Introduction
It's hump day, and you know what that means- yet another status update!
As the title kind of implies, this was not a very productive week for solving puzzles. Syntax's semester is coming to an end, my research is coming to a start, and the calendars stayed pretty booked.
Not only were there relatively few solves this week, the puzzles that did get solved weren't too notable. There was a little discussion with me two weeks ago about Playing A Round, and a lot of discussion last week about Running for Office and the last Arbor Day puzzles; this week's update will probably not lead as many discussions, since I don't believe we cleared anything that was unusually difficult, and we definitely didn't crack any of the metas.
Even though I'm being a bit of a downer in my opening paragraphs today, there have still been a lot of optimistic things happening in the Hunt. The biggest piece of good news this week: we have a reasonable way to complete all of the special event towns, and we may even be able to go for the meta.
I'll give a general warning that we may not update during the first full week of May, since our team will temporarily become the One-Man Mystery Hunt while Syntax is taking final exams (and also grading them.)
Rules Changes
"Canonically, you celebrate Placeholder Day whenever you'd actually like to celebrate a different holiday but don't yet have the ability to do so." - /u/Starcro
Last week, an attempt at Connect Four gone awry had informed us of the existence of Anima Oratorio and Date and Thyme. This left us wondering about what exactly to do with them.
Meanwhile, solving the events in exchange for solvent has been treated as entirely fair game so far. Solvent is a big deal, and there's no reason to handicap our tiny team by not having any. The events even have been uploaded in a mostly-solvable form, too! Reg Day was a straight puzzle, Flag Day is a puzzle that might take some work to set up, and Talk Like A Pirate Day can take the form of a creative submission (even if there isn't a background crowd with which to sing whatever we submit.)
A problem arose with both the Groundhog Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day events, though. Both of them would take a human moderator and some very unusual supplies (such as lightboxes and children). Even if we ignored that, we couldn't reconstruct the physical components of either puzzle without having the answer revealed to us in the process. And with two answers permanently missing (and an undeniably awful track record at solving metas), we probably would have no chance at solving the event lamppost to have a reliable supply of solvent.
At some point, I decided to quite literally put two and two together. There were two spare flex puzzles that were completely solvable, could give out any answer line, and had no purpose for us to solve. There were two events that were completely unsolvable, but they gave out specific answer lines and had a lot of other reasons for us to attempt them.
It was decided before we attempted either of the Placeholder Day puzzles that Anima Oratorio would replace the doubly-rewarding Groundhog Day event, and that Date and Thyme would replace the Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
The treatment of the event meta, as with Your Birthday Town, is still an open question. Unlike last week, though, it's an open question worth discussing.
A Retrospective on Arbor Day
I don't think Syntax or I have anything negative to say about Arbor Day. This was, other than perhaps Halloween, the best-designed round in the Hunt as a whole to me.
You managed to make a round where almost everything felt like it fit perfectly with the theme, in spite of Arbor Day having the most puzzles of any round and perhaps the narrowest range of traditions. I'm glad that there weren't a lot of explicitly tree-themed puzzles; the ones that did exist were memorable, to say the least. Meanwhile, you did a really good job making the more topical puzzles feel like they had a home here. The round had an almost-Zen feel to it.
The best thing about Arbor Day was the variety of topics that the puzzles covered. Nearly every puzzle was about something. The first three things in the round to us all started as a bunch of loose clues, but ended up each being memorable in a different way. Meanwhile, this round gave us some of the first interactive or technical puzzles; it felt like the proper start to those. The only puzzle that was explicitly about the Hunt itself was also in Arbor Day; even though it's among the least tree-related puzzles in the round, I still feel that it wouldn't be better anywhere else. (I get a good feeling from the fact that it's in a middle round where most of the midrange teams could see it, and also from the fact that there's only one obvious Hunt history puzzle.)
There were also a lot of strongly-themed puzzles where the themes don't obviously fit a category; that's something I really like, too. Mountains and Valleys, Furious Fellows, and the ever-confusing Delightful are the ones that stick out the most.
