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seekingferretSleep Log for the days around Hunt:
Thursday: Go to sleep Friday morning around 2AM, wake up around 7PM.
Friday: Go to sleep Saturday morning around 6AM, wake up around 10AM
Saturday: Go to sleep Sunday morning around 6AM, wake up around 9AM
Sunday: Go to sleep Monday morning around 1AM, wake up around 8AM, groan loudly, call work to tell them I'll be late, sleep until 9:30AM.
Monday: Go to sleep Monday at 10PM, wake at 8AM.
So yeah, Hunt.
Hunt was pretty great, and exhausting. I had surprisingly near perfect travel... Left work a half hour late and was worried I'd miss my train, but I raced a mile in icy streets with three bags and made it to the station with three minutes to spare. Then a perfect transfer at Penn and a quick trip on the T had me in my hotel room by 12:30am. (And on the train ride I beat my record for a Friday NYTimes Crossword by two minutes!) But a really close friend I haven't seen in two years was a hotel floor above me, so rather than going straight to sleep I went to his room to hang out for a bit.
Kickoff revealed that the putative Health and Safety theme was, of course, a fakeout theme. We soon got transported inside the head of Miss Terry Hunt, a competitor in the Health and Safety Hunt, and we watched as the various Inside-Out-style Emotions in her brain competed with each other over how they felt about the Hunt theme. This ultimately led to them all fleeing Cranium Command and Terry's mind crapping out. Our mission as solvers, then, was to guide the Emotions back to Cranium Command and locate her missing core memories, in time to enable her to complete the Health and Safety Hunt's final walkaround and find the coin.
The Inside Out theme was fun even though I haven't seen the movie. The Emotions had a variety of interactions with the teams over the course of the Hunt, extremely in character. In general, this Hunt went for 'high production values', meaning they wanted the story to be a very present part of the whole Hunt, a thing that was fun on its own, not a thing inserted for the sake of providing some structure around the puzzles. I don't necessarily expect that, and it's not the primary reason I go to Hunt, and I've enjoyed Hunts that were a lot less themey, but I definitely had fun with the the themey parts of this Hunt.
I spent a lot of my time doing group solves and relatively little trying to solve puzzles on my own, which is par for the course on a team as big and talented as Palindrome. I didn't solve any puzzles myself, but I made significant contributions to the solutions of ten or fifteen puzzles. I've since gone back and solved a couple puzzles on my own that I didn't get to look at at Hunt. Particularly over Shabbos, I focused on big, tedious puzzles where I could back up someone who could write and use computers by doing error checking and suggest ideas. We spent hours on a puzzle that involved imposing construction geometry on a Sol LeWitt floor mosaic on campus... I read instructions from the printout while my teammate marked lines and points on photographs of the mosaic. In the end, we never got the final answer- someone else on the team used our work and figured out how to extract the answer. Sometimes, that's frustrating, but it's usually easy to just get swept up in the energy and forward momentum our team has.
Saturday afternoon we unlocked the scavenger hunt. I've written before about how most of Palindrome hates the scavenger hunt- not on principle, just because as a team that mostly isn't local, we're severely disadvantaged when it comes to completing it. But the locals on the team got together and completed it Saturday evening, which was good because it was part of the Pokemon round, where many puzzles, upon being solved, evolved into more complex puzzles. In the case of the scavenger hunt, it evolved into a scavenger hunt requiring bigger and more improbable items- and a strong encouragement in the language of the list to half-ass and fake the items as goofily as possible. We had a blast half-ass arts and crafting our way through the puzzle- taping a NASA logo to a motorcycle helmet and calling it an astronaut's helmet, wrapping a teammate in yellow tape and calling her an Academy Award, throwing another teammate with a drawing pad and marker into a cardboard box with a radiation warning sign and calling it an X-Ray machine ... One of the highlights of my weekend, for sure.
A writer with 538 embedded with us this weekend. This was his article on the experience: Can You Stay Awake For 50 Hours And Solve 150 Puzzles?
There were four meta-meta puzzles associated with the four later rounds. (A meta puzzle is a puzzle that uses the answers to a set of previously solved puzzles as clues. A meta-meta uses the answers to multiple linked metapuzzles as clues. The basic difference between a metapuzzle and a normal puzzle is that it's often possible with lateral thinking to solve a metapuzzle in spite of not having all of the feeder answers.) We solved the first of our meta-metas Saturday afternoon, the second early Sunday morning. And then as we continued to solve puzzles, we got to a point late Sunday morning where we had two meta-meta puzzles open and basically all the answers feeding into them. And then we were stuck. Fifty or sixty people all banging out heads against the same two puzzles for hours. We finally got the third meta-meta around 2PM Sunday, and the last meta-meta around 5pm, but by then it was too late- the coin was discovered by another team sometime after 4. In the end, Palindrome finished the Hunt in a respectable third place. By that point I was already on a bus back home. Some year we'll win and it'll be awesome.
It's been a week since Hunt and I still haven't entirely recovered sleepwise. But it was worth it.
