2023-05-06

mystery hunt write-up

this is an extremely late write-up, but given the information that i reveal in this post, it couldn't really come earlier

intro

so let's start from the very beginning. in january, the night before mystery hunt 2022.

i was originally considering walking over from et and sleeping at teammate's airbnb the night before. that was my original plan, but it changed for a couple reasons: first, my covid pcr test from wednesday didn't have results out until late wednesday night, and second, i ended up deeming it too dangerous to walk a route i was unfamiliar with at night.

so i slept at et that thursday night. it was my very first time sleeping over at et.
there were a couple other things about et that were interesting, one of which was a thing i wrote on the whiteboard about the amount of time before hunt starting, which i would be constantly updating. the other interesting thing was that et also had its own mystery hunt team. it is quite amusing that i have close ties to two mystery hunt teams for location-related reasons, but i don't hunt with either of those teams since i was pushed onto teammate my freshman year by cj and just stayed there.

friday morning, i walked from et to teammate's airbnb, arriving at around 11. i recognized approximately 1 person (that being evan), though everyone there was definitely very friendly. we were playing just two to pass the last hour before kickoff, then i jokingly mentioned that spirit island would be a bad idea, and was happy that several teammates have also played it a lot, though probably not as much as i have. at that point i think i've spent around 100 hours playing spirit island, though i also don't remember how quickly i was adding to that around that time. the semesters surrounding it i spent at least 4 hours a week, though it could have been as high as 10 hours on some weeks.

anyways, we started doing puzzles, after being entertained by 3 countdowns in a row. i contributed a decent amount during hunt, going mostly for logic puzzles and solving them very quickly. i was told i was the strongest logic puzzler out of everybody at that airbnb, and probably top 3 in teammate overall, which definitely strongly boosted my self-esteem. sadly, i failed to be completely pacifist in hunt, as i remember very clearly accidentally killing a captain in one of the sci-fi-cisco puzzles.

we ended up finding the coin sometime sunday morning. i was very excited for this, as i was the one person on teammate who was also in mit puzzle club, so i could do a lot of things.

i left the airbnb on monday afternoon carrying way too much stuff with me, and spent like 1.5 hours walking to next because et wasn't planning to drive a van to campus until i passed them and crossed the charles river. when i got to next, i decided to visit wayne, whom i can probably reveal that i was kinda crushing on at that time. the "cluedump" (a thing from esp that was named after a thing from sipb) happened later that afternoon, though i and wayne did end up doing some silly shenanigans with one of the puzzles (specifically this one, wayne made a mouse slip while doing #9 and dragged the king to h1 instead of g1)

that cluedump went nicely, it made me excited, though i didn't really have any puzzle ideas or know what to do in the later days. i was hoping that i would be able to write some puzzles though…

not only was i excited for writing puzzles, i was also excited about having a unique role in mystery hunt organization this year. specifically, i was the only mit undergrad on teammate, and i was also part of puzzle club exec. i knew i would have to do some logistics work, though i wasn't quite informed about how much or what nature the work would be. hopefully it would be enough to make me feel important, but not enough to overwhelm me…

spring semester

a couple weeks after the cluedump, patrick reached out to me asking if i wanted to write a puzzle with him. i was very enthusiastic about this, and after hearing his ideas, i spent 4 hours that night outlining what would happen in the puzzle. patrick eventually wrote the actual script for the puzzle, and with some checking of work, we had a testsolvable draft. this puzzle got shared at a "puzzle potluck" kind of event, but it ended up being pretty underclued once we tried it out, and i decided to put this puzzle on pause for a bit.

this semester, i decided to take the squares class. this isn't actually connected to hunt in any way, it's just to make people reading this think there is a puzzle about square dancing. i did think of a few ideas for how to make a puzzle about square dancing, but those ideas didn't come until the end of 2022, since for most of 2022 i was busy learning calls. i went from nothing in january 2022 to knowing basically all of c2 in january 2023.

a couple other hunt-related events happened around this time in the year. first of all, theme proposals and voting happened. as other teammates have mentioned, they were basically all "teammate is evil". i really liked the aesthetics of one proposed theme and the mechanics of a different one, but those themes ended up being the least popular ones, and i guess they would have also been a lot harder to work on, so it worked out better in the end.

