ...
Link THIS every-state-in-continental-USA driving route is even MORE optimal (if you're optimizing for Scrabble). ...
>> "I'll keep this simple. One of you is a real human cop—and one of you is a robot. Only we don't know which is which!" ...
Book Report: Random House Puzzle Maker's Handbook It's a book about how to make crossword puzzles (and other word puzzles) from 1995, a revision of a book first written in 1981. It's about how to make (and edit and market…) crossword puzzles ...
Nautical Flags, Richmond Posting this just in case it shows up later as a Shinteki puzzle site, you know? ...
Book Report: Undiluted Hocus-Pocus It's Martin Gardner's autobiography. It's about his life. It's not about logic puzzles, tricks with matchsticks, or computer simulations. Those are things he wrote about. His autobiography is about t...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Marin County Behold, it is my write-up of Shinteki Decathlon 9! Read them to gain great insight into puzzlehunting a la "Oh man I wish the Army Corps of Engineers would install air conditioning in the Bay Model."...
Book Report: China 3.0 I picked up this anthology of essays because it showed up in an author search for Michael Anti. Thus, I expected to have my pro-free-speech views reinforced. It turns out that Anti wrote just one ess...
Jotting Notes on Erin Rhode's 2014 GC Summit Talk "MIT Mystery Hunt Q+A" It's "MIT Mystery Hunt Q&A", an unplanned Q&A session with Erin Rhode, captain of the team that ran the Alice Shrugged MIT Mystery Hunt This here is my notes. [My rambling asides are in ital...
Jotting Notes on Rich Bragg's 2014 GC Summit Cluekeeper Update Cluekeeper is a puzzlehunt answer-checker app. Game Control tells the app about the hunt's answers and hints. Players run the app. They can use it to check answers. The app does time-release hints. ...
No-Spoilers SF Leisurely Mini-Game 2014 Report WOOOO! That was fun! ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Oakham Puzzlehunters of the world, the Oakhammites of Oakham are calling us out: Well-heeled readers from further afield might also note that this event is one week before the Armchair Treasure Hunt Clubâ€...
Book Report: A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling There are plenty of storytellers out there, but they tend to specialize. Meanwhile, these transmedia projects keep popping up: some story-pieces embedded in movies, comics, ARGs, radio plays… ...
>> Looking over the (Google Translate of the) RebusRally #100 announement, something caught my eye: If the team has immunity (ie, at least half of the team has put rally with the team name) I wonder...
Puzzle Hunts were Everywhere, even Hayes Valley Behold, it is most of the puzzles from the 2014 #terngame, a.k.a. Twitter's annual puzzlehunt. I say "most" of the puzzles because there were a couple of "you had to be there" puzzles. Like the one t...
Jotting Notes on Todd Etters' and Phil Dasler's 2014 GC Summit Talk "Famine Game Postmortem" It's "The Famine Game Postmortem", a talk by Todd Etter and Phil Dasler, the Lead Gamemakers of the Famine Game This here is my notes. [My rambling asides are in italics] and I take some pretty egreg...
Book Report: Annabel Scheme What if the quickest route to organize the world's information was a Faustian deal with a demon? Our heroine is an ex-hacker occult specialist who… uhm, these stories were silly but fun. ...
'Zine Report: SF Zine Fest/Behind the Wheel The 2014 San Francisco Zine Fest is going on now. I swung through, mostly picking up mini-comics and little books. The Zine-est thing I got was Behind the Wheel, A Lyft Driver's Log, a.k.a. PiltdownL...
Larry Lane …as encountered on a walk through the Oakland Hills ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Arlequin Cafe in San Francisco's Hayes Valley Some scribbled notes about GCing at #terngame14, a.k.a., Twitter's internal puzzlehunt. ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Musha Cay My parents forwarded me this article about Adventure activities for travelers. Every few months, at Musha Cay, a private resort in the Bahamas owned by David Copperfield, the magician gathers his g...
