Drunk Dialing

My parents were chatting the other day about "news" items each had seen recently. Mom was talking about the ways communications technologies have affected youth socialization, mostly focusing on email and IM. Dad was talking about some article in the Globe about how you should erase your ex's phone number from your mobile to make it more difficult to drunk dial him. Over at 2GD today, 0.5  talked about how sweet he is based on the people who drunk dial him.

The phenomenon of drunk dialing has been enabled recently by both the prevalence of mobile phones and the fact that most people keep their acquaintances' numbers stored in same. Scottoway the Luddite once commented that the ultimate evil of the mobile phone is to have to admit, "Shit, I got that girl's digits, but they didn't save properly in my phone." Interesting how I can remember all these numbers of people I knew in elementary school, but I couldn't tell you what any of the numbers are for my five closest friends right now.

0.5 also brought up a point about how he thinks people lose their societal inhibitions when they're drunk and thus their drunk persona more accurately represents their inner self. An interesting thought, but I think all inebriated behaviors are clouded by the additional effects of the state (e.g. increased sexual drive, depression, anger, lack of lucidity, poor brain function). In vino veritas, perhaps, but there's plenty of other grimness floating around in there, like the sulfites of society.

Hunting a Hunt

My 2005 Mystery Hunt experience was unfortunately marred by the fact that I missed the majority of the action due to my heinous flu, which appeared on Thursday and rendered me immobile for all of Friday and fatigued for all of Saturday. I nonetheless got in several good hours of puzzling that went a little something like this:

I arrived in 56-154 at around 1PM on Saturday which was already 24 hours into the hunt. I was equipped with my drugs, tissues, gatorade and thermometer to try to prevent myself from getting any sicker than I already was. In retrospect we were already hopelessly behind to have any chance of winning, but I didn't know that then. I started setting up my laptop (it took a little while for MIT's wireless DHCP server to give me an IP address) and someone across the room asked if anybody knew how to play poker.

I quickly started working on a neat little puzzle which consisted of a lengthy description of a poker game and not much more. A girl named Liz (I think she was a tetazoo frosh) had been working on the puzzle, googling for the obscure poker terms but I jumped right in without even glancing at my laptop. At one point, I mumbled "San Francisco busboy...so the other dude has Queen-Three..." and she was like, "How the hell did you know that?!" I blushed and said something about playing a lot of poker.

Anyway, we cranked through the puzzle and got the answer, which was a good way to start the day.I next got involved in this taxonomy puzzle that Josh and a girl (maybe named Caroline?) had been tooling on for many hours. It was actually pretty neat, but ended up generating a bit of frustration. I was diverted to stare at the Green Meta (the first of many times I did this) and Josh and Caroline had the aha! breakthrough for the taxonomy puzzle.

At this point I think I meandered among several puzzles, without much luck. I spent a few cursory minutes checking out cposs's progress on the pr0n puzzle and then went back to working on the evil Green Meta with Feldmeier. Within 15 minutes we had basically solved the goddamned thing but fell into the trap I remember from the Monopoly Hunt of trying to generalize aspects of one meta and force them onto the others. In this case everyone seemed convinced that we should order the puzzle solutions using the map, like the red and blue metas. Mark had the exactly correct idea (which had been previously examined by Anand and Zoz) but we just couldn't get the order to work. I could see the word "POWER" and since I knew we were looking for a super power I thought we might try anagramming the rest of the letters. The problem was that we had NILS plus one missing letter and the anagram server wouldn't take blanks. I had actually typed NILSA in and was about to search when I decided "Nah, I don't wanna bother doing this 26 times." Of course it turns out "A" was the missing letter and "SNAIL POWER" was the answer.

Eventually I wound up working on a really nice baseball puzzle with Erin and Amittai where we played a baseball game based off a scorecard using little slips of paper. It was fun and we did finally get the solution, which was satisfying. I wandered around for a little while more that night, but I was exhausted and still sick, so I went home around 11:30 PM.