second, there was a small event where we speedwrote metapuzzles in small groups, where we were given a type of food and how the meta we wrote should use that type of food. the first group i worked in just misunderstood the instructions, and the first puzzle had the food used in the shell instead of as one of the answers. i also ended up committing learned helplessness for the other rounds and really didn't get the mindset to do much for the other 2 rounds.

third, the potluck thing happened. i don't remember a lot about it, except that it was during one of the days of spring hssp (an esp program), so i just stayed in the room afterwards to look at the puzzles. i remember wslp and redacted recipes existing here, but nothing really else. the puzzle i was invited to co-write was also shared here, though no teams made significant progress on it. i would eventually re-write this into a different puzzle throughout the rest of the year, but that's another story that i'll save for later.

anyways, skip forwards to may, the day of east side festival (a yearly festival held at ec). i would have been getting my hair re-dyed that day, except that all the hair dye disappeared for some reason, so i didn't have anything concrete to do at the festival. fortunately, teammate also had a bunch of people nearby, and i was able to talk to people and get a couple of puzzle ideas, though none of them really came to fruition. i did actually end up with an entire puzzle draft, though i don't think it was really that interesting, and i didn't get the motivation to continue working on any of them before the answers became unclaimed.

i also signed up to edit puzzles over the summer, but i failed to get assigned to anything over the summer, which was maybe a fault in my own communication. the next time i was asked about editing, summer had already passed and i started becoming hosed again, so i was no longer able to edit.

summer

unfortunately, for all of summer, i was not nearly as helpful as i wanted, and i did not make nearly as much progress on puzzle-writing as i wanted, since i accidentally got addicted to two minecraft modpacks: vault hunters, and enigmatica 2: expert skyblock.

i was involved in plenty of testsolving and writing that happened over the summer, but i spent nowhere near as much time on either as i did on minecraft.
i don't really remember what i testsolved over the summer, but i also lived at et where a couple of current members of et (including two that i talked to basically constantly) still lived over the summer. this kinda meant that i wasn't really able to work on puzzles, since i needed to make sure they didn't see or hear about any of the stuff i worked on.

i do remember getting pulled into another puzzle since patrick asked me if i wanted to help write a logic puzzle for what eventually became book of fixed stars. i said sure, though unfortunately i was also really bad and unconfident at writing logic puzzles so i wasn't really ready for it. it wouldn't really get worked on for a while, as there was stuff to be done before the logic part got written, and we would also need to plan out how to make the regions exist. later in the year (in october), i thought of doing a reverse star battle, though this would have been very unconstrained, and i also didn't like star battle so i should maybe have thought harder about alternatives. fortunately, the lead author, mona, later had the idea of using tentaisho, which was much better since it was region division, though it's also not a puzzle type i was good at either writing or solving.

i ended up getting bailed out of this puzzle by justin yokota, who used a program to find a solvable tentaisho-moonsun combo. my major contribution ended up being verifying that this puzzle was solvable by hand, though i somehow ruled out one of the three solutions to the standalone tentaisho, which fortunately didn't end up mattering.

i also remember volunteering to help olga write crossword clues for endless knots. i also joined a group to testsolve the rest of the puzzle, but i myself didn't get anywhere, and the puzzle ended up getting completely rewritten.

galactic asked a bunch of us to help testsolve gph near the end of the summer. i was pretty excited for this, but this made me miss the practice session for tech squares amateur night, which i was partially planning though not very prepared to call for, so i ended up deciding not to call at all. that makes this the second year in a row that gph had really annoying timing, though i don't think it's anybody's fault, it's probably just bad luck. anyways, after doing the intro round which i kinda enjoyed, i looked at the main round. this was a previously untested gimmick with new mechanics, but the main issue i had was that re-entering the answers would refresh the page and lock the puzzle for everyone, so i couldn't go back to look at the puzzles when i was working on them. fortunately this got changed later, but it was a mechanic that i really didn't like. this, combined with my ongoing minecraft addiction, the fact that i suck at making insights in hunt puzzles and the fact that i was still living at et where other people i sit next to would want to do gph later, meant that i didn't end up doing anything for the entire rest of the testsolve.
however, i did contribute enough to be acknowledged on the gph wrapup page, so someone from galactic who didn't know me asked me for my name. this was right after i started going by lumia, which is a name i imported indirectly from my minecraft username. however, i also wanted to change my last name, so i decided to ask the group i talked to while deciding a minecraft username for a suggestion for my last name, since they basically already chose my first name. someone suggested a word from puflantu, so i looked through the dictionaries and found a couple that could work. i ended up being torn between neyo (which means 180) and adbole (which meant star), i ended up choosing neyo since it would make my name euryvocalic, though i also realized in february 2023 that i could also make adbole work since my name would be supervocalic if i dropped the a from my first name.