Book Report: Ghost Spin What if the quickest way to travel was to transmit your thought-state to another world so that you could be "uploaded" into a new body? What if you were "broadcast" and folks in several places upload...
>> "We'll likely call it BANG 31 regardless of whether someone else runs one with that number." oho ...
Book Report: Thursday's Children It's a "best of" collection of Curtis Chen's 512-words-or-fewer flash fiction. Short storylets, one or two scenes apiece; that's about enough space for some wry witty banter and/or to start noodling ...
Link: team lowkey in Decathlon 9 I keep saying that puzzlehunt reports don't lend themselves to video, but I'm rethinking that now that I've seen Team Lowkey in: Decathlon 9. ...
Tom Lester, Annie, and the kids are doing OK Yesterday, I was navigating from one systematically-chosen map spot to another, walking through East Oakland, when I heard my name. Oh! That lady loading stuff into her car was Annie…oh, I mus...
You have to Trust me on This One: Mahlen's Doing OK, Too It's a weekend of coincidental meetings! Mahlen's doing OK, too. You have to trust me on this one; I ran out my phone batteries capturing Munzees, so no photo. He's reading Original Copies about bu...
>> The Snoutcast interview with Yuan is a pretty good behind-the-scenes view of Puzzled Pint. ...
Book Report: The Puzzle Instinct This book talks about how humans think their way through puzzles. It mostly does this by walking you through several classic puzzles. If you're already somewhat jaded of the classic puzzles, then lon...
Book Report: Chinese Playground I picked up this book around the time that arms dealer Leland Yee was suspended from the California state senate. That case had some San Francisco Chinatown gangster connections. If you look around f...
No-Spoilers SF Leisurely Mini-Game 2014 Report, part II In theory, there's a possible Seattle re-cast. So I never posted a report. (NO SPOILRZ!!) And now it's more than a month later, and I've forgotten a lot. So here's a post with a lot of [redacted], sc...
Book Report: the Adventures of T and T In this parable, two ostriches are illuminated through a series of spiritual experiences including visions, a glimpse of the afterlife, and miraculous teleportation. ...
Book Report: Ghost Spin What if the quickest way to travel was to transmit your thought-state to another world so that you could be "uploaded" into a new body? What if you were "broadcast" and folks in several places upload...
Milestone: 26 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 26 millionth it. 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: every time a robot visits so...
Link: A Conversation with Puzzle Master Wei-Hwa Huang This person enjoys puzzles. ...
Book Report: Threat Modeling There are unhelpful ways to fret over computer security. This book shows ways to channel those tendencies towards something useful. It also points out the Elevation of Privelege card game, an excuse ...
fantabular.py converts puzzlehunty Quip docs to spreadsheets fantabular.py is a little computer program to look at your Quip documents, find those with "Tabular" in the name, and convert their tables to spreadsheets. If you're part of a puzzlehunt team, you o...
Book Report: Things a Little Bird Told Me It's an autobiography by Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, co-founder of Jelly. At the start, it talks about crazy risks he took. Some of which, in hindsight, still seem pretty risky… Some of ...
fantabular.py: already obsolete Remember a few days back when I posted about fantabular.py, a little computer program to convert Quip docs to spreadsheets? It's already obsolete: Quip now includes spreadsheets. Now I wish I'd procr...
Book Report: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test It's a book about the rise of LSD culture in California. It's a book about Ken Kesey as something like a charismatic cult leader, about the Merry Pranksters. It's easy to look back and criticize thes...
My Hobby's been De-Skilled OK, I'm exaggerating. But here's what I'm talking about: If your puzzlehunt has an automatic answer-checker app, then your site monitors don't have much to do. I and some of the other Davis site volu...
Book Report: The Routes of Man Better than a road trip, it's several road trips. Pirated lumber, mountainous roads, "the AIDS highway" years later, a Chinese road rally club, an ambulance in Lagos, … This book explores some...
