This interview got me thinking about the movie "The Last of Sheila," co-written by Sondheim,
a mystery story that involves a puzzlehunt.
(I'm not the only one who was thinking about that;
Hall was inspired to write a post
about the movie, focusing on the puzzlehunt's timeline)
The interview points out that Sondheim had the sense to playtest his puzzlehunts.
(A theater nerd, he referred to playtesting as "dress rehearsal".) The puzzlehunt Game Control guy in "The Last of Sheila," as near as I could tell,
didn't playtest his game. His game's first challenge has an awful lot of
red herrings; it felt like he could have narrowed things down a bit and still had
plenty of challenge left. He seemed surprised at how tough the second challenge was.
The first time I saw the movie, I assumed that Sondheim was a feckless amateur
puzzlehunt-runner, and wouldn't have considered playtesting. But now… I wonder.
Maybe he didn't playtest because he was
cruel. He might have liked the idea that his players were wandering around
confused.
Maybe he didn't playtest because… well, for the same reason we, the audience
for a heist movie, don't get to see all the planning work ahead of the heist:
planning isn't cinematic; we'll have more suspense if we don't know what's coming.
I talked with Bryan Clair, that math professor/puzzle nerd in St Louis, today and found out he has a new web site.
Well, the content is about the same as his
old faculty web page, but he doesn't have wrestle with the university IT department head every time
he wants to upload some new files. I guess I'll link to the new web site so that the various
search engines etc. know to go look there. Yep.
Tammy McLeod isn't just my teammate on MIT Mystery Hunt's Left Out;
she isn't just a sudoku champion; she's also a world record
speed jigsaw puzzler. She started a YouTube channel with another
speed puzzler, USA national champ, Yvonne Feucht. I'm a jigsaw
ignoramus, so a lot of
their pilot episode was over my head.
I was nevertheless amused, especially
with the 1:1 competition that starts at about the 15:30 mark.
A couple of years back, I set my phone's timer-finished sound to clown music, by which I mean a short excerpt from Julius Fučík's "Entrance of the Gladiators." Here's a handy ♫ 20 seconds of c...
This news article's data visualization is like a series of tubes. (It also make some neat inferences about changing work patterns and why San Francisco's city budget has stupidly preventable annual c...
I pre-ordered the book 50 Years of Text Games and you can, too. It's a book of 50+ essays about computer games; the author chose one game to write about per year from 1971 to 2020. If that has you th...
Oof, when I blogged about "heading in to Starbucks," that was before I heard about them closing all their stores in Ithaca, a town where all the Starbucks had voted to unionize. On second thought, I ...
If you liked my writeup of being on the 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt writing team, you'll love Alex Irpan's writeup of being on the 2023 MIT Mystery Hunt writing team. Thrills! Chills! Image memes! Crises t...
I have set up an account on the social network post.news. If you're also on post.news, let me know so I can follow you. If you're not already there, I'm not necessarily encouraging you to join right ...
In the upcoming election, San Francisco Proposition D defines "affordable" housing in a way that surprised me, but made sense when I looked up California state law. Prop D makes allowances...
phraser improvements
Phraser, the tool for generating word+phrase lists useful for solving+designing puzzles, is now smarter when reading crossword constructor dictionaries. Thus, hundreds of thousands of words+phrases g...
Krakenwagen update:
Searchers more rigorous than me found a couple of better online pix of the krakenwagen (small pics here, click a pic for link to original). Thanks to Ray Ryan and Dan Egnor for finding these an...
In the recent San Francisco District Attorney recall election, we found out many San Franciscans thought the D.A. has a lot more leeway than was true. And then there's this guy: ...
"The California Department of Housing and Community Development said Tuesday that it would focus on San Francisco for its first ever 'housing policy and practice review,' a process that will dissect...
The Collaborative Word List Project is a darned useful resource for word puzzle constructors and now it's free.* This is a list of phrases and hand-tuned scores. Here are a few lines from the file: ...
If your memory is very good, you might remember there was a TV crew getting footage at the 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt. Specifically, I dodged around that crew as I carried pancakes at the Pancake Pictiona...
Oof, I'm just now finding out that large parts of fave novel Angle of Repose were plagiarized from the journals of Mary Hallock Foote. I really liked the authentic-sounding descriptions of life in th...
Link: "Puzzle World" Discord
I joined the Puzzle World Discord, a set of chat rooms for puzzlehunt and gnarly-puzzle enthusiasts. If you're not into Mystery Hunt and peek at this Discord today, you might think "oh gee whiz maybe...
This week's 50 Years of Text Games post is about Universal Paperclips. Universal Paperclips is an online "clicker game." Well, it's kinda online. It's a web page; but all of the game's programming ru...
Steve Yegge is shooting videos about working at big tech companies. Nerds of a certain age may fondly remember Steve Y's blog rants (and, more recently, Medium rants), in which he wrote about working...
Link: Kissinger Death Tontine
I grabbed some dates in October 2025. I don't know whether or not I expect Kissinger to survive that long, but earlier Octobers were taken. ...
I had a fun time solving Patrick Berry's puzzle extravaganza "Containment Policy." It took a while to get through. The puzzles were pretty straightforward to solve, but then I spent a while staring a...
September is National Preparedness Month (NPM) here in the USA. Unfortunately, I didn't find out about the existence of NPM until we were already well into September, so I didn't have any cool prepar...
Some Texans made a pro-life whistleblower web site to persuade other Texans to anonymously report each other for personal medical decisions about abortion. These awful people, “Texas Right to L...
Link: Free Burger Force
Some time back, I recommended a comic book called Burger Force with the caveat that it was tricky to acquire, being published in the far-off land of Australia. Thanks to the power of the internet and...
Google Ngrams Download
There's a new-to-me set of Google Ngrams (big files with frequency counts for common and not-so-common English words&phrases&word-strings): Google Ngrams Download. I mention this because when...
