Tablesaw!

On Thursday, I came home from work and suddenly felt exhausted. I collapsed into bed feeling nauseous, and later in the evening, I was threw up. My wife's had a crud for a while, and I was worried I caught whatever she had; but I bounced back quickly over the next two days, so I think it must have been more of a food-poisoning thing.

I woke up on Friday in time to watch the Hunt Kickoff for a Dungeons and Dragons theme, Monsters et Manus. I kept expecting to fall asleep again, but the puzzles were fantastic and kept me going all day. I was still kinda weak, but staying in bed solving puzzles on a laptop was just my speed.

This year, there were a more than the usual number of puzzles where I came in after other folks had done most of the work and spotted the answer phrase. I did it for our first meta, The Despondent Dynast, and then our second meta, The Fighter. I also did it, amazingly, for our last meta, The Broken Bridge. After explaining my reasoning on why we should try this guess while we still had clues going, I wrote:

Tablesaw-XPS (Sat 23:12:55): Not the strongest, but I wanted to throw it out.
Tablesaw-XPS (Sat 23:13:02): It's not the weakest either.
Tablesaw-XPS (Sat 23:13:22): Anyway, I have to get pizza and didn't want it bugging me.
Tablesaw-XPS (Sat 23:13:27): TABLESAW OUT!

After getting pizza and returning to chat, the team was on its way to the final interaction and runaround.

Puzzles where the opposite happened included Boston Burgers (where I got tripped up on the extraction), and Changing Rooms (an excellent cryptic-clue based puzzle that I just started falling asleep during). I'm most proud of my gruntwork for Tricky Wicket, which turned out to be one of the most difficult puzzles in the Hunt. I spotted the gimmick and did a lot of work getting all the data collected, but was very grateful when I called in some teammates and one of them spotted the important messages I had missed. (She also was able to use the a key technique correctly when I was flailing).

The Hunt was really incredible, all around. Recommended puzzles are:

• Before and After MASH
• Locked In
• Typecasting (probably my favorite of this year, all things considered)
• Changing Rooms (on the difficult side)
• The Puzzle at the End of this Book
• Precipice
• Out of the Mouths of Babes (cutest puzzle)
• Hum a Few More Bars

This is my Dear Author letter for Invisible Ficathon. It's also my first Dear Author letter, so bear with me. I'm going to copy the "Details" information (which were written "IC"), and fill it out with some extra information, including source information.

I am not really a fic reader; even in fandoms I'm deep into, I prefer reading meta. The fic I read is rare, usually highly recced out of things like Yuletide, and has kind of meta qualities. I like crossovers and other things that highlight form and literary quirks of the source, rather than having an engagement with the characters themselves. Similarly, I read gen almost exclusively. However, as you will see below, I'm not ruling out romance or porn in some circumstances where I suspect it would be interesting and/or hilarious.

Gigamesh

My favorite part of every Gigamesh fic is the Hannahanian commentary that by necessity accompanies it. I know that fandom has generally decided the commentary should be about twice the wordcount of the accompanying fic (as in the 33/67 Drabble exchanges), but I prefer the ratio to be much more skewed to the commentary side. I'd hope for at least a triple-sized commentary, but if you feel comfortable making it even bigger, go for it!

Also, while I generally read only gen fic, I do also enjoy Gigamesh fic that is half-and-half. I go both ways: romantic/sexual fic with gen commentary is OK, as is gen fic with romantic/sexual commentary. But doubling up on the pairings is right out.

Source: A Perfect Vacuum by Stanislaw Lem.

A Perfect Vacuum is a collection of reviews of fictional books. There are preview pages available on Google Books that can give you an idea of what the book is like. It is modeled after James Joyce's Ulysses (using the mythology of Gilgamesh and Enkidu), and more especially, the very intricate and often suspect textual analysis of the same. "Our task is made easier in that Hannahan—unlike Joyce!—provided his book with a commentary, which is twice the size of the novel itself (to be exact, Gigamesh runs 395 pages, the Commentary 847)."

Blasto (fictional film series)

I also really love the dialogue of Blasto (and Bubin) and love reading crossovers with other fandoms (or vice versa). Gen only. I'm not trying to be a prude, but I'm not interested in reading about Hanar procreative activities. no, not even with Asari.

Source: Mass Effect series.

The Mass Effect wiki has a good summary, but I strongly recommend listening to the entire audio of Blasto 6: Partners in Crime, as taken from the Mass Effect 3; it's about ten minutes. You will understand why I love the dialogue. There's apparently a comic book too, but I haven't read it.

Escape from Zyzzlvaria

I'd love to see Captain Blastoid in a crossover with other fandoms like Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, The Matrix, The Producers, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego and others that have no apparent connection to each other. Gen only, please.

Source: D2: The Mighty Duck Konundrum, MIT Mystery Hunt 2009, MIT Mystery Hunt 2010, Round 2009 (from a different timeline, and so not necessarily canon).

I'm not specifically asking for there to a be a puzzle in the fic, but, if you really want . . .

Tulola-Gobu

I'd really like to see more about what happened between Nasta-se and Dullo-ge before the start of the novel that led to the murder. If at all possible, please write in Chaosian, or, if you can't, be sure to capture as much of the color of the language as you can.

Source: Son of the Realm of Unspeakable Chaos (Translation)

Another puzzle-based source, but I really wanted to include this one because I felt like conlangs deserved a place in the Invisible Ficathon. The known Chaosian dictionary is limited and is mostly dedicated to describing flags, hence my reference to "the color of the language."

See You Next Wednesday

I don't even know how to give guidance. It seems like everyone who writes fic for this has seen a completely different film. If your fic can provide insight into some of those discrepancies, that'd be great, but if not, go wild.

Source: The films of John Landis (Wikipedia page).

This title has referred to lots of different films within films, so I really don't want to limit interpretations, but I'd love to see something that tries to merge two or more. Also, given that one of the most notable See You Next Wednesdays is advertised "A Non-Stop Orgy" (though the parts of the film we see does seem to have lots of orgy interruptions), I totally accept that this one may get porny.

Dixon Hill (series)

I love Haircut Lapinski fic, and I have yet to see anyone address his obsession with fractions with appropriate detail.

Source: Star Trek: The Next Generation (Memory Alpha)

The noir detective novels that Picard uses for holographic recreation. One of the characters gives the line: "I'm as jumpy as Haircut Lapinski trying to land on a fraction." That is the best line. THE BEST. And it has been plaguing TNG fans for a while, based on websearches. It is time for the truth to be known.

If you hadn't noticed from the previous links, the theme this year was videogames. The wedding that teams were invited to turned out to be the wedding of Mario and Peach, which was predictably interrupted by Bowser. As for what happened next . . . it's probably best to let the Hunt mastermind explain the whole story:

Still Unsolved (MP4) highly recommended for pretty much everyone.

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?)

There will be one puzzle that is presented as a series of Old Spice Guy Videos. Ideally (but unlikelily), they will be filmed during the Hunt in response to tweets sent to @MysterySpice.

(I'm on a Hunt.)

(That might be a good icon, actually.)

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Beginner's Luck, the Covertly Operational Inversion Node was located in the basement of Building 13 and activated on Monday morning at 3:02 AM. The Brass Rat, MIT, and all Mystery Hunters have now been inverted out of Zyzzlvaria and into freedom! (In other news, everyone who was outside Zyzzlvaria is now trapped inside. Sucks to be them.)

Congratulations to Beginner's Luck for finding the Covertly Operational Inversion Node, and congratulations to everyone who came out to solve. I saw so many teams doing so many great things, it made my head explode. All the rest of y'all. I'm sorry we've trapped you in Zyzzlvaria.

Not much more to say, because I'm lacking several things I need, including sleep. I'm looking forward to holding ojouchan in my arms again and sleeping some more.

A special look into the headquarters of ZyzzlCon 3009.



A little rumpled, and a little unshaven, but I think I look pretty good there. I'm enjoying this funky new sweatshirty thingy.

I uploaded the pics from my camera today, but most of them sucked. I didn't remember to take too many during the Hunt, and the group photos didn't turn out so well.

The only ones I like were from Boxwood Hall, where ojouchan worked in high school. We went to visit her friend and former boss. I put them up on Picasa for the hell of it.

There are a few pictures elsewhere, though. ennirol got some better group photos in her Flickr set. And Katherine has many pictures, mostly of Hunt HQ, but also of us finding the coin. My favorite picture is this one:

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 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.

So, some people are have been softening their words, but I'm going to come right out and bluntly say that I hated this year's MIT Mystery Hunt. Yes, I enjoyed spending time with my team and the people in New York and Boston during my vacation surrounding, but if I could have the fifty hours or so I spent staring at those puzzles I'd grab them in a second.

I've been trying to write up my thoughts and opinions on this Hunt, and it's been difficult, because sometimes I just get too angry writing, and I lose my focus.

If you examined the Hunt minutely, you might come to the impression that the things that were wrong were minor. But each of those minor things had a major impact, and the things that were bad, unsatisfying and unfair overshadowed what was fun and well-designed, even if it did not outweigh them.

The entry I started writing today is titled "Skinned Knees on the Marathon Trail." I like comparing the Mystery Hunt to a marathon. They're both very strenuous, but very rewarding tests of endurance. But the marathon works because it is pure running over a long period of time. The route is clearly marked, the path is clear, and supplies are freely available along the way. Any non-running distraction. The amount of screw-ups, gaffes, miscommunications and awkward logic made this Hunt feel less like a marthon and more like a very, very, very long, haphazard obstacle course. I felt like I was dealing more with route directions and potholes in the road than with actual running.

I've saved a draft of what I've been writing, and I'll come back to it soon, but for now, I think that a lot of my attitude is summed up in this excerpt:

( Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them )

More eventually, including the stuff I liked.

FriNYTX: 19. ThuNYTX: 8:45. Written by canadianpuzzler. What very good taste. You! Go solve it now!