Be vewwy, vewwy, quiet. I'm hunting puzzles.

[sniffnoy]

So last year about this time Youlian disappeared for a weekend, flying out to MIT for the MIT Mystery Hunt where he competed on the Manic Sages team. This year he stayed here solving remotely for Manic Sages, and thus collected other people for a remote solving team in Tufts - mostly just Peter, actually, but also whoever wandered into Youlian's room - which basically consisted of Japser and Winston and Steve and E-Lin (IIRC) on Friday before Mickey's Paranoia game, and me afterward and in the days to follow.

(Perhaps I should say something here about Mickey's appearance and Paranoia game; but I think I'll just stick to mentioning that Sonia was kind of creeped out by me knowing Mark Berberian and E-Lin. Really, you go to lab school, you don't expect some number of your classmates will be going to the university? Oh, I'm also disappointed that we didn't get to kill or take hostage that R&D guy...)

Anyway. Apparently the team Beginner's Luck has won at this point, but the hunt continues, so I'll refrain from commenting on the puzzles for now. I really didn't do very much, as noted above, but I did help a tiny bit on the Hiigara meta, helped a little on Croctograms (well, I suggested a pretty important and correct idea for solving it, but I think the on-site people also came up with it independently a bit ahead of me and just hadn't mentioned it in the chat), led the completion of Space Madness once most others had gone to sleep (though by that point I was essentially doing the obvious with the ideas developed by others), and came up with the key idea for solving I'm Your Magic Man (without even using the thing that was supposed to clue it, actually).

ADDENDUM: Also, amusingly enough, on the Fifth Doctor puzzle, I temporarily became the guy who knows about cricket, despite not actually really knowing much of anything about cricket, because I knew more about it than Peter and Youlian, and the people who actually knew about cricket weren't working on that puzzle at that time...

So, yay.

-Harry

Comments

[grenadier32.livejournal.com]

Awww, I was hoping for one of your detailed writeups on Paranoia. :-P

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that would take too long. Perhaps I should explain for everyone else a bit more about the R&D guy, though...

So when we were getting outfitted, a green R&D guy gave us some experimental equipment and started explaining it to us. The first one was a commie detector. When it went off on one of our team members, we all shot him. The R&D guy said "No! No! Not in here!" which meant, of course, that he was a commie sympathizer, and had to be executed - though with our red laser barrels, we failed to do so. He next gave us a mutant detector - this one couldn't be used on a specific person, but instead just went off if there was a mutant in the area. When it went off, well none of *us* are mutants, right? And I called for his execution again. Later, after his explanation had been very interrupted (by Jasper's character stealing all the experimental equipment) something involving the commie detector led me to conclude that maybe he *wasn't* a communist, and instead of killing him, we should take him hostage until he gets back to explaning everything. I was pretty disappointed that we didn't end up doing any of this.