Larry Hosken: New: Tag: pedestrian

You might have looked at ballards* and thought There's no point trying to balance things on top of something so round. But on my morning walk, I saw that someone had precariously balanced a stack of those rolly-spooly-seat thingies^† atop a ballard, taking advantage of the seat's concavity.

*Ball-shaped bollards

^†Do those seats have a name? I thought they might be called "rolling chairs" to contrast with "rocking chairs" but apparently a rolling chair is something else entirely. [Updated to add:: Apparently they are "spun chairs"]

Nice Bench Mystery: Solved

You might recall a couple of weeks back I noted a mysterious bench plaque at San Francisco's Music Concourse: "Nice Bench, 2" small plaque on a bench that reads, "Nice Bench / A gift to San Francisco Parks an honor of the Nice Family"

small plaque on a bench that reads, "Nice Bench / A gift to San Francisco Parks an honor of the Nice Family"

I looked around a little for the implied "Nice Bench, 1" but gave up before finding any such. There are many many benches in the Music Concourse.

My mom was also interested and did not give up. Yesterday she found this:

bench plaque that reads "Nice Bench / A gift to San Francisco Parks in honor of the Nice Family"

Hats off to my mom.

(Some puzzlehunt enthusiasts use "moth vs maggot" jargon to describe people who flit from task to task vs people who persist at a task for a couple of weeks. Those puzzlehunt enthusiasts will appreciate that I am moth-er than my mother.)

Walking in San Francisco's Inner Richmond neighborhood, I wondered which portmanteau folks had settled on for Sushi Bistro's Castle Cagliostro-themed mural: is it Caglibistro or Cagliobistro? Google turned up neither.

"Caglibistro" mural featuring Castle Cagliostro-inspired art with a sprinkling of Sushi Bistro logos

"Cagliobistro" mural featuring Castle Cagliostro-inspired art with a sprinkling of Sushi Bistro logos

Anyhow, I guess I'll try making a blog post that uses both portmanteaux and see which one gets more web search traffic.

I should probably mention that mural's by Fred Goykhman for Crimson 22.

Seen at the Music Concourse: a modern fairy circle; a bench dedication that I don't understand: "Nice Bench, 2"

bare-branched tree with a ring of little flags planted in the ground around its base

small plaque on a bench that reads, inexplicably, "Nice Bench, 2"

Sidewalk chalk art on Judah at 20^th Ave: Answers the question you never knew you had, "What if the Care Bears were actual bears?"

Sidewalk chalk art of blue bear with stormy heart chest decoration against a rainbow background

Some weeks back, I saw a post on the New Bohemia Signs tumblr, a picture of art&artists, students in a sign-painting hand-lettering class.

smiling artists holding up hand-painted lettered signs

Beyond admiring the handiwork, I also was interested in the sign that said "Haight," since I live near Haight. Spelling out the Japanese phonetic characters カメレオン, I figured it was for a shop called Chameleon… which was confusing since I didn't know about any such Haight-area shop.

Then I forgot about it until my exercise walk this morning. Suddenly, a new shop appeared: カメレオン, at 1605 Haight.

locked-up storefront; you can see part of a hand-painted sign behind the bars

Sorry I didn't stick around to take a clearer picture; it was raining.

It's a #graffiti mystery: Several days back, I noticed a graffito "wet concrete." You might assume I saw it written in sidewalk concrete, but it was actually written in chalk on a gray (cement-colored?) plastic traffic barrier.

gray plastic traffic barrier with "wet concrete" written on it in a couple of places

It seemed like something meta- was happening, but I wasn't sure exactly what.

Maybe this graffiti enthusiast likes writing the names of graffiti-relevant surfaces onto other surfaces. Maybe I should keep an eye out for "billboard frame" written in concrete and/or "big blank wall" written on a billboard frame, etc.
Shiny gray plastic looks kinda like wet concrete. Maybe I should keep an eye out for "wet concrete" written on other shiny gray things.
I saw this graffiti at the Waller Street Skate Park. Maybe some skateboarders say "wet concrete" to express enthusiasm for skating on wet concrete? (The internet tells me that skateboarding on wet concrete is a bad idea (apparently water isn't great for ball bearings?), so probably not this.)

Since then, I've kept my eyes peeled during my exercise walks. But I haven't spotted any graffiti that shed light on this mystery.

Today, I went past the skate park again, wondering if the barrier would yield any clues—but the barrier was gone. It was drizzling; a "wet concrete" sign would have been sort of appropriate.

skate park displaying a distinct lack of gray plastic traffic barriers

Instead of narrowing down the mystery's solution, I had a new theory:

Maybe some nearby construction project had poured concrete for a sidewalk and placed a barrier there and written "wet concrete" on it to warn passers-by; then some jackass dragged the barrier to the skate park. And the barrier, essentially a large piece of litter, had since been removed.

Now I will reconcile myself to the fact that I will probably never solve this mystery.

San Francisco trivia / Expert Level: What's wrong with this picture?

photo of a traffic sawhorse in foreground; Golden Gate Park's Chinese Pavilion in the background

San Francisco's Golden Gate Park emerged from the recent storms relatively unscathed, but the scathed bits yielded more interesting pictures so here you go.

[photo: fallen tree]

[photo: a path ramps into a swampy pond decorated with powered-off light fixtures]

Yesterday I walked out to San Francisco's Ocean Beach. Along the way, I observed the carcinisation of a mailbox at 4625 Lincoln. The beach itself was misty, pleasingly abstract. The Great Highway had reverted to the Great Walkway; I don't think that was scheduled; I think the rains had just washed a lot of sand over the road and nobody wanted to dig things out with more rains predicted that night.

photo: crabby mailbox at 4625 Lincoln

photo: wintry beach scene: sand, water, distant hills, gray sky

photo: great walkway, with few pedestrians and a lot of sand

There was a break in the storm this morning, so I took a quick exercise walk. There was tree debris, mostly due to the storm, but also a bit I suspect due to a Haight Street drunk.

[photo: downed branches at Page Slow Street]
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[photo: small Christmas tree in Haight Street Wells Fargo ATM shelter]
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My weather app said there was a break in the storm so I struggled into my rarely-used rain gear and went outside. When the rain hit my head, I got mad at the app and the national weather service and everything: they said it would be clear! I got out of the rain in a bus shelter, hauled my phone out of my pocket, and looked at the weather app again. In the minutes it had taken me to dress up and head out, the app had changed its tune. It now acknowledged rain was possible.

[photo of a rain-soaked intersection]

Then the wind hit, not just a gust of wind. This was a long minute of stormy wind trying to shove me around. It seemed like the kind of wind that could change the weather in a hurry. I stopped being mad at the national weather service. Not much point trying to predict this mess.

A big storm will blow through the San Francisco bay area tomorrow. We're supposed to prepare; but I wasn't sure what to do. A lot of earthquake-preparedness carries over to storm-preparedness.

But then on my morning exercise walk along JFK Promenade in Golden Gate Park, I walked past the outdoor ping-pong table. I saw that the little box of ping-pong equipment was sitting out exposed in the plaza. So I reached out a toe to nudge the box under the ping-pong table. Now, any rain that falls straight down will fall next to the box instead of into the box assuming nobody moves the box later today which actually seems pretty likely. Thus I contribute to community preparedness.

[meme image: Starship Troopers soldier says I'm doing my part!]

Foresters have been clearing out the eucalyptus trees from the hillside above my apartment. They've been working for months and aren't done yet. These are some especially-tough eucalyptus trees. Late in the 1800s, the entrepeneur Adolf Sutro planted eucalyptus trees, hoping to build wooden things out of them. But Sutro planted the wrong kind of eucalyptus trees, accidentally importing a tough and gnarly kind that was difficult to cut.

[photo: hillside with some scattered trees among the debris of some felled trees]

[photo: the trunk of one felled tree]

Sutro built many things in San Francisco (not using those trees). A lot of them are falling apart. E.g., Sutro Baths was a grand building enclosing some swimming pools down by the ocean. But now it's exposed pools, the ocean waves wearing it down bit by bit.

If you went walking among the eucalyptus trees you'd see that they shed a lot of bark, like sheets of thick paper. Not many plants around here are strong enough to grow under that bark; thus the forest was on track to self-perpetuate. It seemed that Sutro's Forest would outlast his buildings, an enduring monument to his mistake, a cautionary tale about an entrepeneur who got lucky at mining and convinced himself he knew which kind of trees to import. Maybe someday there will be some local California scrub growing on that hillside instead. Maybe someday. It's taking a while to clear out the eucalyptus. It's really tough.

On this day between rains, I walked in a strangely lush Golden Gate Park. Today, one could pretend San Francisco wasn't dealing with a drought on top of everything else. ...

Oh cool, the city set up a Men's World Cup viewing party on JFK Promenade so the local soccer fans could watch on the big screen without swapping air. In case you're wondering "since when does L...

W- were they on sale? Suddenly ballards are all over Golden Gate Park. (Pictured: Ballard, ballard, ballard. Bollards, ballard. Ballard, barrier, ballard. Ballard, barrier, ballard.) Oh...

When I walked through Golden Gate Park, the carnies were setting up Jingle All the Way, also known as the San Francisco tree lighting ceremony and official lighting up of the Entwined artificial tree...

Every so often, you stumble upon something that reminds you how much more is going on in San Francisco than you know about. ...

Looks like that Entwined light-up art installation is coming back to the Peacock Meadow in San Francisco (as has been noted elsewhere). ...

Someone was asking me what they do with the Golden Gate Park pianos on JFK Promenade at night. They put piano covers on them: ...

Nick's Labyrinth I continued my morning exercise walk past Laberinto Verde: floreciendo and in amongst some trees I bumped into a new-to-me labyrinth. And when I search the web for it, I don't find anything. I guess ...

A few weeks back, I blogged a picture of the road mural Laberinto Verde: floreciendo. It was hard to figure the mural out from my picture; it's a big mural on the ground; so my on-the-ground picture ...

Spotted on my walk this morning: ladybug deco on this column (painted by fnnch) Ha ha ha, see it's funny because I said "spotted" and ladybugs have spots. ...

Not sure if the orange blob on this stump is a mushroom that grew in the rain; or a pile of candy corn left out in the rain by discerning litterbug trick-or-treaters. ...

Hallowe'en Haunt ♫ Oh I don't want no more of that carnie life / Gee Mom, I want to go home ♫ From now until 2100 tonight it's Hallowe'en Haunt on JFK Promenade in Golden Gate Park. I saw people setting up som...

Laberinto Verde: floreciendo Folks continue to decorate the car-free portion of JFK Drive Promenade. There's a new road mural, Laberinto Verde: floreciendo by Josué Rojas, assisted by Anthony Jiminez. I suppose to really ca...

Last year, I spotted some Hallowe'en riddle decorations at a neighbor's house. Alas, I didn't spot them until after Hallowe'en, too late to be useful. So this year, I'll post a link back to my last-y...

Polytechnic Way San Francisco has a new commemorative street, Polytechnic Way. It's named for Polytechnic High School, which you probably haven't heard of. That school is defunct now, its main building torn dow...

There's a new art installation up by JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park. When I first saw it, I thought "It's too bad my puzzlehunt-addled brain's going to spend the rest of the day trying to find a messa...

On my morning walk, the stretch of Haight Street by Buena Vista Park was being taken over by movie-production people. The big signs said Dust Bunny but the smaller permission notices said PYM product...

On this morning's exercise-walk, I took pictures of some things that seemed out-of-place. Not every out-of-place thing is bad; most quite the opposite. ...

A little model house appeared in Golden Gate Park near the 19th Ave & Lincoln entrance, by the fence of the Arboretum. It sits atop a… stump? Do I call it a stump if it's taller than ...

On my morning exercise walk, I saw SFFD ladder trucks doing some sort of rescue on 17th Street. 17th Street is pretty steep; it's easy to remember it's 17% steep (though not that steep on the block w...

San Francisco is getting new public trash bin enclosures. There are a few designs up for consideration. I visited one design today. It just plain didn't work. When folks tried to throw out their tras...

I'm progressing nicely in that Pikmin Bloom walk-around-with-your-phone game. I've walked over 2.5 million steps, yes indeed. ...

I walked a mile (the wrong way) along the San Francisco Marathon this morning. ...

Some gold-color sidewalk chalk art for the golden ratio. Willard Street, San Francisco, USA. ...

San Francisco, a city in decline (if you're walking downhill (which I was)) ...

This morning I rode BART out to Berkeley, walked around south & west Berkeley for a bit, and caught AC Transit back. That's not super-exciting, but it is my first time getting out of town since the f...

As I headed out on my exercise walk this morning, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. In a house garage that hosted a polling place for last week's election, there was still voting equip...

1 Million Steps I'm still playing that Pikmin Bloom walking-around mobile phone game. I recently hit a milestone: I've walked a million steps while playing the game. ...

Plum blossoms starting up on Hillway Ave. Not a lot so far, but they're a-comin' ...

Because of the recent COVID-19 surge, I've kept my morning walks close to home. E.g., this morning I walked past this building on the hill across the street from my apartment. In other news for ...

Please enjoy these snapshots from my morning walk: New year, new me folder to set up to hold my blog pictures, please pardon my dust ♫ la la la ♫ ...

When I popped out of the coffee shop on the homeward leg of this morning's walk, a rainbow dazzled me. San Francisco doesn't get much rain; I don't see many rainbows. This one caught me by surprise. ...

Today at sunrise, I snapped a picture of Sutro Tower. Turns out I wasn't the only one. ...

When I walked past the UCSF Parnassus Emergency Room, its parking lot was overflowing with ambulances. An ambulance that didn't fit was parked in a nearby bus stop. As I kept walking, another ambulan...

Lately, I've been playing a new walking-around game: Pikmin Bloom. As I walk, I look at a map on my phone, where I see that I'm leaving a trail of little flowers behind me. I also see trails of littl...

On Hallowe'en evening, kids in St. Louis don't just say "Trick or treat," they ask jokey riddles. Unfortunately, these little kids make up their own jokes, and the results are abusrdly unfunny. Each ...

You may recall that some months back I started playing a walking-around game called Orna. I'm still playing it these days and hit a milestone this morning: My character is №100 in my region (Northern...

On this morning's exercise walk, I encountered some racist horseshit flyers. They were stapled to some wood in a bus shelter. When I went to rip them down, I discovered that they weren't just stapled...

I walked around San Francisco Bay July 1-7, 2021. You might think Big deal, Larry walked around the bay before. But before, I only walked most of the way around the bay, stymied by the lack of a pede...

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Comic Report: The Secret to Superhuman Strength It's a graphic novel memoir by Alison Bechdel, who you might remember from Fun Home. It's about her attempt to keep mens sana in corpore sano (sound body, sound mind). She talks about her experiences...

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...

The Walk Lately, I've been playing The Walk to make my walks more interesting. During the pandemic, my usual way of keeping walks interesting doesn't work. I'd hop on a bus/train so I could walk someplace I ...

#IVoted in person today. This might surprise my fellow Californians—California's dodging the pandemic by voting by mail this month. I was sent a mail-in ballot to fill in and return. But this m...

RandoWalk A while back, you might recall, I tried using the Randonautica app. The app chooses a random walk destination nearby. i got frustrated with the app and uninstalled it: when I switched between apps on...

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...

My walks took me past civic efforts. I traversed part of the leftover marks from the recent attempt at breaking the world's longest hopscotch course record in the NoPa neighborhood. And I saw the new...

Randonautica I had a system to randomly choose exercise-walking routes. I put that system aside when the pandemic reared up. The system chose routes that often involved a bus ride to the walk's starting point and...

Public health art by Susan Kare, I bet. Walkway at Presidio Ave Presidio Gate, San Francisco. ...

Yes, the flying pig is wearing a facemask. 240 Third Ave, near Clement. ...

Yesterday, I walked along a stretch of Fulton Street to see the message recently painted there. It wasn't so easy to read on the ground; it made more sense from the vantage of, say, a local news heli...

That DRILL IN PROGRESS sign is up again in the UCSF Parnassus Hospital emergency room parking lot. Once again, there are tents up. This time, it's fenced off, presumably to keep clueless doofuses lik...

As I walked past UCSF Parnassus (a combo medical school+hospital), there was a big sign out front saying DRILL IN PROGRESS. Behind that sign were some big tents set up in the emergency room parking l...

This morning, I went for a walk along the Embarcadero. Not much happened. I appreciated that. ...

[Content warning: implied violence] This morning, I went for a stroll on the Embarcadero. I came up to a small gathered crowd and stopped when someone pointed out the reason for the crowd—a jo...

One the one hand, I fell in the mud. Maybe I should be more careful. On the other hand, mud is soft. I emerged with no injuries, just a lot of dirty laundry. Maybe I was just-the-right-amount carefu...

Looks like I just ran out of excuses for not walking all of the way around San Francisco Bay. ...

I have walked 1000km while playing that Harry Potter Wizards Unite game. (That milestone doesn't capture the fun of the game, but it's something that folks can understand even if they don't know t...

The really unsettling thing about out-in-the-world puzzle hunts, eldritch horrors aside, is days later when you think you see puzzles everywhere. Just looking down at the sidewalk and you think you s...

Today I walked the SF Crosstown Trail, a long walk from one corner of San Francisco to the opposite corner via lots of parks and greenways and trees and such. There were a few stretches of sidewalk i...

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...

Back in December, I took an overnight trip to Sacramento. Sacramento has rivers. ...

If anyone asks why I'm busy, I'm just gonna go take all my 💰 out of the bank and hide it under my mattress after seeing an ATM frozen on this screen. ...

#Book Report: Balancing on Blue It's an account of walking the Appalachian Trail, hiking for months to travel 1000s of km along mountain ridges. Folks hike this if they're in great shape and want to get away from civilization for a...

I volunteered to pick up trash today. Lately, San Francisco's been in the news for outlawing plastic straws but having streets littered with needles and human poop. So I kept count of some things as ...

Book Report: Walkable City For a few decades, Americans thought that they wanted out of the inner city; bought cars, moved to newly-developed suburbs. These sparsely-developed areas weren't "walkable"—Getting anywhere in...

A while back, you'll recall I made a phone game that involved walking around and "checking in" to various landmark-y locations. The game got its information about local landmarks from Foursquare, tha...

Book Report: The Lost art of Finding our Way This book is darned near perfect: It's about how folks navigated back before there was a GPS phone in every pocket. Had things I didn't know about Vikings and about Marshall Island stick chart wave m...

This morning I tried out the Metaverse augmented reality game, which might or might not still be in beta, depending on where I read about it. In this game, you wander around looking at a map on your ...

My bus slowed to a crawl behind the naked march. Fans of nudity slowly slowly ambled down the middle of Haight Street, in the way traffic. It seemed rude. Did they really feel justified blocking buse...

Game: Troubador Tour Board I made a phone game: Troubador Tour Board. You play it by walking around with your phone, occasionally pressing a button. Nowadays, that's not so unusual for a game. This game's unusual in that you d...

Walking around my neighborhood today, I see 100% grim faces. It reminds me of hallways in companies facing multiple layoffs. ...

Last week, I walked most of the way around the bay (again). This week, I wrote about it. Unlike the previous time I walked most of the way around the bay, I didn't make a point of stopping at interes...

I'm just now back from a most-of-the-way-around-the-bay walk. My feet must recuperate. I may wear socks and sandals together. I appreciate your understanding during this difficult time. ...

Book Report: Wild It was a bestseller. Everybody read this before I did. You probably already read this or decided you wouldn't. Anyhow. It's a memoir of grief on the Pacific Coat Trail. I saw the movie before I read ...

Understand: I grew up in a time of paper maps. I'd look at a map of some place and never think I could get from there to some other not-on-the-map place. Maybe those places were close; but whoever th...

Yesterday, I passed the site of SCRAP's upcoming escape room game, Escape the Jail. It was a little bittersweet to consider that "Escape the Jail" theme. On the sweet hand: Run More Games, yay. On...

Book Report: The Old Ways It's a book of philosophical meandering ramblings about walking and sailing old routes. It starts out with a great deal of meandering musings, but if you can get past that, there are some interesting...

It's like someone started to bedazzle this lamp post. And then someone labeled some stones for a phone keypad before noticing that there weren't enough. Or something? It's like something, that's for ...

This morning, I did a sort of whaddyacallit… phone-guided walk of the Berkeley hills with a back-story. Following SMS and voice instructions, I walked and climbed and saw some things to a narr...

obscure joke What does one say to an urban drifter who lacks snacks? "You're" a "flâneur" without a "flan". ...

Google Streetview knows Muir Woods trails Why walk the Steep Ravine trail like a chump when you can traverse it virtually through street view? There's the Steep Ravine, the Matt Davis, much of the Dipsea… I was thinking of walking ...

Wanted: Mnemonic for Proper Coyote Hazing What this photo is failing to show you is a coyote peeking out from amongst the eucalyptus trees uphill from UCSF Parnassus Heights, i.e., really really close to where I live. That's from my walk ...

Further Around the Bay I walked more of the way around the bay. You may recall that my walk most of the way around the bay last month skipped a few parts that seemed too dangerous for walking; and a part that didn't seem t...

That time I walked most of the way around the bay I took eight days and walked most of the way around the bay. I wrote down some things that happened, took some photos. Let's hope I left out the tedious parts and included only the interesting parts....

I finally tried a Detour audio tour. These tours are like a neighborhood audio tour that you listen to on headphones, but use your phone's geolocation to figure out if you're at the right place to he...

Over-Engineered Walks: Pittsburg Yesterday, I walked from the Pittsburg/Bay Point BART station to Old Town Pittsburg and back. This was my last walk chosen by that "Geocaching Vicinity" system. It was a good system. It was a good...

I finally figured out there's no great way for me to walk south off of San Bruno mountain, a.k.a., the dramatic hill from the end of the WHO game. Ages ago, when I wanted to take a long walk, I used...

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. ...

Book Report: Cool Gray City of Love It's a book about San Francisco. Something of a cross between a history and a gazetteer; it's a collection of 49 essays, each using a San Francisco neighborhood as a leaping-off point for talking abo...

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Assumption school exists. The jokes practically write themselves. ...

Over-engineered Walks a year later: Munzee I still play Munzee, in which folks post the GPS coordinates of barcode stickers, and I go find and scan those bar codes. Since you only get credit for scanning any particular Munzee once, it gives m...

Over-Engineered Walks a Year Later: randomized deck from index cards I still let some written-on index cards figure out my walking route to work each morning. If my route doesn't bring me to the correct block, then I take the last card, cross out its number, and write...

Over-Engineered Walks a Year Later: Geocache Vicinity When I want to get out from behind the computer and go for a walk and don't want to choose the route myself, I still do this: Choose a geocache that I haven't visited yet that's a little further away...

Larry Lane …as encountered on a walk through the Oakland Hills ...

Nautical Flags, Richmond Posting this just in case it shows up later as a Shinteki puzzle site, you know? ...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Stanford Campus and/or the Moon This long weekend was all about location-based games, mostly out in the world. Played Shinteki's Stanford Puzzle Tour Failed to Real-Escape the Moon Base Followed a Hash House Harriers trail from th...

Happy National Poetry Month I saw a poem this morning: Parent demonstrates-by-example how to look both ways… ...

Updated a photo of McGrouther-Conradi tacks with an informative message I got about their history. ...

How to be sure a site is GPS-friendly? How do I know if a place is "glitchy" for GPS? I thought it was enough to just glance at my phone-map for a few seconds, but now I don't know what to think. The other day, I met friends downtown. I ...

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To try a game prototype where the "map" depends on where you physically play, go to Amnesia Fortnight, pony up a few bucks, vote for "Buried Metropolis," and hope for good luck. That's the skinny. H...

Book Report: The Ludic City Mostly, an academic jots down observations of people goofing around in cities' public spaces. Pedestrians waggle their arms. Buskers and street crazies accost passers-by. Bicyclists ride in perhaps-s...

The plan was to stick some Munzee barcodes to things. Things did not go according to plan. I tried sticking a barcode under a utility box and the barcode fell right off—the box was covered with...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even 10.4 N 75.5 W This morning, I had the spirit to look up. Above the usual eye-level was a crudely taped-up laminated message, triva-lly cluing a certain location. (Not my location; I was in San Francisco, USA, of c...

Over-Engineered Walks: Munzee Addendum Last week, the Munzee folks must have spidey-sensed that a puzzle-hunt enthusiast was writing about their geocaching-in-the-age-of-smartphones game. We know this because soon afterwards, they launche...

Over-engineered Walks: Munzee Munzee is a game that encourages you to go places, something like Geocaching in the age of smartphones. In Geocaching, you are given a set of lat/long coordinates; you go there, you find a little con...

Over-engineered Walks: randomized deck from index cards A few weeks back, Brian Enigma posted in response to one of these "Over-engineered walks" posts: @lahosken Or get a set of DiceCards and remove/ignore the ones with a north or diagonal compass. Or ma...

Over-engineered Walks: Geocache Vicinity When I'm traveling and I want to to do some semi-random wandering, I look for geocaches, little boxes hidden around the world whose lat/longitudes are posted on a website. Except I don't really look ...

Tonight's talk wasn't recorded, which is too bad because it touched on The-Game-ish themes. Participants move through space, facing challenges which they overcome as a group. Still, that lack of reco...

Over-engineered Walks: Dice Around the start of 2012, I started work at Google's San Francisco office. I walked to work, but quickly got tired of walking the direct route day after day. I started walking a different route each ...

Over-engineered Walks: Keep Walking South I walk for exercise. I don't like deciding where to go, though. I set up systems to make that decision for me, so I can enjoy the breeze and the sweet, sweet endorphins. Complicating these systems: I...

Vertical garden, Hickory Alley ...

A resident addressed me: "It would be interesting to set up a time-lapse camera here." I was walking at Waldo Point Harbor in Sausalito, a big houseboat area. Specifically, I was stepping off a tempo...

The people of Brisbane, California, decorate the town's fire plugs. When a fire plug wears out, they don't want to discard their art, so they have a plug preserve. ...

New-to-me Golden Gate Bridge overlook by Battery Godfrey ...

The @Shinteki logo, before it was a triangle, was a seated discus thrower. (Specifically, it was a mash-up of Rodin's Thinker and Discus Thrower statues.) That was pretty funny because ha ha who thin...

Photo: Niantic Ave If you walk from San Francisco to the Daly City BART station, you could pass this. ...

Saw a Hash House Harriers pack run past, my first time seeing a live pack instead of just leftover chalk marks on the ground. At first I was kind of disappointed. I thought "If I were the hare, I wo...

Windows Phone event setting up at San Francisco @BillGrahamCivic, preparing for major crowd control. ...

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...

My high school chums and I used to go to the No-Name Sushi restaurant every so often. We stopped going after it caught fire. (How does a restaurant specializing in raw fish catch fire? Anyhow.) I wal...

@HollowSF now has @DandelionChoco. nextdoorsweets.com is open and serving boba and gelato. I'm gonna get fat. ...