apparently teammate had a retreat somewhere sometime in august, but i didn't go because i didn't want to spend money. i think there was stuff happening virtually, but i don't think i actually participated in any of that at all.

fall semester

now we've entered the fall semester. i was initially taking 4 classes this semester, but one of them ended up being too hard and also conflicting with a second-semester class that i registered for, so i ended up taking 3.5 classes. out of those 3 full-semester classes, 18.217 (young tableaux) was very lenient on assignments (there were two over the entire semester), 18.821 (project lab, i.e. simulated research) was a group project class, and 18.404 (computability/complexity theory) was very fun though pretty difficult. so i did still have plenty of time for testsolving during the semester.

when the semester started, meetings between teammate and puzzle club resumed. i volunteered to be the person handling all the "normal" classrooms and filling out all the forms, as well as being the person deciding where events will be. these could really only be done by me, since i'm the one person who's both on teammate (so i could get spoiled on events) and on puzzle club exec (so i could coordinate room stuff with the rest of puzzle club exec). walker and moor carried me through a lot of this by writing all the emails that i needed to send. walker was also in my group in 18.821 so i could talk to them pretty often.

during the semester, we finally made our announcement for the registration website going up. i volunteered to be the one telling the puzzle discord servers about this, though unfortunately none of the mods of one of the servers that i asked (i think i only asked the mods who were active (i.e. green or red on discord) at that time) responded until after the announcement went up in puzzle world. the funny part is, cmu puzzlehunt was announced in that server like 1 minute before mystery hunt was announced, so there was plenty of banter about the announcement timing.

i also got to eavesdrop on teams planning what they were gonna do for mystery hunt, as well as joining the discord servers of some of the teams i was closest to, such as random, wafflehaus, and et phone in answer. et phone in answer gave everybody the ability to manage channels, which will be important later.

testsolving

i don't think any of the testsolving was that remarkable, since i got carried through a majority of the puzzles. one puzzle i do remember testsolving was reflective screen, which i did solo from around midnight to around 4am. i got the aha for the logic puzzles basically instantly, and also the extraction pretty quickly, but i failed to realize the answer was the answer. i had the answer actually written out in the spreadsheet when i said "i'm gonna go to sleep", which resulted in this interaction:

another puzzle i remember testsolving was a trip to the museum. i was told to take pictures of what i thought would be part of the puzzle (after i was given the puzzle), but i also spent an extra 3 hours at the museum being at the museum and looking at stuff. there was one particularly interesting video showcasing something that's mildly sexual so i should probably not share it here. actually, this is my website, so i'll just say that it was about making female semen and there was extensive discussion of sex and gender, particularly the meaning of sex that is not compared to gender.

i saw a lot of other things at the museum, specifically the stuff on the third floor which was not part of the puzzle. that was where the robot and ai stuff was, as opposed to the stuff on the second floor which was mostly biology and astronomy. there was that exhibit that was building a sandwich while a robot is pouring drinks around you. the name of the exhibit was something like "be a good robot teammate" and of course i participated in that.

that one puzzle i wrote that actually made it into hunt

specifically this one

sometime in december, we were having a weekend where we blitz-wrote puzzles for conjuri. i was having a conversation with evan, and he said a couple of things about hanabi, as well as making a remark about a hanabi word puzzle. he also wanted help writing crossword clues for diagramless, so i volunteered to help him do that as well.

i thought about evan's remark overnight, and then came up with a hanabi-scrabble hybrid puzzle. the first draft of this was way too cheesable, since the answer phrase would have been read directly from the hands of two players at the end, which meant that the other two players' hands didn't really matter, and you'd know what to focus on by reading through the puzzle at the start.

