Larry Hosken: New: 2016

Book Report: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby It's Tom Wolfe articles about culture, celebrities, and New York city. He wrote these in the early 60s. The culture writing holds up. Even if demolition derbies are no longer so popular, it's fun to...
Remember how I went sailing? I went sailing a few months ago. I just now got around to posting a write-up with photos. Yes, it took me a while. If it weren't raining, I probably still wouldn't have got around to it. Anyhow: comp...
>> #mysteryhunt delay means I get a chance to try Google Cardboard ...
>> I slept. I woke up. We are still solving… #mitmysteryhunt ...
>> I sure hope nobody wants me to think too hard for the next few days #mitmysteryhunt ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Cambridge/California This past weekend was the annual MIT Mystery Hunt. I played for the first time. I joined up with Team Left Out, a team on which I know several people, Those people are nice, and There's a pretty swe...
Book Report: Progress Principle This book's cover is misleading; the book is good, but I almost returned it to the library without bothering to read it. The cover shows a Post-It attached by a thumbtack, which seems like the resul...
Dave Litwin is doing OK Ex-Geoworks folks might be interested to know that I bumped into Dave Litwin on SF's Embarcadero today. He works around there; Autodesk has some Maker-y 3D-Printing-ish development at a pier building...
>> Today's mail brought a batch of Kickstarter goodies from Oubliette Escape: a booklet of short stories and some pretty postcards. I remember that some of these are puzzles and some aren't. I don't re...
Book Report: Collaboration It's a book about things that can go right or wrong when a big organization encourages or discourages collaboration. Done well, it can help. Done poorly, it can harm. This book didn't really help me ...
>> When we ran that Telegraph Hill Hunt game a few months back, we started in San Francisco's Washington Square. Not wanting the cops to roust us from the park, we sought permits. But in the end, we did...
>> Kind of amazed at my parents' story of unsubscribing from Blue Apron. Not 100% sure that that half-prepared meals aren't piling up in a warehouse somewhere, earmarked for them. ...
Book Report: Prisoners of Power I wanted to try a book by the Strugatskys, who I keep hearing good things about. Unfortunately, they were novelists. I bet this book was pretty good for a novel, but I'm mostly into non-fiction these...
>> Happy New Year! Here's a couple of frames from the old silent movie Salome that might enhance your understanding of the novel Medusa's Web. Or might not. I'm only partway through. I just wanted to st...
Book Report: She's Just Another Navy Pilot A memoir by Loree Draude Hirschman about being one of the first women combat pilots for the US Navy, mostly about her first voyage as such on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. As if learning to l...
>> Irish setter, apparently. ...
>> I played the computer game Firewatch and it was very pretty indeed. ...
>> I played through Firewatch a second time. The first time through, I'd played in a very focused manner. Given a mission, I carried out that mission with no side-tracking. But that was kind of a shame,...
Book Report: San Francisco's Telegraph Hill It's a book about San Francisco's Telegraph Hill neighborhood. I was interested because I wanted a puzzle hunt there. This book talked about local history. Back in the day, before folks had Facebook ...
Upcoming Come Out and Play talk Catherine Herdlick, cofounder of the Come Out and Play festival, will give a talk at the Adventure Design Group in April. The announcement says she'll talk about "…her intentions for the next ...
Book Report: Orbiting the Giant Hairball In theory, this is a book of anecdotes about a creative person surviving/thriving in the bureaucracy of the Hallmark company. Mostly it seemed like anecdotes from someone overly anxious about authori...
>> This afternoon, I clomped around the decks of a couple of tall ships, the Lady Washington and the Hawaiian Chieftain. These ships are usually up in Washington state, but for now they're at Oakland's ...
Change of Address: lahosken@gmail.com My email address is lahosken@gmail.com . Some mail to @lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us addresses isn't getting through. ("How much doesn't get through?" you ask. I'm not sure—as near as I ca...
>> When puzzle nerds get crafty… Not only are you doing a mystery quilt, but you're also solving a murder mystery! With each month you get both a chapter of the story and a new quilt block to ma...
Swarm Leaderboard Question If you don't use the Swarm app, you can stop reading now. I use Swarm, but I'm hazy on the rules. For example… So far this week, I've earned nine Swarm coins by checking in at places. (well, o...
>> Puzzled Pint is now in San Francisco's East Bay. Because spending more time in traffic than in puzzling is for chumps. ...
>> I'm preparing to give a talk at the upcoming Game Control Summit for puzzlehunt designer nerds. Where by "preparing," so far I mean tinkering with Javascript for an HTML slideshow as an excuse to pro...
>> A mere 22 months later, I finished that pub crawl. ...
>> Ever since that convention kerfuffle, I've been trying to remember this cold-war era movie quote: Student Journalist: As your party's leading presidential candidate, you are a staunch advocate of n...