My local Nextdoor is full, as ever, of whiners. Lately, car drivers have been squawking about streets that got closed to through traffic to ease pandemic exercise—give folks space to bike and r...
I enjoyed this crossword puzzle's gimmick: https://www.theatlantic.com/free-daily-crossword-puzzle/?id=atlantic_20210221&set=atlantic&puzzleType=crossword ...
I've been digging these interviews with early employees at tech startups. (Note: I didn't say "with founders"—instead, these are the first hires, wacky risk-takers who maybe weren't that convin...
Occasionally, my web alert for "Hosken" turns up a winner. Genital shape key to male flies' sexual success "Male genitals generally, and in Drosophila specifically, evolve very quickly, so we were...
Link: Open Infrastructure Map
Open Infrastructure Map: It's a map of power lines, communications towers, gas lines, and stranger infrastructure-y things. It's not complete. You may have heard of the Open StreetMap project—a...
Smoke-surrounded folks: You know how the Purple Air map has that menu with LRAPA and AQandU items? And how those items might help get the map data to use a formula closer to the EPA's? That menu has ...
link: Web War Stories
Computer nerds, take note: I just enjoyed watching "Overflow," a @WebWarStories episode about debugging and fixing a gnarly computer bug. The bug occurred on a rapidly-growing-popular web site, so th...
Wildfire smoke having relented in San Francisco, I resumed my exercise-walks. I noticed some Hash House Harrier marks on the ground. The Hash House Harriers, you will recall, is the drinking club wit...
I thought I knew what "home industry" meant but maybe it should also mean industrial music sheltering at home Ten Grand Goldie official video from Einstürzende Neubauten on Vimeo. It's all very ...
Are you up for filling out daily surveys and sharing your phone's location data to help some UCSF researchers track how Covid-19 is spreading around the world? Install this app on your phone (perhaps...
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...
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...
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...
If you're in the USA remember to vote Tuesday (if you haven't already). If you're near Berkeley and you like drama and scholarship, you might want to know Shotgun Players is putting on the play "Arc...
Are you kicking yourself because you missed Hunt for Justice? Well, we're re-running it. So if you missed it the first time and are now thinking something like "Awwww, if I'd known there were going t...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even your local Cinematheque
Puzzle nerds and movie buffs, you might be interested in this email I got after a phone call today: Larry - good chatting with you. To recap our conversation: I'm Jack Kelley, producer of the fort...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
I'm kind of embarrassed about how long it took me to install Signal. I assumed it would take a while to set up. It's a security app written by security people. Surely there would be questions I didn'...
I'm liking Signal, a text-messaging app. It was darned easy to set up. I replaced my phone's built-in text messaging app with Signal. Now when I text another Signal user, Signal encrypts the message ...
You can "friend" someone on Kloak without meeting them f2f.
I thought the only way to "friend" someone on Kloak was to meet and scan each others' phones. But Egnor played with the app enough to figure out it's got UI to use other means, e.g., email. That's n...
kloak looks interesting
Kloak is a social network in which your friends can see what you're up to, even though the folks running the service can't. To "friend" someone, you meet them in person and each use the app to scan t...
GEOS-SC vs SC-GEOS
If you worked at Geoworks, you might remember that one of our products was GEOS-SC, an operating system for early-days smartphones. And you might remember that in Japan, the GEOS trademark was held ...
The Sawzall programming language has been replaced by Go? That means some documentation I worked on back in the day has gone obsolete. The fate of a software technical writer: Here tells the truth on...
Link: How to Host a BANG
A few days back, someone added some good material to the How to Host a BANG wiki. I've since made some little edits on things I had specialized knowledge about—e.g., if you're running an el-che...
Follow-Up Links
If you envied my opportunity to play that Shinteki Hipster BINGO Hunt in San Francisco's Mission District, cheer up: it's now available as a ClueKeeper self-guided hunt. You can play it the next time...
Hipster Bingo: Puzzle Hunt or Not?
This Shinteki Hipster BINGO Puzzle Hunt on ClueKeeper thing at the Come Out and Play festival sounds puzzle-hunty. Then again, it's not announced on Puzzle Hunt Calendar, and maybe that's because it'...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even BRC
"Aug 30-Sep 7 Puzzle Hunt at Burning Man Black Rock City, NV If you go, you'll know it when you see it." –Puzzle Hunt Calendar No, I'm not going to Burning Man. But if you are, now you can re...
Link: From Haight Theater To Goodwill, The History Of 1700 Haight Street An article with some San Francisco history showing that local politics makes some pretty $&#*ing strange bedfellows. &he...
Link: Double Fine Adventure!
I've been watching this serial documentary about how a computer game got made. It distills the thrill and the angst of game development. I've mentioned it before, but back then to see the videos, you...
Some people are surprised to hear about someone playing the trumpet while driving. I'm not; if that bozo tried that on public transit, the other passengers would have kicked him off. ...
An article about a "Sleep No More"-like immersive play in China: Director Meng Jinghui Brings First Full-Immersion Play to China. Not exactly a pervasive game, but kinda pervasive. ...
Game: Broken Age
The Broken Age game is pretty; it's like playing a painting; and it has funny jokes! There are also some not-so-funny jokes; one challenge in the game is a puzzle in which you have to set up a funny ...
Book Report: This is Improbable
It's a book collecting and compressing "Improbably Research" topics. This book convinced me to go back to reading the Improbable Research blog. A chapterful of this stuff is a lot to get through in a...
Something to do in Austin: You can, of course, bring your own desk with you to the Oval Office, as did Lyndon Johnson. The Johnson desk is now in the replica Oval Office at the LBJ museum in Austin...
Link: Documentation, Support, and Customer Success
Anything worth documenting is worth documenting well. But not everything is worth documenting. And I think this guy would agree with me: Recently I’ve started to see documentation as a psychologic...
Link: Law Offices of Lowell Finley
If you're into election technology, a new blog to follow: Law Offices of Lowell Finley. Remember when California was reporting folks trying to sell us so-bleeding-edge-it-aint-really-working-right-ye...
