dr_whom

As is traditional, there's the list of places I've been in 2024. Places I spent the night are in bold, places I'd never been before are in italics, and places I went to on multiple unconnected occasions are underlined.

Newburgh, N.Y.

Syracuse, N.Y.

San Diego, Calif.

La Mesa, Calif.

Philadelphia, Penna.

Coronado, Calif.

Beverly, Mass.

Salem, Mass.

Corinth, N.Y.

Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
Cambridge, Mass.

DeWitt, N.Y.

Cairo, N.Y.

Hudson, N.Y.

Cazenovia, N.Y.

Escondido, Calif.

Miami Beach, Fla.

Chula Vista, Calif.

Pittstown, N.J.

Franklin Township, N.J.

This is the fourth year in a row that I've had to change my travel plans for winter break at the last minute.

This year, William Labov, my PhD supervisor, passed away in mid-December, and the LSA is hosting a memorial for him on January 9 in Philadelphia, I wasn't planning to go to the LSA this year, but I've rearranged my travel schedule to allow me to go to the memorial.
Last year, I was planning to go to the LSA, and then I got COVID on New Year's Day, so I canceled my plans and went back to San Diego immediately, skipping the LSA and doing the Mystery Hunt remotely.
Two years ago, I also got COVID on New Year's Day, and instead of going back to San Diego immediately, I stayed in Massachusetts an extra week and traveled back after I had recovered, and did the Mystery Hunt remotely.
Three years ago, I was planning to go to the LSA, but because of high COVID incidence, the American Dialect Society announced that all of its sessions would be held on Zoom, so I canceled my travel plans and attended the ADS sessions remotely and didn't get COVID.

I don't have anything much to say about this; but it's weird that it's happened four times in a row now.

A map of the US showcasing the state highway marker sign designs of each state

Map from https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1arvr8r/state_highway_marker_designs_for_every_us_state/

Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, West Virginia: plain squares. Normal, reasonable.

New Jersey, Delaware, Kentucky, Mississippi, Iowa: plain circles. Also fine.

Rhode Island, Maryland, Indiana, Illinois, Texas, Montana: Plain squares with the state name. Helpful if you can’t remember what state you’re in, I guess.

New York, Virginia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Oregon, Hawaii: A little more creative than the basic square or circle, but still a nice, simple sign shape. Several of them are shield shapes, reminiscent of the US Highway and Interstate Highway signs, which is also a nice touch.

Vermont, California: Add the state name and a bit of color to an otherwise simple shape. Not too bad. But also, I live in California and the state highway signs don’t always have the word “California” on them. How many of these are exaggerated?

Michigan: That big M in that font is the logo of the University of Michigan. Sure do love their college football, Michiganders.

New Hampshire, Pennsylvania. A recognizable state symbol that still makes a fairly simple sign shape without getting in-your-face about it. Minus points to New Hampshire for still using as a state symbol a rock formation that collapsed in 2003.

New Mexico: The red Zia sun symbol is one of the best emblems of any state and fits well with a simple round sign. Having to fit around the number makes the proportions a bit wonky but overall I like it.

Kansas: Oh, I get it, it’s a sunflower. I like the concept and the shape, but I worry that in yellow it could get mistaken for a caution sign.

Utah: The drawing of a beehive is a little cartoonish; more detail than a highway sign needs. Pushing it.

Washington: The head of George Washington is just a terrible shape for a sign. Ridiculous, absolutely not.

Ohio, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, South Dakota. Using the shape of your state as the shape of a sign sometimes works, and definitely communicates that they’re state highways. I’ll allow it. Bonus points to Ohio for having a state that’s actually shaped like a shield.

Louisiana, North Dakota, Arizona: State map and name seems a little redundant in my opinion.

Florida, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Idaho, Nevada: States that aren’t well suited to be the shape of a sign, but they squeeze them in there anyway. Trying too hard.

Minnesota: Tiny map and state name and multiple colors, too much going on.

Nebraska, Wyoming, Alaska. Simple shapes with the state name on top and a symbol on the bottom. These ones seem a little crowded, and the symbols are mainly too small to really come across. Alaska is the best of them since the Big Dipper is a simpler design than Wyoming’s cowboy and Nebraska’s Covered Wagon With Two Passengers Being Pulled Over A Hill By A Team Of Oxen.

Colorado: You’d think the state flag would be a good design for a highway sign, but it just comes across as garish and squeezes the number into the bottom half.

South Carolina: State name, and tiny map, and tiny state symbols inside the tiny map? Save it for your license plates, buddy.

Here are the places I've been in 2023. As usual, places I spent the night are in bold, places I'd never been before are in italics, and places I went on multiple unconnected occasions are underlined.

Boston, Mass.
Beverly, Mass.
San Diego, Calif.
Borrego Springs, Calif.
Escondido, Calif.
Lemon Grove, Calif.
El Cajon, Calif.
Encinitas, Calif.
Vista, Calif.
Philadelphia, Penna.
Springfield, Penna.
Nether Providence Township, Penna.
Poway, Calif.
Brookline, Mass.
Cambridge, Mass.
National City, Calif.
Somerville, Mass.
Danvers, Mass.
Athens, N.Y.
Catskill, N.Y.
Greenport, N.Y.
Round Top, N.Y.
Ghent, N.Y.
Syracuse, N.Y.
La Mesa, Calif.
Newburgh, N.Y.

Travel and the world were more normal in 2022 than 2021; although the pandemic is still ongoing, at least I have an ordinary-sized list of places I've been in the last twelve months. As usual, places I spent the night are in bold, places I'd never been before are in italics, and places I went on multiple unconnected occasions are underlined.

