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My Personal Hunt.
The archived Hunt isn't up yet, so I'm going to hold off on specific comments for a little bit. This is just my own comments.
This was the fourth year that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ojouchan and I Hunted together, but it was the first time that we traveled together from Los Angeles. Unfortunately, I didn't have as much free time to take days off as I did last year, which cut into a lot of our non-Hunt activities. We flew into Newark, and spent some time in Elizabeth, Ojou's home town. I know she would've preferred to have more time in New Jersey, but we were in Wedensday night, and we drove to Boston on Friday morning.
We made good time getting into Cambridge, but squandered it looking for parking. By the time we pulled into a pay lot and walked to campus, we'd missed the opening.
This was also the first year we had a hotel all three nights, instead of sleeping on site. This was an Ojou request, and it certainly helped my mood. I benefitted it as well, though there were probably times I would've preferred to stay at HQ longer. But the showering was a very good thing. I think next time, I'll try a bit harder to get a T-accessible hotel so that we don't need to take our rest at the same time.
Overall, I personally didn't have as good a Hunt as the last one (which was Spies, for us). I never really got into the swing of the structure, so I didn't help as much with metapuzzles as I did in Spies. Also, I didn't get to spend as much time sitting down with a puzzle that I could sink my chops into and solve all the way through.
A lot of the time, I like to filter through puzzles that are only half finished and trying to power through to the end. I get a lot of enjoyment out of this process, but in this Hunt, it wasn't a good way to operate. As a few people have already started mentioning, there were definitely some very flawed puzzles in this Hunt. There were lots of fantastic ones, but the problem puzzles did start piling up. And because I was looking at started-but-unfinished puzzles for most of the Hunt, I ended up spending more time staring at the problem puzzles than the awesome puzzles. I just spent a little time flipping through the Hunt, and there are a lot of puzzles I'm really sad I missed.
My real contribution to the Hunt this year was general right-brain-storming. Generally, I'd stare at something than ask a question that crack things open. But I'd rather have had more time thoroughly working toward an answer.
So that's my goal for two years. Solve more individual puzzles, get back onto the meta mode. For the coming year, I definitely want to do a better job at writing puzzles. One advantage to the repeat is that I (as I'm sure many of the rest of the team) have puzzles that I didn't get time to execute. Now I can go back and do it again.
After the Hunt was over, there wasn't much time to spend with the many friends we have in Boston, including the people on the organizing team, the people on opposing teams, the people at Arisia, and Ojou's friends from Williams. We'd kind of expected that our team would be done with the Hunt early. Palindrome had expressed interest in last year's end-early-but-keep-HQ-open model, so I figure that even if we didn't win, Evil Midnight would be done by Sunday morning. I was hoping to use the rest of Sunday for socialization. There was a geocaching event at Arisia that I wanted to go to, and there were, of course, lots of people to see everywhere.
But the Hunt went on pretty long, ending at 8:26 p.m. I haven't heard much from Palindrome about what their expectations were, but I did hear that they'd planned to keep HQ open until Sunday afternoon, so I believe that they expected the first teams to finish the Hunt Saturday night/Sunday morning as well. Half-past eight isn't at all a bad time for the Hunt to end, but it made me upset, again, that I'd cut the vacation so close. I'd really been hoping for that extra day.
I just got an e-mail that Dr. Awkward will be facilitating the final runaround tomorrow night on the MIT campus. I know that most of the people reading this are the NPL/out-of-town faction, but I encourage everyone available to do this runaround, especially MIT students and alums.
Before I started doing the Mystery Hunt, my knoledge of the MIT campus was pretty much limited to The Lurking Horror. Doing the runaround, I was surprised to see how much I now know and remember about the campus just from doing runarounds and things like this.
My gratitude goes out to the members of Palindrome for hosting this year. This Hunt definitely experienced turbulance, but as pilots, Palindrome went to great lengths to keep the flight moving smoothly and in the right direction. They adapted quickly to change and were always sensitive to our needs and desires. With all the stress and panic they must have been experiencing, it was really an amazing feat.