BAPHL has a wiki!
Nathan Curtis mailed the baphl-announce mailing list with good news: …I wanted to let you know about a resource that Hubert set up for us. The BAPHL website now has a wiki. Visit http://www....
Link: Things & Movies
Fiji's TV and internet evolved, uhm, out of order. At least from an American point of view. The embrace of video takes on more significance when one considers that television was not available in F...
Link: Braille Notation for Complex Cello Music
"Feldman’s piece in particular, which uses geometric figures over the course of a graphically represented x-axis of time, cannot be transcribed at all into standard braille music encoding." ...
Overloaded Name
If you say Gordon Moore, as in "Moore's Law" …now we have to ask if you mean the Intel co-founder's rule of thumb about computer hardware advances or the San Francisco beat cop. ...
This evening's Adventure Design Group was the San Francisco Institute of Possibility. This was about as far from puzzlehunts as you can get—they run events that might be described as awesome pa...
Link: "The Best API Documentation"
A blogger blogs about goals for API Documentation. He starts with the important two questions: Who is the audience? What are they trying to do? …though he doesn't phrase it that way. ...
Link: Photoset of Chicago 2013 Puzzle Hunt
It's 2015. Why am I only now seeing these photos of a 2013 Chicago puzzlehunt? Because I'm a nerd even when touring (touristing?), I recognized those library stacks. ...
I'm lahosken on ello.co
I joined that social network ello.co. https://ello.co/lahosken, that's me. If you're on there and we know each other, we should "follow" each other. Or whatever it's called on this thing. If you fol...
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 ...
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...
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, ...
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 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...
"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...
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...
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, ...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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: 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...
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...
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. ...
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...
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. ...
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 ...
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: 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? ...
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 ...
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? ...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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. ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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. ...
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: 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...
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. ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Kickstarter
The Puzzazz folks want to send you a puzzle a month, a sort of time-release extravaganza. Or something like that, check it out. Be sure to watch the video for a new entry in your "Wei-Hua Puts His To...
Excerpt from the 2012 Santarchy/Santacon Convocation: Do a tug-of-war, a treasure hunt, take over alleys, take over stoops, driveways, churches, bring snow and have a snowball fight… do somet...
Link: Puzzlehunt Pencils
In case you've run low on Shinteki graph paper, Eric Harshbarger will sell you pencils adorned with code alphabets. Hmm, they're #2 pencils. For collaborative outdoor nighttime solving, that's probab...
Richard Benjamin on "The Last of Sheila"
The A.V. Club isn't completely worthless without their crossword. They interviewed the actor Richard Benjamin about, among other things, "The Last of Sheila." Mostly stuff that you already knew, sure...
I have infinity words for you
Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers... ...
A Braille printing company wants someone who knows Morse code for an "event." Too bad I'm nowhere near Louisville, because that sounds like it could be the best event ever. ...
Link: The Animator Letters Project
The Animator Letters Project publishes letters from experienced animators, letters exhorting young animators to keep at it, hone their craft, etc etc. It's inspiring; it might be especially inspiring...
Pretty sure that @GoogleArt lets me see this intricate old astrolabe more closely online (if I zoom in) than I could in the "live" museum, where it would be in a glass case. And what are the chances ...
Link: SpliceVine interview with Sara Thacher
@thacher is a big name in the @jejuneinstitute game and other TransMedia experience/game/thingies. This site about video editing(?!) interviewed her, and she mentions an early influence: Janet Cardif...
@ikai pointed out an unintentionally funny article The Real Reason Silicon Valley Coders Write Bad Software. The reason? Because they aren't better English writers. This article made it into the Atla...
@_dev_joe, maintainer of the MIT Mystery Hunt Puzzle Index,, has announced an update. More puzzles, more organized, plus a tidbit especially interesting to me since I haven't played in the Mystery Hu...
Twitter is Hiring a Tech Writer
...or maybe more than one. I dunno, @JoinTheFlock is mysterious to me. I didn't even know the listing was up until someone told me. Am I under a non-solicit thingy with you? I.e., do you work at Goo...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Truckee, potentially
"I have been working on puzzles for my own race that I want to have in Truckee as a Girl Scout fund raiser." –Dave Rector From the looks of his sample puzzle, he might have been inspired by Sh...
Link: Where Else? / exploring nonchalance
It's a really good write-up of the Nonchalance/Jejune Institute Game. It's a Cardhouse product. That means it's written by someone who's a lot closer to the Nonchalant wavelength than I am; and also ...
Link: Cosmo, the Hacker "God" Who Fell to Earth
This article about an identy thief is pretty amazing. Perhaps 25% of its amazing-ness comes from the story itself: how on earth does a 15-year old kid get so good at navigating bureaucracy that he ca...
I'm Jill Stein!
Which 2012 USA Presidential Candidate are you? Take this personality quiz and find out! This quiz also says that my opinions are closer to those of Democrats than Greens. Since Stein is the Green Pa...
Comment on GFPuzz's WarTron writeup
I tried leaving a comment on GFPuzz's WarTron writeup, but then LiveJournal told me my comment had been automagically marked as Spam. (I dunno why. Maybe because I use an OpenID account on LJ?) Anyho...
Link: Anagramr anagramming game
This is me with the high score at an anagramming game: Leaderboard: @lahosken:170 @stalefries:111 @nwerneck:67 @ixpu:56 @ckolderup:55— An Anagram Game (@anagramr) August 30, 2012 You might wo...
Link: Ravenchase Great America Race writeup
A team of west-coast puzzlehuntists played through the whole Ravenchase Great America Race last week, solving in cities from Washington DC to Boston. They blogged the race, mostly posting a writeup t...
Link: Your free software website
I am a technical writer. Within technical writing, as with other kinds of writing, there are genres. Genres are defined by rules. If you want to write the web page for an open-source project, these a...