San Diego, Calif.
Los Angeles, Calif.
Del Mar, Calif.
Long Beach, Calif.
Beverly, Mass.
Cambridge, Mass.
Salem, Mass,
Chula Vista, Calif.
Syracuse, N.Y.
DeWitt, N.Y.
Newburgh, N.Y.
Philipstown, N.Y.
La Mesa, Calif.
Northampton, Mass.
Whately, Mass.
Worcester, Mass.
Corinth, N.Y.
Adams, Mass.
North Adams, Mass.
Coronado, Calif.
San Jose, Calif.
Philadelphia, Penna.
Boston, Mass.

If you write out the alphabet:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

...obviously each letter is used the same number of times: 1/26 of the entire string, about 3.8% of the time.

If you replace each letter with its NATO alphabet symbol:

ALFA BRAVO CHARLIE DELTA ECHO FOXTROT GOLF HOTEL INDIA JULIETT KILO LIMA MIKE NOVEMBER OSCAR PAPA QUEBEC ROMEO SIERRA TANGO UNIFORM VICTOR WHISKEY XRAY YANKEE ZULU

...then the appearances of the letters in that 138-letter string are as follows:

A: 14 (10.1%)
B: 3 (2.2%)
C: 5 (3.6%)
D: 2 (1.4%)
E: 15 (10.9%)
F: 4 (2.9%)
G: 2 (1.4%)
H: 4 (2.9%)
I: 11 (8.0%)
J: 1 (0.7%)
K: 4 (2.9%)
L: 9 (6.5%)
M: 5 (3.6%)
N: 5 (3.5%)
O: 14 (10.1%)
P: 2 (1.4%)
Q: 1 (0.7%)
R: 11 (8.0%)
S: 3 (2.2%)
T: 8 (5.8%)
U: 5 (3.6%)
V: 3 (2.2%)
W: 1 (0.7%)
X: 2 (1.4%)
Y: 3 (2.2%)
Z: 1 (0.7%)

And then, if you take that string, and replace each letter in it with its NATO alphabet symbol, so ALFA becomes ALFA LIMA FOXTROT ALFA and BRAVO becomes BRAVO ROMEO ALFA VICTOR OSCAR and so on...

...and you iterate that process, each time replacing each latter with its NATO alphabet symbol, it looks like the percentages asymptotically converge toward values approximated by:

A: 15.8%
B: 0.8%
C: 5.9%
D: 2.1%
E: 9.2%
F: 4.3%
G: 1.0%
H: 3.8%
I: 8.3%
J: 0%
K; 1.4%
L: 7.6%
M: 5.1%
N: 3.2%
O: 13.0%
P: 0%
Q: 0%
R: 9.1%
S: 3.3%
T: 3.9%
U: 0%
V: 1.0%
W: 0%
X: 1.1%
Y: 0.3%
Z: 0.%

I haven't proven those or calculated the exact limits or anything; I just iterated the process a bunch of times until the first decimal place stopped changing. I think it's interesting how the limits differ from the percentages in the first iteration, in the string ALFA BRAVO etc. For instance, in the first iteration, E is the most common letter at 10.9%, but in the limit A and O are both well above E; this is because a lot of the mass of E in the first iteration comes from words like JULIETT, QUEBEC, and YANKEE, which don't propagate themselves much (if at all) in further iterations, whereas A appears in a more frequently-occurring set of letters, such as OSCAR and INDIA and an extra time in ALFA. C and U both start out at the same rate in the first iteration, but C stabilizes at a relatively high 5.9% (well above average!) while U approaches zero, just because C appears in the highly-frequent ECHO and OSCAR, while U appears only in JULIETT, QUEBEC, and ZULU (aside from itself, UNIFORM), and J, Q, and Z don't appear in any other letters, so U just adds a paltry four occurrences per iteration while most letters are increasing exponentially.

I don't know if this is useful for anyone, or anything, but I did the calculations, and figured I should record the result someplace.

Map of where Star Trek characters are from

A map of Star Trek major characters who canonically were born on or grew up on Earth, and where they’re from. Across the bottom row are several characters who are canonically from or implied to be from Earth, but there’s no specific location that they’re from directly stated in canon.

Some things to observe:

The majority of these characters are from the U.S. Most of them are white; notable exceptions include Sisko (from New Orleans) and Sulu (from San Francisco). Sisko and Sulu were very valuable representation for men of color and I love them both, but the writers weren’t very creative in having them be from a couple of the most obvious cities for a Black American and an Asian American to be from. Kudos to the Voyager writers for defying stereotypes and deciding Harry Kim was born in South Carolina.
Not a single character from China or South Asia, and only one from Southeast Asia—the most densely populated regions on the planet. Nobody canonically from the Middle East or North Africa either. (Alexander Siddig is from North Africa, but there’s no canonical information on where Julian Bashir is from, and it seems implied that he’s from England.)
Basically there’s what the writers obviously think of as the Default Places someone can be from on Earth (the U.S. and a handful of places in northwestern Europe), and then a handful of characters from Exotic Foreign Places such as Russia, Japan, and Africa™.
The distribution hasn’t gotten noticeably better over the fifty-something years of the Star Trek franchise.

( Some methodological notes on how locations and pointers were chosen: )

Another year, another Mystery Hunt held remotely. I still miss going to Cambridge and seeing all my Mystery Hunt friends, but it was nice to be able to do puzzles with my partner K.! I'm gradually getting used to not seeing a lot of the puzzles, as my team has gradually evolved from a top-5 team ten years ago (even when we weren't trying to win) to a team that Gets Together And Solves Some Puzzles now, as we've gotten older (and, perhaps, as Hunt sizes have increased). And I think Hunting from home has contributed to that feeling for me, since (unlike at the Hunt in Cambridge in person) I'm not doing basically nothing all day but the Mystery Hunt, but also doing normal household things like cooking dinner, taking out the trash, and so on, which contributes to me seeing less of the Hunt itself.