I used to stop in at the Roastery for the decor. They used Papyrus font despite being across the street from an art school. I always wondered what woke the art students up more: the coffee or the gra...

People are surprised that Barefoot Contessa's at @sfcarts Stanyan/Waller. But "no shoes, no service" law sez she's gotta eat outdoors. ...

Each morning, a food truck pulls up behind the San Francisco opera house. Its car horn plays the bugle tune First Call. A night at the opera meets a day at the races. ...

I walked home a different way yesterday and bumped into #OccupySF . It's a real thing. You know how sometimes you read a news report of a protest, but eventually figure out it was just a half-dozen p...

I walked south and took some photos http://goo.gl/nQMb5 ...

Puzzle Hunts were everywhere, even the Magic Mountain area at Coyote Point park I went for a walk partway down the peninsula this morning. At one point, I realized I was walking past the Coyote Point playground, the one with the big castle-themed play structure. This site was th...

I went on a walk this morning. I took a few photos. ...

Wooly Pig Cafe There's a Wooly Pig Cafe 3rd Ave and Hugo in San Francisco. I feel like I scored some kind of "scoop" by discovering this cafe by walking around instead of by reading Heath Putnam's Wooly Pig blog. ...

In the Haight, trading words with a tattooed dope fiend is old news; but shopping in a supermarket is novel. ...

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...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, but the Edges are Fuzzy On my way to Saturday's excellent Shinteki Decathlon game, I swung by a few places to take care of a few things. E.g., I stopped to take an unhurried look at that worn-down Jejune sticker I'd spotte...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even the Marin Headlands and maybe the Seat in Front of me on the Bus There was that awesome Shinteki Decathlon game a couple of weeks ago. One of the clue sites was Hawk Hill, a high hill in the Marin Headlands. It seemed like a neat site, so... yesterday I went bac...

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...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even San Jose I like The Game. I like the puzzles, but in between puzzles, I like hopping into a van and zipping around, visiting interesting places. Even though... all too often we don't really linger at the in...

Follow-up: SFZero Suggestion Box You may recall that last month, I stumbled onto a suggestion box on Waller and Steiner streets. This suggestion box, as it turned out, was part of a game. This game, SF0, is a sort of mutual-dare c...

Not-Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, but especiially at Waller and Steiner On my way back home from the library, I encountered a nicely-made suggestion box at the Northeast corner of Waller and Steiner. Signage encouraged passers-by to write suggestions on index cards and ...

Book Report: The Roads to Sata In this travelog, our hero walks the length of Japan, from the tippy-top of Hokkaido, the length of Honshu, down south past Sakurajima. This was in the 1980s, and gaijin were mysterious; he encounte...

Can I Mooch a Ride from San Francisco to Mars Saturday Morning? Dear Lazyweb-- I'm volunteering at the Googol Conglomerate tomorrow, i.e., Saturday. I could spend three hours getting there from San Francisco on CalTrain. But I'd much rather mooch a ride with y...

Book Report: New Yorker Feb 14 & 21 2005 I read the New Yorker in stack order; magazines are not pushed on the stack at publish-time, but are queued elsewhere for a nontrivial time; that is, I don't read them in chronological order. So you ...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere I stepped off the streetcar two stops early tonight. I wanted to walk a ways. I had recovered from my wild and crazy weekend. I was no longer hobbling around--I could walk. So I wanted to walk, g...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere Peter Tang just rented a new apartment. Today Steven, 'Lene and I went over to paint some of the walls. Watching paint dry is not interesting. So between coats we headed out for lunch. As we walk...

Park Challenge Today Team Unwavering Resolve (a.k.a. Steven Pitsenbarger, Paul du Bois, and I) played in Park Challenge, a puzzle hunt game organized by the Desert Taxi folks. It was a fun stroll in Golden Gate Pa...

Book Report: A Walk In the Woods Bill Bryson confirms that hiking is difficult. This book was OK. Tags: book | Appalachian Trail |Labels: book, ok, pedestrian...