A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

The Twitter hashtag for the MIT Mystery Hunt is #mysteryhunt. Watch the painfully nerdy excitement mount!

36 more hours until kickoff...

Congratulations to the Evil Midnight Bombers for running the funnest Mystery Hunt I've attended, to Beginners Luck for solving it first, and to my team of Immoral, Illegal & Fattening for being super awesome. There is no finer group of folks I'd rather be sequestered into a classroom for three days with.

This was my sixth "birthday party" spent at the Hunt, and while I certainly had my share of frustration, I feel I did more solving this year than ever before, as did our team as a whole. This was the first year I think we were really-n-truly trying to win, and everyone put their all into it. It was fun to watch my hardcore-solver friends continue to work even after I'd run out of energy.

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In other news: Yes, 100011. And so I officially say adieu to the youth demographic. Very well, says I: this year is gonna gonna be as awesome for me as my age is auspicious (in decimal, anyway).

There will be related pictures up later. But the T is gonna start up soon and I'm pledged to show up at IIF's HQ and help clean up, so they'll have to wait.

I have a totally bomb-ass mystery hunt plot idea. I have already shared it on my team's mailing list - somewhat ill-advised, since by the time IIF wins some of our current team is statistically likely to have migrated to other teams. On the other hand, any actual implementation of the idea will almost certainly end up looking quite different. (cthulhia and I have already been chatting about interesting variations.)

I'll just say that it's high time for another SF-themed hunt. ACME (containing, at the time, the core of today's IIF) did a bang-up Matrix hunt in 2003, and 2005 had a light-hearted superhero hunt. I really wanna help put one together in 2010!

It's almost noon on Sunday and we haven't been told to go home yet. The last couple have ended shortly after I caught the last T out of Kendall on Saturday night, so yes.

On the other hand I just got back to our HQ in building 26, after going home at 4am to sleep and warsh and eat. So, it's been an unusual hunt. I'll have more to say when it's over.

Thanks again to folks around the country that I bugged for the sake of one particular puzzle, on Friday night.

Wish us luck!

The MIT Mystery Hunt is only a few days away. I'm determined to get as much money-work as I can done before then; there is a backlog, with end-conditions in reach. There won't be much Volity or Gameshelf progress, despite so much I want to do in both. (Though maybe I'll squeeze more in if put the video games away for now...)

Some of my team (Immoral, Illegal, and Fattening, Attorneys at Law) gathered at MIT Saturday night to practice, breaking up into groups of four and then running through a shorter puzzle extravaganza. (It was this one, actually, by Dan Katz.) I was on fire, solving three puzzles alone, and helping to finish up a couple more. My puzzle-fu has never been stronger, and I was pleased when another group still finished well ahead of us, suggesting that our whole team is really well poised this year. (That group contained a hunt veteran who is joining our team this year, so that's exciting too.)

I hope that we at least make it into the endgame, which would be a first for IIF. I was last night reading the 2006 hosting team's description of that year's endgame, and filled with fear and desire.

I had two very good meetings, in two very different roles - in one I was like arr I am a good leader and in the other I was like arr I am worth what I'm paid.

Bought two books. One is "How to Start a Business in Massachusetts" by O'Neill and Warda. Ha ha, horse before the cart, yes, but it's a smartly written summary and I've already learned a lot. I got it mostly to learn more about how the state recognizes a proprietorship - self-employment, basically - and get advice on customizing and maybe growing it.

The other is a collection of 365 NYT crosswords. Yes, it is September and it's time to start seriously training for the mystery hunt. Crosswords and recognizably crossword-like things are only a small part of the hunt, but word puzzles in general make up the majority of its busywork, and being able to chop quickly through crossword-style clues is a crucial skill.

I'm sure to enjoy these with classicaljunkie, who is at least as much a crossword lover as I, and who will join our team in January. To me, this is another reason to look forward to the hunt, what with yet another awesomely smart and creative hunt-mastering team, and IIF more pumped to win than ever. Hmm. I don't like phrases like "I can't wait" because holy crap there's a lot I need to get done by January, but... next year's hunt is going to rock.