I think Palindrome put together (with one significant exception) a really good Hunt this year! Basically all of the puzzles I worked on had interesting concepts and fair designs, and I enjoy the way Palindrome uses flavortext cluing. The "bookspace" theme was very broad, but not so much as to make the Hunt feel non-cohesive, and it enabled each round to have its own cohesive theme. (When the Hunt began and I saw that the theme of the first round was children's books, I was like "okay, and so I assume the next rounds will be other genres like mystery and horror," and I was very gratified when those did in fact turn out to be the next rounds.) The round themes seemed pretty well-implemented, in that each puzzle in a round made at least a decent effort to tie in to the round's theme in its content or flavortext, even in the opening rounds where every puzzle's title had to be the name of a children's book. Moreover, they did a good job tying puzzle answers in to the puzzle's theme or flavortext as well, which is nice both for the sake of elegance and because it makes backsolving feel more rewarding. (If you know one of the puzzles in this round must have the answer JAVELIN THROW, but you don't know which, maybe you should guess it for the puzzle whose title is "The Last Olympian"!)

Many recent Mystery Hunts have begun with "warmup rounds", so to speak—a self-contained round with somewhat easier puzzles that has a rewarding structure and conclusion of its own, which smaller or less experienced teams may still be able to complete and feel a sense of accomplishment. This Hunt actually had two such warmup rounds: the opening "Investigation" round, with 10 puzzles and a simple metapuzzle (helpfully flagged for new solvers with an explanation of what a metapuzzle is!), followed by the more complex "Ministry" round, with 25 puzzles, five metas, a meta-meta, and a concluding mini-runaround, still relatively compact and self-contained but with the feeling of a mini-Hunt, even with a prize at the end for teams that completed it. (This isn't counting the pre-Hunt "Star Rats" puzzle round that I never got around to looking at—and so the only thing I have to say about that is that, as always, I find fake Mystery Hunt themes a little tiresome.) Conceptually, I like this scheme a great deal—giving teams at a wider range of skill levels something that feels like full-Hunt experience. And I quite liked the internal structure of the Ministry round; I like the challenge of structures where you have to figure our which puzzle answers feed which metas. However...

The Investigation and Ministry rounds formed bottlenecks where you had to solve the round's meta before you could move on to the next round. The Hunt FAQ stated "Every time you solve a feeder (non-meta) puzzle, you unlock another puzzle.... If there are no more puzzles in that round to unlock, then it will unlock a puzzle in the earliest unlocked round that still has puzzles left to unlock," but that apparently wasn't true for the transition from the Ministry round to the main Bookspace rounds, and my team began to notice it as we solved the last few Ministry puzzles and saw no new puzzles being unlocked. That kind of bottlenecking can be extremely miserable for solvers, especially if they get stuck on a harder-than-expected puzzle. That's exactly what happened to us: we solved all five metas in the Ministry round, backsolved the answers to any individual puzzles we hadn't solved yet, and then the entire team had only one puzzle open for hours. And we got stuck and made no progress and had no idea what to do on that puzzle for quite some time (more on this below), meaning there was an hour or more during which our team had nothing to do except stare at a puzzle that we didn't know how to solve, until we were eligible to request hints on it. That's never a situation you want a solving team to be in. Fortunately for us it happened late at night, so many of our team members were asleep, and by the time the rest of the team woke up we had finally solved the meta and completed the Fruit Around puzzles, so there were multiple new puzzles open for the morning squad to dive into. But for those of us solving between 10pm and 2am PST, the Ministry bottleneck left us very frustrated. I understand that for plot reasons Palindrome didn't want to unlock the main Bookspace rounds until the Ministry meta-meta and Fruit Around had been completed, but I really don't think a team should ever be stuck with only one puzzle to work on until endgame of the whole Hunt.

On the other hand, I really want to compliment Palindrome for the thought and effort they put into accessibility for the Hunt. In many cases, they provided text transcripts for puzzles presented in audio format, and text descriptions for puzzles presented in image format. That wasn't always possible—there were some puzzles where any verbal description of the images would have given away too much of the puzzle, or where the audio element was untranscribable noise, for instance—but I appreciate that did this where they could!

I wish Hunt wrapup meetings would return to a greater emphasis on puzzle content. What I go to wrapup for is to learn about how the rounds and metas worked; I'm not that interested in the writing team's internal logistics, how artists were selected, etc.

What follows are some potentially spoiler-containing comments on specific puzzles!

( Puzzles within! )
A few other puzzles I worked on and enjoyed, but don't have any comments on: My First ABC, Crewel, the Herschel Hayden meta, the Randy and Riley Rotch meta, Called Onto the Carpet, the "Unfinished Symphonies" minipuzzle of Endless Practice, and Fruits Stickers (though I moved away from the puzzle after we solved the clues and identified the animals, before moving on to the step involving Japanese orthography and an anime series).

This was a great Hunt, notwithstanding the Ministry bottleneck and I wish I'd seen more of it. Next year, hopefully, back in Cambridge!

At the end of every year, I post a list of where I've been. Last year I optimistically said "Here's hoping for a 2021 with more places" than 2020, and you know what, I went to even fewer places in 2021 than I did in 2020. Nevertheless, here they are; as always, places I spent the night are in bold, places I'd never been before are in italics, and places I went on multiple unconnected occasions are underlined.

San Diego, Calif.
Del Mar, Calif.
Beverly, Mass.
Cambridge, Mass.
Boston, Mass.
Newton, Mass.
Billerica, Mass.
La Mesa, Calif.

Onward and upward!

