NPL

[prog]

cthulhia (half-)jokes about joining the NPL in order to gain insight on next year's hunt, but I think I'm actually gonna do it. Waddayathink?

Also the 2007 hunt officially ended for me last night with Immoral Illegal & Fattening's post-mortem and group-reminisce. This was just a great hunt. I look forward to 2008's, and I hope to participate in one or two mini-hunts before then!

I think I've been largely responsible for one new team member per year since IIF took up its current name. Cth joined us two years ago, Zarf last year, and I successfully hooked classicaljunkie this year. She came by to visit early Saturday evening, and ended up solving until OMG-the-T-is-shutting-down-o'clock. There was a rough start, after I chose to work together on what turned out to be one of the hunt's lamest puzzles (which was too bad because it looked really cool). But then we chewed through most of a more interesting one, and then mrmorse grabbed her to kick ass on a Sudoku-themed one and that's really all it took.

Comments

[cnoocy]

There's not any good reason not to join the NPL if you have any liking for puzzles and can afford to spend $18 a year on it.

[toonhead-npl.livejournal.com]

Well I dunno if that's the best of reasons to join, but heck if it gets you in the door why not? You already know a bunch, here and over at stuff like the Hunt.

[gemini6ice.livejournal.com]

I wound up working that late on Splits & Mergers. So then I kept going until Hooray-the-T-is-starting-o'clock! But I fell asleep on the way home and missed my stop. :(

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

I was in the NPL for a couple of years, but this boiled down to being sent a monthly newsletter full of flats, which I have no interest in working on. (At least, not solo. But if I were working on them with someone else, he'd probably be in the NPL anyway.)

I could give you my pile of newsletters, if this would make your decision clearer.

[grr-plus1.livejournal.com]

Speaking of lame but cool looking puzzles, were you trying to do the Devil Ducky one too?

[prog.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I don't know how it turned out... I worked on it until it was time to go home, just building a table in our team wiki of addresses and duck colors. I don't know what the puzzle mechanic ended up being... now I'm curious. :)

The lame one I referred to was "Manipulating the Masses", a stew of red herrings in an overdiluted flavor text broth. Ahem.

[lorelei-sakai.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the table! I ended up solving the ducks later directly from the information in the wiki.

It turned out you needed to plot the addresses on a map of Paris. They were all near the Arc de Triomphe, and so you had to create letters in semaphore using the Arc and the pairs of ducks of the same color. I thought it was kind of elegant, actually.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Hey, that's great, both the puzzle mechanic and that my work was useful.