Hmm... I have no idea how to write a summary of my Mystery Hunt experience. So many things happened in so tight an amount of time. There was so much energy and excitement and enthusiasm and frustration and just sheer brilliance in our team headquarters it was often overwhelming.

I drove up to Cambridge with thirdblindmouse and her boyfriend Thursday evening. The ride up was incredibly easy: barely any traffic, no weather issues, just a smooth shoot up the highway. I settled in in my hotel room. In the morning, I met up with a teammate at our team storage locker to ferry stuff to team HQ. I then drove over to a kosher deli to pick up one of their Shabbos specials. This was a clever idea I'll have to remember to do for future years- the food served for all my Shabbos meals this year, and meant that I ate better than I have at any past Hunt. Then I rejoined the team to help set up our room while other team members went to kickoff.

Kickoff happened, then as usual everyone regrouped at team HQ to wait for puzzles to open. And waited. And waited. There were some technical difficulties with the site server software for the Hunt, so an email went out to let everyone know the Hunt wouldn't start for another hour. I popped over to Control Group to say hi to friends while we waited.

And then puzzles started and I pretty much didn't stop moving. Suddenly we had about twenty puzzles all at once to work on. I flipped through them and found one that I thought looked like a sports puzzle, Mad Dogs. I started plugging away the data, made sense of where it came from, grabbed a couple teammates to help out with data collection, and forty minutes later I had my first solve of the Hunt. It was a good way to start things. It turned out to be the closest I had to a solo solve all Hunt, but that's okay, Hunt is about teamwork and I made important contributions to solving a whole bunch of puzzles. I slowed down on puzzling when sundown fell and I had to shut off my computer and only offer what puzzling help I could within the restrictions of Shabbat.

Palindrome solved the first metas and metameta scarily quickly and we jumped out to the early lead as we discovered that the Dog Show theme of the first round was a ruse to conceal the Hunt's true theme.

We were given instructions for a runaround puzzle- a set of clues guiding us around MIT's campus. The problem was that most of the words in the clues were replaced with the word 'dog', so we had to figure out what the word dog was substituting for in each case in order to navigate the clues. We blundered our way around campus, figuring out the clues. Eventually we were led to a member of Team Luck who revealed the true theme- the movie Inception.

The Hunt's inception theme honestly used Inception's big ideas better than the movie did- it used the space of dreams and manipulating dreams to explore stories as far ranging as Lovecraft and King Arthur and Endymion, always connected ultimately to the idea of dreaming. We assumed the role of an inceptor who'd been attacked by the dreamer's defenses and knocked into a deeper dream world. In order to get out, we had to solve puzzles to remember that we were in a dream, then solve further puzzles to figure out how to deliver the 'kick' to wake up the rest of our team and escape the dreamworld. Everything was well-themed and the artwork was gorgeous throughout, creating an ambiance that made solving the puzzles very satisfying.

After the runaround, we continued to puzzle for a while. I worked on a puzzle called Feel the Music, one of my favorite puzzles of the Hunt, because it had a lovely and unlikely set of realizations and a group of five of us working on the puzzle split the discoveries about equally over a five minute period of fantastic collaboration. There is really nothing as thrilling as a strong group solve, with everyone building on each other's ideas to work through to a surprising solution.

I went to sleep fairly early. I went to Shacharit services at the Tremont Street Shul, which were nice, and kibbitzed a bit at kiddush before heading back to puzzle. I helped a little bit with a few puzzles, but mostly I was waiting for sundown to fall. I spent a good deal of time on Vagabond Tours, the most adorable event of Hunt for me, since the 3 ten to twelve year old's on the team took charge of leading us on this photo-scavenger hunt and a good time was had by all.

Fortunately, sundown was perfectly timed for the puzzle most ideally pitched to me.

Before the Hunt, we went around the room in Palindrome HQ introducing each other and saying what puzzle we were hoping to see in the Hunt. Palindrome is a gigantic team and a lot of us don't know each other well, so this was a chance to get a sense not only for names but for what our puzzling strengths were. A surprising amount of the really specific puzzle requests came to fruition in this Hunt. I asked for a Judaism puzzle and the Hunt responded with a doozy, the tricky Provision. (It took us about 18 hours from initial approach to solution, but I no longer feel bad because I see that only four other teams solved the puzzle.) Provision came out about ten minutes after sundown Saturday for us, and we pretty quickly realized it was referencing the MIT Latke-Hamentashen debates. Up my alley? Just a little bit. I spent most of the evening watching Latke-Hamentashen arguments on youtube and trying to figure out how to extract an answer from the data. My favorite moment of the Hunt may have been when I said, "Wait a minute... have we tried using HEBREW Morse Code?)

We continued making progress through the Hunt's rounds, knocking out the early metas pretty easily, but we did slow down over time. In devjoe's Hunt recaps, he notes that this is pretty typical for Palindrome, as most of our team goes to sleep at night. Apparently we lost our first place status to Left Out on Saturday and slipped into third or fourth place by Sunday, though Sunday afternoon, when Team Luck visited the leading teams to try to make a decision about whether to postpone their original intention of closing Hunt HQ at Sunday 6PM, they concluded that we were just as much in it as anyone else, if we could just bust through the last few metas.