I was talking with my mother and sister the other day about, how many towns in Massachusetts have indigenous names? And the answer seemed to be... not very many, but I wasn't sure. So I went ahead and made this map, and it looks like the answer is... about 15 out of 351 towns in Massachusetts have names derived from indigenous Algonquian languages. Most of the town names in Massachusetts come from England.

Take the accuracy of this map with a grain of salt; I did very haphazard research to create it, mostly on Wikipedia and town history websites, with a lot of educated guessing. But here it is, in case you're interested:

Map of Massachusetts with towns colored according to the source of their names

Map of Massachusetts with towns colored according to the source of their names

Below are some more detailed notes and examples of what the colors mean:

( Details and examples )

It's been a week since the 2021 Mystery Hunt, and I've finally got time to put down my thoughts about the Hunt! Due to the Current Condition of the World, this Hunt was held entirely online, and as a result this was my (and presumably a lot of people's) first time doing the Hunt from home rather than in a room full of my teammates in Cambridge. The structure of the Hunt was built around an MMO-type online environment where solvers would explore an alternate-universe version of MIT called the "Perpendicular Institute of the World" (⟂IW—i.e., MIT upside-down); I was surprised to learn at wrapup that this had been the plan all along, before COVID forced the Hunt to be all-virtual, since it seemed like such a perfect substitute for the role the physical MIT campus usually plays in the Hunt.

Anyway, I barely interacted with the ⟂IW virtual environment at all—in part because I was absorbed in solving the puzzles themselves; in part because, well, during a normal Mystery Hunt I don't usually interact with the physical MIT campus all that much; and in part because bandwidth issues or something that meant I couldn't really have the ⟂IW "Projection Device" and video chats with my co-solving teammates open at the same time without severe lags. I think the Hunt's novel puzzle-unlocking mechanism sounded really clever—you unlock new puzzles by interacting with NPCs in the ⟂IW virtual world, and solving puzzles can earn you access to new areas of the map so you can find new NPCs—although I never really interacted with it myself. The writing team said their plan was to simultaneously make the Projection Device essential to the Hunt while also making sure people who weren't interested in it and just wanted to focus on solving puzzles had the opportunity to do that, and I guess from my vantage point in that second group it seems to me that the plan worked well enough!

Being at home rather than together in one place with the team meant that it was harder to get a feel for what other people on the team were working on, and thus the overall structure of the hunt and its rounds. In Cambridge, when people are working on a metapuzzle they usually do it on the big whiteboard in the front of the room, which makes it easy to see where we stand with respect to progress on a meta, when people are working in it and when they have insights, and so on. I think the absence of that physical presence this year it part of the reason why I had little involvement in metapuzzle solving, and it may be why it took my team a long time to get started on some of the metas—it was hard to see where were were on them and prioritize. Or at least that was how I experienced it.

I like the trend in Mystery Hunt design where the Hunt begins with a single round with a straightforward meta structure, and then once that is completed it opens up additional rounds which might each have their own widely varying structures. So some of the later rounds in this Hunt had multiple submetas in parallel, some had just one meta for all the puzzles, some had submetas sort of nested within each other: having each round not only have a different metapuzzle but a potentially different structure of how the metapuzzles relate to the puzzles keeps solvers on their toes and adds another layer of interest. I didn't work on the giga/kilo/milli/nano round meta structure at all, but I want to especially highlight the innovative structural conceit of that one: a round which is solved by backsolving an impossible puzzle based on the meta answer, rather than on extracting the meta answer itself; and backsolving that reveals that it's the meta answer to another round which works the same way, so instead of solving puzzles to get to a metapuzzle to get to a meta-meta, you start from the meta-meta and work down to the bottom-level puzzles. I have no idea what the experience of solving that was like, so I don't know if it was actually fun to do (and it seems to depend more on pre-existing familiarity with typical Hunt round structure, in order to subvert it, than most metas do); but I'm very impressed by the idea and by the level of experimentation with what defines a Mystery Hunt round and metapuzzle.

I'm also grateful to the writers this year for not giving us a fake theme: the theme presented at kickoff was what the theme of the Hunt actually was. There were plot developments over the course of the Hunt that kept the theme interesting, but not radical twists revealing that the theme was something other than what we'd been told it was. I think a fake theme has been done effectively approximately once, and that was in 2003. I was wondering, given the "upside-down" gimmick of the name ⟂IW, if it would turn out to be a Stranger Things theme, but I'm just as happy it didn't.

Finally, the puzzles! Almost all of the puzzles that I worked on myself I thought were great. I mean I have some criticisms here and there, but overall these seemed like an extremely solid set of puzzles—even though it seemed like there were a whole lot of errata emails making corrections to them! I think the remote-solving experience pushed me to do more beginning-to-end solves on puzzles; often in Cambridge I sort of flit between puzzles when I hear people on the other side of the room doing something that sounds interesting, or when we hit a dry patch on a puzzle and stop making forward progress. Not being in a room with the rest of the team made me more likely to focus on a single puzzle instead of getting distracted by bits and pieces of others. There were a few puzzles I dropped in on in the middle, and a few I abandoned because I wasn't making progress, but I think I did way more complete puzzles than I often have in recent Hunt years.

Some comments I have on specific puzzles!

( Spoilers below )

Some other puzzles that I worked on and enjoyed, but don't have any comments about, include the following: Common Knowledge, Don't Let Me Down, For Better or For Worse, Not Again!, The Yew Labs metapuzzle, Exactly, and Look What We Drew. And while I was looking through puzzles to write this blog post, I came across Title of the Puzzle, a delightful little puzzle that I never actually saw during the Hunt but that I highly recommend.

Well, every New Year's Eve I post a list of everywhere I've been in the preceding year, and this year the list is unsurprisingly very short. As usual, places I spent the night are in bold, places I'd never been before are in italics, and places I went on multiple occasions are underlined. 2020 is the first calendar year of my life in which I spent no time in Beverly, Massachusetts.