I'd say that this round could take in some more of the logic puzzles and crosswords from the towns around it to have better spacing for those types of puzzles in general, but really, I just sort of want the other towns to be more like Arbor Day. It's a lot easier to get into a puzzle when it's about something, even when it isn't something I'd typically be interested in.
Puzzle-Specific Notes (Solved)
Anima Oratorio
Ahhhh, Placeholder Day. Having every puzzle end in a mystery task is a really clever theme for a round, don'tcha know?
Despite tasks having the potential to be embarrassing, time-consuming, or both, I thought that Placeholder Day would be a nice break from the chaos of Holi and Bloomsday or the mires of the remaining puzzles from other rounds. That definitely hasn't been the case.
We spent days trying to figure out what Anima Oratorio could possibly be about. Most of that time was spent looking at various obscure trading card games to find one with 191 cards in its initial set. In the end, we found several games that started off with a set of 191 uniquely-named cards; all of those games were obscure enough to cause problems finding images or lists of their cards. Even when we found a list with enough information, it was just a sign that we were on a wild goose chase.
The characters named "C" and "J" near the top also were considered to be central to our understanding of the puzzle at some point. We kept thinking that this was going to be based on some piece of Japanese media set in a high school-- while that may be true in some ways, it definitely caused us to waste a ton of time looking up the cast of characters from random anime. (Animes? I don't think I've ever thought about how that word should be pluralized.) Not only did we try to randomly find TV Tropes articles about pairs of female characters, we also tried to play the guessing game with what the names could be. "Girls' names that start with C" isn't that broad of a category, especially when you limit it to names that are likely to show up in something from Japan.
Even when we looked up the card names directly, we picked exactly the wrong ones to look up first. Googling "vampire moth" gave us a bunch of results about a real genus of moths named Calyptra, for example. For some reason, the word "Calyptra" has appeared in a few anime programs and TCGs before, so I ended up spending a couple hours off-course researching places where it had appeared.
We finally got unstuck by Syntax getting fed up and Googling "drunken serpents", which gave us a concise list of the 191 shadows that could be used in the puzzle. Just having a list of Persona 5 shadows in front of us wasn't quite enough to solve it, though. We needed to understand something else about the game. So, we tried to read about the game's mechanics...
"Hey, there's a Caroline in here!" - Syntax
Randomly seeing the name "Caroline" when doing research for a puzzle has almost always been a bad sign. I can't remember a situation where it happened unless we were nose-deep in the wrong topic; most notably, a lot of Charles Darwin's letters were addressed to a Caroline when I was reading them for Poor Richard Goes To Sea. Needless to say, it came as quite a surprise that she was actually one of the characters referenced at the top of the puzzle. It was even more of a surprise that despite "Caroline" being in our team name, we never actually considered it when we were actively trying to think of "girls' names that start with C".
The actual logic puzzle was on the more difficult end of things when we finally understood how combining shadows worked. We almost had to ask about the instructions because they seemed quite vague to anyone that wasn't confident in their understanding of Persona.
That being said, the authors did a very good job of leading us around a lot of game-mechanic-related mishaps. In particular, combining shadows in Persona 5 is not commutative (A×B doesn't necessarily produce the same results as B×A), but that never created any issues with us because of the puzzle page's layout.
Mentally, I was very prepared to have the task involve trading a card for the answer. We'd talked about quite a few different trading cards or board game supplies we own before getting the instruction to submit a joker. Thank you for not making me dig through my boxes of bulk Magic commons and uncommons until I found the right one. (Also, thank you for not making me find a card shop that sells Yu-Gi-Oh cards, or submit a card with a specific Pokémon on it, or combo off with the one broken Force of Will card with the Cheshire Cat on it, or any other task related to a specific TCG.) All we needed was a joker, and we didn't even need to mail it in from Minnesota.
There was still a little debating over if various trading cards counted as a joker, or if some decks of playing cards had better jokers than others. Eventually, we settled on the joker from a thematic Fluxx deck.
It's weird to me that this was the double-solvent puzzle while we're still pretty stuck on Date and Thyme, but being stuck on easy things while breezing through hard things is one of the only certainties about this blog (along with complaining about puzzles I liked, using three times as many words as I need to make my points, and making unnecessary references to Caressing.)
