Larry Hosken: New: 2019

>> Back in December, I took an overnight trip to Sacramento. Sacramento has rivers. ...
Book Report: Factfulness It's a book by the GapMinder folks reminding us that India, China, world-health do-gooders and other folks have changed human society plenty in past few decades. On the one hand, this is happy "news"...
>> Three especially-popular blog posts from last year: Book Report: Beautiful Trouble In which I advise approaching a collection of political action techniques with at least the caution you'd use when...
>> I have a couple of iron-on patches but no iron. 👆 Still trying to figure out on how many levels that sentence is not ironic. ...
Book Report: Breaking Cover Autobiography of a lady who used her CIA ops training to interview 140+ displaced Iraqi families to screen them for bad folks so the not-bad folks could escape the war and live in Slovakia. As you mi...
>> Some people think I went overboard writing an app and designing an elaborate ritual to tell me where to take my walks, but in the long run it's probably less trouble than these naive saps who thought...
>> New plan for the coming year: #mysteryhunt Thank you, #SETEC! We had a blast. And now, bed. ...
>> /me flies back home from Boston OK, now Federal workers who are working without pay should definitely go on strike. ...
>> Remember a couple of weeks back when that Ninth Step Station serial started on Serialbox but their web signup was b0rken so you couldn't do anything? Their web signup is fixed now, try it again. ...
Aftermath I stopped resisting, just downloaded ♫ Semper Paratus ♫ and added it to my folder of walking music. #mysteryhunt ...
>> Here ya go, my Mystery Hunt 2019 write-up. Includes a picture of a kitten. ...
Book Report: Reporter content warning: war crimes, uspol It's an autobiography by Seymour Hersh, who reported on (among other things) the My Lai massacre, Watergate, and Abu Ghraib. There's an important lesson for soldi...
>> In case there was any doubt that I am a Californian: I polished off a 3# sack of oranges in two days. ...
>> Conten Conundrum Management System Playin' with puzzletron. I guess when your puzzlehunt has more than 100 puzzles, you want something more sophisticated than a spreadsheet to keep track of 'em. ...
Book Report: Manhattan Beach It's a novel. People enter the water, people exit the water. People change names, people change themselves. There's some WWII waterfront life bits, which were fun; and shipwreck raft survival which w...
>> Question for you: If you're like most folks, you know it's good to get early feedback on projects but you don't like it when someone judges your rough, unpolished work. How do you get yourself to nev...
>> A new batch of Nordic LARP talk videos went up a few days back. One of these applies even to non-LARPers. At least, it applies to non-LARPers who collaborate on big, ambitious projects. Brace yoursel...
Book Report; The Fifth Season This science-fiction novel depicts a cruel society, laying out some tragic consequences. It was a saddening read. ...
>> Back before I knew anything about non-top-40 music, San Francisco had a punk rock venue Mabuhay Gardens. There aren't so many anecdotes floating around about that place nowadays. But Andy Prieboy jus...
Book Report: [REDACTED] [REDACTED] My mystery hunt team is kicking around theme ideas. If there's a theme to the theme ideas, it's: books I hadn't read yet, movies I hadn't seen yet, TV shows I had yet to watch, etc. So lately I've be...
Getting COBRA Complete? Don't use automatic payments, they're b0rken You might hazily remember some months back my COBRA provider messed up an automatic payment and bizarrely handled it by cutting off my coverage and encouraging me to set up automatic payments to avoi...
Book Report: How Smart Machines Think When Sean Gerrish isn't automating the creation of wordplayish portmanteaux, he wrangles artificial intelligence… or writes this book about it. It's a popular-science survey of modern AI. You ...
>> Holy moly. PC/GEOS, that OS I was documenting as my first "real job" out of school, is still kicking around… and its owners open-sourced it. Behold the news and the github repo. Thanks to Morg...
>> We're putting together an MIT Mystery Hunt. It's an MIT Mystery Hunt—not some generic puzzle hunt. There should be some MIT-specific goodness in there. I joked "This doesn’t just mean extra-eng...
>> What if we all assumed that everyone else's Miskatonic U application video was going to be all "Baby Shark" so none of us used "Baby Shark"? ...
>> Puzzled Pint is coming up on Tuesday. I wrote this month's set, aided (a lot) once again by excellent Puzzled Pint editor Neal Tibrewala and excellent anonymous-to-me playtesters who I love even thou...
>> Wish I'd thought of "Road R'lyeh" earlier. ...
Book Report: Sunburst and Luminary It's a memoir by one of the programmers on the NASA Apollo project. Specifically, he wrote the computer programs that the astronauts used to land on the moon. This book is a real thrill ride for mode...
>> The building across the street from the Temporary Transbay bus Terminal continues to be constructed. Recently, the building-side facing the bus terminal got decorated. Basically, it's a dark wall wit...
>> Were you excited to hear that I'd written a set of Puzzled Pint puzzles, but on the evening in question you felt really lazy and you just stayed home? Yeah, me too. All is not lost: the excellent PP ...
Book Report: The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler Speaking of heavily redacted documents: Raymond Chandler discarded most of his notebooks, but overlooked some. This little book has some excerpts. It's of interest only to the completist; there's not...
Book Report: Paper Some months back, I learned that back in pre-USA days, the American Colonies had to import rags from the old country to make paper with. I thought that was weird. My mom noted that Mark Kurlansky had...
>> COBRA Complete, the COBRA administration company that messed up about 2/5 of my automatic payments to them, just sent me a check with no explanation. Now I'm wondering which scenario is most likely: ...
Milestone: 35 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 35 millionth hit. 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 s...
>> I read a book. I won't report which book; I was researching a puzzle, so naming it would be spoiler-y. But but it was a rare excuse for me, a non-academic, to visit the San Francisco Public Library's...
Book Report: Ninth Step Station, Season 1 It's cyberpunk detectives fighting crime in a divided city. It's fun. There are fun bits of spycraft, drone walls, and the kinds of nasty side effects from extreme body modification that Mike Pondsmi...
>> I was unintentionally cruel a while back. I posted a photo saying "ha ha ha, this wall decoration could almost be Braille, I see codez everywhere ha ha ha". And then some nice folks pointed out that ...
>> Today I walked the SF Crosstown Trail, a long walk from one corner of San Francisco to the opposite corner via lots of parks and greenways and trees and such. There were a few stretches of sidewalk i...
>> I drank some instant tea. But first I snapped photos because I didn't find much online about this tea. Behold: Platinum Myanmar Milk Tea. ...
Book Report: Silence on the Wire It's a book with ways to indirectly find out internet-security-ish info about things. E.g., if you're curious to know whether visitors to your website also frequent the San Francisco SPCA website, yo...
Book Report: All At Sea It's a writer's memoir about joining up with a documentary film crew hoping to document seamanship techniques by nomadic sailors based near Thailand, sort of. But things go off the rails and it's a r...
Book Report: Bad Blood Content warning: all the gross bodily fluids Today I was walking along, minding my own business, and I felt something wet on my hip. I looked down and saw blood and guts on my sweatshirt. My brain s...
>> Curtis and DeeAnn of Team Snout were in town. We played the Edison Room over at the excellent Palace Games Escape Rooms. And and and Curtis had Puzzled Pint stickers with him, so now my laptop is ext...
>> I went to scenic Boulder, Colorado. I had a rough time getting around, so the resulting travelog is pretty whiny, sorry. ...
>> Played some fris golf today. That's like frisbee golf, but when the group ahead of you gets attacked by a swarm of enraged bees, you say "Let's skip this part of the course." ...
Book Report: Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age It's a combination biography of Grace Hopper and story of the development of COBOL, the first mumble programming language (where historians and quibblers enjoy arguing about what exact phrase goes in...
>> I still use computer files. So I keep remote backups. Some weeks back, my backups stopped working. I was using Dropbox, and Dropbox was doing some biiiig upgrade. One side effect of this upgrade was...
>> Silver lining: the stove wasn't on when I left that pot full of beans on the stove and then went to Boston for a week. ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Arkham Some excellent puzzlehunt nerds ran a Cthulhu-themed "The Game"-style puzzle hunt in the appropriate geographical area. It was pretty impressive. I played in it with team Mystic Golems; and post...
Book Report: Hello World It's a book about AI and ML, especially where they bump into ethical questions. Part of the problem we get into is… computers nowadays (as in the past) are good at things humans are bad at; bu...
>> The really unsettling thing about out-in-the-world puzzle hunts, eldritch horrors aside, is days later when you think you see puzzles everywhere. Just looking down at the sidewalk and you think you s...
Book Report: Season of the Witch It's a history of San Francisco, concentrating on the weirdness of the 1970s and early 1980s. Jonestown, AIDS, … I'd read about bad things from those days, but hadn't followed Mr Rogers' advic...
Book Report: The Great Getty This biography tells the story of J. Paul Getty, oil tycoon. Getty made his millions the old-fashioned American way: his father was an oil tycoon. Reading about his early years as he lucks into a for...
>> When I say "I threw up my hands," what I mean is "I flipped my computer the bird, twice." ...
>> I wanted to go see the new mural "2020" by Tauba Auerbach, but Google Maps makes me think I can see it by looking out my window from pretty much anywhere in the USA's convex hull so I guess I'll stay...
Book Report: How Not to be Wrong A mathematician writes about how to think about the universe. A lot of the math-for-the-layperson material was old news to me, but there were some new-to-me bits. E.g., I'd read about instant runoff ...
>> When I read that Puzzled Pint now has a Code of Conduct, my first thought was "What about scissors?" … and they have a clause about scissors. They thought of everything.* Nice job, f...
>> I have walked 1000km while playing that Harry Potter Wizards Unite game. (That milestone doesn't capture the fun of the game, but it's something that folks can understand even if they don't know t...
>> Today's my birthday. My aunt Ellen came into town, so we had a little get-together over at my Mom and Dad's place. (That means it was a pretty good day, in case that wasn't clear.) ...
>> Who wants in on a poetry pyramid scheme? You invest one poem, get up to 400 back. Let me know. I'll need your email address. ...
The Devil's Chessboard It's a biography of Allen Dulles—Nazi sympathizer, CIA director, Bay of Pigs fiasco-driver, Warren Commission Report obfuscator. The story of this terrible human being reminds us that one perso...
>> Farewell to Kennedy's Irish Pub and Indian Curry House where a couple of BANG puzzlehunts finished. Maybe there's some correlation between "has enough empty space to shelter many puzzle nerds on a we...
>> “Freedom isn't free.” –Guy who went to City Hall to vote early and left his bus pass by the metal detector. ...
>> Looks like I just ran out of excuses for not walking all of the way around San Francisco Bay. ...
>> Adventures in web layout: Depending on compatibility between that font you're using and various text-rendering library versions, maybe everything seems to work until you look closely and notice that ...
Book Report: Into the Raging Sea USA ships don't go down with all hands anymore. There are multiple redundant safety systems, inspections, drills… But the El Faro steamed into the eye of a hurricane and sank with no survivors...
>> One the one hand, I fell in the mud. Maybe I should be more careful. On the other hand, mud is soft. I emerged with no injuries, just a lot of dirty laundry. Maybe I was just-the-right-amount carefu...
>> My downstairs neighbor's vacuum cleaner caught fire today. Nobody was hurt, but, y'know, who knew vacuum cleaners could catch fire? Pardon me as I get a head start on picking my New Year resolution...
>> "The more time I spend in front of a keyboard, the more I think my core skills here aren’t any more complicated than humility, empathy and patience; that if you understand its authors the code will r...
Book Report: Misbehaving It's an autobiography of an economist who wanted to affect policy. This is difficult: If you want to convince a politician to do something that they didn't already want to do, you probably need some ...