Ocean Grove, N.J.
New York, N.Y.
Syracuse, N.Y.
San Diego, Calif.
Cambridge, Mass.
Coronado, Calif.
Chula Vista, Calif.
Pauma Valley, Calif.
La Mesa, Calif.

...and that's it! Here's hoping for a 2021 with more places.

In North American major league sports, teams are usually named after the city where they play their home games (Boston Celtics, Philadelphia Flyers, Indianapolis Colts, etc.) or in whose metropolitan area they play their home games (New York Giants, Dallas Cowboys, Los Angeles Angels, etc.). There are some exceptions, however—teams whose names use something other than a city name to identify where they're from.

All of the 170 current teams in the NBA, WNBA, NHL, NFL, CFL, Major League Baseball, and Major League Soccer are named after places. 135 of them are named after their home cities, using the city's full name. Of the remaining 35:

1 is named after a part of a city, rather than a whole city:
Brooklyn Nets

3 are named after an abbreviation of the city name, rather than the full city name:
LA Galaxy
Real Salt Lake
Vegas Golden Knights

3 are named after a broader region including the city, rather than the city itself:
Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Lightning, and Rays

21 are named after their home state or province rather than city:
Arizona Cardinals, Coyotes, and Diamondbacks
Connecticut Suns
Colorado Avalanche, Rapids, and Rockies
Florida Panthers
Indiana Fever, Pacers
Minnesota Lynx, Timberwolves, Twins, United FC, Vikings, and Wild
New Jersey Devils
Saskatchewan Rough Riders
Tennessee Titans
Texas Rangers
Utah Jazz
(I'm counting "New York" as a city rather than a state name, since all such teams are in the city or its metropolitan area.)

2 are named after an abbreviation for a province or state-level unit:
BC Lions
D.C. United

1 is named after a nickname for a state:
Golden State Warriors

4 are named after a multi-state region:
Carolina Hurricanes and Panthers
New England Patriots and Revolution

By far the most common non-city name is Minnesota, used for six teams—in fact, all teams in these leagues located in the state of Minnesota use the state name; no other state with more than one team in it has that distinction. The league with the greatest number of non-city names, in both percentage and raw total, is the NHL, with 8 non-city names (Vegas; Tampa Bay; Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, New Jersey; Carolina) out of 31 teams.

The big story from this year's Mystery Hunt, I guess, is the restrictions and confusion around overnight solving. About a week before the Hunt, the organizers, team Left Out, announced that MIT was refusing to waive their official policy against on-campus events taking place between 1am and 7am, and so teams would have to vacate their reserved solving rooms overnight and would not even be allowed to do on-campus puzzle data gathering between those hours. After what I can only assume was an intense series of negotiations between Left Out and Puzzle Club on the one hand and MIT administration on the other hand, they eventually decided that teams with MIT student members could remain in their rooms, and you could do Hunt activities in MIT public spaces overnight as long as you wore an official Mystery Hunt name tag. (My team didn't have to vacate our room, as it turned out, because we didn't reserve it through the Hunt organizers, but there was some confusion on that point at various times.) Left Out did a heroic job making sure the Hunt could go on as usual under the circumstances, and I really want to salute the last-minute work they must have had to do.

I don't want the overnight issues to overshadow what I think really should have been the big news from this Hunt, which is this: Left Out finally instituted automated answer checking. When I started doing the Hunt, the way you confirmed a correct answer was that you phoned the organizers' official Hunt phone line and they would tell you if your answer was correct or not. At peak times you might spend a long time getting busy signals and waiting to get your answer confirmed. In 2006, when my team ran the Hunt, we switched to a system where you click a button on the website to put your team on a queue, and then someone on the organizing team would call you back to check your answer, and with small changes that was basically the system for 15 years. This year Left Out finally bit the bullet and made the change everyone knew had to happen eventually: you just type your answer and click "submit", and the system instantaneously tells you if you're correct or not. Past writing teams had resisted instituting that in part because it makes it easy to just spam guesses until you get the right answer; but Left Out had a system that imposed a time delay on answer checking if you submitted too many wrong answers for a puzzle too quickly, and that usually worked as sufficient disincentive for too much guessing. Having a fanfare play for everyone on the team who had the Hunt page open when anyone on the team submitted a correct answer was an inspired decision; it really made the answer confirmations seem like a celebratory communal team event rather than just one person's accomplishment.

Another Hunt-wide innovation I liked a great deal was the Penny Passes—the reward for attending events was a pass that would let you unlock a new puzzle in a round of your choice. In a Hunt with pretty strict unlocking—basically you unlock a new puzzle when you solve a puzzle—these were a good tool to keep the Hunt moving and keep people from getting stuck, without just handing out free answers as some teams have done in the past (which seems much more high-stakes!).

I liked the overall round structure of the Hunt—it wasn't too complicated, but I appreciated the difference between the more straightforward inner rounds and the more experimental outer rounds.

( spoilers about the structures of later rounds )

My team didn't quite manage to solve the Creative Pictures meta, and never even made enough progress on the other three outer rounds to get a sense of what their structures were or how they worked, so we really only saw about two-thirds of the Hunt. We haven't been trying to win since 2010, but over the past ten years we've moved from still being a top-5 team to a top-10 team to a top-20 team, as we get farther from our peak and other teams put more effort into improving their solving. It's an interesting adjustment to make: I'm still used to, even if we don't get to endgame, getting a solid idea of the structure of the Hunt and how its rounds worked; and this year we barely even got into the last three rounds and didn't get a chance to experience whatever interesting meta structures they contained. I was a little disappointed about missing out on some of the key parts of the Hunt that I'm used to seeing.

