Tablesaw!

I still am not quite prepared to talk in detail about the Mystery Hunt, because a lot has to do with my team experience, which was awesome, but also more personal. So instead, here's a list of recommended puzzles from this year's Hunt.

This post contains minor spoilers. Most Mystery Hunt puzzles have little or no instructions. Under the cut tags, I'm going to give more explicit instructions and some comments to make the puzzles accessible, both to more casual solvers and to seasoned veterans who want to skip ahead to the good stuff. (If you don't see any cut text and you would prefer not to see some or all of these spoilers, read this page from my Jaunary 19 page.) Complete answers to each puzzle can be found using the "Call in answer" link at the top of each page.

Keyboard Cat. ( How it works )

Toad's List. ( How it works )

Everybody's Got to Be Somewhere. ( How it Works )

Meta Testing. ( What It Is, How It Works )

Timbales. ( What it is )

Stuff Nerd People Like. ( What It Is, How It Works )

Expletive Deleted. Figuring out how to fill in the blanks shouldn't be that hard, and I'd feel bad spelling it out. I will spell out how to get from there to the final answer: ( How to Get from There to the Final Answer )

The Cats Meow. ( How It Works, Why It's Fun Even if You Don't Want to Solve It )

Part of Speech. ( How It Works )

Painted Potsherds. ( How It Works )

Inventory Quest. ( How It Works )

Laureate. No need for spoiler tags, this one is straight up with its instructions. This is a cryptic crossword, so if you're not familiar with those conventions, it's going to be very difficult. Specifically, this is a cryptic in the style of the Listener Cryptic, so if you're an American cryptic solver unfamiliar with British conventions, this will still be very hard. But if you do happen to be familiar with solving very difficult cryptics in the British vein, this puzzle is lots of fun.

Hints, with a bit of love!. ( How )

A Representative Sampling. ( How It Works )

Plotlines. I think this is the puzzle that maximizes accessibility and awesomeness. Definitely look even if you click through immediately to the answers. ( How It Works )

Toto, I Have a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore. I can't really spoil this one, but I feel like the aha is fairly accesible to the right sorts of geek. If you don't see what's going on fairly quickly, click through to the answer. If you do, ( here's how to get a final answer ).

Unnatural Law. ( How It Works )

E Pluribus Unum. Okay, this one looks unfair, but it's actually fairly tractable, and can be a good way to start thinking laterally about puzzles like this. ( How It Works )

Unlikely Situations. Just look at the puzzle. If this puzzle is for you, you'll recognize it instantly and figure out what to do. If you don't it's probably not the puzzle for you. ( How It Works ) Even if you don't want to solve the puzzle, you may want to click through to the answer to see a little bit more about the subject.

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So those are my recommendations. There's a lot more stuff that I enjoyed, but it's all less accessible, and I'll probably need to talk about them more spoilerily to do them justice. These are just ones I think more people would get a kick out of.

If you think I've listed too many, then here are my top three fun, accessible puzzles: Toad's List, Inventory Quest, and Plotlines. Go do those.

Also, here are some puzzles that I didn't work on but are on my list to try. No descriptions because I haven't spent any time working on them.

• Mountain Pass. Apparently a diagramless crossword.
• Flat Head. Apparently a set of flats.
• One More Try. Apparently a crossword, though probably very devious.
• Good Times in the Casino. Apparently a cryptic crossword.
• Build Your Own Acrostic. Apparently an acrostic-like thingie.
• Counting the Ways. I have no idea what this one is, but it seemed like people were having fun with it.
• Payroll. Another puzzle I've heard people talk about but don't know anything about.

I spent the weekend with many wonderful people. But I spent it in Boston, a city that hates me and wants me to die cold and alone.

So before I talk about the Hunt and all the other noteworthy things from this weekend, I would like to alert Boston to a few things.

• I just walked out to get a salad made of locally-grown organic vegetables. Also, I was wearing sandals.
• In fact, it's so warm, I need to open up my windows to make sure the house cools down a little.
• Southland is fliming outside my house tomorrow. Literally right outside my window.

Yeah, fuck you, Boston.

(P.S. Boston People I still love, mkay?)

"Gus, don't be the only black male lead on cable television."

Nice one, Psych.

Dear Vampire Diaries,

( Stupidly minor spoiler relating to the title and my icon )

More to come, surely.

As awesome as it is to have the box set of Daria, it's not really helping with the college flashback thing.

I'd forgotten how many different places and with how many people I'd watched so many different episodes.

I also remember everything being so much more vivid. Watching pre-HD cartoons in the HD era is so disconcerting.

The second of three fanmixes for whedonland. This one is for Angel's evil law firm Wolfram & Hart. Links go to MP3s where freely available, and to streaming versions for everything else.



( Songs, links, lyrics, and notes )

Thank you to everyone who offered me support based on yesterday's entry. I woke up feeling better; and then I had oral surgery, which was a bit of a downer, but I've bought lots of oatmeal, and everything's looking good for now.

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I mentioned I was making fanmixes for whedonland. It's part of a gift exchange that the community's been participating in for the last month an a half. Unfortunately, August was not a good month for me to do any things, so most of my work has been crammed into the last week of July after I got my assignment, and this past week continuing to the deadline (Sunday).

I've been worried that my offering was anemic (some people have received some truly marvelous offerings), so I thought maybe I'd throw in a crossword, because even if it isn't the most polished, it's a pretty safe bet that she'll be the only person receiving a crossword. So I came up with a short theme, found a grid, and started playing around with it yesterday.

I figured I'd mostly use autofill to save time. But then I started working on an awkward corner to see if any Buffy-specific words could help. A few hours later, I finally had it working, and that's when I notice I could drop two squares from my grid to open it up a bit more (and make the fill a little more interesting. A while after that, I spent a half hour converting the entry list of the Buffy/Angel Wiki into a wordlist so that I wouldn't have to keep checking manually. And a little while later, I was done.

Of course, when I was done, it was a little after nine o'clock. I was understandably hungry, having eaten only a large oatmeal in the early afternoon (I slept in). And although I had planned for dinner, going out earlier today to get spaghetti and sauce, my plans for making dinner included the pots and pans that I'd planned to clean this afternoon. The pots and pans I would have cleaned, if I'd noticed that I was burning the hours away writing the crossword. unwilling to be hungry while washing dishes and cooking, I walked over to Palms Thai to eat some soft noodles while listening to Thai Elvis.

The crossword looks pretty good, though.

Rizzoli & Isles

It's like Bones except David Boreanaz is replaced with Angie Harmon, and we follow the Booth character instead of the Bones character. This means that the show makes me sad because I just keep thinking "NEEDS MORE ISLES."

The Gates

Another damn vampire show. This one has a great premise: vampires, wereolves, and mythological et ceteras have banded together in a tightly controlled, upper-class gated community to protect themselves from persecution from both humans and their own kind. Also, they all hate each other and get involved in internal politics trying to get the others to break the rules and get caught so they get kicked out. And yet, so far (and by so far, I mean I'm two episodes behind), it's been doing things in the most boring way possible.

This paragraph contains spoilers, if there's anyone who cares. For example, a teenage girl is planning to go to the father-daughter dance with her single dad. The day of, she makes out with her new boyfriend and leaves him drained of energy. The school nurse/witch tells dad that his daughter is becoming a full-fledged succubus, and they need to start dealing with it. Dad says he wants to wait to tell her until after the dance, to have one last moment of innocence. Now, given all this what do you think happens at the dance? Does the daughter lose control and drain the life of her father while "Butterfly Kisses" plays on the PA, leaving her scared, traumatized and vulnerable? Or is the dance entirely uneventful and followed by a sober, serious talk that cuts away before we actually get to see her learn the truth? If you thought the latter would make better TV, then you're a crappy enough writer to make The Gates what it is today.

Seriously it makes me The Vampire Diaries. When's that coming back?

Haven

Only seen the pilot (I've got a DVR backlog), but the mandatory banter between the lead and Love Triangle Points B and C was reasonably amusing.

Dear The Closer,

You like to point out that you're the most watched drama on cable. Please act like people are watching.

For example, if you need to have a closeup on a missing person's photo on top of what is presumably some sort of official document, please remember that you are filming in HD, and that even if people do not freeze-frame, a number of words will jump out at the casual reader.

I don't expect you to fabricate files for any such situation, but in choosing a preexisting document, you should try to find something that generally matches.

The manifesto of the Unabomber is not a document that blends well in situations like this. Especially when the section you choose to put up front is the Unabombers ravings on "feelings of inferiority" among "Leftists," which includes lines like "Those who are most sensitive about "politically incorrect" terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any "oppressed" group but come from privileged strata of society."

In summary, please take a hard look at your art department.

Tablesaw

Hey, let's restart the inventory. I've been putting this off, but can't for much longer. You see, last season, Hulu kept five shows on backlog, and so I would write these to catch up with the episodes disappearing from the cite. But the new season is coming, so Hulu's about to take them down, so I've got to finish this off fast.

Let's see, how did this work . . .

( An explanation of 'Full Inventory' )

Anyway, last time I promised to "look at the word missing from my icon and grapple with a form of oppression that I'm not very good with." If you look at the icon, and compare it to my inventory of the pilot, you'll see that there's a word missing: crazy. In between writing that post and making the icon, I read a post discussing the word and its relation to persons with disabilities. Don't remember what it was, but this similar post just popped up on FWD, so that's helpful.

But another issue, the one that resonated when I watched this episode, was the way that "crazy" becomes an umbrella term that labels all persons with any type of mental disability as dangerous.

Lewis Caroll's Alice . . . was as mad as a hatter. And Charles Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Caroll, was not writing books, he was chronicling this young woman's descent into a sociopathic madness in all of his books. He didn't write these books, these are warehouse fabrications.

It's not uncommon to read the Alice stories as referring to the view of a person with a mental disability, but that view doesn't correspond in any way with the Alice portrayed in the episode, except under the umbrella concepts of being "crazy," "mad," and "insane" to link one form of mental disability to another and then to criminality.

So, what about the stuffs:

Artifact: Studio 54 Disco Ball
What does it do? It represents "trapped desires refracted by light, sound, sex, mind-altering drugs into a disco ball." In the Warehouse, it reflects light in a sparkling pattern and plays "I Will Survive" (though the online version didn't get the rights to the song). In the wild, it "projects yearning and craving. . . . It imparts a grim stampeding inhumanity against anything decent."
Is it in any way accurate? A bit fanciful, but nothing out of the ordinary. One special note, though: as a stinger to the episode, Arite revelas that Steven Rubell, who was one of the co-founders of Studio 54, he considered calling his club "Wonderland." (We'll get to why that's apropos.) When I heard that, it had an urban legend too-good-to-verify feel to it. So of course I tried to verify it. I expected to find it everywhere, because it's that kind of interesting trivia, but instead it was nowhere. Apparently this factoid was made of whole cloth. If it spreads, remember that this is where it started.
Does it belong in America's Attic? Studio 54 was definitely in the United States.

Artifact: Chip from the Jubilee Grand
What does it do? Allows the holder to see for a brief period into the future. The experience is probably addictive, and repeated use causes burn damage to the holder.
Is it in any way accurate? The Jubilee Grand is a completely fictitious casino, but the Warehouse 13 wiki (which has bulked up a bit since I last wrote these) suggests that it's a reference to the fire at the MGM Grand Casino.
Does it belong in America's Attic? Nothing about the fictitious history suggests otherwise.

Artifact: Lewis Caroll's Looking-Glass
What does it—wait didn't we do this one already? Yes, we did. During the Full Inventory of "Resonance."
What . . . did it do? It allows a person to interact with a "double" of some sort, and lets objects pass through to the other side. This is useful for playing table tennis without a partner.
And now what does it do? It . . . I don't even know. The spirit of Alice Liddel is trapped inside it for some reason that is apparently not related to her knowing Caroll as a child. And when there's multiple mirrors, it can escape into the body of someone else, which gets trapped in the mirror.
Is it in any—what? I know, right? There's just nothing cohesive about it.
Seriously. But is it in any way accurate? Who even knows anymore?
Does it belong in America's Attic? Despite having been ripped to shreads narratively, I'm still going to go with the previous conclusion of no.