The next day I drove back to Cambridge about 9AM and found a fairly small crowd awake and working. I tooled for a while with Amittai and a couple other people on this art-gallery logic puzzle. It would've been interesting but one dude had already been working on it for many hours and was convinced that the approach Amittai and I wanted to use was already exhausted. It was a shame because he was so insistent that we were wrong that I just gave up and left (not because I thought I was wrong, but because he insisted on standing there offering his critique). These things happen when people have been staring at the same pages for two days. Shortly after this it became evident that we had no shot of winning and I was suprised at how quickly that took the wind out of my sails. Besides, I had an appointment for some football later that day. I packed up my things and headed out.

It was a shame I missed so much, but I really enjoyed myself for the most part. I got to see a couple people I don't usually see, which was very nice. Plus the puzzles I worked on were nice in that they weren't obscenely difficult or obfuscated for the most part. Not to harp on this point, but it really underscored how far off we were last year in thinking everything was "too easy" and adding stupid extra levels to "fix" that "problem", which only left us with puzzles everyone hated. Now I will stop "using" these "quotation marks".

Writing a Hunt

Wax wrote about his feelings on this year's Mystery Hunt. At one point he talks about how he hopes that somebody (Mayhem in his case) gets a chance to write a hunt that is somehow "different" from the current pattern. I might write about this year's hunt in detail somewhere, but right now I'm motivated to provide a perspective on this exact question of creating a novel hunt from someone who tried to do just that.

It's terribly difficult. We first set out with this idea of getting away from the way things had been done in recent memory (i.e. having puzzle rounds which build metapuzzles which meta-meta, which lead to a final runaround). We also wanted to give puzzles more MIT flavor and bring them away from the canonical puzzle types (crosswords, cryptics and so forth, as well as common encoding mechanisms such as sorting, letter-plucking and so forth) preferred by NPL types. Right away we realized two things:

1. In order for 80 distinct puzzles to lead to a coin they must have structure of some kind, and it's pretty damned hard to create that structure in any way other than the rounds-with-meta system.



2. Creating the Mystery Hunt is a huge responsibility which ultimately requires a product you hope will please everyone who wants to participate—thus you need to include at least some of those canonical puzzles that everyone expects. One of the reasons they are always used is that people tend to enjoy solving them.

In the end we had a mammoth hunt with what I think was a pretty cool structure. Unfortunately, all that most people saw was the island-by-island phase, with standard metas (although they all had the cool feature that the answers were "transforms" for the paper maps we handed out—e.g. one needed to be read under UV light, one needed to be folded into a pirate hat and read along the seams). We also had a whole secondary structure where some of those words were re-used in "Booty Metas" which were clued by the main map and yada yada. It was cool, believe me, but would've required a whole week for somebody to solve.

We were overambitious and inexperienced from start to finish. We ended up with too many puzzles which lacked polish. Writing the Hunt has been described as a full-time job, and it is even more daunting for a group of people with little experience doing this sort of thing. My advice to people from Random this year is fairly simple:

1. Don't make it too long! The Hunt should end on Sunday, not Monday morning. People are just burned out by then—focus on better, not bigger.


2. As first time writers, focus twice as much energy on writing and testing as you think you should.

Lotta Action.

Lotta action recently. Lotta. Action. As most of you know, I finally made some tangible progress on getting to Oxford. The upshot of last week's flurry of activity makes it look as if I might be in Boston until this October. Promptly after sending off the application I was bedridden with a disgusting flu bug, which caused me to miss the first day of the Mystery Hunt. The rest of the Hunt was pretty bangin' though. More on that later (maybe).

Also needed to update the old bløgroll: a few non-updaters trimmed and a few new faces on the scene, including LBJ and a couple of Grim Dudes.

<i>Jeopardy!</i>

I just saw the most ridiculously difficult Final Jeopardy! question ever.

Category: English Royalty

Answer: One of the three years in which three different kings reigned.

Question: What is 1066? || What is 1936? || What is 1483?

I mean, honestly, who could possibly know that? The only one vaguely possible is 1066, because evidently two kings had reigned prior to the Norman invasion. But that's a pretty trivial detail, given that nobody remembers (well at least I don't) who William conquered, let alone who had died to put that guy into his brief stint as HRH.

