(no subject)

[prog]

I have been working on this mystery hunt on and off for the last couple of evenings. It's great. I have solved a bunch of the basic puzzles and I still have no idea what to do with the answers. They're clearly instructions to perform further wordplay on something-or-other, but my target is uncertain. I wonder if it will become clearer to me if I solve all of the basic puzzles first?

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Does Games Magazine need younger talent? I just solved (part of) a puzzle in this month's issue that involves building words that have something in common semantically, though you aren't told what ahead of time. One of the answers was OLIVER, HAIR, and CATS -- aha, all musicals.. But they're really old examples, and I'd argue the pop-culture validity of at least one of them. I feel fairly certain that I'm on the young end of the age group that could solve this with offhand knowledge.

Actually, I'm being kind -- the fouth member of the set was MAME, which I'd never even heard of. According to WP, it was a stage hit from the mid-1960s starring Angela Lansbury, and was later a flop of a film with Lucille Ball. Whatever. The other three alone made the answer obvious to me, but recognizing OLIVER was a stretch... I think I dimly remember lots of TV ads from a 1980-ish revival or something.

Surely they could have worked in RENT or something? Or is that actually less famous than I think it is?

Regardless, it reminds me of hearing someone's description of trying to play the original mid-80s edition of Trivial Pursuit. Back then, he was a little kid, and couldn't play against adults because they'd mop the floor with him, as you'd expect. Today, however, he finds that vindication is denied him, because half of the questions assume you are a baby boomer and ask you things like "Who played Mr. Peepers?" Erm. (Well, I actually know what "Mr. Peepers" is thanks to lileks.com, but that's beside the point. And anyway I don't know who played him.)

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Would it be worth my while to join the NPL? cramerica, IIRC, suggested the idea some time ago, after I gleefully announced that I had solved my first cryptic crossword. However, everyone I know who is a member seems to have been a member since forever. I'm a little hesitant to take up something that most people seem to do as adults only coz they started when they were kids, like role-playing games, or smoking. Eh heh heh.

Comments

[cramerica.livejournal.com]

Join us...

I started in 2001, and it took me several months to get up to speed on the "flats" and tricky cryptics. But, if you're enjoying wordplay puzzles and games, the NPL is the mainline.

One good thing about living where you do is that you have a high concentration of local NPLers (which I miss).

[cnoocy]

I joined around the same time. And tahnan joined about a year earlier. Take a look at the minisample; if you enjoy that, you'll enjoy the Enigma.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the link!

I think I have seen this page before, some years ago, following a link from Zarf's website. I saw the examples of flats and thought "Wow, that sounds really boring." But having seen issues of the Enigma on your coffee table since then, I know there's more to it than that.

Is that our own saxikath I see on the subscription page, listed as editor?

[cnoocy]

Why do you think she's always so busy? :) I can also bring some recent issues to wherever I see you next. (Foo? Probably.)

[magid.livejournal.com]

The movie Mame was a flop? I remember seeing it on TV (more than once), and enjoying it, though other than one or two plot points I couldn't tell you what it's about now.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Well, it may have been good, but WP sez it was a commercial failure produced just as movie-musicals were falling out of fashion. It further notes that contemporary critics thought Lucy's throat sounded blown out from years of smoking, and here she was trying to sing, and o the embarrassment. (I haven't seen it, so I wouldn't know meself...)

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

You were never a drama club kid, huh? The thing about "old" musicals is that high schools and community theater groups all over America continue to perform them. Yes, even Mame occasionally. So while hipness = low, cultural availability = higher than you might think. Nationwide, I'd bet at least as many people would recognize Oliver! as Rent.

(Which isn't to say you're wrong about Games needing younger talent, of course. :-)

[(Anonymous)]

Huh? Mr. Peepers isn't old at all. He's a recurring character on Saturday Night Live, played by Chris Katan (at least as recently as two years ago). :-)

- Karl

[greenlily.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing they meant this Mr. Peepers, who'd be known to classic TV trivia fans (and, apparently, habitués of lileks.com) but possibly not to society at large.

CHEW SLOWLY. SLOWER. SLO-O-OWER.

[prog.livejournal.com]

What the-- http://timstvshowcase.com/peepers2.jpg

Did signs like that actually exist in 1950s school lunchrooms?!

[temvald.livejournal.com]

they made a musical about an arcade game emulator in the mid-60's?

weird.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I know, that's totally the only thing the name means to me. It would be like discovering that there was a popular Vaudeville revue called "The Mac SE/30" or something.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

You (or someone) should make a puzzle that would be really easy to solve for someone who was alive in 1905.

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

The targets of the first-round puzzle "answers" eluded me for a little while as well. Take a close look at the puzzles you've solved, to see if there's anything that you could apply your instructions to.

[toonhead-npl.livejournal.com]

I'm also a latish joiner to the NPL: I joined in 2000 after hearing how great the SF Con was; got my first Enigma in the mail and said "What? This crazy-ass stuff isn't anything like the Con puzzles!" and then let my membership lapse for a few months until two other people just joining convinced me to reup. Soon thereafter I joined a solving group and NOW I can make sense of the word puzzles that make up the bulk of the Enigma. Once you get the hang of the "lingo" they're actually kinda fun and challenging.

The minisample online is due for an update soon: they were soliciting submissions for it at the Con this month.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Part of the "problem" (as cramerica points out) is that I am spoiled by living in Puzzle Central USA, and have already done the MIT Mystery Hunt twice for goodness' sake. But I'm being convinced that the NPL is something worth getting into anyway.

sometimes seeing is believing (or understanding anyway)

[toonhead-npl.livejournal.com]

Fellow NPLer Dart has created Flash animations showing many flat types in action. He says he's not done yet, but there's a lot there and it's neat:

http://dartcanada.tripod.com/flats/index.html

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

Speaking as someone whose web page you saw an NPL link on, I can say that I tried it and didn't get into it. Word puzzles don't thrill me. I like mystery hunts, and the NPL con I went to had an enjoyable one. But overall, neither the con nor the Enigma subscription was for me.

On the other hand, I learned Mafia at that con, and then I decided it would be a cooler game if it were about werewolves, and that sequence of events CHANGED HISTORY. As it were.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

The problem in this case may not be that Games needs younger talent; the problem may be that Games needs to stop running crosswords from fifteen years ago because they don't have enough new content. Out of curiosity, who was the author of that puzzle?

[prog.livejournal.com]

Francis Heaney.

Some of the puzzles have a byline of "From the GAMES library"; I assume those are the ones you're talking about? But if so, that implies that ones with named credits are new.

(Also, ~15 years seems to be spot-on... one of those "library" puzzles this month has a cartoon picture that's meant to depict a typical movie-fan, and marks him with a Batman T-shirt. Holy 1989!)

[lunchboy.livejournal.com]

I wrote that puzzle? I totally don't remember it. What's the title?

It's definitely a reprint, because I haven't written anything for them for, like, five years (except for one Ornery Crossword). "Rent" would almost certainly have been out at the time the puzzle was written; since I don't remember the puzzle I don't remember if I left it out because there was some constraint, or if I simply left it out because I can't stand the score to that frickin' musical.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Great, now I'm all embarrassed for implying that you're an old fart. THANK YOU LIVEJOURNAL. I MEAN tahnan. I totally failed to put two and two together WRT the similarity of the puzzle's author and the domain name of the NPL mystery hunt's website, too, it seems. Oh well. Nice to meet you. :)

Anyway, it's called "Group Therapy", and involves doing one-letter shifts on already-grouped words (though the words are initially stored as great cartoon pictures by Ron Barrett).