Mystery Hunt Roundup 2023
Jan. 22nd, 2023 03:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sniffnoySo, Mystery Hunt was last weekend!
Finally Mystery Hunt was held in person again and... I stayed home. I didn't really feel like spending the time and money to go up to Boston again after having just done so the previous weekend for the JMM (uh sorry I didn't let you know I was in the area Asher, things were pretty thrown-together), expecially given how uncoordinated Daniel and Emma and I all were.
So, Daniel and Emma went up to Boston and I stayed home. Kind of annoying because if I'd anticipated staying home I could've invited more people to join me here, like Angus or Jessica or Esther. I mean I still could've but eh our systems make having people on the team unofficially a bit inconvenient and anyway I wanted to be puzzling and not wrangling people. So yeah I basically just did things alone from home.
Seems like I picked a good year to stay home though! I'm hoping that by next year the campus is open again, even if that doesn't seem very likely. :-/ But of course also I say that because of how long Mystery Hunt went this year... about 67.5 hours, is that the second-longest?
I don't really have a clear idea of why it went so long. I remember 2013, the longest ever, which went so long because they just made the whole thing way too hard. But this year's hunt didn't seem much harder than usual. (Indeed, another reason I'd say this was a good year to stay home was because there was hardly ever a time where there wasn't much for me to do!) Were there just too many puzzles? Bad unlock structure? A nasty bottleneck or difficulty spike at the end? I dunno.
Anyway, I guess if I'm still living in New York in January of 2026, I'll likely stay home for that one too, and so I should plan for that and invite more people. :P
But yeah other than the length this was a good year. We didn't get far into the last set of rounds I'm afraid; we only unlocked a few puzzles each in those rounds. We did at least make use of our free answers this year! But, one other annoyance: Parts of the website were too heavyweight and slowed down my computer. Keep your webpages small, people...
Oh, heh, one other funny story before I get to discussion of individual puzzles -- some months ago, at an OBNYC meetup, I forget the context but I was talking to a person named Catherine Wu and telling her about Greek and Hebrew numerals, and she was like, oh that's interesting, I should write a puzzle about that, and I was like, wait, a puzzle? Like a Mystery Hunt puzzle? And she was like, oh oops. :P Turns out she was on Teammate and writing puzzles this year! Anyway, if you're reading this, uh, hi Catherine! :)
OK, on to individual puzzles!
Dropypasta -- I did a bunch on this one. When I got to it, the basic idea of the drop quotes (that they were Melee copypastas, and the missing letters gimmick) had been figured out, but I think only the Jmook one had actually been filled in. I actually correctly filled in the Alex19 one based purely on the lengths, not taking account of the available letters at all. :P
Then came the second part, which was done by me and one other person, I forget who. There was some question of how to interpret the different stages. Initially we messed up Battlefield by basing it on character names, because we hadn't realized that the two examples given were first/last exemplars (or rather, I'd thought of this idea, but thought it didn't apply universally). Man Fountain of Dreams is a weird one, no idea how they came up with that. I think we also messed up Pokemon Stadium a bit by deciding to interpret it as reading the character select screen left-to-right from bottom to top, rather than straight-up distance to the Pokemon block, but whatever.
Anyway, ultimately we executed the bracket with only a few errors and got something that was sufficiently close to the answer to call it in. Although, I remember that due to those errors and us getting "IXLAND" at the end, I initially thought it was trying to clue "VINDICATE ON IXALAN", and started looking for Magic cards from Ixalan block with a Vindicate effect. :P (There aren't any.) But uh fortunately my teammate realized it was supposed to be VINDICATION ISLAND instead...
Scicabulary -- Another one I did a lot one. When I got there, someone had figured out "Zengurt" -> "Froyo", but either hadn't gotten any further than that or hadn't figured out how it generalized. But I did and started filling out a bunch of them. Really "Leakfast" is something of a giveaway, who hasn't made that joke? :P (Although in fact that's not where I started.) I have to note that I'm pretty sure that the "inter" in "intercom" is not actually short for "internal", but, whatever.
G|R|E|A|T W|H|A|L|E S|O|N|G -- I did very little on this one, I'm mostly just pointing it out because I think the crossword gimmick is neat.