The Hunt opened with the literal, real-life on-stage wedding of two members of the writing team, and honestly I felt a little weird about it? The invitation they sent out a week before the Hunt was just an alteration of the invitation we had sent around for Mario and Peach's wedding in the 2011 Mario Hunt; it both seems a little inappropriate of them to literally just copy our team's design, and certainly didn't make it clear that this wedding (unlike the one in 2011) was going to be real. And so there I am unexpectedly a guest at an intimate moment in the lives of two people I don't know; I'm glad they got to have their wedding in a venue that was meaningful for them, but it felt inappropriate for them to be imposing their important personal moment on everyone who was just there to solve puzzles. The Hunt theme fakeout in the middle of the ceremony was pretty funny... but the segue from the wedding to the actual Hunt theme seemed very awkward and tacked-on. Maybe I would have felt better about having a wedding at Hunt kickoff if the wedding actually had something to do with the Hunt, since introducing the actual Hunt theme is what kickoff is for?

That said, the theme of the Hunt was delightful and I definitely would not have preferred a Hunt that was actually wedding-themed. Left Out really nailed the aesthetic of the cheesy, past-its-prime, low-budget amusement park; I loved the mismatched collection of mascots. And the overall amusement park theme allowed for a lot of fun sub-themes. I think the writers did a really good job of keeping the puzzles on-theme in each round, either through the actual puzzle content or just the flavortext. The pressed-penny souvenirs were maybe my favorite component of the Hunt: they were a vehicle for the endgame puzzle, of course, but they also put a nice capstone on each round, tied in to the Mystery Hunt as an institution by being "coins", and perfectly fit the thematic aesthetic as cheap souvenirs from a cheap amusement park; and moreover, they were just fun to make. They had a station set up in a room on campus where you would feed a penny into the press and turn the crank yourself to flatten it and print the puzzle/souvenir symbols on it. The Left Out members running the workshop when I went to get the Spaceopolis penny were kind of perfectionists, making me run four or five pennies through the press till I got one they were satisfied with (I spent five cents doing that!), but after I got back to the team's solving space I saw why: some of the other pennies we had gotten from earlier rounds were not as well flattened, and you could still see the Lincoln Memorial on them, obscuring the puzzle-relevant symbols. During cleanup at the end of Hunt, I nabbed the penny I pressed to add to my collection of Hunt souvenirs.

Here are my spoilery thoughts on some of the specific puzzles that I worked on and thought were noteworthy:

( Spoilers within! )

Puzzles I worked on and liked, but don't have much to say about: Moat-er Boats, The Scottish Display; Goldilocks; Gallery of Tomorrow; Sand Witches; the Witches' Hut metapuzzle; The Holy Cup of the Raven-God; Teacups; Dog.

Congratulations to Left Out on an excellent and very entertaining Hunt; I just wish I'd been able to see more of it!

Here's the list of places I went in 2019! Places I spent the night are in bold; places I'd never been before are in italics; places I went to on multiple different occasions are underlined.

Ocean Grove, N.J.
New York, N.Y.
Syracuse, N.Y.
Fayetteville, N.Y.
North Adams, Mass.
Cambridge, Mass.
San Diego, Calif.
Pittsburgh, Penna.
Ithaca, N.Y.
Lansing, N.Y.
Beverly, Mass.
Salem, Mass.
Coronado, Calif.
Corinth, N.Y.
Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
DeWitt, N.Y.
Gloucester, Mass.
Arlington, Mass.
Boston, Mass.
Danvers, Mass.
Somerville, Mass.
Canaan, N.Y.
West Stockbridge, Mass.
Onondaga, N.Y.
Hancock, N.Y.
Encinitas, Calif.
Julian, Calif.
Eugene, Ore.
Worcester, Mass.
Moorestown, N.J.

Now that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has finally won an Emmy Award for its songwriting, this seems like a good time to share my opinions on the top 10 songs of the series as a whole. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was a TV sitcom about Rebecca Bunch, a lawyer who quits her job at a fancy firm in New York and moves to West Covina, California to chase happiness and Josh Chan, the guy she dated for like a month in high school. It was surprisingly honest and serious about mental illness, relationships, and sexuality, and more importantly for my purposes today it was a musical, with at least two songs in every episode. I approach Crazy Ex-Girlfriend as a musical theater fan, coming from the perspective of "when the emotion becomes too strong for speech, you sing"—i.e., the songs I like best are usually the ones that illuminate the characters' emotions or relationships in a meaningful way. (Spoilers for the show are below, of course. CW for misogynist term in title of one song.)

( the top-10 list )

Honorable mention, in no particular order: His Status is Preferred; JAP Battle (CW for fatphobia); Gettin' Bi; (Tell Me I'm Okay) Patrick; We'll Never Have Problems Again; I Could if I Wanted To; After Everything I've Done for You (That You Didn't Ask For); You're My Best Friend (and I Know I'm Not Yours); It Was a Shitshow; Who's the New Guy? (CW: making fun of a character's "manic episodes")

Picking up a meme from

landofnowhere, I'm going to go through Shakespeare's plays and list which ones I've read/seen/acted in. This post is partly in honor of the Underground Shakespeare Company at the University of Pennsylvania, of which I was a member for 9 years and with which I performed in 11 plays and countless one-off scenes, and which recently announced its dissolution after 18 years of Shakespeare. I definitely can't remember every production of these plays I've ever seen or every time I've read them, but I'll do what I can.