Turns out the winner was the dumb woman who wagered the least. Weird.

<i>Democracy</i>

Sometimes I feel guilty about not writing anything in my bløg for several days. After all, I think that the people on my bløgroll who don't update regularly are Class A Ass-Pirates. Anyway, between this discomfort and my earlier promise at the end of the NYE entry, I present my thoughts on the aforementioned play, by Michael Frayn, performed at the Brooks Atkinson in New York.

One might reasonably wonder how interesting a 3 hour play about Willy Brandt could possibly be, but they managed to pull it off. It was a little "talky" as one of my friends who saw it said; the show consisted almost entirely of guys in suits standing around talking to each other. This was never something that bothered me, though, and my own writing often suffered from a similarly recumbent attitude.

In fact, I don't have a hell of a lot to say about the play itself. It's well written, as is everything I've seen or read by Frayn. The acting was mostly very solid (one or two of the smaller roles were fairly bland, but I doubt there was much meat to work with). It was just nice to be in a theatre again. It's funny how powerful certain staged moments can be that would absolutely fall flat on film. Or maybe not; I should realize, after all, how vast the gulf is between film and theatre.

NYE @ NYC

A random act of kindness from a drunken stranger was all that kept my fairly sweet New Year's Eve trip to  New York from being an incredibly bad one. Several people have already written about the trip, so as usual I'm stuck trying to think of something clever to say that hasn't already been said. (N.B. this will be my last heavy dose of Phi-Speak until the next time I decide to grim it up with those jawns)

LBJ and I rolled down to New York on the RMFW on Friday morning and arrived at the Port Authority at about 1:45 that day. I called Lopez to make sure he was home (predictably he was still soiling from the previous night's bender). He gave me some typically useless advice on which subway lines to take to get to his joynt, but thankfully I had printed out the relevant section of the MTA map from the interwang before leaving Boston.

When we arrived at Lopez's apartment we found him, Steele and Rhéaume in various states of undress and soilage. While they composed themselves we hung out and checked out the surprisingly funny flick, Anchorman. After some tasty south-of-the-border fare cooked up by Lopez we headed downtown to Radio Perfecto, which Lopez et al had reserved for NYE in advance. There was open bar and hors d'oeuvres (after a $100, of course) and the scene was legit. Throughout the night the few other people there who knew me would recognize me and drunkenly shout, "Rigs!"

Things took a potentially disastrous turn around 1AM when it became evident that nobody knew what had happened to Lopez. All the other Phi's seemed to have other plans for sleeping arrangements: some people were kickin' it old school, some people were checking out girls with very large buttocks and some people were draped on complete strangers. LB and I eventually decided to just take a cab back to Lopez's apartment in the dim hope that somebody would be there to let us in.

When we arrived at his place there was nobody there to answer the buzzer. I spent the next 30 seconds thinking about how I was going to avoid sleeping on a park bench when 5 or 6 fairly drunk revelers went into Lopez's building.

"Are you trying to get in here?" they asked.

"Yeah," Laurie said, "Our friend lives here."

"It's a good thing you don't have a dishonest face!" replied our new best friend.

So at this point we were at least inside the building. We trudged up the stairs and lo and behold, the door was completely unlocked. Inside, Lopez was snoring on the couch in his boxers and socks. LB and I wearily crawled into bed where I said a silent prayer of gratitude that we weren't being accosted by pimps and crack dealers on the streets.

The next day we had a pretty money game of tag football in Central Park, where team B-Side outlasted team Q-Syyd in a spirited victory. Well it was spirited except for a couple jawns who spent most of their time chatting on their cell phones instead of focusing on their post routes. We all went to bed early (this time LB and I had a hotel room near Times Square).

On Sunday LB and I saw Democracy, which was a pretty solid show all around. I guess I'll save my in depth review for another entry, though. We kicked another BoW with the Phis and then took the bus back on Monday morning. All told, not a bad weekend.