Art of the game.such.fame! -- Oh boy, this one. So when I got to this one, the first part was mostly done -- which means, yes, I didn't need to identify the cube, people had already gotten that one. :P I did identify the Monolith in Oslo...
Then came the second part, the regex crosswords. Apparently nobody else wanted to do these because I ended up doing all three of these completely alone. Ah well. But that led into the third part!
Fortunately someone on the team was able to identify these as Maidenhead Locator System extended squares, something I'd never heard of before. But then we got stuck. I thought we should try to convert these back into what3words, but this had the problem that what3words has a much higher resolution than Maidenhead Locator System; I tried using the centerpoint of each extended square, but, uh, that didn't go anywhere.
Thankfully someone else noticed the hillside letters and filled those in; we missed a few, but that was enough for us to narrow it down to Chicago (or at least, to an area with no major league baseball teams aside from Chicago ones), so uh it only then took 4 guesses to get the answer. :P (Four guesses because we initially tried CUBS and WHITE SOX rather than CHICAGO CUBS and CHICAGO WHITE SOX...)
I think we got stuck here a bit due to being unaware of some of the useful tools here. Like, someone linked to this website, but like, I at least didn't notice that it has a satellite view mode. So we ended up relying a fair bit on formulas I'd programmed into the spreadsheet to convert the extended squares into latitude/longitude, except of course I just gave the centerpoint rather than like conveniently showing the whole extended square... yeah. But eventually we got it!
Centerpieces -- Hoo boy, this one. We got pretty stuck on this one for a long time. For a long time we just got nowhere. Someone made a remark in the chat saying "Hm are these anime songs? Blueberry Train, Happy Party Train..." (they also listed a third one which wasn't accurate but I don't remember it). But they didn't follow up on it! And so for a while I didn't think much of it either.
But finally I was like, hey, this remark seems worth following up on, and I applied Google to these terms and I found -- these aren't just anime songs, these are Love Live songs specifically! And with that I was able to start filling in the song titles.
Now I don't know anything about Love Live, but using the fan wiki I was able to get most of the song titles. Unfortunately the fan wiki is on Fandom and so horribly weighed down with ads; keeping it open for any length of time was a pain. Maybe I really should install an adblocker...
But then once again we got stuck for a while. Me and some others were able to slowly pick off most of the rest of the song titles -- missing only Meccha Going and Kokoro Kirarara, we did get those two eventually but not until later -- but the question was what to do then?
One person had the idea to fill in the song's centers, based on the puzzle title. OK, but then what? We were stuck again. Fortunately someone eventually noticed what any actual Love Live fan could have told us, that all the singers have personal logos! And that allowed us to fill out another column with the singers clued by that. OK... but then what?
At this point we got stuck again. Someone eventually came along and solved the rest of the puzzle, realizing we had to look for duets, but I wasn't there for that. Presumably this puzzle would have been much easier if anyone on the team were familiar with Love Live!
Artistic Vision -- I actually had the idea that the intersections of the clued colors (or the self-intersections when only one) were relevant, but I didn't get anywhere with it because I didn't think to just, like, highlight them; instead I tried to lay out the answers along them, which didn't work because the lengths didn't match. Oops. We ended up using a hint to get the idea on this one.
♊ -- There was some attempt at this one before I took a look at it, but it got abandoned. It looks like people filled in the official names of the emoji, noticed that the lengths didn't match up, and then kind of gave up? I ended up taking a second attempt way near the end of hunt. I did take account of the lengths, but unfortunately I missed the central gimmick and so wasn't able to fit things into the grid. Like I did notice that a bunch of the emoji seemed to have two possible answers, but when that happened I just assumed that lengths would disambiguate, or picked the more canonical one if it didn't. I didn't think to write down both, oops. >_> After my initial attempt didn't work, I changed some answers around, and got something that still didn't work, so I basically gave up; we ended up spending a free answer on it soon answer, as we were trying to make use of a lot of those right then.