i rewrote this puzzle twice. the first rewrite was to make the discarded tiles matter, and the second rewrite was because i realized that i was playing cards from the wrong side of the hand. the extraction for the puzzle also changed, from reading the word directly, to a cluephrase involving multiplication and time (which was the definition used in the meta), to its current version with two cluephrases of "previously owned" and "learned from others".

the process of choosing what letters went where and what clues were given was pretty tedious because there were very few constraints, so i added a constraint while writing that "yurt" appeared somewhere in the puzzle, since it would appear fairly early in the process, as the letters were chosen backwards. the choices of cluephrase were also pretty constrained, since i wanted to make the letters used in the game a subset of scrabble tiles, and the played letters just had to be in alphabetical order, so no x's or z's could be used, and only 1 f could be used, for example. i also went in after the last construction to make sure that the hints worked the same way as they did in normal hanabi, starting at 8 and not going below 0, and increasing by 1 for every discard. this did throw off some of my planning, so at some points it was far harder to make words out of the letters of someone else's hand, but i still covered it mostly.

i am still amused by the fact that such a large proportion of teammate plays hanabi, but i don't, yet i was the one writing a puzzle about it.

winter break

anyways, the semester ended, and i went back home for a couple weeks. i didn't really want to go back home, but there was actually a pretty big benefit to being home compared to living on floorpi: i could talk about puzzles out loud. i couldn't do this on floorpi because cj is my next door neighbor and the walls are not very soundproof. i took advantage of this as much as i could by doing most of the changes to my puzzles, as well as both rewrites of set off fireworks there.

this time was also around when the big hunt events started happening. there were a few speedruns of the full hunt, a showcase of hunt structure, a showcase of runaround, and so on. i tried to participate in as much of these as i could, though due to family reasons there definitely were things i couldn't do. there were a couple of final logistics things happening as well, such as me ordering things from mit's slightly modified amazon so that wayne, puzzle club's treasurer, doesn't have to see what's getting bought and get spoiled.

the final stretch

so much stuff happened right after i got back onto campus the week before mystery hunt

in the week leading up to hunt, i ended up skipping all classes to work on hunt. i walked the 20 minutes to teammate's airbnb several times to work there, and more importantly, to socialize and meet other teammates that i either haven't seen for a year (well, for 7 months for some of them) or have never met in person. i also spent some time admiring the puzzles and the art in the hunt. conjuri was my second favorite round, partially because it was the round that set off fireworks was in. admiral bootes was definitely my favorite by far, especially the dark theme, the fonts, and the puzzles themselves. i thought to myself that if anything was making me a catgirl, it would be this round. (though i do think one of my friends softened me up to this idea by a lot in the previous semester) i'll also make this paragraph an invitation for people who know me either online or irl to try to push me further in that direction.

there were a lot of other non-puzzle things i still needed to do. there were meetings with custodial services, with e33 lighting, with mit video productions, and so on. i know that these organizations were all different, but the forms i filled out, and the emails i sent were so similar and so close together that they blurred together in my mind and made me unable to distinguish between them nearly as easily. it took until nearly the day of hunt for me to fully understand how many organizations i had interacted with:

for the event registration, i had to fill out a form on atlas. it wasn't too bad since i've used the form before for a different organization, though as forms normally are, there are questions that i had to ask the rest of puzzle club about.
for the room reservations, i decided to be the main point of contact for the main group of classrooms and for the bush room, and we would get asked about what rooms we needed, and of course we wanted as many of them as we could get. there were also some departmental rooms that walker emailed the department heads to request, and we then had to schedule key pickups and dropoffs for some of them, or to get the door codes for others.
for the bush room, i had to fill out forms about reservations, timing, and capacity, and then figure out who all the mit students on teammate were so we could give all of them tap access. unfortunately, we couldn't give alums tap access, so one of the 3 mit students on teammate (either me, evan, or jake) had to be awake to let all of teammate in when campus opened up at 7am.
for the shirt designs, i had an email chain with student merch, which was to ask about whether we were using the trademark properly.
for custodial services, i filled out a form, and then at some point met with the custodial staff to decide on what custodial services we wanted over the weekend. i ended up negotiating down what they would do to only picking up the trash that was left outside the classrooms overnight and not doing anything inside the rooms until after hunt ended, though i suspect that even that was unnecessary and we could have requested for them not to do that.
for e33 lighting services, i uhh actually didn't interact with them that much to really understand what they were doing for us until the sunday of hunt. i do remember having some back-and-forth emails about not knowing how much to budget.
for mit a/v, i again filled out some forms, and we picked up the equipment on friday morning just before hunt started.
finally, for mit video productions, i filled out yet another form, and then had a meeting with them to decide on what exactly we needed from them. this meeting was slightly amusing because when i walked to teammate airbnb just before it, we were doing an icebreaker where we had to say something uninteresting about ourselves. ksun's uninteresting fact of having two windows open right next to each other on his laptop was definitely the best uninteresting fact, but i got to say that i had to go to a meeting as my uninteresting fact, which also let me escape the icebreaker with style. then, during the meeting, i called one of my teammates (alex) for assistance, who then said that he didn't have the authority to decide on this and called a different teammate (jacqui) over. i was told by moor that alex was the one who had opinions, though maybe jacqui just knew more about what should be done?

there was also stuff with our storage spaces in the basement of walker memorial that we lost last year, but we still had stuff in that space that we needed to use for hunt, such as phones and office supplies.

of course, we also had several interactions, many of which nonpositive, with other organizations, though i won't reveal any details of the interactions here.

the entire month before hunt was absolute hell for logistics, where it felt like basically all the forces of mit were against hunt happening. the announcement of stata being shut down on saturday (which i think was a bit older and we planned around), the bush room being occupied by a different group until 6pm on friday (which was also older and we planned around), then the internet not working, classes taking over our classrooms completely unnecessarily (i.e. one small class that cj was apparently in was moved from one room to a bigger room that we've already booked for being a hunt hq, for god knows whatever reason). campus being closed from 1-7am was also a mild annoyance for both teammate and the solvers, though that was at least better than all of fall semester, when campus was closed all the time and all doors needed tap access. logistics feels like it always is a nightmare though. one reason i suspect causing this is that a lot of mit administrative stuff only goes 2-3 months in advance, so e.g. for the event registration, the custodial services requests, and some of the room reservations, we needed to wait until november to do it. fortunately, some of the room reservations could be done earlier (thanks kaitlin and judith), but it was still annoying not being able to get the logistics stuff out of the way earlier.

yet somehow, my sleep schedule that week was better than my sleep schedule for all of 2022. i went to sleep before midnight every night, since i was tired enough, and i also had to wake up early sometimes. i also still had time and energy to go to squares, and this time there were several mit alumni that were here for hunt. i forgot my squares nametag (i'm pretty sure i straight up just lost it), so i took a sticker and wrote bootes on it as my nametag. i knew i'd get away with this, since 1. it's a constellation 2. my friends all know i'm into starlight 3. specifically, it's a constellation in my favorite minecraft mod, astral sorcery 4. i've written not-my-name on my nametag a few times, though this action was inspired by someone else who wrote not-their-name on their nametags more consistently. though i did also draw the constellation on the sticker just in case, and i pronounced the name like the constellation and not the admiral when i was talking about it at squares. after hunt, someone said to me that they couldn't believe i got away with writing bootes on my nametag that night. i still feel pretty good about it.

pre-hunt prep

the thursday before hunt, we went into a classroom and basically showcased all of hunt to ourselves. we also got t-shirts to wear on the day of hunt, but we were told to not show the back because it included spoilers. i, evan, and jake were told that we should split shifts to make sure that two of us were awake at all times where campus was open. i offered to be the one waking up early, but evan and jake were both more willing to do it than i was (they're both grad students), so i switched to the night shift.
i then went to go meet irl some people from one of my online puzzle friend groups (whom i hugged several times), and then the organizers of the how to hunt workshop, ben and jen, both of whom i recognized pretty easily. i went to the how to hunt workshop to socialize, and i talked to wayne and yannick for most of the time. at the conclusion of the how to hunt workshop, cryptics were mentioned as being bad and i yelled definitely too loudly that cryptic clues are better than regular clues since there are two ways to get the answer instead of just one, so you didn't need to know as much random trivia (or google as much) to do cryptics.