( the plays! )

My TV still can't receive CBS for some reason, so I had to subscribe to a free trial of CBS All Access to watch the Tony Awards! (I guess "some reason" is, CBS wants people to subscribe to All Access, so they deliberately have a low-power over-the-air broadcast that some consumers in their broadcast region can't receive, most likely.)
James Corden remains a pretty good host, though many of his bits weren't really about him being funny but about him getting people from the audience to be funny.
The opening number was okay and fairly entertaining. The theme was basically "live theater is so much better than TV (except when TV is better that theater)", which lost a little bit of its oomph since I was watching it on my tiny computer screen with a three-hour broadcast delay. I don't think it was as good as some of the Tony openings in recent years, whose topics were more about the experience of making theater rather than the experience of watching theater.
I think the best host bit was the "Michael in the Bathroom" parody, especially with the cameo appearances from past hosts. However, I did notice that there was never any explanation of what they were parodying; understanding why they were doing this song hinged on the viewer recognizing it as a parody of a song from Be More Chill, a show that was nominated for one Tony but wasn't otherwise especially highlighted. I only recognized it because Standing Room Only, the showtunes radio program I listen to on weekends, had played the song a couple times in the last few weeks. (I certainly don't know any other songs from Be More Chill.) But since I did recognize it, I thought it was a pretty good parody.
Celia Keenan-Bolger received her first Tony nomination when she was 27 years old, for playing 13-year-old Olive Ostrovsky in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. This year she's 41 years old and won a Tony for playing 9-year-old Scout Finch. She's apparently aging in the wrong direction, like Merlin.
I'm a little surprised that Scout is considered a featured role rather than a leading role in To Kill a Mockingbird, but then I haven't seen the play.
Also, Celia Keenan-Bolger's speech about how important Detroit is to her made a nifty segue into the Motown music of Ain't Too Proud, the Temptations musical. That can't possibly have been intentional, can it? Cool serendipity, anyway.
I thought Santino Fontana was great in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, but in the number from Tootsie he really looked like he was phoning it in. Based on what I saw of his performance in that, I was astonished that he won the Best Actor Tony for it. (Tootsie also just... doesn't look like a very good musical, based on that number. Plus, like, it's presumably not my place to make this judgment, especially given that I haven't seen the show, but it looks likely that Tootsie is... not super cool for trans people.)
I'm so glad the Tonys returned to inviting the Best Play–nominated authors to come onstage and talk a bit about their plays—especially after last year when there was basically nothing about the plays at all. If it was James Corden's idea to do this, as one of the presenters mentioned, more power to him. I still think it would have been nice to see some clips or something of what those plays looked like, though.
Jez Butterworth using his speech to salute his wife, Laura Donnelly, to recognize all the work she had done on the show, especially while pregnant, was a really sweet touch, I thought. But I would have actually liked to hear what The Ferryman was about, especially since it won Best Play! Okay, I know he said I could Google what it was about, and I eventually did, but it still seemed like information missing from the Tony show.
Andre de Shields is just all-around amazing.
Everyone kept talking about the fact that the revival of Oklahoma! was, like, a modern and innovative reimagining of the show that nevertheless changed none of the book or lyrics... but nobody ever explained what was moderrn and innovative about it. Nevertheless, it looked pretty good and I'd be happy to see the show. Ali Stroker's performance of "I Cain't Say No" was certainly compelling. During the performance of "Oklahoma!" the camera kept spinning around and making it hard to follow the song.
Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus definitely sounds interesting and I'd like to see it.
Rachel Chavkin used her acceptance speech very well to call for more diversity in Broadway production.
Sophia Anne Caruso in Beetlejuice definitely looks a lot like a young Winona Ryder.
The number from Beetlejuice didn't convince me that the show was worth seeing. The choice of adding a bunch Tonys-specific jokes to the Beetlejuice song was entertaining and gave a good sense of what kind of show it is, but it would have been nice to see what the song is actually like in the context of the show it's from. Also, "The Whole 'Being Dead' Thing" is a really bad song title.
Having a bunch of white people singing "The Banana Boat Song" was kind of a bad look right after Chavkin's speech about diversity.
I understand how they're going to put a lot of technical awards during the commercials, and just show brief excerpts of the acceptance speeches. But if Jessica Paz was really the first woman to win a Tony for sound design, it would have been nice to hear an excerpt of her acceptance speech, instead of Nevin Steinberg's speech describing her as such.
Kristin Chenoweth's introduction to The Prom playing on her image was kind of fun, if a little bit too on-the-nose.
The Prom itself looks like, as K. said, "dumb wholesome fun". (She also said "why is everyone in costumes from West Side Story?")
I've listened to the original cast album of Songs for a New World a lot, so I know Brooks Ashmanskas's voice very well, but I've never actually seen him before. His performance in the number from The Prom seemed a little broad to me, but he looked like he was having a good time.
It seemed like there were a lot of Teleprompter errors over the course of the show—people misreading their lines and whatnot—culminating with Marisa Tomei just standing there and saying the prompter hadn't turned on yet.
I think there were only three revivals with the authors' name as part of the title this year: Arthur Miller's All My Sons, Lanford Wilson's Burn This, and Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!. Maybe this annoying trend is finally ebbing?
Choir Boy looks great. I'm glad they were able to have a performance from it—which maybe they were able to do because there weren't that many musicals nominated? Based on that performance, though, I kind of wonder why Choir Boy itself doesn't count as a musical. Maybe that wasn't typical of the rest of the show?
After having Catherine O'Hara introduce Beetlejuice and Kristin Chenoweth introduce The Prom and so on, it was very weird that there was no introduction for Hadestown.
Hadestown is definitely the show that I'm most interested in seeing coming out of this Tonys broadcast. I loved the swaying lamps in the number they performed—they created a really effective feeling of vertigo and otherworldliness.
They had the presentation for Best Score in the show, and Best Book during the commercials this year. I always think those are two of the most important and interesting awards and it's a shame they can't have them both during the show—couldn't we have had a couple less, I dunno, celebrities pretending to try to feud with each other, and more awards during the show?
The choice of presenters for Best Score was odd, though—David Byrne, who will be bringing his American Utopia concert to Broadway, and Vanessa Carlton, who will be performing in the jukebox musical Beautiful later this year. In other words, both presenters for Best Original Score were plugging their connection with Broadway performances that do not have original scores.
I guess they had Kelli O'Hara introduce the performance from Kiss Me, Kate because she was the show's only acting nominee but wasn't in the number they wanted to perform. I wish they'd given her something more interesting to do, though; she seemed really wooden in her introduction.
This year's musical about Cher has three people playing Cher. Last year's Donna Summer musical had three people playing Donna Summer. Is this... the new thing?
"Can You Feel the Love Tonight" is a very weird song choice for the In Memoriam segment. Cynthia Erivo is a great performer though.
They couldn't even put the lifetime achievement awards during the show? Though I guess last year they did have the lifetime achievement awards in the show, and it was very awkwardly done, with a weird medley, so maybe it's for the best?