Book Spade -- I helped a little on this one but don't have much to say about it. Um, hi Catherine! :)
Business Cards -- We gave up on this one so fast. Nobody on the team knew wargames. It's funny that the puzzle was ultimately about Twilight Struggle, a game I have, but like... we didn't get that far, none of us are really wargamers apparently.
Overloaded -- I wanted to work on this puzzle, but it got unlocked while I was in the middle of doing the regex crosswords mentioned above, and by the time I finished them the puzzle was solved!
Too Many Secrets -- Oh boy, this one is annoying. We figured out most of the movies, but two of them -- The Da Vinci Code and 21 (the still for the latter is so generic!) -- we didn't get, at least not while I was working on it. (I initially thought the clue for The Da Vinci Code was cluing Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but later realized that couldn't be right...) Then the second part was a pain too, because in many cases there wasn't a single obvious code that could be applied, or the code that was applied didn't seem to quite match the one in the movie? For instance, in the case of A Christmas Story, setting the decoder ring to B2 doesn't actually yield the correct code! And there was quite a bit of question about how to interpret the IQ one. Well, I won't go on about that...
Anyway eventually someone figured it out sometime after I stopped working on it? Yay.
The Filing Cabinet -- I didn't work on this one at all, I'm just noting it because I think it's a neat puzzle.
Baking Bread -- I wanted to work on this one, and then I saw it was a Breaking Bad puzzle. Darn, guess I can't help with that then...
Pixel Art -- Ugh, this one. I noticed that something seemed to be up with the colors, and we had the idea of a message being hidden in the low bits, but we did not notice the clues pointing us to the specific scheme to be used. I think to the extent we were working on this, we were trying to just, like, examine the low bits for information and trying to figure out how to decode for that alone; we weren't looking for clues that would explain to us how to decode.
(Also, hi Catherine again! :) )
Touch Grass Challenge (IMPOSSIBLE!) -- We used a free answer on this one so fast. :P
My Fun Bow -- I made a brief attempt at this one, but got nowhere because I didn't pick up at all on the Swahili theme (no surprise as I didn't know the language).
Note that at this point we're getting into puzzles that we unlocked, like, Sunday night, and so that mostly just, like, didn't get worked on that much.
Dispel the Bees -- Oy, this one. We didn't get the theme on this one. We did not make the connection to NYT Spelling Bee, and did not realize that the number of distinct letters in each answer was important. As such we just weren't really able to complete this.
Like, we filled out most of the clues -- including realizing that the answer to "shape of this puzzle" was almost certainly HEXAGON -- and certainly we noticed that all the answers in the first group included an X, which together with the counts in each group suggested that they went near the center -- but how to actually arrange what we got in a hexagon? Without the connection to Spelling Bee or realizing to look at distinct letters, we didn't really have any idea how to lay things out.
(We also got some of the clues wrong because, again, we missed the "exactly 7 distinct letters" constraint. Well we also got some wrong while accidentally still satisfying that, because, again, we weren't trying to actually lay out the answers...)
So, yeah, basically we solved most of the clues but then got stuck.
Interpret Perplexing Texts -- Hahaha oh my this one. So, I basically worked on this one alone in the wee hours of Monday morning, basically right up until the coin was found. It's been quite a while since I stayed up all night for Mystery Hunt, but, dammit, I was getting somewhere on this puzzle, and I wanted to see where it led!
Man if we'd had more people we probably could have solved this one but unsurprisingly most people had stopped by this point so it was just me. It's funny how this puzzle actually has a very similar idea to Scicabulary, mentioned above.
I did manage to solve most of the clues, but unfortunately not enough to extract the message, and there was one I actually messed up. I notice some of the phrases used are in forms different from what I would say, but fortunately in many cases it doesn't matter because the varying part doesn't end up in the solution, and in other cases it's disambiguated by the enumeration bank. I started with "between the devil and a hard place", that was the one that made me suspect what was going on, and then "it's not rocket surgery" confirmed it -- I guess that latter one is a bit of a giveaway. (Before that, it was clear it involved mangled expressions, but not entirely certain that they were being mangled in this particular way.)
