Spacing

Snap 21 this weekend- beautiful day, and well constructed high quality puzzles.  Major props to bruce + co and the burninators.  The following is mostly my notes to walk through the images and puzzles to aid my memory. :-)

Before the opening I learned that no part of RTC opens before 9:00.  They must have taken my work schedule to heart...

first puzzle – word transformations – setting a new silly hat record for least time totally rat-holing on the first puzzle!

Puzzle 2 – out in the open with math, mostly solved backwards, but not too bad.

3 – A scenic hike through the biking trails (with several cyclists trying to run us over) we discover:
  A. Someone other than C. Montgomery Burns has heard of Catsup, and
  B. City Hall is not where we thought it was.

4 – Elements and hard trivia.  I usually get by by knowing what order they appear in, but this required knowing properties-  Un-phased (groan) we solved it as a crossword.

 we made a good parade of hats through the Redmond business district.

5 – The letter 21. Set of constrained crossword clues, with matching letter beads for necklace making.  I spent most of my time ordering the letters into piles.

6 & 7 – a crossword + cut out at the skate park.  The cut out had a lot of good aha moments as we clarified what we were building, and before the meta was probably my favorite of the day.

8 – blackjack – getting enough clues to solve the puzzle by winning hands, then we skate by as half our team took french in high school.  huzzah!

9 – Drinking age.  Fun jumbled wordsearch + crossword.  Makes me look forward to a good bit of monastic polo.

10 – meta – reasonable to follow, and also a fun puzzle in its own right, even if I refused to take the tiny pixel sized pieces out of the bag. There may have eventually been wind.

Then a wrap up with sunshine and snacks.

also, reflective sunglasses.

Kicking off the weekend after halloween, SNAP 4 took on som e heavy zombie theming, though we really only saw the walking dead at one point- during the thriller music video.  Overall summary - unexpectedly nicely put together puzzles, and a lot less bashing our heads against the wall than other events.

1. Kickoff - Unexpected productions.

Zombie's take over a mall- caught on multiscreen security cameras.  Nicely constructed, but a combination of poor visibility, and our lack of coordination made this one frustrating for longer than it needed to be.  Which is probably exactly what is needed for an opening puzzle designed to spread teams out a bit.  Eliot wins a cookie both for not killing the rest of us, and successfully turning my bogus data into the right answer. 

High point: Yell out when it's in your row. I! Was that in your row? No...
 

2. Standard Forms

Put the paint by numbers, sudoku, mastermind, and 5 other types together at once to check them off.  Good for splitting up and blazing through.

3. The Path of enlightenment
 
A runaround, with awhile to discover that's what it is.  Nice touch 1 was getting all the tickers in the Seattle center to spill a combination of 1984 and V for Vendetta truisms.  I ran around and collected scraps of nonagrams without figuring out how the puzzle worked, while we learned the set of mantras.  Of course the path to collection was important, so we went out a second time, and I solved tiny puzzles while Jay put together the path.  Sadly, my 30 minute in comment of- Hey we have a picture of an umbrella, I bet the answer is 'do you have an umbrella' came true 45 minutes later when we actually learned the answer.  Must learn to guess.  Also the garden outside of the seattle center is a lot more interesting and extensive than I knew.

4. Zomg Penguins
 
Pop culture puzzle, also good for blazing through.  This was the first stop that was service food.  I really appreciated being able to pick up snacks along the way, since we got so very hungry last time at UW.  Much appreciated.

5. Lunch Menu
Another division of puzzles- more word focused this time.  A very elaborate way to say 'fold airplane' to be sure.  Once we had that figured out (which took about 4 tries) we had to solve a maze given directions- which I failed at and jay successfully told left from right.

High point- There's no way this is semaphore- it just, doesn't make sense. no no no.  (2 minutes pass) Ok it's semaphore.

6. Logic puzzles
Get puzzle, divide work, merge, go.  Nice setup, and effective- plus it left sergey and arthur free to start the eventual metapuzzle.  I didn't really like the answer to this one, since it was just reading out some specific data from the final table. On the other hand I don't know of many logic puzzles that I like the final read out from...  Also - Dining hall #4- possibly be getting a little old by this point.

7. Dominance Game

Had we read the directions correctly- and had I kept a notation that distinguished between < and > effectively, this might have gone a bit faster- but it was still very fun.  In case there are not enough reasons for the internet to mock me, I'll see if I can post a grainy video later.

8. Circle runaround
I skipped out on this one to help with the meta. Here's a picture though:

9. Meta assembly.
We get one more key and put together our meta pieces.  It was surprisingly quick, but we skimmed from the previous three puzzles and that helped.

10. Sanctuary

A low key end to the event- no zombies to destroy, just some stray puzzles that we were glad were not from the actual event.  Ternary phonetics - I'm not sure when those make sense? But we did assemble meta puzzles with the help of black light:

and there was cake... or death.

So in conclusion, I'm very happy with this Snap, and it positions the event to be a solid lightweight additon to seattle puzzling, also Braaaaaaaaaaaaains.

Sitting in suburbia, I'm just realizing how many of my friends from years ago went into music professionally.  From a few minutes of collecting urls:

http://www.myspace.com/theshondes

http://www.myspace.com/julieloydmusic

http://sonsofbill.com/

http://www.myspace.com/morwennajay

http://www.myspace.com/generalnoise

And I'm sure I'm missing more.

After the return of my third rock band peripheral there is hope!  The new pedal design looks to be a good bit more reinforced.

old:

new:

It still doesn't help me through 'run for the hills' though...

hinter- Did you hear anything unusual on the golf course?
me - nope
hinter- Didn't you hear them say 'fore' ?
me - How is that unusual? We're on a golf course! <phone taken away>

As fond as I am of saying it only snows in Redmond once a year, Redmond is still more fond of proving me wrong.

When I woke up this morning, there was snow on the ground, but the real show started in the early afternoon.

By the evening there was enough in my back yard to make a snowman, so I did.

He didn't want to pose for a picture with me, but I made him anyway.  I think he's trying to get away in this shot.