>> Yesterday, I passed the site of SCRAP's upcoming escape room game, Escape the Jail. It was a little bittersweet to consider that "Escape the Jail" theme. On the sweet hand: Run More Games, yay. On...
Book Report: The Art of Travel I went out for a cup of coffee this morning and it felt like an adventure because: rain. Should I write a few paragraphs to convey the exhilaration of walking through a shower in a drought-parched la...
Bonus Telegraph Hill Hunt Puzzle: Gerke Alley I rough-drafted many puzzles for the Telegraph Hill Hunt BANG that didn't make it in. That's expected. Most of them, I'm happy to leave by the wayside. Some of them, I'm happy to hang onto for some f...
No Exit "No Exit: Play by Sartre where he's forced to play a really boring Room Escape game." –Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl Hell is other peop...
>> Trial runthrough of my 15-minute Game Control Summit (have you RSVP'd yet?) talk was an hour long. That's… That's why you do a trial runthrough of your talk. Guess I'll cut some. Maybe I'll cu...
Comic Report: The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye This comic is funny. I say that right away because when I tell you the premise, you'll be tempted to click away thinking "oh that is some fauxlitical artsy-fartsy bullroar to be purchased by earnest ...
>> I'll be in Washington DC at the end of April for DASH. What should I see while I'm there? I've already seen a lot in the area on a previous trip when I put my socks on my ears. But what else should I...
Comic Report: The Imitation Game It's a comic biography of computing pioneer/codebreaker Alan Turing. It's pretty good as you'd expect since it's written by Jim Ottaviani, who's done other excellent science-y biography comics. ...
Comic Report: Patience It's a new Dan Clowes comic. If you're already a Dan Clowes fan, that's probably enough to know. I don't want to write about the story because: spoilers. But there are strange new worlds and halluci...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even not-Redmond Some California folks got together over the weekend to playtest the upcoming Microsoft Puzzlehunt. Staying spoiler-free, I wrote some stuff about it, but only the bits around the experience, as it we...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, but keep 'em out of mall jail I considered another site for the start of the Hill Hunt BANG: the park between Piers 35 and 39. I "remembered" that the Ghost Patrol game had used this location for a puzzle, finding some ...
Haircut Day ...
>> Understand: I grew up in a time of paper maps. I'd look at a map of some place and never think I could get from there to some other not-on-the-map place. Maybe those places were close; but whoever th...
>> Computer programmers say "premature optimization is the root of all evil" because it encourages our tendency to complicate programs for negligible benefit. But here's another reason: the start of a p...
Book Report: Liar's Poker When Hillary Clinton took Wall Street money and passed laws to help Wall Street companies, was that so bad? Read this book for the practical jokes but also to remember Wall Street's outrages. Liar's ...
>> I wanted to watch this sitcom, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. It's a Netflix exclusive. Sometimes publishers do crazy stuff with their content. Instead of publishing it ina straightforward manner, they t...
Book Report: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes And Other Lessons from the Crematory What happens to our bodies after we die? This book talks about preparing bodies, funerals, that sort of thing. We've got plenty of taboos around death. E.g., the author figures that leaving your body...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even San Mateo OMG OMG OMG ...
Worlds Colliding, well, Lightly Brushing anyhow QuizUp, a trivia quiz app, is built using Pants, that build tool I wrote documentation about. ...
>> That was an amazingly fun playtest! I am just back from Palace Games, the folks who do the Houdini Escape Room in San Francisco. They're putting the finishing touches on a new room. After we playtest...
>> Today I handed out puzzle pieces for Shinteki. If you're a SF-area puzzle nerd, you probably perked up when you read that and though Aw FOMO, I better not have missed a Shinteki event. Settle down: t...
>> Broke my glasses; hauled my spare pair out of storage. Can't remember whether I purposefully chose extra-nerdy frames to prompt swift replacement, but that's sure how it's working out. ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even DC Metro I am back from Washington DC. I have puzzler gossip. Folks there are organizing a series of afternoon hunts, a la BANG or SNAP or BAPHL. At the start of Washington DC DASH, Todd Etter and Evan Davis ...
Jotting Notes on Issac Kelly's Adventure Design Group talk Issac Kelly has done technical things for Nonchalance and at some places I hadn't heard of. He's made gizmos and web sites. I was hoping to hear about those, but instead he talked more about project ...
Comic Report: Rebels Happy Free Comic Book Day! If you want a comic book that's Free as in America (versus Free as in Beer), you can purchase the newly-collected Rebels. It's tales if the American Revolution. Mostly from...
>> …and the blood loss makes me pale, sympathizing with Kimmy's time trapped in the underground bunker. ...
>> Sometimes the city doesn't break your puzzle. ...
Comic Report: The Twilight Children I read this The Twilight Children collection that just came out, filled in the gaps for the issues I'd missed. It looked good. Rest in peace, Darwyn Cooke. ...