Anyway I wanted to point out particular ones I didn't get here:
"beat a dead record" -- I got the "beat a dead horse" part, of course, but I couldn't think of any synonymous idioms; "like a broken record" is different enough I didn't think of it. And of course "documentation" made me think "manual" or "guide", not "record"...
"blink of a hat" -- Yeah, didn't get this one at all.
"stomping woods" -- I figured out "stomping ground", but couldn't figure out any other expression to go with it.
"seize the iron while it's hot" -- So, this is the one I got wrong. "Strike while the iron is hot" was pretty clear, but what was it combined with? I assumed "seize the day"... but that would yield "strike the day", which isn't in the enumeration bank! I didn't think of "seize the moment" at all; IMO "seize the day" is a much better-known expression.
But while looking for possible replacements for "seize the day", I came across the expression "grasp the nettle"; sure, it wasn't a great fit, but a number of these were pretty loose already, right? So that's what I went with, yielding "strike the nettle" instead of "strike the moment". Oops.
"in the line of a limb" -- yeah, all I could tell was that this had something to do with the word "limb". I wasn't sure whether it was "out on a limb" or "life and limb".
"dish the tea" -- I am not really familiar with either of these phrases...
"wipe the water" -- Yeah didn't get this one at all.
"throwing darts at straws" -- I don't think I've ever heard the phrase "throwing darts in the dark". I was thinking of, like, "throwing darts at a dartboard", or something.
"monkey wrench in the ointment" -- who says "monkey wrench in the works"? The phrase is "spanner in the works". (You do throw a monkey wrench in things, but not in "the works".) Fortunately, it doesn't affect the result! So uh that's actually one I got, but I wanted to comment on it anyway.
Reactivation -- I tried to help a little on Drive 2 but didn't really get anywhere. I did help a little on drive 4 as part of figuring out what the commands meant.
(Also, hi Catherine again again! :) )
Anyway, yeah, that was this year! Yay Mystery Hunt, hopefully next year's doesn't run so long, and if we're really lucky maybe MIT will finally reinstate open campus and get rid of all the damn tickets and waivers and such...
-Harry
Finally Mystery Hunt was held in person again and... I stayed home. I didn't really feel like spending the time and money to go up to Boston again after having just done so the previous weekend for the JMM (uh sorry I didn't let you know I was in the area Asher, things were pretty thrown-together), expecially given how uncoordinated Daniel and Emma and I all were.
So, Daniel and Emma went up to Boston and I stayed home. Kind of annoying because if I'd anticipated staying home I could've invited more people to join me here, like Angus or Jessica or Esther. I mean I still could've but eh our systems make having people on the team unofficially a bit inconvenient and anyway I wanted to be puzzling and not wrangling people. So yeah I basically just did things alone from home.
Seems like I picked a good year to stay home though! I'm hoping that by next year the campus is open again, even if that doesn't seem very likely. :-/ But of course also I say that because of how long Mystery Hunt went this year... about 67.5 hours, is that the second-longest?
I don't really have a clear idea of why it went so long. I remember 2013, the longest ever, which went so long because they just made the whole thing way too hard. But this year's hunt didn't seem much harder than usual. (Indeed, another reason I'd say this was a good year to stay home was because there was hardly ever a time where there wasn't much for me to do!) Were there just too many puzzles? Bad unlock structure? A nasty bottleneck or difficulty spike at the end? I dunno.
Anyway, I guess if I'm still living in New York in January of 2026, I'll likely stay home for that one too, and so I should plan for that and invite more people. :P
But yeah other than the length this was a good year. We didn't get far into the last set of rounds I'm afraid; we only unlocked a few puzzles each in those rounds. We did at least make use of our free answers this year! But, one other annoyance: Parts of the website were too heavyweight and slowed down my computer. Keep your webpages small, people...
Oh, heh, one other funny story before I get to discussion of individual puzzles -- some months ago, at an OBNYC meetup, I forget the context but I was talking to a person named Catherine Wu and telling her about Greek and Hebrew numerals, and she was like, oh that's interesting, I should write a puzzle about that, and I was like, wait, a puzzle? Like a Mystery Hunt puzzle? And she was like, oh oops. :P Turns out she was on Teammate and writing puzzles this year! Anyway, if you're reading this, uh, hi Catherine! :)
OK, on to individual puzzles!
