Larry Hosken: New: Tag: link

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Who are you impersonating to celebrate Identity Theft Awareness Week? ...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

Can't look away ...

Permalink

Surfwords is an intense word game. I'm enjoying it so far… in short doses, because it's intense. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

I've had a good time playing the word puzzle game Cell Tower at https://www.andrewt.net/puzzles/cell-tower/ ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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: ...

Permalink

"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...

Permalink

...

Permalink

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: ...

Permalink

Genius ...

Permalink

Eric Harshbarger made another desk out of Lego. There are pictures and progress videos. One of the videos also has a cat. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Maybe the real horror was that Alien was inspired by terran lifeforms. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

I enjoyed this crossword puzzle's gimmick: https://www.theatlantic.com/free-daily-crossword-puzzle/?id=atlantic_20210221&set=atlantic&puzzleType=crossword ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

https://plague.wtf shows plague graphs for USA states. It is pretty scary and scary pretty. ...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Long before the Two-Tone Game puzzlehunt …there was a two-tone ska single decorated with a crossword puzzle, as seen on the Puzzlenation blog. ...

Permalink

LA People: The Heritage Scare real-world game with imaginary murder It's not exactly a haunted house, more of a chance to score points or something. http://www.theheritagescare.com/ ...

Permalink

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Vancouver BC This linked-to photo makes me think puzzly magician David Kwong snuck a puzzlehunt into a recent TED event‽ ...

Permalink

“In a parallel world, the Many-Worlds Interpretation hypothesis has already been tested and found to be false.” –Paul “MaxwellBuchanan” Dear ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

I played the computer game Firewatch and it was very pretty indeed. ...

Permalink

Irish setter, apparently. ...

Permalink

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'...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Question for GCs: When to take team payments? I asked a question on the Puzzlehunts Google+ community. ...

Permalink

Has anyone asked the Burninators puzzlehunt team for their reaction to StrongBad's imagined Escape Room in the latest homestarrunnerdotcom video? ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Link: "We Value Experience": Can a Secret Society Become a Business? A few days after this article about it was published, the described art project shut down. Which might say something about artistic vision versus collaboration or something like that. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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'...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Link: Chanrio How did I struggle along before I knew about Chanrio, the Sanrio-style avatar maker? ...

Permalink

Link: Confronting New Madrid St Louis and environs for earthquake/disaster nerds ...

Permalink

Link: Someone Else's Book Report Dennis Bianchi of the SFPD reviews books. He reviewed Days of Rage, a book about violent extremists in 1970. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Link Tagging and graffiti as corporate team-building exercise. 1AMSF ...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

I think Europe is ahead of the USA in birdsong recognition smartphone apps. Chirpomatic. Warblr. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Going to the Doubleclicks Show Thursday night? Maybe get there early One of my neighbors puts weir—uhm, thought-provoking stuff out in front of his apartment every so often, ephemera of the El Fornio Historical Society… e.g., fliers announcing Father Serr...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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....

Permalink

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...

Permalink

"I was really proud of my jar of teeth…" ...

Permalink

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." ...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

I bet a South Pole Traverse driving simulator would be pretty epic. ...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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, ...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

"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...

Permalink

Link: Video: How 1000s of Devs Can Work on the Same Code and Understand Each Other If your organization doesn't use C++, you might be surprised that this talk about Google's C++ Style Guide could be relevant. But very little of it gets into C++. It's mostly about coming up with a s...

Permalink

Link: A Conversation with Puzzle Master Wei-Hwa Huang This person enjoys puzzles. ...

Permalink

"I'll keep this simple. One of you is a real human cop—and one of you is a robot. Only we don't know which is which!" ...

Permalink

Link THIS every-state-in-continental-USA driving route is even MORE optimal (if you're optimizing for Scrabble). ...

Permalink

Puzzlehunts are Everywhere, Even Boston Just started reading this GC Writeup from Wartron Boston ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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, ...

Permalink

With current technology, we cannot hope to eradicate feral swine. ...

Permalink

Dave Schweisguth knew about a couple more Escape-the-Room games, including one whose grand opening is Friday! ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Link: Burmese Punks Think You're #1 Pogo Dancing in Myanmar (via Giant Robot) ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even San Francisco, leisurely-ly OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Puzzlehunts are Everywhere, Even Locked in England or something Chris in England started a blog: Exit Games UK. Partly about escape-the-room games in the UK, but also taking in some tangentially-related nerdery. So far, so good. ...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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? ...

Permalink

Link: Broken Age, Part 1 I played a computer game Broken Age, Part 1. It was pretty; it was fun; it was pretty fun. You might like it, too. ...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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? ...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Link: Real Escape Game giving a talk 10/29 One or more Real Escapists will give a talk on the evening of October 29. Will include a "short puzzle experience". ...