Potential Puzzle Hunters are everywhere, even St Louis
While I was in St Louis to volunteer for DASH, I did some shoe-leather investigation in search of potential puzzlehunters. I had a lot of fun helping at DASH... but we only had two teams this year. T...
If I win my bet, then these guys have to poke around in wolf poop. Or something like that. Petridish.org is like Kickstarter for science instead of art. ...
Link: Ranking Wikipedia Pages
This puzzle nerd has ideas on how to rank Wikipedia pages for notable-ness. Similar goals to Nutrimatic, but taking advantage of more data. Some of you folks might have some good ideas on things he c...
Link: Going Cardboard
I enjoyed this documentary about boardgames and boardgamers, Going Cardboard. If you don't already think boardgames are fun, this movie probably won't convince you otherwise. But I think they're fun ...
I annotated a geographical location in Pinwheel.com. It might or might not be a good way to pass information for games that happen out in the world. It's new, so I'm sure it will change. For now, jus...
animated gif zombocom logo
The internet is not yet complete; there are still gaps. For example, today I tried to find an animated GIF of the zombo.com animated "flower" logo and couldn't find it. So I made one (with some bla...
Even SF Japantown
Who else wants to play @realegame? It's ~1.5 hours long with about an hour of team puzzling in SF Japantown. They're running a few sessions, so you can choose when you want to play. Most of those ses...
Book Report: Hackerspaces: the Beginning
Oh, I heard a mouse chewing above my head. I sure hope it doesn't figure out how to get into my apartment from my neighbors' apartment and... uhm, but I didn't want to talk about gnawing-spaces, I wa...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even inside Puzzle Hunts
The MIT Hunt had an amazing recursive puzzle. @Prestemon blogged his solve so you can experience the majesty without having to bust your own personal brain for eight hours. (Well, as I post this, he ...
More Tyro Crossword Construction ramblings
Some days ago, I posted some noobish thoughts about crossoword construction. I'd figured out that Nutrimatic's default word lists were good for Nutrimatic's use case, but not so great for a list of c...
The new ice cream parlor a few blocks away has a backstory: during prohibition times, bartenders were out of work. So they went to the soda fountains and sophisticated-itized them. I felt like a n00b...
Mechanics' Institute Library
Remember a while back I screamed that USA legislators wanted to make a local censorship service a la China's Great Firewall? They're still at it. Lots of folks are protesting it today. You can, too. ...
ArtGameLab, Super Going
@thacher has been interesting lately if you're a San Francisco person who likes pervasive games. (That's not unusual. If you're even halfway into ARGy stuff, yawta follow her.) She mentioned that the...
Joined goodreads
I joined goodreads, yet another site that recommends books to read based upon books that you liked. It's been around for a while, but I didn't join. Amazon.com's recommendations were fine! But then A...
Link: thelatitude
The Nonchalance website (GC behind Jejune Institute) updated recently The Jejune Institute is now CLOSED. Our adventures concluded in 2011 with hidden episodes IV and V. For information on our ne...
Link: Nourot Studio glass pumpkins
Behold a link to Glass pumpkinoid decorations, photos thereof. One stop during the bay area rerun of the WHO game was Nourot Glass Studio in Benicia. On display were glass pumpkins. Of course, The ...
Book Report: Tactile Morse Code
Sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover. I don't feel that I need to read the book Tactile Morse Code because its cover explains its system pretty well. Bonus irony points for being a book about...
Book Report: Hackerspaces: the Beginning
It's a free book in which folks who participate in Hackerspaces write about their organizations and their spaces. Hackerspaces are tangled up with the Maker movement: folks who chip in to form a spac...
Happy American Censorship Day
If you use the internet, you probably want to visit http://americancensorship.org/. USA legislators want to set up China's Great Firewall in the USA, urged on by copyright holders screaming about pir...
Link: new Dead Milkmen album
Fogeypunks and humorees of a certain age might remember The Dead Milkmen from back in the day. They have a new album out. I haven't listened to the whole thing, but "Caitlin Childs" and "Meaningless...
Book Report: Deep State
If you've been listening to the recent Snoutcast podcasts, you've heard interviews with some ARG (Alternate Reality Game) folks. If you listened to this week's podcast, you might have heard of a Walt...
Link: Why Did The Elite Extend The Suffrage?
Maybe I should try a warped Churchill quote on my Libertarian friends: Big Government is the worst form of government in the world except all the others that have been tried. It's not 100% pure flipp...
The Go Gopher Meme is Too Damn High
I've been messing around with writing an web app on App Engine using Go. A few months ago, there was a nice demo presentation of creating such an app that used as its example Mustach-io, a program fo...
Why I love Puzzalot Forum
Post by Robotguy: I am working on a type of crossword that is played on the surface of regular polyhedra... [more explanation...] I would appreciate any feedback. And this yielded relevant, practic...
Supermarkets vs museums. Curated peaches are near the artisanal cereals in aisle six Since when does stocking a store - any kind of store - count as “curating?” –things consumed A lo...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, and can become your landmarks
This week's Snoutcast is a conversation with Rich Bragg about traveling to play in puzzlehunts. Rich talks about the feeling he gets when playing a game in an unfamiliar city: it's as if the city was...
Book Report: Tabletop: Analog Game Design
It's a collection of papers by a few authors about tabletop games: design, history, culture, place in society, all that. I got it for free here: Tabletop: Analog Game Design. Some of my co-workers a...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even in NYC audibly
Remember how I went to New York and kinda figured out that some of the puzzle nerds there were into some kind of puzzly-geocaching combination thingy that I never really figured out? This week's Snou...
Comic Report: Three #1
Three #1 is a comic anthology featuring three LGBT comic artists telling LGBT stories, so you'd think it would be some boring thing that you'd read to one-up your sweater-wearing NPR-listening f...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Morgan Hill
Hey Seattle puzzle people: don't click the link in this blog post. I'm talking about a BANG, but some SNAPpish folks are talking about re-running this event in Seattle. Actually, you know what? Don't...
