An Ergodic Walk

I did the Bay Area Night Game 12 tonight with the Platonic Solids (I was the dodecahedron). It was fun up until I realized that I had lost my cellphone, bike headlight, and only functional pencil. So that’s $100+ I’m out now, and we didn’t even win…

But I suppose we should get around to writing the BANG we were supposed to have written earlier. Maybe if I get the time I’ll write a critique of the puzzles.

I went to a National Puzzler’s League minicon today, at Trazom’s beautiful flat (pun intended) in San Francisco. It was fun, although my rusty slow puzzling skills resulted in slowness and mistakes that could have been easily avoided. I’m afraid that I must have annoyed Rubrick with my ineptitude. I couldn’t stay very long, only enough time to play a few games and get a good running crack at Bartok’s megagame from the convention, which I had missed.

This is probably gibberish to most people who read this. The upshot: I went to a puzzle party this afternoon, and it was fun. I met some interesting people, but I am a slow solver.

Jeff is going through some self-flagellation over at his blog over the 2004 Mystery Hunt, and I have to agree with him — our hunt sucked a lot. On the other hand, since I was responsible for a decent chunk of the suckage, I feel the need to find the silver lining in his dark cloud.
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I came across Cliff Johnson’s site today. In case you didn’t know, Cliff Johnson is the creator of my two favorite Mac games of all time, The Fool’s Errand and 3 in Three. I had almost given up all hope of playing these games every again, since I didn’t have my old Mac II, but I just found out that you can buy all of his games for the low, low price of $20 with support for OS X, or download them for free. What’s more, there’s a sequel to The Fool’s Errand coming out in October for Windoze and MacOS. This news just makes my day. And check out the rest of the site too, there’s all sorts of puzzle-y goodness there. I can feel my productivity slipping already.

So I’m spending about 12-14 hours a day working on prep for the Mystery Hunt, and although I’m the most stressed I’ve been in the last year almost, it’s also one of the most invigorating sensations I’ve had in the last year. The fact that I can sit here and work for so long on one thing and that I make some progress every hour almost gives me hope that when I go back to school I will be able to do the same thing, work really hard on one thing and get it done, or at least make progress. This project for me is a psychological springboard into my real work.

The MIT Mystery Hunt is coming up soon, and I’m off to Beantown. It’s like a piece of theater, really. Next week is tech, and we open on Friday. Good thing I’ve done so much theater, or I might be tempted to panic.