we tested the phone number that night, and we noticed that the number that reaches the phone we were using is off by 1 from the number that we listed on the registration website. i spent a lot of time figuring out how to set up the phones so that the number we listed connected to a working phone. it was pretty annoying since we had like 10 phones with different numbers, and we needed to find the one that was linked to the number that we have displayed in public areas. i did eventually figure out how to do this, and also change it to redirect to a different person's phone. now i am hopefully able to show others how to do this.

my experience in that week i would honestly describe as amazing, despite burnout. i suspect the main factor was me coming back on campus from back home, and now i had both time and motivation to work on my puzzles, and i could actually wear clothes that i actually liked. on top of that, i was also very excited to see the rest of teammate in person again, and some people for the first time. the only very slight drawbacks to being back on campus were that cj was next door again, so i couldn't talk loudly about puzzles, and decreased food security. the first one of that was solved primarily by me going to teammate's airbnb to do most of the puzzle work, and the second one was solved by me cooking very basic meals, as well as spending a lot of money to buy food.

hunt!

then came friday, the day of hunt. early in the morning, i went to mit a/v to pick up the a/v equipment, then helped rahul tape signs on the doors to show what team was in which room. i wore my coat to hide the back of the shirt, and also my gloves so i wouldn't get papercuts on myself or sweat on the paper. this, of course, made me really hot, but i dealt with it since i'm pretty used to hot temperatures, though of course i made some non-serious complaints about it.

i then went to flour to meet a bunch of other people from that friend group i mentioned earlier. they asked me to name as many people there as i could, and i managed to name almost everyone there except for two people (which makes 13 out of 15), though the nametags that some people were wearing definitely helped, as did one of them prompting me to guess the people they were sitting next to.

we then went outside and a passing teammate (i think it was helena) offered to take a picture of us, so this turned out to be my second face reveal in that server. i took quite a bit of pride in how i did my first one, in that it was one of my friends irl who posted the picture of me, making it much harder to find. one person i've told i've face revealed can attest to this, they told me they went several pages deep looking at pictures i've posted trying to find it.

i returned to kresge and watched the rehearsals of the opening skit. since this was my very first in-person hunt, i didn't know anything about what it should have been, so i thought the stuff that teammate said as teammate after the museum stuff ended was still part of the skit. i guess this year was the exception, where it was actually part of the skit, and some stuff unique to our hunt came up in this section.

we set up our first hq in 2-105. the loading puzzle happened, and the first breakout was done by galactic in an hour. this was also around when we realized that hunt was gonna be way too long, so we made the decision to release hints early. later, some teams called us to see what was going on, since the puzzles seemed to not load, and we would respond with really funny comments implying that it was a puzzle. unfortunately, when we were responding, the entire room laughed pretty loudly which may have interfered with the person who answered the phone.

we moved to the bush room as hq at 6pm, when it became available. at that time, i was at the art event, and there i met "that guy that i played spirit island with once", recognizing his discord handle from his nametag. he's one of the people i was really hoping to meet at hunt.

i went to all the events, since i was basically the person in charge (well, more specifically the point of contact) of the rooms that the events were held in. this took up most of saturday as well, and i stayed in the student center, where the events were held, since it was cold outside. i also really wanted to interact with people as much as i could, so i went on a lot of team visits, including the ones to florey, random, and wafflehaus, since i knew people on those teams personally (and actually had tap access to florey). i also went to several midpoint interactions, though not the very first one that galactic had.

big changes

in efforts to make the hunt move more quickly, we decided to rearrange the unlocking order of bootes round, so the puzzle i've been working on all year was moved to near the end. i was fine with that, though it would mean that et would not get to it before hunt ended.

then, on saturday evening, we made the big decision. two of them, actually.
the smaller change for us, but more notable change for hunters, was that we changed reactivation to only need 3 out of the 4 metas before it. this is more notable for hunters because it was the one that was actually visible.
the bigger change for us, but less noticeable change for hunters, was that we cut 2/3 of the bootes round, leaving just the space modules meta and its feeders still in hunt. this got somewhat mixed results, as some teammates were audibly upset, but most teammates applauded the exec team for making this big decision. surprisingly, i was mostly unaffected by this, even though the puzzle i've been working on all year was in one of the two cut rounds, because there was a very strong agreement within teammate that we should have the rest of the bootes round released afterwards in a mini-hunt, similar to star rats from 2022, except after hunt instead of before. it also guaranteed that et wouldn't see my puzzle before hunt ended.