Permalink

But if you meet a friendly horse / Will you communicate by Morse? ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Jotting notes on Odyssey Works' talk at the Adventure Design Group, 2013 A few months back, some folks from Odyssey Works gave a talk about their art. I heard about it from the Adventure Design Group meetup. Though I scribbled my thoughts afterwards, if you weren't there...

Permalink

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere from Pittsburgh to Chicago It's the Great America Rac— I mean it's the Quest for the Iron Raven! And puzzlehuntists you've heard of are going to blog it! ...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

I have infinity words for you Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers... ...

Permalink

Link: Life and #LIPA after Sandy Sad read about NY electricity not coming back http://bit.ly/SSKBz2 ...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

Human flesh search engine comes to San Francisco. I am impressed; it helps when the target posts to Facebook. ...

Permalink

Why are you reading this instead of staring at http://xkcd.com/1127/? ...

Permalink

Jotting Notes on Corey Anderson GC Summit 2012 Presentation: Running Someone Else's Game It's a talk by Corey Anderson, a survey of this year's talk theme: games run more than once. Simulcasts, replays, and the like. My rambling asides are in italics and I take some pretty egregious summ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

@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...

Permalink

@_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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Joe and Lauren's House in Berkeley A puzzlehunt aimed at beginners, from a beginner's point of view: Cultists of Cthulhu: Part 1, Part 2 ...

Permalink

http://ericberlin.com/?p=5066 is Heisenbergian puzzling: the observer gets an answer though it's not a puzzle. ...

Permalink

Link: I Troll Econo http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/econotrolls-illustrated-bestiary.html ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Link: BAPHL of the Bands! BAPHL of the Bands! Puzzle hunts are everywhere, even Boston, yes indeed. ...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Link: Nordic Larp Won the Diana Jones Award! Good to see careful documentation of far freaking weirdness get some recognition! ...

Permalink

Link: Robot Apocalypse http://what-if.xkcd.com/5/ #wartron Randall Munro does not fear our hypothetical robotic overlords. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Nice writeup of Shinteki Disneyland in Wired http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/02/shinteki-disneyland/ ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Todd Etter: best day job ever? ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Book Report: Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide? Try to stay awake through the short description, because it gets better after: autobiography of a bench chemist. Max Gergel learned practical chemistry: someone wants some quantity of some substance ...

Permalink

Link: Chess Story Dave Hill writes about playing chess for money in Zucotti Park. Right, that Zucotti Park. ...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, and worth documenting if you ship them to Seattle or something I'm catching up (caught up now) on Snoutcasts, and just listened to the BANG 28 Debrief. You might wonder: what information was in the BANG 28 puzzle playbook? Folks kept raving about it (and about t...

Permalink

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere and/or Everywhen, and I bet I prefer Everywhen Catching up on Snoutcasts, I just listened to the SNAP 8 Debrief. SNAP 8 was a "rerun" of BANG 28. (Surprisingly, it was run by the same folks who ran WHO. I think there's some kind of karmic balance...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

I'mma let your floppy drive march finish, but Simple Text File is the best H/W music of all time http://goo.gl/edrMZ ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Star Trek price-slash fanfic: http://goo.gl/4eSf2 ...

Permalink

If LASER stood for Liquid Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Ripples http://goo.gl/Mdb2p. ...

Permalink

Nordic LARPers invade graffiti-art blog http://goo.gl/CQDgs ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Link: LOLMaybeCat ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

You don't understand. I coulda had class. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Bainbridge Island MS Intern Game got written up in Inside Bainbridge ...

Permalink

SFMoMA wants game-ish installation proposals http://www.mesart.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1151&sid=b7daa4852154c4c7ffce75f2d1b2d2b3 via @avantgame ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Jotting Notes on Allen Cohn GC Summit 2011 Presentation: Doctor When It's Allen Cohn in a video of his presentation at GC Summit 2011 about the upcoming Doctor When Game. Click that link to see the video and/or read these here notes. Wei-Hwa's advancing the slides t...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

I have reason to believe that a New York Times Op Ed columnist read my name while he was pooping. I think I deserve a Poo-litzer for that. ...

Permalink

Jotting Notes on Sean Gugler GC Summit 2011 Presentation: Puzzle Design Case Study Sean Gugler talked at the 2011 GC summit about the Hogwarts Magic Mirror puzzle (which was awesome). (You should watch the video instead of just reading these notes. Much of the talk is about art, d...

Permalink

Jotting Notes on Larry Hosken GC Summit 2011 Presentation: 2-Tone Game as an Overnight Game, Sorta It's Larry Hosken talking about time and the 2-Tone Game. My goodness, what a handsome and debonair speaker. They should have this guy back every year. And how cool is it that he was wearing a "Hec...

Permalink

Jotting Notes on Curtis Chen GC Summit 2011 Presentation: Everything I know about Running the Game, I Learned Trom Running The Game Curtis Chen of Team Snout talked about stuff he's figured out from running the game. Specifically, he talked at the recent GC Summit and if you follow that link you can see the video. But here's the ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Jotting Notes on Bill Jonesi GC Summit 2011 Presentation: Rallye School It's a talk by Bill Jonesi about Road Rallys, especially about the local varieties favored by The Rallye Club. This was a good talk. Going into it, I thought "road rally" just meant time+distance r...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Thank you, individuals from Blood & Bones and Team Longshots. ...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Wonderella reminds us that following trails of puzzles is dumb. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Link: MobNotate The next time someone wants me to mark up their manuscript, I might suggest they use MobNotate to gather feedback. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Michael Agger wants a word for someone who speechifies about the future. He coined "Keynotist" but I prefer TEDifice. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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? ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Jotting Notes on John Owens' 2010 GC Summit Talk "Metas I Have Known" Jotting down some notes from John Owens' talk about Metapuzzles at GC Summit 2010. I sometimes think that people think too much about metapuzzles... but on the other hand, just last week I was helpi...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Jotting Notes on Dan Egnor's 2010 GC Summit Talk "Computer Tools for Puzzle Creation+Solving" Jotting notes about another Game Control Summit 2010 talk: Dan Egnor on Computer Tools for Puzzle Creation and Solving. When I saw the talk live, I didn't follow it all, and got distracted from the ...

Permalink

Jotting Notes on Debbie Goldstein's 2010 GC Summit Talk "DASH 1: One Game, Eight Cities" I just watched the video of Debbie Goldstein's 2010 GC Summit talk about the first DASH game. It was pretty cool to see Debbie talk. If you want to know how someone can be nice enough and energetic...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Jotting Notes on Ian Tullis' 2010 GC Summit Talk "Reflections on Puzzling" In this talk, Ian Tullis talks about puzzle design; in general and in the puzzlehunt style. He talks about what makes puzzles interesting in general; and the weird areas that the puzzlehunt communit...

Permalink

"And they look at the puzzle and they say 'Oh that's so hard; I could never do that'" SnoutCast #25: "Puzzled Pint #1 Debrief" (around minutes 17-19 or so) talks about folks who say "I could never do one of those puzzle-hunt things; the puzzles are too hard." And if you're a BANG enth...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

Link: Kung-Fu CB Mamas on Wheels vs. the Aztec Motorcycle Wrestling Nuns Happy National Poetry Month, USA people! Perhaps my proudest poetic month was when I constructed the couplet The Kung Fu CB Biker Mamas and the Aztec Wrestling Nuns Lined up along the freeway...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Comic Report: Girl Genius Collection #8 (Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones) | Act-i-Vate Primer It seems kind of silly to post an online review a comic book when folks can go read the comic online and decide for themselves. And yet, here we are: Girl Genius. Girl Genius is a darned fun story ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Link: How to stop leaking private info each time a FB friend takes a personality quiz A while back, I started looking at FB app coding, and was thusly creeped out. When someone writes a Facebook app, e.g., one of those What sandwich condiment are you?!? quizzes, they can tell that app...

Permalink

Link: Deny you ever read about Crypto Strikes Back in this blog post In theory, I'm hobbyishly working on a little programming project. In practice, I make almost no progress on it. I'm almost never home and awake and alert enough to code. The bad news is: not much...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Link: Auto-translation of foreign web pages getting more convenient I sometimes visit web pages that are in languages other than American. To understand those pages, I need translation. For a while, the Google Toolbar has had a useful button: you can press this bu...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Jotting notes on Teresa Torres' GC Summit 2009 Lecture "GC Transparency" [A few months back, I went to the 2009 GC Summit, where Game Control people exchange philosophy, anecdotes, and techniques. I didn't take notes then. I retain things better when I take notes. So t...

Permalink

Jotting notes on Scott Blomquists' GC Summit 2009 Lecture "An Analytic Framework for Estimating Puzzle Quality" [I re-watched another 2009 GC Summit lecture. In this one, Scott Blomquist of Team Sharkbait talks about measuring puzzle quality. It's kinda a measure of puzzle simplicity--avoiding putting stuff ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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....

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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, ...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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;...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Stanford I enjoyed reading this write-up of a recent Stanford Game. You might, too.Labels: link, puzzlehunts...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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, ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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&...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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?...

Permalink

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Seattle and/or annoying movie promo internet sites. Peter Sarrett enjoyed the SNAP game in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. In tangentially related puzzling news, many people worked on the Google/Sony Da Vinci Code game. At least a couple of them were...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

"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...

Permalink

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. ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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 ...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Saw I recommend this photo. Tag: photosLabels: link, photo...

Permalink

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...

Permalink

Tags