(no subject)

Some fractured thoughts on the NPL con. This is preliminary, and not everything will make sense to you if you don't know much about the NPL, but I'll try do be more thorough and introductory in a later post.

First, y'all posted too much this weekend. Way too much. Where were you on the weekends when I was desparate to read new content? Apparently you were too busy making plans to post a whole lot during the weekend when I was in Colorado without a computer. Skip=600.

Remote Control was a lot of fun. I ran it five times and received a lot of compliments. The scores were generally pretty uneven, but people enjoyed the work and attitude of the thing. I learned a lot about the game I'd written through playing it, and I don't think that things really got started until the third run. I'm going to put together a nice something that has all of the questions, including changes made during the con. In the meantime, everyone who'd been filtered out of my Con Game updates can look back at the declassified posts on : Part 1 & Part 2.

The official program was really fantastic this year. I know that a lot of people were a bit apprehensive about most of it. The World Series of Wordplay in particular seemed ripe for problems, with only twelve people actually solving. But qaqaq knew what he was doing, and the tension and excitement carried over amazingly well. The most upsetting thing was how little of it we ultimately got to see.

When I wasn't running Remote Control, I did a lot of other trivia games. I didn't do particularly well in most of them. When playing Jeopardy boards by cramerica and Noam, I found myself perpetually a half-second behind on questions. I only managed to salvage my place in Cram's by pulling out a true Daily Double. sproutcm's pub trivia was lots of fun, but my team had a hard time of it, though we managed to work together well on the "identify the TV show based on the names of children" bonus. And in Ember's Trash Trivia packet, I mostly came out ahead by being on the team with zundevil (who is generally not someone you want to be pitted against in a game of trivia), but I did manage to do our team proud by identifying Seatlle Grace Hopsital during a tossup question.

The Diorama Flats was another official event that seemed like an iffy proposition, but I had a blast putting mine together with cazique. When it came to solving, I had a feeling that cramerica, who had been my flat-competition cosolver from Indiana to San Antonio, would have formed a new partnership during the con I couldn't attend, and I was correct. Instead, I paired up with local NPLer Jigsaw. This was a good move, as we were only one answer off from complete (my fault entirely). He'll say that I did 75% of the work, which is true, in a sense. I was really good at identifying chestnuts and simple bases. When it came to the rough stuff, we worked together really well.

The cryptic crosswords were really fun. Wombat's official puzzle, Color Ado, was definitely my favorite. Coming in at a close second was thedan's Immovable Objects, which was simple and straightforward, but had a wonderful theme (which took me stupidly long to identify). Embarrassingly, some of the puzzles that I still have yet to complete are tinhorn2's and Jigsaw's, both of which I had a chance to testsolve before the con.

It felt a little weird coming back after missing a year. There were definitely a lot of faces I didn't know who'd been at the Michigan Con. It also felt weird arriving on Thursday, which meant I had less time to hang out with people. I mean, I love the games and puzzles, but one thing I really love about con is just being able to talk to people, and I felt like I didn't get enough of that.

Finally, some of the best pictures of the con available right now are at Mum's Flickr page.