Over-Engineered Walks a Year Later: Geocache Vicinity When I want to get out from behind the computer and go for a walk and don't want to choose the route myself, I still do this: Choose a geocache that I haven't visited yet that's a little further away...
Book Report: Flash Boys It's about high-speed trading; including shady deals by brokerage houses with high-speed traders. If you're setting up a stock market, some folks will pay to get early access to information about tra...
Over-Engineered Walks a Year Later: randomized deck from index cards I still let some written-on index cards figure out my walking route to work each morning. If my route doesn't bring me to the correct block, then I take the last card, cross out its number, and write...
Book Report: Inside the Red Mansion This is sort of an investigation of Lai Changxing, a Chinese smuggler tycoon from a few years back. By the time you're done, you've explored corruption in modern Chinese life. There might not be a wa...
Over-engineered Walks a year later: Munzee I still play Munzee, in which folks post the GPS coordinates of barcode stickers, and I go find and scan those bar codes. Since you only get credit for scanning any particular Munzee once, it gives m...
Book Report: A Fighting Chance It's an autobiography by politician Elizabeth Warren. Before she w19as a politician, she was an academic. She studied bankruptcy. When she started, there was received wisdom around bankruptcy: people...
Link: Video: How 1000s of Devs Can Work on the Same Code and Understand Each Other If your organization doesn't use C++, you might be surprised that this talk about Google's C++ Style Guide could be relevant. But very little of it gets into C++. It's mostly about coming up with a s...
Book Report: The Maze of Games The Maze of Games is a puzzle extravaganza: about 52 puzzles leading up to four meta-puzzles leading up to another meta, along with some bonus puzzles. The variety was fun; and on those few occasions...
>> Sometimes, New Comic Day means buying new comics. And sometimes it means Erik Larsen is hanging out at Isotope showing some so-new-it's-not-yet-for-sale big Savage Dragon art. ...
Book Report: Maps To The Other Side (The Adventures of a Bipolar Cartographer) Maps to the Other Side is a memoir. If you're looking for straight up cartography, you won't find it. But if you're looking for a community organizer, organic farmer, mental health activist… y...
>> "It turns out they were images of the tape records written by a Cedar Mesa program called the Archivist. Luckily, when the 9-track tapes were transferred to 8mm tapes, a file called rosetta.tar conta...
Book Report: Sailing a Serious Ocean If you want to sail around the world and/or across big oceans, this book probably is a good introduction to how to think about planning, dealing with heavy weather, emergency boat repairs, etc. If yo...
>> Assumption school exists. The jokes practically write themselves. ...
Book Report: Hatching Twitter (Have I mentioned lately that I don't speak for my employer? This would be a good time to mention that. I read this book about Twitter's history. It tells a fairly sad story. Sad enough such that I f...
>> Tonight's Adventure Design Group presentation was about The Go Game. They got their start around here. Thus, it wasn't 100% surprising when founder Finn mentioned early on talking with Alexandra Dix...
>> I played the computer game Hack 'n' Slash and it was pretty fun. It's that game where you get to change the game's program as you play through it. (I guess it's also a platform by which you can creat...
Rock Breaks Scissors Human brains give us amazing intuition. That is to say, they've evolved some pretty great shortcuts. But those same shortcuts make our brains stumble in some situation. This book points out some of t...
riddly scavenger hunts are everywhere, even san francisco as mailed out to a list at work just now I wanted to share The SF Hunt, a scavenger hunt that some of my good friends are planning. It's an event you won't want to miss. What is The SF Hunt? The ...
>> I attended an interesting talk recently. It was about tracing requests in complex service-oriented-architecture web service dealies. It was by Ben Sigelman, who worked on the Dapper project—whi...
>> I attended an interesting talk recently. It was about tracing requests in complex service-oriented-architecture web service dealies. It was by Ben Sigelman, who worked on the Dapper project—whi...