Dropypasta -- I did a bunch on this one. When I got to it, the basic idea of the drop quotes (that they were Melee copypastas, and the missing letters gimmick) had been figured out, but I think only the Jmook one had actually been filled in. I actually correctly filled in the Alex19 one based purely on the lengths, not taking account of the available letters at all. :P
Then came the second part, which was done by me and one other person, I forget who. There was some question of how to interpret the different stages. Initially we messed up Battlefield by basing it on character names, because we hadn't realized that the two examples given were first/last exemplars (or rather, I'd thought of this idea, but thought it didn't apply universally). Man Fountain of Dreams is a weird one, no idea how they came up with that. I think we also messed up Pokemon Stadium a bit by deciding to interpret it as reading the character select screen left-to-right from bottom to top, rather than straight-up distance to the Pokemon block, but whatever.
Anyway, ultimately we executed the bracket with only a few errors and got something that was sufficiently close to the answer to call it in. Although, I remember that due to those errors and us getting "IXLAND" at the end, I initially thought it was trying to clue "VINDICATE ON IXALAN", and started looking for Magic cards from Ixalan block with a Vindicate effect. :P (There aren't any.) But uh fortunately my teammate realized it was supposed to be VINDICATION ISLAND instead...
Scicabulary -- Another one I did a lot one. When I got there, someone had figured out "Zengurt" -> "Froyo", but either hadn't gotten any further than that or hadn't figured out how it generalized. But I did and started filling out a bunch of them. Really "Leakfast" is something of a giveaway, who hasn't made that joke? :P (Although in fact that's not where I started.) I have to note that I'm pretty sure that the "inter" in "intercom" is not actually short for "internal", but, whatever.
G|R|E|A|T W|H|A|L|E S|O|N|G -- I did very little on this one, I'm mostly just pointing it out because I think the crossword gimmick is neat.
Art of the game.such.fame! -- Oh boy, this one. So when I got to this one, the first part was mostly done -- which means, yes, I didn't need to identify the cube, people had already gotten that one. :P I did identify the Monolith in Oslo...
Then came the second part, the regex crosswords. Apparently nobody else wanted to do these because I ended up doing all three of these completely alone. Ah well. But that led into the third part!
Fortunately someone on the team was able to identify these as Maidenhead Locator System extended squares, something I'd never heard of before. But then we got stuck. I thought we should try to convert these back into what3words, but this had the problem that what3words has a much higher resolution than Maidenhead Locator System; I tried using the centerpoint of each extended square, but, uh, that didn't go anywhere.
Thankfully someone else noticed the hillside letters and filled those in; we missed a few, but that was enough for us to narrow it down to Chicago (or at least, to an area with no major league baseball teams aside from Chicago ones), so uh it only then took 4 guesses to get the answer. :P (Four guesses because we initially tried CUBS and WHITE SOX rather than CHICAGO CUBS and CHICAGO WHITE SOX...)
I think we got stuck here a bit due to being unaware of some of the useful tools here. Like, someone linked to this website, but like, I at least didn't notice that it has a satellite view mode. So we ended up relying a fair bit on formulas I'd programmed into the spreadsheet to convert the extended squares into latitude/longitude, except of course I just gave the centerpoint rather than like conveniently showing the whole extended square... yeah. But eventually we got it!
Centerpieces -- Hoo boy, this one. We got pretty stuck on this one for a long time. For a long time we just got nowhere. Someone made a remark in the chat saying "Hm are these anime songs? Blueberry Train, Happy Party Train..." (they also listed a third one which wasn't accurate but I don't remember it). But they didn't follow up on it! And so for a while I didn't think much of it either.
But finally I was like, hey, this remark seems worth following up on, and I applied Google to these terms and I found -- these aren't just anime songs, these are Love Live songs specifically! And with that I was able to start filling in the song titles.
Now I don't know anything about Love Live, but using the fan wiki I was able to get most of the song titles. Unfortunately the fan wiki is on Fandom and so horribly weighed down with ads; keeping it open for any length of time was a pain. Maybe I really should install an adblocker...