Something In Common
Welcome to another episode of "Songchild Talks About Singing".
There have been a lot of talented singers on this year's puzzles. Most of the people outside the Hunt who I've exposed to Playing A Round have commented on it sounding like actual songwriting and being catchy. The Obligatory G&S Puzzle had a great run at a parody patter song-- as I quickly found out when I was first considering songs to sing, patter songs are a lot more difficult than they look. The rapping in the final file from Comma and a Freaking Dot was right on the rhythm. The whole concept behind The Sound of Music required the singer to be perfectly on pitch in every clip. The singing in I Knew "Weird Al" Yankovic... might be in a bit of a different context from the others, but it does take a lot of talent for the same person to sing 23 different songs well enough to be included on an introductory puzzle.
........and then we have this. I feel like the lack of a background and the off-key-ness of the singer were intentionally to make things difficult. That being said, I only started paying a lot of attention to this puzzle last week-- right after I finished Playing A Round-- and it was jarring. I know that solvers would normally have had a while between the last clips of Setec singing and this, but that still doesn't make me feel any happier about this.
Matching the lyrics up and getting the words out of there was a piece of cake. Figuring out which melody went where was a piece of cake that was left out for weeks until it became hard as a rock. That's when mold started growing on it and the hazmat crew probably should have been called in, but you told us to eat it anyway.
The biggest problem with this puzzle was that we didn't know all of the songs very well, and we kept doubting our memories rather than assuming the singer wasn't perfect. The next-biggest problem was that a lot of the songs sound fairly similar to each other-- in particular, we had a lot of problems with the Battle Hymn of the Republic and any clip which had a lot of the same repeating note.
On top of that, the singing being sometimes on-key and sometimes tone-deaf was confusing enough to make us think that it was somehow related to indexing. We had a lot of tricks to understand the singer's pitch by the end of this-- most of the time, we just paid attention to the rhythm. In a couple of cases, we even had Syntax sing the songs, because he was bad enough at staying on pitch to instantly trigger my memory of where I'd heard a particular off-pitch melody before. (He really doesn't like singing, but when push comes to solve, then he'd do a lot of things he doesn't like to shove a puzzle and move on.)
I can't tell if the many variations of lyrics, melodies, and names of several of these songs were helpful or not. On one hand, we never tried to do anything with the names of the songs because they were so ambiguous (especially in the case of the TV themes.) On the other hand, there was a lot of confusion about both the lyrics and melody in various clips-- the lyrics to "The Yellow Rose of Texas" stood out as being particularly difficult to nail down. (There's a yellow rose of Texas // That {I'm / I am} going (back) to see // {No other [fellow / soldier / lots of other variations] knows / Nobody else [could / can] miss} her // {Not half as much as / No [other / any of the "lots of other variations" in the previous line], only} me.)
Even though I've said a lot of negative things about the singing here, I think this was among my favorite puzzle concepts so far. There are a lot of songs that can be described as "Amazing Grace, but not", and it was fun to pick them apart. The extraction was also very clever, though it took some head-scratching for us to get there.
Also, seeing that the answer to this was "SMASHING PUMPKINS" instantly made us use solvent on The Bill back in Presidents' Day. We thought that "DARK LANTERNS" was supposed to be the extra answer because it could stop Halloween (there were even two puzzles in Halloween with "lantern" in their names, don't blame us!) After seeing that The Bill feeds an unknown problem, we thought we had the wrong idea behind which answers were extras. I didn't realize that re-enacting the "one if by land, two if by sea" scene on Patriots' Day was a tradition out there.
Concrete
Ahhhh, simple word puzzles. This is another puzzle that I liked, but I don't have a long story about it.
Actually, there's a bit of a story. We originally filled in the grids on paper without marking the borders of the pentominoes. As luck would have it, we lost the paper. That ended up being a good thing-- I didn't realize that all of the grids were 60 cells or that there was exactly one of each shape in each grid until I re-solved everything on a spreadsheet.
We ended up being stuck on extraction on our first journey through the concrete jungle, but what we should have been doing was blatant to me as soon as I got through it the second time. I actually really liked the extraction step here, in hindsight. This puzzle is just as much about poetry as it's about pentomino tilings, and if you aren't paying attention to both of them, then the extraction just doesn't work.
