Diorama Flats

Thanks to tinhorn2, a major portion of the Denver NPL convention is available online: Diorama Flats.

For readers not involved with the NPL, "flats" will need some explanation. Usually, they take the form of poetry, and you can get a nice introduction to that style of puzzle in the NPL's minisample. In short, every flat starts with a "base" which is a group of words united by a particular bit of wordplay. So hideout and hideous form a base known as a "last-letter change," for reasons that should be obvious. Others are mote complicated, but they're all listed in the NPL Guide

But for this convention, we threw out the whole "poetry" thing and decided to work in a more three-dimensional medium. For diorama flats, the words in the base had to be represented in the form of a diorama, made with the various arts-and-crafts materials provided.

Over fifty dioramas were made on Friday night, though only thirty-three were presented as part of the competitive solving the next day. I thought I'd take this opportunity to share some of my favorites.

First, here's the one that I made with cazique (I was going to embed them, but Picasa isn't letting me, I guess:

CONSONANTCY (7, 5, 5)
(Link to Diorama)
=Z-Saw (cazique/tablesaw)

A Consonantcy is a flat type where the consonants for each word remains the same, though the vowels change (like acorn, crayon, and ocarina). The numbers following the title tell you how many letters each word has.

Other favorites:

DELETION (5, *4) (*4 = not MW)
(Link to Diorama)
=100 Down/D Ness

In a Deletion, one letter (but not the first or last letter) is removed from a word to create another word. The asterisk means that the four-letter word is capitalized. "Not MW" means that the word doesn't appear in a major Merriam-Webster dictionary.

TRANSPOSAL (*6, 6)
(Link to Diorama)
=(Logic/Artist unknown)

A Transposal is a simple rearrangement, with the same letters in each word. Again, the asterisk means that one word is capitalized, but this time, it can be found in Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary.

LETTER BANK (11, 12 5)
(Link to Diorama)
=Vebrile/¢

In a Letter Bank, the first word (the bank) has no repeated letters. The second word uses each letter in the bank at least once but possibly many times (like lens and senselessness). The "12 5" means that the second "word" is actually a two-word phrase where the first word is twelve letters and the second word is five letters.

FIRST-LETTER CHANGE (8)
(Link to Diorama)
=tmcay & Team Conorado

Should be self-explanatory. Change the first letter of the word to get a new word.

Someone Kept Moving His Chair, So He Completed His Thesis

The release of Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog threatened to break the internet yesterday, and there were definitely a number of casualties. Hulu, which was hosting the video, started getting massive slowdowns, then the Dr. Horrible site went down, along with a bunch of related sites like Whedonesque and the home page of Felcia Day, one of the stars.

While the outlying sites remain down, the Dr. Horrible site has upgraded to new servers, and seems to be propogating along the DNS servers about now. So if you weren't able to see it yesterday, now's a good time to try again. You know, before the new servers get broken.