Jotting Notes on GC Summit 2011 Panel: My First Game
The 2011 GC Summit tried something new, albeit something that's worked out well at conventions you've heard of: a panel discussion. So I looked at the video and jotted notes on GC Summit 2011 Panel D...
There was finally an entry puzzle on The Master Theorem simple enough such that even I could solve it. I kinda wish that had happened before DASH3, where I met one of the Master Theorem guys. Because...
If you're in Google Plus and want to encircle me, I am lahosken [at] gmail [dot] com. Not much stuff of mine will show up there any time soon; I couldn't find a way to import my blog posts there yet...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even the new Online Journalism
Sweet article by Sara Faith Alterman in the Bold Italic with awesome illustrations by juan leguizamon about the local puzzle hunt scene. No wonder a bunch of people suddenly showed up at the 2-Tone G...
Swedish Rebusrally team name I would gladly steal: Baron Bosse Behöver Betänketid. I don't know what that means, but I'm sure I betänk like a bosse. On the other hand, not so much: The Sammanswet...
USPS-mailed some puzzle printouts to a hotel so that (I hope) some out-of-towners in town for Shinteki can use them to play 2-Tone on Friday without having to slow down to print stuff out at a Kinko...
There's a van parked across the street from my apartment labeled Digital Concrete. That sounded about as useful as Online Haircuts. But when I visited the Digital Concrete website, it was pretty inte...
The Tenderloin National Forest is a cool little spot in San Francisco. It's been around for a few years, but I didn't know about it until I walked past today, checking up on 2-Tone Game sites. The Fo...
Why is Corey Anderson so fast at puzzling? Constant practice. While most engineers scribble their designs on whiteboards, Corey draws his backwards on a transparent sheet of glass. Dude is badass. ...
My Ubuntu box auto-updated a bunch of packages with names like "libavcodec" and "ffmpega". Hey those got mentioned on all those troubleshooting pages with which I totally failed to use Pitivi edit a ...
I'm trying to figure out if I'm set up to shoot and edit simple home videos. This Linux distro comes with a video editor called "Pitivi". As near as I can tell, that name is short for "I piti the foo...
puzzlehuntcalendar.com makes a difference
A few people have been playing the 2-Tone Game this past weekend—referred by puzzlehuntcalendar.com. I checked the IP addresses of three of the players; they were from the East Bay, Spain, and ...
Lowell vs Reality
You may recall that in the most recent California gubernatorial primary, I voted for Lowell Darling. He had the best plan for fixing California's revenue situation: if elected governor, he'd do nothi...
Escapist Comics: as threatened, the Dark Carnival folks opened up a comic book store in Berkeley, bootstrapping it with the comics "left over" from Comic Relief. It's on Claremont Ave, out next to Da...
Coming Soon to Oakland Museum: More Michael McMillen
I went back to the Oakland Museum, hoping to snap photos of Michael McMillen's Aristotle's Cage, which you'll recall that I liked. By the door to that piece of art was a little sign: there's a McMill...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even the greater Seattle Area
I'm reading about the World Henchmen Organization The Game coming up, and I realize part of the reason I'm excited is that I still have that lasso from the Justice Unlimited Game. You remember, the ...
PhotoCity Pervasive Capture-the-Flag Photo Game Part II
PhotoCity is this game where you "capture" areas of a city by photographing them. But you can't play in just any neighborhood. The game only works if you start in a place that they've "seeded". I h...
People kvetch about ineffective government nowadays, but I just read this report of the 1880 legal case UNITED STATES v. THIRTY-TWO BARRELS OF DISTILLED SPIRITS and the distilled spirits won. It's c...
Cyber-F-22
Sometime the past few years, the prefix "cyber-" changed meaning. It used to mean "high-tech". But lately, it's meant "I am trying to sell some poorly-thought-out computer crap to the USA governmen...
If I was a SF bay area parent of a kid old enough to hold a glue gun, I'd want to know about the "young makers" and Open MAKE at the Exploratorium http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIX5a9HouKM . Lo...
Technical Writing Student Internships
Google is taking technical writing interns this summer. Yeah, everyone at Google's a genius and should never ever need anything explained to them. OMG especially not by some wet-behind-the-ears compu...
For old time's sake, looked at the Rapture Index. It's showing Google Ads now. If he figures he'll be around long enough to spend the money, that's a good sign, right? ...
I created an about.me profile. I'd heard about about.me, wondered what the fuss was about, so I tried it. Now I've tried it and... I still wonder what the fuss was about. So now I have yet another p...
When I write a post at this here blog, that post gets around. It's syndicated on Friendfeed, Google Buzz, LJ, FB, ... and probably other places I forgot. People can comment on it in all those place...
Art Hunts are Everywhere, even the Presidio
I was just reminded of a walk I recently took in San Francisco's Presidio. There was an art event going on around the Fort Winfield Scott area; exhibits scattered around outside. You could approach...
15 Games Meme
I got tagged by a meme in Facebook. It's about games. Since I'm on the front seat of this bus and the people on the seat behind me can see my laptop screen, I guess I won't playtest any puzzles rig...
Link: Jet Lamp video/talk about Text Adventure Games
Yesterday after work I went out to see a movie, sort of. And I recommend you go see it, depending on where you are. The movie is "Get Lamp", and I haven't actually seen the whole thing yet. It's a...
Link: Snoutcast
If you're wondering What is this mysterious "conversation" for which Larry felt he needed to come up with "talking points" ahead of time? the truth can now be revealed: it was a Snoutcast interview. ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Sveden
A page with a couple of RebusRally photos makes me think that Rebus Rallies happen more than once a year, though I rarely hear about them. ...
McSweeney's is running a riddly hunt. There's real treasure at the end. Doesn't sound like my kind of thing, but maybe it sounds like your kind of thing. ...