We're still continuing the tradition of being unlucky with answers for the Bloomsday-Arbor Day meta. I'm 99% certain that this is another spare, since it obviously kills Valentine's Day and it's too big to place in the Pi Day grid.
Travel Planning
This has been one of only two scenarios where having a gut feeling that an unattempted puzzle was going to be Caressing has been helpful. (The other time it happened to me was on the third problem in Ten Years Later in the Galactic hunt, which was a lot weirder when it ended up being the right way of doing things.)
I like that the formatting of the puzzle gave us no ambiguities in what we should be getting from the clues-- chunks of five capital letters. The theme made it seem obviously air travel-related, and it didn't take very long at all for us to find out that waypoints were five letters long. Syntax even got in on connecting the dots into letters-- just like singing, he was willing to do it to get us out of Holi faster. We were expecting a solve to come in, but instead we got an instruction that conveniently came with a free stumbling block. Oops.
The flier came in-- it didn't quite fly at us like it normally would, but it was very clear. We didn't know what to do with it at all. This probably is because it wasn't a creative task, and it also wasn't another caress-the-dots word. We realized that the coordinates led to major airports, and the waypoints were sort of close-ish to those airports, but that's about it.
Eventually, I decided to test what I'd get if I told Nutrimatic to make words with one letter from each waypoint in order. It sent me, among other things, "call in Ohio". A place that you can fly to would be a sufficient answer to this, so I called in Ohio. No dice. I looked up what other four-letter phrases could fill in the blank, and saw "oh no" and "oops". Those seemed like inherently funny answer lines to me, so I called them in, not expecting them to work at all. Oops.
That "oops" has been among the luckiest oopses to date.
Connect Four
Usually, titles and flavor text are helpful. This is the only puzzle where they've both strongly suggested the same wrong idea.
Over the weekend, I decided to try this in paper. I wrote out the bottom grid, and the nine words by it, and realized why I was an idiot. Reading the first letters of the words was obvious, but for some reason, reading the last letters of the words was a concept so alien that nobody had ever tried to do it. We did a lot of guesswork on how to fill in the blank after "see recent", and some of our wrong answers actually took time to verify as being false, since "recent" in this context means "in a random week in January".
I thought that Touring the Nation would be the start and end of collaborating with other puzzle publishers, and it was kind of surprising to see another puzzle give us an external puzzle. However, the external puzzles here felt a little less grindy, mostly because they didn't have a lot to do with the starting material. That's a good thing-- we didn't find a published solution to these right away, so we had to actually go through all of the solving.
Personally, I'd probably have thought that this was going to work like dropping checkers forever, even after realizing that "CODE" was spelled out in the right place by the four grids. Syntax was the one to test if the middle chunks of each of the words could work anywhere, and was still surprised that getting "COTENANCY" out was the last step.
Having the answer to this right next to "COTTONY" in our progress sheet is going to be really confusing, especially if they don't go to the same place.
Keeping Tabs
Bloomsday, we'd missed you. For some reason, this seems like a much easier round than Holi, and we're still trying to pace ourselves here so we don't have a week where we solve very little due to most of the open puzzles being stuck in place.
Even with the pacing, I'm surprised this stayed open as long as it did. The theme was appealing and it wasn't particularly long or difficult. We never had problems with thinking that the tabs on the page were actual music. I recognized several of the string instruments right away, too.
We did have a little hang-up on the last step. We got "a gospel" out of the tabs, but we didn't think to re-order the notes. I spent a good chunk of time finding out what the notes would be if you actually played them on the instruments in the puzzle, and thought that we were going to be missing this for a long time due to not knowing anything about gospel music. Plugging in a four-letter gospel like "Mark", "Luke", or "John" didn't work without the right ordering.
Then Syntax guessed "ukulele" because he ignored the tab and just tried to make words out of the letters in "Luke". Welp.
I'm happy that this has the potential to feed Arbor Day (even if it actually goes somewhere else in the end)-- most of the other answers we had at the point when we solved this couldn't fit in the wheel at all.