But then once again we got stuck for a while. Me and some others were able to slowly pick off most of the rest of the song titles -- missing only Meccha Going and Kokoro Kirarara, we did get those two eventually but not until later -- but the question was what to do then?
One person had the idea to fill in the song's centers, based on the puzzle title. OK, but then what? We were stuck again. Fortunately someone eventually noticed what any actual Love Live fan could have told us, that all the singers have personal logos! And that allowed us to fill out another column with the singers clued by that. OK... but then what?
At this point we got stuck again. Someone eventually came along and solved the rest of the puzzle, realizing we had to look for duets, but I wasn't there for that. Presumably this puzzle would have been much easier if anyone on the team were familiar with Love Live!
Artistic Vision -- I actually had the idea that the intersections of the clued colors (or the self-intersections when only one) were relevant, but I didn't get anywhere with it because I didn't think to just, like, highlight them; instead I tried to lay out the answers along them, which didn't work because the lengths didn't match. Oops. We ended up using a hint to get the idea on this one.
♊ -- There was some attempt at this one before I took a look at it, but it got abandoned. It looks like people filled in the official names of the emoji, noticed that the lengths didn't match up, and then kind of gave up? I ended up taking a second attempt way near the end of hunt. I did take account of the lengths, but unfortunately I missed the central gimmick and so wasn't able to fit things into the grid. Like I did notice that a bunch of the emoji seemed to have two possible answers, but when that happened I just assumed that lengths would disambiguate, or picked the more canonical one if it didn't. I didn't think to write down both, oops. >_> After my initial attempt didn't work, I changed some answers around, and got something that still didn't work, so I basically gave up; we ended up spending a free answer on it soon answer, as we were trying to make use of a lot of those right then.
Book Spade -- I helped a little on this one but don't have much to say about it. Um, hi Catherine! :)
Business Cards -- We gave up on this one so fast. Nobody on the team knew wargames. It's funny that the puzzle was ultimately about Twilight Struggle, a game I have, but like... we didn't get that far, none of us are really wargamers apparently.
Overloaded -- I wanted to work on this puzzle, but it got unlocked while I was in the middle of doing the regex crosswords mentioned above, and by the time I finished them the puzzle was solved!
Too Many Secrets -- Oh boy, this one is annoying. We figured out most of the movies, but two of them -- The Da Vinci Code and 21 (the still for the latter is so generic!) -- we didn't get, at least not while I was working on it. (I initially thought the clue for The Da Vinci Code was cluing Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but later realized that couldn't be right...) Then the second part was a pain too, because in many cases there wasn't a single obvious code that could be applied, or the code that was applied didn't seem to quite match the one in the movie? For instance, in the case of A Christmas Story, setting the decoder ring to B2 doesn't actually yield the correct code! And there was quite a bit of question about how to interpret the IQ one. Well, I won't go on about that...
Anyway eventually someone figured it out sometime after I stopped working on it? Yay.
The Filing Cabinet -- I didn't work on this one at all, I'm just noting it because I think it's a neat puzzle.
Baking Bread -- I wanted to work on this one, and then I saw it was a Breaking Bad puzzle. Darn, guess I can't help with that then...
Pixel Art -- Ugh, this one. I noticed that something seemed to be up with the colors, and we had the idea of a message being hidden in the low bits, but we did not notice the clues pointing us to the specific scheme to be used. I think to the extent we were working on this, we were trying to just, like, examine the low bits for information and trying to figure out how to decode for that alone; we weren't looking for clues that would explain to us how to decode.
(Also, hi Catherine again! :) )
Touch Grass Challenge (IMPOSSIBLE!) -- We used a free answer on this one so fast. :P
My Fun Bow -- I made a brief attempt at this one, but got nowhere because I didn't pick up at all on the Swahili theme (no surprise as I didn't know the language).
Note that at this point we're getting into puzzles that we unlocked, like, Sunday night, and so that mostly just, like, didn't get worked on that much.
Dispel the Bees -- Oy, this one. We didn't get the theme on this one. We did not make the connection to NYT Spelling Bee, and did not realize that the number of distinct letters in each answer was important. As such we just weren't really able to complete this.