Link: My Secret Identity Revealed on CPedia
The folks at the Cuil search engine have a new way of presenting their data, Cpedia. Instead of the stereotypical list-of-ten-results, they construct an encyclopedia article. Where by "they", I mea...
Link: Blue Door Puzzle Trail
I ego-surfed for mentions of the 2 Tone Game, and found one: a post on an ARG (Alternate Reality Gaming) forum. (Thanks for that!) The poster there called the 2 Tone Game a "puzzle trail". Apparen...
Link: PhotoCity Pervasive Capture-the-Flag Photo Game
Just watched a video of a recent talk by a University of Washington professor named Popovic. His schtick is crowd-sourcing difficult tasks by turning those tasks into games. (Have you heard of Rosett...
I am an Aardvark
I joined Aardvark, the social search service where you ask questions and they're answered by your friends, your friends-of-friends, or whoever. And then I totally failed to think of a question to as...
Link: California Secretary of State on Voting Systems
I'm doing taxes today. In my California tax booklet, there's a form asking me if I'm registered to vote. That's great. We citizens are supposed to get angry about taxation without representation. ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Disneyland
Excerpt from the bottom of Matt Haughey's Disneyland travelog Another highlight of the trip was using the Wishing Stars iPhone app in the park. It's basically a photo and clue-driven scavenger hunt ...
Link: Puzzle Forum @ Puzzalot
If you're a puzzle-huntist, I'm sure you're already subscribed to the excellent Puzzalot blog, so I don't know why I even bother to link to link to his post announcing that he set up a puzzle forum. ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Rashomon Gate
The BANG 25 Writeup Addendum over at Puzzalot gets into a tricky aspect of team puzzle-solving: figuring out who had which insight. It's a hard problem; I've given up on it myself. If Player A tell...
Link: Stuart Landsborough's Puzzling World
Puzzling World is a tourist destination in New Zealand. It started out as a big maze for people to wander around in. Then they added some strange attractions. Some of the ad copy worries me, thoug...
Jotting Notes on Red Byer's GC Summit 2009 Talk "Run More Games"
OK, jotting some notes about Red Byer's GC Summit 2009 talk "Run More Games". Yes, the talk was months ago; my notes are not timely. Oh, before I even start, I should link to Red's own notes about ...
Google & OpenID: discovery URL
A while back, I mentioned that Google supported Opendid. There's one important detail that I had a hard time finding amidst the mountains of documentation: If the user wants to use their Google acco...
Link: Pimp my Bookcart Contest
Some webcomic is holding a Bookcart decoration contest. The only place I have ever seen decorated book carts is at UC Berkeley's library; that's where I've shot all of my book cart graffiti photos. ...
Link: Bang XXVI
The web page for BANG XXVI gives my browser window a hard time, but it's announcing a SNAP simulcast, and that's a good thing to know about.Labels: link, puzzlehunts...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even in the News
Alert reader Mahlen spotted this article at SFGate, an essay by Dave Blum of Dr Clue: ..."The Amazing Race" definitely has boosted interest in treasure hunts, but that sort of competition and dysfu...
Link: Plain ol' Tasha
Tasha draws a comic. It's pretty good. She was inspired by Jim's Journal, and that inspiration shows. You might think I'd link to a good comic to recommend it. But I never got around to it. Yest...
Jotting Notes on DeeAnn Soles GC Summit 2009 Presentation: Being GC
[DeeAnn Sole of Team Snout spoke at the GC Summit 2009. You remember when I volunteered on the Hogwart's Game, I followed around this one lady who, operationally, had the whole game in her head? The...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Tampa
A few years back, I pointed out a multi-day Game shaping up in New Zealand with a bionic theme. That game never came together. But all was not lost! Eagle-eyed Justin Graham got word: The GC for tha...
Link: Ken Jennings roolz San Francisco
City Hall runs this town. And who runs city hall? Not Gavin Newsom--he's bumbling around, grooming himself for a gubernatorial run. Fortunately Jeopardy star Ken Jennings stepped in to keep city ha...
Link: XXX, Poison Picnic Puzzlehunts
I'm not cool enough to attend SXSW, but when folks there twitter about attending a puzzlehunt lecture, I pay attention. A lecture about puzzlehunts, forsooth. Apparently, a couple of folks put togeth...
Link: Javascript the Good Parts
Yes, I should be writing about BATH4 and MSPH1[23]. But that would require effort. But link posts are easy. So I'll link to a video of Douglas Crockford talking about the good parts of Javascript....
Link: AllMyData
I occasionally backed up my files. But it was always ad-hoc: zip up an archive of some files, upload it to my web server. Done by hand when I got around to it (not often). Then there was the time ...
Link: Warren Spector, Playing Word Games
Warren Spector does not, as far as I know, play uppercase "T" The uppercase "G" Game. But he designs lowercase "g" games. He worked on some good stuff for the Paranoia pencil-and-paper RPG... uhm, ...
Link: Two Narrow Establishments in the Inner Sunset
My neighborhood has a hot dog shack: Underdog. It's at around 18th Ave and Irving. I like it, and suspect that my foodie friends might like it, too. They might not trust my judgement, of course. ...
Link: Musicbrainz
I haven't posted a new J-ska review in ages. Did they do any good? I don't know. I got angry emails from folks who wanted to make sure that I should really give the band Mongol 800 another chance;...
Link: Help Get Sita out of Copyright Jail
The fun of watching cartoons plus the smugness of giving to a good cause: I encourage you to Help Get Sita out of Copyright Jail You might remember the cartoonist Nina Paley. Or you might not rememb...
Link: Free Andi Watson Comic
You don't have to blog about the things you're thinking about. Sometimes the things you're thinking about... don't bear blogging. Sometimes you can use blogging as an excuse to think about somethin...
Link: Coffee to the People
I guess as long as I'm linking to a cafe, I should link to the place where I pick up coffee on weekend mornings: Coffee to the People. I claim that it is awesome. It's a cafe at Haight on Masonic. T...
Link: USA Census Tract Data
I want to travel somewhere, but where? I like the places that I've been. I could keep going back to them. Then again, one reason to travel is to see new things. How do I keep from falling into a ...
Link: Caja's HTML sanitizer for Javascript
[Edited to add: If you have questions or concerns about Caja, the Google Caja Discuss group is a good place to ask them.] When you write a program that's supposed to be secure, you have to plan on ...
Link: Arising like a Phoenix from a Bathtub
Further evidence of Darcy's ongoing awesomeness: she rescued the contents of the team Taft on a Raft web site. It's back! Including the material from the The Apprentice Zorg game! If you sadly too...
Ghost Patrol Links, including Photos
Yeah, yeah, you were waiting for the Ghost Patrol results, but me, I was waiting for Wesley's photos. And he posted them: Wes Chan's Ghost Patrol photos. Mostly photos of puzzles and of our team (M...
Link: Muppet Movie Game Blog
I was was avoiding linking to the Muppet Movie Game Site, but have since figured out that was dumb of me. You might say I avoided linking them due to philisophical differences... but really it was m...
Link: Google Reader Hooked up to Automatic Translation
A couple of weeks ago, the Google Reader folks announced that I (or you, for that matter) could use Google Reader to subscribe to foreign-language feeds, automatically translated. I thought I'd like...
Link: We Told Stories
Do you remember a few months back, there was a web-sensation around a novel told through the medium of Google Maps? I read that novel. What I didn't know is that this project was part of the effort...
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...
Link: Ghost Patrol Application from Mystic Ghosti
You won't find the Mystic Ghosti application on YouTube because... it's not a video. We played to our strengths, creating a ghost-capturing cryptic crossword. Where by "we", I mean "not me". My "c...
Link: BANG Suddenly Looming on Horizon
As one of the bureaucrats of the Bay Area Night Game wiki, I sleepily go through my chores. My feed reader monitors the "recent changes" section of the wiki. When it detects something, I go to the ...
Link: A 3-D Puzzle Chat Room
Here's an attempt at creating a Lively room for the discussion of puzzles, puzzle hunts, and/or whatever. (That sentence might make more sense if I explain that "Lively" is Google's new free 3-D cha...
Puzzle Hunts were Everywhen, even 1973
Holy #$!) check it out: It's old Game invites to pre-Midnight Madness 1970s Don Luskin et. al puzzle-y Games! And newspaper articles describing those games! It seems like they were pretty heavy on ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Minneapolis
Remember a while back, I mentioned SF0, a not-really-a-puzzle-hunt dealie, more of a mutual-dare society? Well some folks on SF0 bridged the gap to puzzlehuntdom: they hosted a puzzle hunt in Minnea...
Puzzles from Down Under
I don't know anything about the puzzles announced at the Google Australia Blog which is a little frustrating because I'm apparently not supposed to register to look at them.Labels: link, puzzle scene...
Link: Race for the Galaxy
When people ask me what I do at work, I clam up. Most of that stuff is confidential. Like when some of us geek gamers play-tested the geek game Race for the Galaxy some evenings, we knew it was a f...
Link: Qwirkle
I don't feel so bad about all those times Susan Ross beat me at Petaluma Game Night now that she's an award-winning game designer for her game Qwirkle.Labels: awesome, entertainment industry, link...
Link: my IMDb page
Darling of course I have a page in the Internet Movie Database. Some might say that it was strange that I worked on a console game for a year. But it was all worth it for that IMDb page. Darling, ...
Link: Some thoughts on security after ten years of qmail 1.0
This guy Hans Boehm came and gave a talk at work today about upcoming C++ support for threads. That's support built into the language. It sounds like sometime in the next few years, we will have at...
Puzzle Hunts are everywhere, even Golden Gate Park
I am back from a 2.5 week trip to the greater Seattle area. I volunteered at the MS Puzzlehunt, which was pretty cool. I guess I'll write something about Seattle soon. But life is still busy. Las...
Links: Some Photos
I think I should point out some things about some photos. This deserves an explanation. I did not take this photo of Jack o' Lanterns. Steven Pitsenbarger took this photo. I did not carve those p...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Richmond
When the Great American Race was going on, several west coast folks were watching various team blogs. I didn't spot Team A2's blog until just now. They've done well in past events, including winnin...
Link: Steven Pitsenbarger on Anthotypes
Steven Pitsenbarger writes about making pictures of plants from their own juices. And that, children, is why you should never leave your salad out in the sunlight all day. It will become part of yo...
Link: writeup of La chasse au tresor de paris
I enjoyed this (English) writeup of a Paris treasure hunt game. Yeah, even though it sounds like it was one of those spot-landmarks-based-on-riddly-descriptions games.Labels: link, puzzlehunts...
Link: Steven Pitsenbarger at Alternative Photography
Apparently, "anthotype" is a photographic development system which uses dyes from plants. I never would have heard about it if it wasn't for this guy: "Pitsenbarger has had a lifelong fascinati...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even the site of buried treasure
I finally figured out how to make some progress on the No More Secrets write-up--I'm sitting at an undisclosed location in the Googleplex, volunteering for the Gooooogol Game. Nothing to do but sit...
Link: Travelers Storybook
I have mentioned this before: When I was growing, I spent a fair amount of time with Bob & Kelly Wilhelm, friends of the family. Bob was and is a storyteller. I don't just mean that he can rela...
Link: Game Shoe
Depending on what you've been doing lately, you might be thinking "If I never look at another photo of an athletic shoe again for the rest of my life, that's just fine with me". But you might still l...
Link: Book Report: Prank the Monkey (pages 91, 92)
You might think yesterday's book report was obnoxious, only covering the first third of a book. If so, you'll find this even more obnoxious: a review of pages 91-92 of a book. Rob "How Much is Insi...
Book Report: Cold Mountain
This is a great book, an odyssey set during the USA's Civil War. It's a bleak study of the horrors of war. It's a story about humans and beasts. You've probably already heard about it. After I rea...