i must admit, i would have slightly preferred "split hunt into two hunts" (i.e. cut the 4 ai rounds entirely and save them all for a different hunt) over "let the rest of hunt be seen". i didn't really understand how much tech/logistics/other work would have to be done, and i still don't understand the tech stuff, though i would expect the logistics part to be the same, maybe slightly easier for the entirety of pc, but probably substantially more for me (since i'll have to do the stuff that walker did last year). this time though i feel like i'm somewhat equipped to do the logistics work, especially since walker already did a substantial amount of arguing for us so it'll hopefully be easier to talk to people about mh. (ily walker :heart:)

the biggest benefit to splitting hunt into two parts would have been that more of hunt actually gets solved. on sunday, we ended up spilling a tank of free answers onto the sea of puzzlers, and this made it so that a lot of the puzzles that i was hoping to get solved instead got skipped. in particular, it seemed like a lot of teams skipped eye and bootes rounds completely, so they couldn't have discovered the gimmicks on their own.

the one legit issue i had with splitting hunt into two parts is that sometimes puzzles have expiration dates. generally, puzzles about anything related to pop culture would be very at risk of being outdated by january 2024, though some of it would be not too big a deal to change, some may be too constrained to change and may need to be rewritten.

i noticed that evan was holding that heart plushie that i remember seeing him with a long time ago. apparently he was burning out, but i unfortunately didn't realize it. if i did, i would have offered him hugs.

on saturday night, teams finally started solving reactivation, which means that we needed to do the midpoint interaction with them. i didn't go on the very first interaction with galactic in the earlier evening, but near the closing time of 1am, a bunch of other teams solved reactivation, so like 20 teammates went as a mob to do the midpoint interaction with each of them in order. i was the one who turned the lights off after every interaction we had, which i guess was thematic since that's what my name means.

when we went into sunday, the hunt being long had a ton of other implications for logistics. the most important change was that the final runaround had to be changed. we had reserved some rooms (in particular, la sala and mezzanine) for sunday but not monday, and those we originally planned to use for the runaround. however, we did not see any team finishing before either of the rooms closed (which was 10pm), so a ton of changes had to be made. in particular, conjuri's part of the runaround was originally going to involve a fancy setup in la sala that actually had colored lights, and we also needed to rearrange hq because it's the only other place we could put the monitor bank and the conveyor belt that were originally in mezzanine. maybe we could have had the rooms and lights for another day if i called earlier, but this was not something that we were actively thinking about until the afternoon, and by that time the cac (office that rooms in the stud were reserved from) was closed, so we couldn't re-reserve the rooms. without a reservation, we couldn't keep the lights either, so we decided to just not bother with either of the rooms the day after and move everything.

so the lesson i learned from this is to always plan for the worst case, not just some bad cases.

later on sunday, et phone in answer solved reactivation. i was the one in charge of doing the midpoint interaction. since they were a hybrid team that was nearby but too far to walk to in person, i could do it in the discord server that they were solving in. after the interaction ended, instead of turning off the lights, i instead took advantage of my permission to manage channels and deleted the voice channel that we were in. at least the rest of puzzle club exec, and the people on teammate i told about this, approved of this action, though et was definitely surprised, and when someone from et mentioned this on discord, there were lots of :notlikeduck: reactions.

on sunday night, we discussed what we were going to do with the removed bootes puzzles. we mostly agreed that we didn't want to do additional work on these puzzles, and to reconvene in march, after everybody cooled down, to talk about this. this was a long time, which was enough for me to make edits to my cut puzzle to make it easier, as well as possibly expand it even further. there was also some talk about renaming the round when it is released by adding new letters to the end, and this is where "further galaxies" was suggested. a couple of us also thought about changing "expedition" to "expansion", though that would probably need more work from art which may not have been feasible.

on monday, i woke up around 10am and stayed in my room until just before wrap-up. i missed all the runarounds, but i was too tired to wait. i saw that a lot of teammates were wearing their team (other ai) shirts, and i became sad that i didn't have one, since i really wanted a team bootes shirt. fortunately, i was able to buy one after hunt.