Like, we filled out most of the clues -- including realizing that the answer to "shape of this puzzle" was almost certainly HEXAGON -- and certainly we noticed that all the answers in the first group included an X, which together with the counts in each group suggested that they went near the center -- but how to actually arrange what we got in a hexagon? Without the connection to Spelling Bee or realizing to look at distinct letters, we didn't really have any idea how to lay things out.
(We also got some of the clues wrong because, again, we missed the "exactly 7 distinct letters" constraint. Well we also got some wrong while accidentally still satisfying that, because, again, we weren't trying to actually lay out the answers...)
So, yeah, basically we solved most of the clues but then got stuck.
Interpret Perplexing Texts -- Hahaha oh my this one. So, I basically worked on this one alone in the wee hours of Monday morning, basically right up until the coin was found. It's been quite a while since I stayed up all night for Mystery Hunt, but, dammit, I was getting somewhere on this puzzle, and I wanted to see where it led!
Man if we'd had more people we probably could have solved this one but unsurprisingly most people had stopped by this point so it was just me. It's funny how this puzzle actually has a very similar idea to Scicabulary, mentioned above.
I did manage to solve most of the clues, but unfortunately not enough to extract the message, and there was one I actually messed up. I notice some of the phrases used are in forms different from what I would say, but fortunately in many cases it doesn't matter because the varying part doesn't end up in the solution, and in other cases it's disambiguated by the enumeration bank. I started with "between the devil and a hard place", that was the one that made me suspect what was going on, and then "it's not rocket surgery" confirmed it -- I guess that latter one is a bit of a giveaway. (Before that, it was clear it involved mangled expressions, but not entirely certain that they were being mangled in this particular way.)
Anyway I wanted to point out particular ones I didn't get here:
"beat a dead record" -- I got the "beat a dead horse" part, of course, but I couldn't think of any synonymous idioms; "like a broken record" is different enough I didn't think of it. And of course "documentation" made me think "manual" or "guide", not "record"...
"blink of a hat" -- Yeah, didn't get this one at all.
"stomping woods" -- I figured out "stomping ground", but couldn't figure out any other expression to go with it.
"seize the iron while it's hot" -- So, this is the one I got wrong. "Strike while the iron is hot" was pretty clear, but what was it combined with? I assumed "seize the day"... but that would yield "strike the day", which isn't in the enumeration bank! I didn't think of "seize the moment" at all; IMO "seize the day" is a much better-known expression.
But while looking for possible replacements for "seize the day", I came across the expression "grasp the nettle"; sure, it wasn't a great fit, but a number of these were pretty loose already, right? So that's what I went with, yielding "strike the nettle" instead of "strike the moment". Oops.
"in the line of a limb" -- yeah, all I could tell was that this had something to do with the word "limb". I wasn't sure whether it was "out on a limb" or "life and limb".
"dish the tea" -- I am not really familiar with either of these phrases...
"wipe the water" -- Yeah didn't get this one at all.
"throwing darts at straws" -- I don't think I've ever heard the phrase "throwing darts in the dark". I was thinking of, like, "throwing darts at a dartboard", or something.
"monkey wrench in the ointment" -- who says "monkey wrench in the works"? The phrase is "spanner in the works". (You do throw a monkey wrench in things, but not in "the works".) Fortunately, it doesn't affect the result! So uh that's actually one I got, but I wanted to comment on it anyway.
Reactivation -- I tried to help a little on Drive 2 but didn't really get anywhere. I did help a little on drive 4 as part of figuring out what the commands meant.
(Also, hi Catherine again again! :) )
Anyway, yeah, that was this year! Yay Mystery Hunt, hopefully next year's doesn't run so long, and if we're really lucky maybe MIT will finally reinstate open campus and get rid of all the damn tickets and waivers and such...
-Harry
no subject
Date: 2023-01-23 12:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-23 05:55 pm (UTC)Geez don't know when I'm ever going to get out there, although I do want to go visit Ann Arbor sometime
Geez that really just leaves Anna and Doug (well, and Alina) for people I know in Boston...
Well uh hope things go well out there!