We did eventually crack them, leading to the LIMBO round in which we had to figure out one last piece of information from all previous rounds in order to make it to the runarounds. But unfortunately as we were working on the LIMBO puzzles, we got word that Setec Astronomy had found the coin. A bunch of our team stuck with the puzzles, solved LIMBO and went on the runarounds anyway, but I kicked it in, and decided I'd had enough. I hadn't slept since Saturday morning and I was hungry and tired. I called ambyr, who was in the Boston area for Arisia, and found that she was fortunately in Cambridge and hungry at the moment, so we met up for dinner and then I crashed back at my hotel room. And then a couple hours later there was pounding on my hotel room because my roommate's keycard had demagnetized and his name wasn't on the room, so they wouldn't let him in without my approval. I was so dead tired that within seconds of letting him in, I was asleep again.

In the morning I helped clean our HQ and drove stuff back to our storage locker, then went to wrap-up to hear funny stories and say hi to some friends on other teams. Then we drove back south and I slept some more.

A couple more anecdotes:

-For one puzzle, a group that had slaved over it for hours finally called in an answer they were confident of: BOVINE PORN. When we got the call from HQ telling us it was wrong (the right answer was ONLINE PORN), the person answering the phone said that she was shocked it was wrong, and then got embarrassed when she realized there was something of a confession of proclivities in her declaration of shock. We later, on a puzzle involving sheep, called in OVINE PORN, mostly so the same person answering our phone could proclaim her shock that this answer, too, was incorrect.

-A puzzle about Epic Rap Battles of History required as a final step that we submit our own. Our team created a rap battle between us and Team Luck, with our team's telephone (where we received confirmation of answers) standing in for Luck and using text-to-speech to deliver its raps. I find the rap hilarious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpA93QPAlKg

-When we were on Limbo, we were stuck on the first puzzle but we knew it was a four letter answer, so we kept trying mostly-educated guesses. The person answering our phone apologized for calling in so much and was told "Call in anything you want." So we called in "Anything I want", and then we called in "Send us a Pizza." When Luck called us back to tell us these answers were wrong, they also gave us the phone number for a local pizza shop. :P

A thing I realized recently... when I was about seven or so and obsessed with the reruns of Adam West Batman on WPIX 11, my parents threw me a Batman birthday party. My grandmother sewed me a Batman costume, which I would regularly put on for the next several years when I wanted to feel awesome. And my mother... in addition to the Batman themed decorations and the cake and whatever else she did for the party, my mother wrote a Riddler-style puzzle hunt where we solved rhyming clues that brought us all over the house to catch the Riddler.

And I just realized that as an adult, I go up to Boston nearly every year to (sometimes dress in costume and) compete in the MIT Mystery Hunt, but Batman (and my mother) is responsible for my first puzzle hunt experience. And I'm pretty grateful for that.


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Thoughts on recently consumed media:

-Kingsman was a pretty hard no. The problem wasn't gratuitous violence, it was the film's attitude toward the gratuitous violence. I was revolted by the scene in the church, which compromised a major character's morality while trying to have its cake and eat it too by fetishizing the moment.


-The Last Five Years movie was delightful, though my relationship with that musical is so tied up in the people who I've shared it with that I can't really give it any kind of honest review. I loved it because I was going to love it no matter what. Anna Kendrick's "I Can Do Better Than That" was a particular treat, and though I think I've seen "The Schmuel Song" performed better than Jeremy Jordan did, I've never seen it staged better.

The movie struggled at times with staging the more surreal moments in the the play- "The Next Ten Minutes" didn't quite sell the overlap for me, chiefly, but overall I thought it was well shot, but this was a movie that was all about the music, and both Jordan and Kendrick did a very good job with the material, and Kendrick in particularly is obviously a superstar.

And... here's a picture of Every Shapiro in Washington Heights!






-Jupiter Ascending was a lot of fun to watch. I don't think it was as well-crafted or well-plotted as Guardians of the Galaxy, but I admired it a hell of a lot more. The originality of the visual universe felt almost like A New Hope in its hidden depths. I'll tell you what- I would really enjoy a sequel where Jupiter has come into her own as a secret space princess. I liked her a lot in this movie, and she was obviously smart and brave and kind, so it was disappointing that she was thrust into a universe where she defaulted to damsel because there was too much she didn't know for her to possibly make the right choices. I want a movie where Jupiter can wage a subtle war of soft power against Titus and Kalique, and not be overwhelmed by their familiarity with the ground rules. (Having seen the second Matrix film, though, I'm not certain the Wachowskis are the directors to give us that growth.)

In general, I admired the movie for building a universe on a massive scale and then not trying to bore us with all the tedious details. There is so much detail in that movie that passed me by, so much density and volume to the movie, that it was remarkable.

Oh, hey! On the bright side, I'm not on any team so I don't have any qualms about speculating publicly ahead of time on who M&P are. I don't care if my team's brilliant insights are revealed to other teams.

So here's a few thoughts. MP are the initials of Metaphysical Plant. One likely possibility is that M and P don't mean anything at all, they're just names chosen because their initials match the team running the Hunt. And because by not showing the full names Plant gets to fuck with you.

Also, it says Massachusetts Institution of Technology instead of Institvte. M and P are also the initials of Mental Patient, and I'm sure that given the demographics of Hunters, insanity would make a delightful theme for a Hunt.

Also, it's not impossible that M & P mean something as simple as Mysteries and Puzzles.

Or Madame Psychosis! She does work at MIT, per Foster Wallace. Wouldn't an Infinite Jest Hunt be fantastic? Anyone? No, just me, I guess.

Mater and Pater (or Ma and Pa) also come to mind as a longshot possibility, a wry and kind of obvious bit of wordplay. But that could only kick off a time travel-based Hunt, and we've done too many of those lately.