Link: Webster's Online Dictionary
Puzzle hunts were everywhere last weekend. Midnight Madness in Hot Springs. Some movie called BHAGAMBHAG set up a promo treasure hunt in Mumbai, sounds big-scale. I didn't do any of that. I have ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Sacramento
Team Snout has revealed their secret behind-the-scenes view of The Hogwarts Game. How much planning went into this game? A lot. Go read. And if they spelled your name wrong, you can fix it. Tags...
Link: Tauba Auerbach images
Good visual design, by tautology, is enjoyable to look at. I stumbled upon some letterformy designs by artist/designer Tauba Auerbach. (I was trying out the new MSN Live image search. In Dirk Gent...
Link: Flowers and P0rn
My apartment building's laundry room is currently out of commision; the washing and drying machines are tipped over with parts ripped out and dumped on the floor. This is either the work of wild bab...
Link: Blinky Light Photo
This morning, I listened to audio recordings of the Team Snout Game Control "war room", jotting down notes for a game write-up. It's not so exciting to listen to this stuff after the fact, when the ...
Hogwarts Photos
A few weekends back, I helped to playtest the Hogwarts Game. Then I went to a few puzzle-construction parties. Last weekend, I volunteered for Game Control for the duration of the Game. I'm workin...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Santa Barbara
I didn't know that people were allowed to think very hard in Santa Barbara, but I may yet be proved wrong. Tags: puzzlehunts | just kidding santa barbara | jeez you're so touchy&...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even New York City
This write-up of the recent Midnight Madness game in NYC has the title I never dared to use: Some serious nerd-ass shit. There are strange things afoot in Toronto, which are perhaps only tangentiall...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Redmond
I'm still working on that Shinteki Decathlon write-up. I got a draft ready, sent it out to my team-mates. Emily wrote back with a bunch of cool jokes that I'd forgotten. Yeah, I forgot plenty; usu...
Link: Lectures on Authorization Based Access Control
If you're a programmer, you might be interested in watching some lectures about Authorization Based Access Control. Some folks from an HP research lab lectured at the GooglePlex about better & e...
Puzzle Hunts Were Everywhere, and So Shall they Be Again
I was sick for the XXTra Online/Paparazzi game, stayed home, missed it. But through the modern medium of blogovoxology, I think I kinda understand what happened. CKL: Palms Down Ian: Paparazzi l355...
Publishing News: Cyanotype HOWTO
My friend Elizabeth Graves is a photographer, but she's also a chemist. She experiments with with alternative photographic development techniques. She's created some neat images, and some of them mad...
Links: Quality Content on the Internets
Wow, it's a blog entry with a small pile of misc links. That's so retro. If you're into puzzles, set up your Personalized Google Home Page, and add some content to it. What content should you add?...
World Addition: Zoe Loftesness
Holy moly, Dave and Penny had a kid. Early indicators suggest extreme cuteness. Extra hippy-dippy style points for being born in a tub of water. Extra high-tech style points for being announced on go...
"Life" is the Noun Form of "Absurd"
The ever-gracious Eve Andersson published my question. To see it, follow the link and scroll down until you see "mysterious envelope". In other news: Snakes on a Plane!Labels: link, pi, teams...
Link: Google Page Creator
I have been playing with Google Page Creator, a new service which hosts web pages and gives you a WYSIWYG editor for them. It's pretty neat. My favorite part: there are pretty templates available. ...
Link: The Apprentice
The Mystic Fish team of space mercenaries has signed up as contestants on The Apprentice: Zorg!. Oh, I hope we get in. Oh, I'm on tenterhooks. Or maybe those aren't tenterhooks. Maybe I just consu...
Link: BillMonk, Billing for the People
I was just checking out BillMonk, a web site that allows people to keep track of the money they owe each other. You and five friends go out for lunch and you need to deal with the bill? Let one guy ...
Link: Sam and Max Game Announcement
Holy moly, it's an announcement of intent to produce a game starring beloved freelance police officers Sam & Max! OK, I concede that the last few such announcements haven't led to any games that...
Blog Infrastructure Update: "Add to Google" Link
Yesterday was Buy Nothing Day in the USA, so I bought nothing. Actually, I didn't do much of anything yesterday. I went cold turkey on caffeine. I'd been hitting the sauce pretty heavily lately, a...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Seattle
Because I am a lame-o, I didn't play in the recent Mooncurser's game. But Matthew "Defective Yeti" Baldwin did, and he's a better writer than I am. Go read his write-up. As of today, there's just ...
Publishing News: XXtra Online magazine
My new plan: finish up my existing writing projects by June 2006 so that I can apply at XXtra Online magazine. Tags: foreshadowing | fave celebs |paparazzi |Labels: foreshadowing, lin...
Link: Parallel Analysis with Sawzall
People ask me what I do at work. I did not write the academic paper Interpreting the Data: Parallel Analysis with Sawzall (Pike, Dorward, Griesemer, Quinlan 2005). But I did revise the tutorial for t...
Link: Elizabeth Graves @ AlternativePhotography.com
Check it out. Elizabeth Graves is a photographer. She makes some normal-looking photos, but she makes some by unusual methods. Some of these were sufficiently unusual to win her a spot at Alternativ...
Link: Joel on Hungarian Notation
Just when I thought I was going to have to read the papers myself, Joel Spolsky wrote a readable paper about the non-braindead version of the software engineering technique Hungarian Notation. Is th...
Hungarian Notation Not Brain Dead
(If you are not a computer programmer, this item will not make sense.) For years I made fun of Hungarian Notation and Charles Simonyi. Now, thanks to Joel Spolsky, I find out that Hungarian Notation...
Link: Hello Kitty BE@RBRICK iPod
Looking at ads for these toys made me imagine Hello Kitty hanging out with some BE@RBRICKs. "Sometimes I wish I had a mouth." "Some of us have mouths. Most of us do not." "How are we even having t...