Split Seven Ways
This was a tight week to get a seventh solve in. We had six puzzles down, and I was up late last night trying to solve Chain of Commands, with no luck. Then, at 2:00 in the morning, I chucked the idea of doing anything but tasks, and I called something into A Bunch of Ripoffs. I still hadn't heard whether it was acceptable when I woke up.
Faced with the problem of being two puzzles under the shortest post to date, I had to pick something and solve it fast. Split Seven Ways ended up being the right choice, even if it wasn't incredibly fast.
I'd already assembled and translated the Greek and Russian lines, and done part of the work on the Japanese one. Separating the Latin-alphabet text took a lot more time than I thought it would, though, even though it was relaxing. I was aware that Swedish and Finnish were both in the pool from early on, and even though they aren't related linguistically, their orthography is similar enough to make things tough.
Last week, there was talk about how Google has mostly kicked extreme resourcefulness and detective-work from the Hunt. Trying to type Japanese text from a picture while only having a cursory knowledge of the language is one of the rare cases where Google won't immediately come to the rescue. The kana were grindy to copy over, but easy to figure out. The kanji, on the other hand, weren't as nice-- I ended up going to Wikipedia's list of kanji taught in Japanese primary schools and repeatedly sorting the whole list by radicals and stroke counts to find what I needed.
Another place where Google is unlikely to help you is when you need to find specific lines and chapter numbers from copyrighted books. It took a while to realize that the lines appeared right after the beginning of a chapter. We ended up using Google to translate the lines, and using our long-forgotten paper copies of the books in English to find out the placement. It's a really good thing we did that, too, since the exact positioning of the lines ended up being important.
We kept thinking that the flavor text was trying to clue us into using the American titles of the books for indexing, but in reality, the only place where it made a difference was at the very end. Ghouls don't wear "pyjamas" in Bloomsday Town.
Puzzle-Specific Notes (Unsolved)
As typical, this will be edited in later. This time, since I didn't solve any puzzles named Running for Office, I shouldn't have to put it in a comment because of the character limit.
Scoreboard
Christmas: 6/6, ⭐ (Nobel Laureate)
Halloween: 17/17, ⭐ (Starbucks Lover), proven anomaly (A Killer Party)
Thanksgiving: 14/16 (missing Jukebox Hero and Your Wish is My Command), ⭐️ (Cross Campus)
Valentine's Day: 16/17 (missing The Treehouse of Crossed Destinies), ⭐ (Caressing)
President's Day: 11/12 (missing Safety Training), ⭐ (State Machine), proven anomaly (The Bill)
New Year's: 10/13 (missing Art Tours, First You Visit Burkina Faso, and Taskmaster), ⭐ (Display Case)
Arbor Day: 18/18, ⭐ (Delightful), proven anomaly (Middle School of Mines)
Pi Day: 15/18 (missing Clued Connections, Compass and Straightedge, and Polyphony), ⭐️ (Playing a Round)
Holi: 10/17 (missing Battle of the Network Stars, Bee Movies, Chicago Loop, Have You Seen Me?, Ridin' Delhi, Riding The Tube, and Would Not Make Again)
Bloomsday: 6/14 (Broken Concentration, Concrete, isithuntyes, Keeping Tabs, Schematics, and Split Seven Ways)
Path metas: 5/14 (CH-HA, HA-TH, HA-VA, VA-AR, AR-PI)
Events: 2/5 (Reg Day and Groundhog Day/Anima Oratorio)
Final Notes
Are the small sizes of the pictures in Date and Thyme intended to be part of the challenge? The low resolution is creating some ambiguity in what food goes where for us, mostly among the last two pictures. Also, there was a question at some point about the list of foods at the bottom actually being representative of the food in the pictures, largely because of the blatant cotton candy in the sixth row with no obvious match in the list.
Could we reconstruct the pieces of the events meta from pictures without spoiling the whole puzzle? If so, does anyone have the pictures? Is the order in which we receive the pieces relevant at all (such as Reg Day being last in the actual Hunt for a major reason?)
Submitted April 25, 2019 at 01:08AM by CheshireSolves http://bit.ly/2Pq6YO2
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