Thursday: Go to sleep Friday morning around 2AM, wake up around 7PM.
Friday: Go to sleep Saturday morning around 6AM, wake up around 10AM
Saturday: Go to sleep Sunday morning around 6AM, wake up around 9AM
Sunday: Go to sleep Monday morning around 1AM, wake up around 8AM, groan loudly, call work to tell them I'll be late, sleep until 9:30AM.
Monday: Go to sleep Monday at 10PM, wake at 8AM.
So yeah, Hunt.
Hunt was pretty great, and exhausting. I had surprisingly near perfect travel... Left work a half hour late and was worried I'd miss my train, but I raced a mile in icy streets with three bags and made it to the station with three minutes to spare. Then a perfect transfer at Penn and a quick trip on the T had me in my hotel room by 12:30am. (And on the train ride I beat my record for a Friday NYTimes Crossword by two minutes!) But a really close friend I haven't seen in two years was a hotel floor above me, so rather than going straight to sleep I went to his room to hang out for a bit.
Kickoff revealed that the putative Health and Safety theme was, of course, a fakeout theme. We soon got transported inside the head of Miss Terry Hunt, a competitor in the Health and Safety Hunt, and we watched as the various Inside-Out-style Emotions in her brain competed with each other over how they felt about the Hunt theme. This ultimately led to them all fleeing Cranium Command and Terry's mind crapping out. Our mission as solvers, then, was to guide the Emotions back to Cranium Command and locate her missing core memories, in time to enable her to complete the Health and Safety Hunt's final walkaround and find the coin.
The Inside Out theme was fun even though I haven't seen the movie. The Emotions had a variety of interactions with the teams over the course of the Hunt, extremely in character. In general, this Hunt went for 'high production values', meaning they wanted the story to be a very present part of the whole Hunt, a thing that was fun on its own, not a thing inserted for the sake of providing some structure around the puzzles. I don't necessarily expect that, and it's not the primary reason I go to Hunt, and I've enjoyed Hunts that were a lot less themey, but I definitely had fun with the the themey parts of this Hunt.
I spent a lot of my time doing group solves and relatively little trying to solve puzzles on my own, which is par for the course on a team as big and talented as Palindrome. I didn't solve any puzzles myself, but I made significant contributions to the solutions of ten or fifteen puzzles. I've since gone back and solved a couple puzzles on my own that I didn't get to look at at Hunt. Particularly over Shabbos, I focused on big, tedious puzzles where I could back up someone who could write and use computers by doing error checking and suggest ideas. We spent hours on a puzzle that involved imposing construction geometry on a Sol LeWitt floor mosaic on campus... I read instructions from the printout while my teammate marked lines and points on photographs of the mosaic. In the end, we never got the final answer- someone else on the team used our work and figured out how to extract the answer. Sometimes, that's frustrating, but it's usually easy to just get swept up in the energy and forward momentum our team has.
Saturday afternoon we unlocked the scavenger hunt. I've written before about how most of Palindrome hates the scavenger hunt- not on principle, just because as a team that mostly isn't local, we're severely disadvantaged when it comes to completing it. But the locals on the team got together and completed it Saturday evening, which was good because it was part of the Pokemon round, where many puzzles, upon being solved, evolved into more complex puzzles. In the case of the scavenger hunt, it evolved into a scavenger hunt requiring bigger and more improbable items- and a strong encouragement in the language of the list to half-ass and fake the items as goofily as possible. We had a blast half-ass arts and crafting our way through the puzzle- taping a NASA logo to a motorcycle helmet and calling it an astronaut's helmet, wrapping a teammate in yellow tape and calling her an Academy Award, throwing another teammate with a drawing pad and marker into a cardboard box with a radiation warning sign and calling it an X-Ray machine ... One of the highlights of my weekend, for sure.
A writer with 538 embedded with us this weekend. This was his article on the experience: Can You Stay Awake For 50 Hours And Solve 150 Puzzles?
There were four meta-meta puzzles associated with the four later rounds. (A meta puzzle is a puzzle that uses the answers to a set of previously solved puzzles as clues. A meta-meta uses the answers to multiple linked metapuzzles as clues. The basic difference between a metapuzzle and a normal puzzle is that it's often possible with lateral thinking to solve a metapuzzle in spite of not having all of the feeder answers.) We solved the first of our meta-metas Saturday afternoon, the second early Sunday morning. And then as we continued to solve puzzles, we got to a point late Sunday morning where we had two meta-meta puzzles open and basically all the answers feeding into them. And then we were stuck. Fifty or sixty people all banging out heads against the same two puzzles for hours. We finally got the third meta-meta around 2PM Sunday, and the last meta-meta around 5pm, but by then it was too late- the coin was discovered by another team sometime after 4. In the end, Palindrome finished the Hunt in a respectable third place. By that point I was already on a bus back home. Some year we'll win and it'll be awesome.
It's been a week since Hunt and I still haven't entirely recovered sleepwise. But it was worth it.