i spoke about puzzle club and acknowledgements at the end of wrap-up, and because i wanted applause, the first thing i said was "as some of you may have noticed, hunt is in-person".

after hunt

after hunt ended on monday, i met up with others from puzzle club exec (except walker who had covid). they were surprised that they saw no puzzles that were about any of my strong interests of spirit island, minecraft, or square dancing, so i decided to tell them about the removed bootes puzzles. i figured that puzzle club exec was a small and trustworthy enough group that i could tell just them about this and still have the secret still be fairly confined. we met up with teammate later, and we were still talking about bootes round. i was hoping that we'd release the removed puzzles substantially earlier, but i did like having the release time be thematic. i suggested the bootes culmination at 4:13am, which was sometime around february 25th, but there was no way that was happening. the popular date suggested at the meeting on sunday night was may 2nd, which was the bootes culmination at midnight, though i don't remember whether that was with or without daylight savings. actually i guess i could calculate it, i'm pretty sure it's without. however, that also is failing to happen, and instead it'll be around the culmination at 11pm edt.

i decided i wanted to keep the pillars of the museum, so i and a couple other teammates brought them to floorpi. i moved one to room 2-131 because i knew there was a squares thing happening that night so i wanted to use it to dance bigons, even though dancing bigons at anything above a2 was something i still wasn't experienced with, and this was a continuing c2 class which is two levels above a2. i later moved a pillar all the way to et, which was a pretty difficult endeavor, and one i regret not wearing a hat for, since it was really cold along the way.

immediately after hunt, i for some reason felt like i wanted to write more puzzles. i'm not sure exactly what caused this to happen, it might have been some amount of validation starvation combined with being in the mindset to write puzzles. in fact, i told cj that i wanted to write for [unspecified puzzle event] this year, though i also said that i wouldn't want to join in the writing until the theme was chosen and the bootes reconvening happened.

similarly, though on a slower timescale, after seeing all of those blog posts about hunt and some newly made blogs also appear to host these blog posts, i was inspired to write my own stuff about hunt, and potentially make a blog for it. however, i didn't know coding and wanted to learn how to make a website for other purposes (in particular, that web app that cj said we'd never build), so i procrastinated on this until spring break.

the penultimate directly hunt thing to happen was the ama with teammate on january 22nd. there, we did actually have plans for what to say if anyone asked about the removed puzzles, or anything related to removing puzzles. we were going to admit that we removed puzzles, but not give any more details about them. however, since we didn't tell anyone besides puzzle club, nobody even asked about it, so we didn't even have to worry about that.

finally, on february 2nd, teammate had a post-hunt debriefing. at the debriefing, there was some talk about writing a crossword and a cat round as intro rounds for the cut bootes puzzles, since they were shown on some screenshots of the monitor bank. i thought this was actually a reasonable idea story-wise and possibly puzzle-wise, though i didn't know how much other effort it would take. we were also definitely questioning how hard these intro rounds would be, since they would need to ramp up to the bootes round with the hardest puzzles. i was pretty enthusiastic about doing this, but my desire to get the puzzles released before summer was stronger.

now that it's may, we're announcing the release of the rest of the bootes round, rebranding it from abcde to abcdefg. these puzzles could be considered a "teammate hunt" since it was written by teammate, but it's also not branded as a teammate hunt (also previous teammate hunts were letters changing by 0, abcdefg has letters changing by 1). i don't think teammate will release an actual on-brand teammate hunt in 2023, so i can't really stop you from calling abcdefg "teammate hunt 2023". a funny thing i noticed was that mystery hunt has a recommended team size ceiling, but abcdefg has a recommended team size floor.

this post getting released was pushed back several times from its initial plan of may first. it was blocked on story for a while because deciding what to put as the story was hard. and i didn't want to release this too far before the actual hunt announcement. then we decided to delay the announcement by another couple of days because of unfortunate events in the first week of may, and then because of microsoft puzzle hunt. after waiting an entire week, it's finally getting released today. it's finally out!

i will likely talk more about abcdefg in a future post, probably sometime around mid-june after they're released, so stay tuned!