Book Report: No Place to Hide It's reporter Glenn Greenwald's perspective on the Edward Snowden story. As such, it's pretty scary. Most reporters don't know how to communicate using encryption. Thus, if you're a whistleblower han...
One Year of Octothorpean The Octothorpean online puzzle-hunt launched a year ago today. How have things gone since then? Pretty well, I think. On the other hand, for the goals I had… They're not so easy to measure. S...
Book Report: A Sense of Direction In which the author goes on a few walking pilgrimages, though he is not himself religious. He discusses what folks got out of pilgrimages back in the day. Similarly, he discusses what they get out of...
Book Report: In the Belly of the Beast A long-time prisoner sent famous writer Norman Mailer some letters about prison life. This books collects excerpts from those letters. They talk vaguely about injustice. There are anecdotes that make...
>> That "Moon" movie was "a Liberty Films production in association with Xingu". Trying to remember if I ever worked on a phone OS software project with code names Liberty and Xingu. Or if that was two...
>> For a few hours, the questions came in waves. For a few hours, I wasn't the consulting detective pondering one tricky case at a time. Instead, a short-order cook, stirring many pots. Asking a clarify...
Book Report: Flashfire There's this character named Parker; mostly in books, but recently in a movie named "Parker." I liked some of the books, so I saw the movie. Then I was curious to know which book it was based on. It'...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even ExitGames.co.uk It's not just about escape-the-room games: This site has launched a major new section that has always been intended to be one of its primary focuses. This site talks about puzzle hunts frequently, ...
Book Report: Newjack How better to research prison life than to become a Corrections Officer for a year? Well, there are probably more pleasant ways, but this book's author worked a year in Sing Sing prison. This is a hi...
>> Myles' account of Shinteki's Disneyland puzzlehunt is spoileriffic and fun. Of course it turns out Tammy is a big Disneyland fan. Of course. ...
Book Report: Cool Gray City of Love It's a book about San Francisco. Something of a cross between a history and a gazetteer; it's a collection of 49 essays, each using a San Francisco neighborhood as a leaping-off point for talking abo...
Link: puzzle blog turtlegraphics.wordpress.com Remember the math professor in St Louis who inspired both teams who played in the year I site-monitored DASH there? He made an escape-the-room game and started a blog to write about it… and, I...
Book Report: Carsick In which cult film director John Waters hitchhikes across America. He spends a lot of time waiting. When he does get picked up, it's often because he's recognized. A non-celeb like you or me wouldn't...
Link: How to Puzzle Cache A little bird told me about a new book: How to Puzzle Cache. It's about puzzle-geocaches. The author's Cully Long; he's one of the folks who put together the Dastardly Manhattan Puzzle Caches, some ...
>> I bet a South Pole Traverse driving simulator would be pretty epic. ...
"Incredibly Excited" Today was my last day at Twitter. I even took a traditional Twitter turning-in-my-laptop-and-badge photo: I think this is a first for me: Quitting one job without the next job lined up. My upcomin...
Book Report: The Internet Police Criminals use the internet. Some use the internet to commit crimes; others to plan real-world crimes. Law enforcement has had to learn to investigate crime on the internet. It's tricky. They're used ...
>> Thanks to family holiday dinner conversation, I have a new worry: am I used to the taste of rancid olive oil? No special reason to think I am. But, since I'm an American, no special reason to think I...
Link: Pittsburgh Puzzle Hunt Xmas 2014 photo set It's photos of four(?) teams of folks staring at things and thinking really hard. I never heard of this hunt until just now. Maybe it was a friends-and-family thing? ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, especially Pittsburgh lately Today, a tweet about a Pittsburgh puzzlehunt: My first puzzle hunt is now available on ClueKeeper! http://t.co/TMwfPYDzMK— Spidere (@Spidere) December 31, 2014 "Spidere" sure looks a lot lik...