Book Report: Dragnet Nation In which a reporter explores preserving privacy, trying out tools and processes to keep governments and companies from learning about her. This book could easily have devolved into tinfoil-hattery, b...
>> SF folks, what excellent voter recommendations/endorsements am I overlooking? I'm looking for such that explain their thinking, not just say Yes on this, No on that. Here's the stuff I'm slogging thr...
Book Report: Nobody's Home It's a novella set in the same world as The Anubis Gates. Ghosts, barges, and hopscotch in Dickensian London. Fun times. ...
>> Pour one out for that photography studio that was a surreal clue site for Shinteki Decathlon 10. I was just in the neighborhood and local winery The Winery SF had put up signs, were redecor...
Milestone: 30 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 30 millionth hit. (I'm a little slow to report this; it happened a few days ago and I wasn't checking the numbers. By the "usual" amount of traffic, I shouldn't have had to check...
Puzzle Hunts and Real Life are Everywhere, even Washington DC It's my Washington DC travelog. DASH enthusiasts might want to skip to DASH photos or not depending on how eager you are to read about art museums, technology museums, and people I know but you (stat...
>> It's a double do-gooder shirt sticker day. (#IVoted a couple of weeks ago, but waited until today to affix the sticker.) ...
Book Report: The Skies Belong To Us It's a book about Roger Holder, Cathy Kerkow, and other skyjackers of 1972 and thereabouts. Then, as now, someone mentally-unhinged seeking fame could get media coverage by threatening many lives in ...
Book Report: Waypoint Kangaroo Happy National Selfie Day! It's also the day that Amazon starts selling the excellent novel Waypoint Kangaroo, so here's a selfie of me holding up my laptop with the book's cover image: In this sc...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even San Mateo BANG 35 was creative, elegant, and fun! And Scott says when you get the [REDACTED] home afterwards, your kids will love playing with 'em. ...
phraser, a word list generator When you construct word puzzles, it's good to have a nice list of words to work with. Over the last several weeks, I've been tinkering on and off to build phraser, a tool that chugs through wiki data...
Book Report: Medusa's Web It's one of those Tim Powers novels in which a carefully-researched history conceals magical conspiracy. What if the set designers and costumers involved with the silent movie Salome were transcendin...
Book Report: The Glass Cage I finished reading this pointless book. It was always in the "neighborhood" of saying something interesting. It's about things that technology gets wrong, a topic I'm interested in. I kept hoping! Bu...
Iron Puzzler 2016 announced Iron Puzzler is once again coming to the SF Bay Area. This is that weekend-long combo puzzle-design and puzzle-solving contest in which teams spend Saturday creating puzzles using "secret ingredients...
Book Report: Thunderstruck It's two intertwined biographies. One is a biography of Marconi, inventor of the wireless telegraph. One is a true-crime biography of a fugitive who was caught due to the wireless telegraph. The Mar...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even San Mateo Behold, it is photos of BANG 35, that puzzlehunt that took place in San Mateo. Well, there are photos from the second weekend, when I was GC-site-volunteering. The first weekend, I was playing&hellip...
>> My mom just sent me a "go link" not from some high-tech startup, but rather from the National Park Service. Maybe all those computer nerds migrating to DC are having some effect! In case you're wond...
Book Report: City Beasts Oh, it's a Mark Kurlansky book I haven't read yet. He wrote books about Cod and Salt; those were good. reads two pages Oh, wait, this here book is fiction? Dang. Uhm, nevermind. ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even San Francisco's McLaren Park I found out about this one too late: REGISTRATIONS ARE CLOSED Sorry, we are out of treasure hunt materials! We are checking to see if we can accommodate more folks. Please check back soon. Even i...
>> Excerpt from the Ghost Patrol pre-game prep-mail from GC: Relatedly, we are fairly demanding on battery life, so please make sure your phones are charged ahead of time I think he means hunt ghost...
Book Report: Coyotes Donald Trump is scared of undocumented Mexican workers. Then again, he's a coward who's scared of plenty of things. How much should you worry? In Ted Conover's book Coyotes, he (Conover, not Trump) t...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Walnut Creek You might think that my photo-taking efforts were stymied when I dropped my camera in that abandoned fast food restaurant's parking lot and the battery popped out. But nay, here are some photos of Gh...
OpenID Connect for Google accounts The document OpenID Connect | Google Identity Platform doesn't have a freeform feedback mechanism, so pardon me as I vent here. When it says "JSON array" it means "JSON object". Okay yeah I figured ...
Book Report: Limits to Growth Some folks wrote World3, a world economic simulator to answer questions along the lines of "if humans keep trying to use nonrenewable energy at their current rate, what will be the warning signs that...
>> Have you looked at Curtis' mysterious postcard yet? I couldn't make head nor tail of it. I do approve of photos of columnar lava, FWIW. ...