The major conference in my field starts on Thursday, October 10th this year, and is being held in Eugene, Oregon—a somewhat out-of-the-way city that there aren't a lot of flights to. Yom Kippur is Wednesday, October 9th. I already knew that that was going to be kind of annoying.

What I didn't learn until just now, though, was that the conference is scheduled to start Thursday morning, rather than (as it does in most years) Thursday afternoon. This basically makes the first sessions of the conference almost completely inaccessible to people who observe Yom Kippur (unless, I guess, they want to travel to Eugene on Tuesday and observe the fast there).

For example, looking for flights from San Diego, I've been able to find 1 itinerary that leaves late enough Wednesday night that I might in principle have a chance of getting to the airport in time for it after the holiday ends, arriving in Eugene at midnight. Failing that, there's no way to get to Eugene earlier than 11am, missing the morning sessions almost entirely. Presumably people coming from farther away will have it even worse.

I'm debating whether or not to send the conference organizers an angry email about this.

I had a great time at the Mystery Hunt this year! It ran a little long—the coin wasn't found until 6pm Sunday, after the announced shutdown time. Most of the time when the Hunt runs long, though, my team tends to start burning out and losing enthusiasm around Sunday afternoon as we get frustrated with loads of puzzles we can't solve, but this time we were still excited and going strong when the Hunt ended. My only complaint really is that it seemed like our available puzzles were pretty sparse Saturday afternoon, and then a lot of puzzles dropped overnight, leaving us with a ton of puzzles on Sunday and not much time left to do them. If they'd unlocked some of them earlier, we would have had more to do on Saturday and more opportunity to get to the rest. I suspect that Setec was overreacting to how short their Hunt was in 2017—they wrote too little that year, so they tried to write a longer Hunt this year, and overcorrected. I'm not complaining, though; although it would have been nice to see the whole Hunt, I had a good time the whole weekend, and I personally think that late afternoon / early evening Sunday is the best time for the Hunt to end.

The holidays theme was a major success, in my opinion. It allowed for a variety of thematic territory as the different holidays have different associated concepts and motifs, while still maintaining an overall coherent feel for the Hunt. On average, the puzzle flavortext did a pretty good job tying in the puzzles to the theme of the holiday they were associated with. (Also, the flavortext did a good job of providing clues for the puzzles themselves, which is something I enjoy a lot, though perhaps I'm the only one on my team who feels that way.) And the plot—the molasses flood threatening the holiday towns—not only was Pretty Hilarious but also felt motivated by real life (the 100th anniversary of the Boston Molasses Flood) in a way that is pretty rare for Mystery Hunt themes. And it allowed them to recognize Martin Luther King Day within the theme of the Hunt, via a community-service event. I'm also fond of the structure where they start with major holidays like Christmas, Halloween, and Thanksgiving, and then as you get deeper into the Hunt you get more oddball ones like Arbor Day and Bloomsday.

The main structural innovation this year was the organization of the metapuzzles: each meta was based on puzzles from two rounds, and you had to figure out which puzzles from each of the rounds fed the metas. I really like the gimmick where "figuring out which puzzles form the meta is part of the puzzle" (well, I like it from time to time, anyway); but in previous Mystery Hunts using that gimmick, to the best of my recollection, there were specific clues to meta assignment (e.g., the Little Black Book in 2009). Here there was nothing to go on except solving the metas and seeing which answers fit. The unlocking order helped a lot with that: the first meta used all the Christmas puzzles and some of the Halloween puzzles, and so solving that one made it possible to rule out some of the Halloween puzzles for the next metas, and so on. The structure of the Hunt thus complemented the structure of the metas themselves really well. Although we never got far enough to actually make use of it, the extra April Fool's metapuzzle was a neat way to use this meta structure to the advantage of the Hunt's plot/theme, as well, so it really made the Hunt feel like an overall well-connected unit.

My team never saw endgame, but I think the twist of having the manhole cover be hidden in the winning team's own solving space (April fool!) was brilliant and inspired.

My own experience of solving this Hunt involved a lot of answer extraction: there were a lot of puzzles that I didn't really work on in a substantive way but that I just dropped in on at the end and helped people figure out how to get a final answer out of the work they'd done so far. In several cases, they already knew how to extract the answer and just didn't have enough letters to read off the final phrase, and I came along and wheel-of-fortuned out the answer from the letters they had. Although that means there weren't a whole lot of puzzles that I worked on from beginning to end (other than, like, most of the crosswords, I guess), it means I got to see and make contributions to a lot of puzzles, and I like feeling useful in that way. And wheel-of-fortuning out answer phrases like that is something I like to think of myself as good at, so it was nice to see I've still got it.

Now, some comments on specific puzzles: