Last year, I spotted some Hallowe'en riddle decorations at a neighbor's house. Alas, I didn't spot them until after Hallowe'en, too late to be useful. So this year, I'll post a link back to my last-y...
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On Hallowe'en evening, kids in St. Louis don't just say "Trick or treat," they ask jokey riddles. Unfortunately, these little kids make up their own jokes, and the results are abusrdly unfunny. Each ...
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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...
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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 ...
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Book Report: Hide Me Among the Graves
Tim Powers writes historical... fantasy? Horror? He writes alternate histories as they should have happened if we lived in a world of the supernatural. He writes histories that show how much less unl...
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Two more Snippets of Online Answer-System Hindsight
I wrote that answer system for the 2-Tone Game, modified it for Ghost Patrol Bang, and hope to work on similar systems for future hunts. Jotting a couple of notes here on things I wish I'd done diff...
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Ghost Patrol BA'NG: some photos and a line chart
I posted some notes about Ghost Patrol BA'NG, mostly some photos from one of the puzzle-construction parties. I attended two puzzle-construction parties. (But during the second one, I didn't work mu...
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Book Report: The Sorcerer's House
It's a fantasy novel in which our characters start out in the normal world and then discover a magical gateway to a world beyond our own where blah blah blah. It sounds like the plot of the worst te...
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Jotting Notes on the Ghost Patrol talk at GC Summit 2009
[I went to the GC Summit 2009, at which various folks talked about how they run The Game. I didn't take notes then, figuring I could watch the video later. So now I'm watching the video, specificall...
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Ghost Patrol: It was awesome, yes
The Ghost Patrol Game was awesome. You just want to lock the creators up in a basement somewhere and force them to crank out more of these things. Uhm, but that would be wrong. Anyhow, there's a wr...
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Link: Ghost Patrol Forums, Sort of
Meat Machine (well, the Bay Area team by that name) set up a "Ghost Capturing" part of their Ghost Patrol application: a social network for ghosts (and ghost sympathizers. I joined, but have encount...
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Book Report: Glasshouse
It's fun to walk up next to Rich Bragg when he least expects it, especially if you're dressed up in glow sticks to look like a character from the movie "Tron". You remember "Tron", that movie where ...
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Book Report: Anansi Boys
I watched the no-more-secrets application videos that have been posted so far. I found the toy sharks very funny, funnier than I would have expected from the verbal description "well, there are toy ...
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Book Report: Strange Itineraries
It's a book of short stories by Tim Powers. There are some good ideas in here--but then most of those good ideas got recycled in later novels. Uhm, and I think they work better in the novels. I en...
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Book Report: Sister Age
A collection of short stories, some of them autobiographical, by M.F.K. Fisher. I was not so fond of the Twilight Zonish ghost stories, but the rest were awesome. There was one story about going ou...
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Book Report: Innocents Aboard
It's a book of short stories by Gene Wolfe. There are some winners and some losers and some, uhm, averagers. It's Gene Wolfe, so even the averagers strike an interesting mood. I liked a ghost sto...
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