Book Report: The Undersea Network It's a book about undersea cables: telegraph cables, coaxial cables, fiber. That sort of thing. The examples are from around the Pacific. And the examples are pretty sweet. The author chased down a f...
>> "Pledging on Kickstarter is buying my future self a surprise gift." –Joshua Little This Baggywrinkles comic book by Lucy Bellwood was a pretty awesome surprise. Sometimes I think the projec...
>> Oh, no wonder that jar was so hard to open. It involved breaking a chip of glass off of one of the threads. ...
Book Report: The Lost Frenchman It's a thriller in which puzzly geocachers are unusually qualified to seek a treasure. It is fun in much the same way the National Treasure movies are fun, but with better puzzles. If that sounds lik...
>> You know you've overtrained your brain to look out for secret messages when you're reading an interview about crewing an old-timey sailing ship and see Question: What is your favorite line (rope) o...
>> Oh hey, there's a new Cometbus out, snap it up. I'm about ten pages into it. So far, it's interviews with NYC cartoonists. The questions aren't about who would win in a fight between Thor and Superma...
>> Free Donald Knuth lecture coming up… about Metafont. Clever guy, but not my topic. I probably won't go, but maybe you're interested. ...
You should do Puzzled Pint this month I playtested this month's Puzzled Pint puzzles. They're fun! You should scoop up some friends and go solve them Tuesday. ...
Book Report: Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous It's a book about the social movement Anonymous. That's a tricky thing to write about because anyone can be part of it. I could don a Guy Fawkes mask and declare that Anonymous' new purpose was const...
>> Police-blotter article has, among other things, a neat little instance of police body cams fighting crime: …At approximately 11:36pm, an officer who "observed a vehicle blow[ing] through a s...
>> Remember phraser, that tool for generating puzzle-design-friendly word lists? I just updated it. I found OMDB, a big database of movie info with a public API. (Did I find it? Or did one of you tell m...
Book Report: The Checklist Manifesto We humans are inordinately proud that we're somewhat cleverer than lizards. The good news is that we can do some complex things. The bad news is that we think we're really great at handling that comp...
Book Report: The Hot Rock It's a heist novel. It's a fun multi-heist novel. I'm glad I read it; it was fun and I always wondered what the Sleater-Kinney album was named for. ...
>> I was abstractly tsk-ing the rumors that Yahoo had stopped forwarding email until I remembered that a couple of SF Bay Area puzzlehunt mailing lists are on Yahoo Groups. Hmm, when I go visit puzzleh...
Book Report: Wild It was a bestseller. Everybody read this before I did. You probably already read this or decided you wouldn't. Anyhow. It's a memoir of grief on the Pacific Coat Trail. I saw the movie before I read ...
>> I'm just now back from a most-of-the-way-around-the-bay walk. My feet must recuperate. I may wear socks and sandals together. I appreciate your understanding during this difficult time. ...
Book Report: Geek Sublime Though we can all agree that Paul Graham was full of shit when he said computer hackers were like painters (in his essay Hackers and Painters), I guess I don't want to read these essays by someone wh...
>> Last week, I walked most of the way around the bay (again). This week, I wrote about it. Unlike the previous time I walked most of the way around the bay, I didn't make a point of stopping at interes...
>> San Francisco peeps who haven't already voted: Hoodline's Election Guide is a darned handy collection of slates. ...
>> Walking around my neighborhood today, I see 100% grim faces. It reminds me of hallways in companies facing multiple layoffs. ...
Book Report: Spam Nation Brian Krebs writes about computer crime. In this book, he traces the spam economy. Want to know how America's health care system keeps Putin in power? (Yes, I read this book a while back, before we k...
>> Hoo boy, political argument at the big family Thanksgiving dinner. We just couldn’t agree on what the worst thing about Trump is. ...
>> “In a parallel world, the Many-Worlds Interpretation hypothesis has already been tested and found to be false.” –Paul “MaxwellBuchanan” Dear ...
Trying out this new hosting service I wonder how hard it will be to get my blogging scripts up and running on this beast. ...
*tap tap tap* is this thing on? My site, lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us has moved. Thanks to the magic of the internets, its address is still lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us. It was running on one set of machines; now it runs on another...
paranoids rejoice! httpS://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us is now totally a thing. ☝ That green padlock means evil hackers will now have to work much harder to MITM the site, yay. ...
Book Report: Stress Test It's a memoir by Tim Geithner, Treasury Secretary under Obama associated with government bailouts following the mortgage crisis. I wasn't a fan of the bailouts. I read this book figuring I'd learn ...
Book Report: The (Mis)Behavior of Markets I kept hearing recommendations for this book. But I'm not really a finance guy, just a recreational math guy. I'd already heard this book's gist: financiers keep getting into trouble because their fo...