Hay, teammates: whatever became of our "Gluttony" bracelets from last time? Did they get received and distributed? I never saw one!

Oh, what else. dangerforce called from his new pad in LA with a tech support question, and we yakked about TV stuff. He gave me a nice location lead I may use later. And I wrote a Gameshelf script! I will say nothing else about that yet.

Been descending into illness. Played a lot of RE4. These are not connected. Probably I caught a cold from one of the hands I shook at the breakfast yesterday. Blecch. Wasn't I just telling someone in person that a freelancer in the information sector doesn't necessarily need to physically network much to get job lead? There you go, then. It actually makes you sick when you even try. Hackers beware!

OK here's the Word Play With Kittens thing, produced by the mystery hunt team Colon Inflating Rhinoceri during last weekend's event. I offer it without comment or joke-explaining. (Thanks to jhango for finding the link.)

Er, hello? It's been nearly two days since the Hunt wrapped and the Word Play Sequel with Kittens isn't on YouTube yet? Am I missing something?

Ideally I'd wait until the 15th but the Hunt's gonna screw everything up, so, Four Pillars:

I've started to bill ITA like they were expecting me to bill them when we negotiated the contract last fall. I had been underbilling by a lot and nobody receiving the bills was calling me on it. (And why should they have?) Also, my first project with them is finally demoable. I mean, I demoed it last Friday. Everyone is happy.

classicaljunkie and I have been dating for a couple of weeks (o scandal, o calamity) and it's been going very nicely, thanks.

Meeting next week with Gameshelf people to discuss "Season 2". I want to take what we learned so far and do things differently and better. I have already made some personnel changes and other strategic decisions, and I'm hoping for a really fun year with the show.

I released version 0.4.0 of Gamut a couple of days ago and am in the midst of some spring cleaning in Volity-space. After the hunt but before February I hope to formally re-launch Volity as an open project. It's been open this whole time, mind you, but we haven't been pushing it as such. The Volity Network has a momentum of its own now, which is very nice, but an adjustment like this still needs pushing.

There's been a lot of good PKD stuff linked from BoingBoing over the last couple of days, but my favorite is this eight-page R. Crumb comic adaptation of an interview he gave near the end of his life. I guess I didn't quite realize that the events he wrote about in "Valis" actually happened to him, at least according to his own perception. These included his conviction that the Holy Spirit or Elijah or A Pink Space Laser or something had zapped him and given him powers, such as the ability to live in A.D. 50 Rome and 1970 California at the same time, or to mishear Beatles lyrics as an alarming medical diagnosis regarding his son (which turns out to be accurate and saves the boy's life).

I would have so liked to meet this man. I think that among my little fantasy worlds is one where he survives his stroke. Years later he meets my brother Ricky and they become close friends, and his family with our family. Creepy, jmac.

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It's interesting timing coz I was thinking with daerr how much I'd love to help plan a PKD-themed mystery hunt, specifically one that blended a lot of tropes from his earlier fiction.

It would start by welcoming all the new colonists to Mars, and assigning them to their workgroups in the mining company's information sector. As the teams worked on their initial task units, the company president would issue frequent video updates and its staff would make occasional personal visits to make sure that everything was running smoothly. But soon enough, the workers' perception would start to change...

I have some more specific ideas which I think I'll hold off on writing about for now. Suffice to say that I really like radiotelescope's notion of putting an actual story, a real narrative, around the hunt. Sure, it wouldn't be as smooth as a better IF game: it would still be a frame around siamese cryptics and duck conundrums and so on. But I love the idea of hunting not just to unlock more puzzles but to see what happens next, and maybe even feel like the team (being, as a whole, a character in the story) is making choices to guide the story forward, despite knowing that the story's necessarily on rails.

I also have some ideas making these "narrative interfaces" work in a puzzle-hunt setting, and tried sharing them only to decide upon writing them down that they wouldn't actually work, and instead just annoy the players. It would be really tricky thing to do right. But I'm sure it's possible. Indeed, it's probably already been done; what the hell do I know about this stuff, I'm a newbie. If that's the case, I'd love to hear about it.