This was the fourth year that
ojouchan and I Hunted together, but it was the first time that we traveled together from Los Angeles. Unfortunately, I didn't have as much free time to take days off as I did last year, which cut into a lot of our non-Hunt activities. We flew into Newark, and spent some time in Elizabeth, Ojou's home town. I know she would've preferred to have more time in New Jersey, but we were in Wedensday night, and we drove to Boston on Friday morning.We made good time getting into Cambridge, but squandered it looking for parking. By the time we pulled into a pay lot and walked to campus, we'd missed the opening.
This was also the first year we had a hotel all three nights, instead of sleeping on site. This was an Ojou request, and it certainly helped my mood. I benefitted it as well, though there were probably times I would've preferred to stay at HQ longer. But the showering was a very good thing. I think next time, I'll try a bit harder to get a T-accessible hotel so that we don't need to take our rest at the same time.
Overall, I personally didn't have as good a Hunt as the last one (which was Spies, for us). I never really got into the swing of the structure, so I didn't help as much with metapuzzles as I did in Spies. Also, I didn't get to spend as much time sitting down with a puzzle that I could sink my chops into and solve all the way through.
A lot of the time, I like to filter through puzzles that are only half finished and trying to power through to the end. I get a lot of enjoyment out of this process, but in this Hunt, it wasn't a good way to operate. As a few people have already started mentioning, there were definitely some very flawed puzzles in this Hunt. There were lots of fantastic ones, but the problem puzzles did start piling up. And because I was looking at started-but-unfinished puzzles for most of the Hunt, I ended up spending more time staring at the problem puzzles than the awesome puzzles. I just spent a little time flipping through the Hunt, and there are a lot of puzzles I'm really sad I missed.
My real contribution to the Hunt this year was general right-brain-storming. Generally, I'd stare at something than ask a question that crack things open. But I'd rather have had more time thoroughly working toward an answer.
So that's my goal for two years. Solve more individual puzzles, get back onto the meta mode. For the coming year, I definitely want to do a better job at writing puzzles. One advantage to the repeat is that I (as I'm sure many of the rest of the team) have puzzles that I didn't get time to execute. Now I can go back and do it again.
After the Hunt was over, there wasn't much time to spend with the many friends we have in Boston, including the people on the organizing team, the people on opposing teams, the people at Arisia, and Ojou's friends from Williams. We'd kind of expected that our team would be done with the Hunt early. Palindrome had expressed interest in last year's end-early-but-keep-HQ-open model, so I figure that even if we didn't win, Evil Midnight would be done by Sunday morning. I was hoping to use the rest of Sunday for socialization. There was a geocaching event at Arisia that I wanted to go to, and there were, of course, lots of people to see everywhere.
But the Hunt went on pretty long, ending at 8:26 p.m. I haven't heard much from Palindrome about what their expectations were, but I did hear that they'd planned to keep HQ open until Sunday afternoon, so I believe that they expected the first teams to finish the Hunt Saturday night/Sunday morning as well. Half-past eight isn't at all a bad time for the Hunt to end, but it made me upset, again, that I'd cut the vacation so close. I'd really been hoping for that extra day.
I just got an e-mail that Dr. Awkward will be facilitating the final runaround tomorrow night on the MIT campus. I know that most of the people reading this are the NPL/out-of-town faction, but I encourage everyone available to do this runaround, especially MIT students and alums.
Before I started doing the Mystery Hunt, my knoledge of the MIT campus was pretty much limited to The Lurking Horror. Doing the runaround, I was surprised to see how much I now know and remember about the campus just from doing runarounds and things like this.
My gratitude goes out to the members of Palindrome for hosting this year. This Hunt definitely experienced turbulance, but as pilots, Palindrome went to great lengths to keep the flight moving smoothly and in the right direction. They adapted quickly to change and were always sensitive to our needs and desires. With all the stress and panic they must have been experiencing, it was really an amazing feat.
no subject
I'm mostly displeased about how things turned out because I was supposed to get to arrest people. I was really looking forward to that.