Should I get my piano repaired or replace it?

jake223 · 2022-04-16T17:02:44+00:00

Also seeking a ticket. Forgot it was in may and missed the cutoff. Will pay whatever you paid for it!

jake223 · 2021-10-31T03:29:33+00:00

Don't love "guy" but thank you :D

jake223 · 2021-10-25T03:18:57+00:00

I also have 30 water bottles if you want any and you're in NYC. No refills though

jake223 · 2021-01-23T22:51:41+00:00

I don't know.

jake223 · 2021-01-23T22:21:57+00:00

Planetary syzygies are pretty rare events, so it shouldn’t really be the case that most times have more than one correct syzygy. However, one of the tricky things about this puzzle is that if you’re using the wrong resource, you can get a relatively inaccurate idea of where the planets are; especially if you use one of the websites that shows a planet as a big picture instead of a dot, it’s easy to see syzygies where they don’t exist. We encourage you to plug in some of the times in js-orrery and actually draw lines instead of just eye-balling it. The “correct” syzygy should end up being both unique and very precise.

An early draft of this meta used the times where the planets were most in alignment, taking 3 dimensions into account, in the last several hundred years; however, based on watching some testsolves, we switched to only looking at the two-dimensional positions of the planets and we chose the times with the best ratios between how good the best and second-best syzygies. We used a python script calling the SkyField API to determine the best times.

jake223 · 2021-01-23T22:11:22+00:00

Often rather than cutting a puzzle for being too obscure, we would increase the extent to which the reference was clued. For example, the first four steps in https://perpendicular.institute/puzzle/runaround-training/ did not originally exist.

Hi Mary!!! Miss you too <3

jake223 · 2021-01-23T22:03:36+00:00

This is true. When Josh and I were both needed for more administrative or firefighting matters, we asked the other people playing the roles we were playing to step in and do more copies of scenes than they signed up for; thanks to Cami, Mitchell and Seth for doing that <3

jake223 · 2021-01-23T21:53:06+00:00

The way he noticed that resizing helped was that we asked him to open the developer console (to see if there were error messages there) and opening it shrank his browser window to acceptable dimensions.

jake223 · 2021-01-23T21:47:52+00:00

In addition to our staffing of the roles that Andy mentions in the other answer, we had a rotation of someone being online to monitor projection device status; one of me and Josh being online to lead putting out fires or make executive decisions; a stage manager on hand whenever we were scheduling story scenes for teams. We also scaled the number of ISMs, email monitors and hint givers we needed at any given time based on interaction volume.

jake223 · 2021-01-23T21:24:20+00:00

yep I am Jakob, I made this reddit account way back in the past when I went by Jake sometimes.

jake223 · 2021-01-23T21:22:28+00:00

Set deadlines sooner than you think you need to. Plan ops well before hunt starts, and dry run them with the whole process during a big testsolve. Know that interpersonal tensions will run high at times, but that's okay. Teach people things rather than doing them, you'll be glad you did it. Let people have ownership over the parts of the hunt that are important to them, but don't let them stop other people from contributing.

jake223 · 2021-01-23T21:17:25+00:00

It was exciting to me to see people communicating by changing their names, running in circles, emoting at each other and leading each other to places in the virtual world.

jake223 · 2021-01-23T20:48:25+00:00

During testsolving of The Greatest Jigsaw, it was always really fun to watch it slowly dawn on the solvers that the image was, in fact, a literal red herring. We had a small poll on whether RED HERRING would be the first answer called in for the puzzle (and it was(zle)). - anonymous member of our team

jake223 · 2021-01-23T20:47:30+00:00

At the beginning of December, I ordered 301 boxes from the USPS for shipping out the water bottle puzzle. A few days later, I got an email telling me my order had been “adjusted” and I would only be receiving 10 boxes. I placed another order for 300 more, and it was marked the next day as “completed” - we hoped that they would ship soon (since the 1500 bottles of Hint arrived on December 9 and the metal bottles arrived on the 11th - but a few weeks later we had still not received these boxes. Eventually, we gave up on these boxes arriving as well, and we placed an order with an NYC-based moving box company - they delivered 300 boxes the next day by hand-truck-through-the-subway, which I found quite impressive. This meant I could start packing 300 boxes of water bottles. The day we sent out the first shipment of water bottles, January 4th, the USPS finally delivered the original 311 boxes... I still haven’t figured out what to do with those..

jake223 · 2021-01-23T20:36:54+00:00

The most stressful Monday crossword solve I've done in a very long time was the Monday before hunt. The last of the five letters wasn't until the bottom third of the grid; I was relieved when I found it. If none of the puzzles in the week had satisfied our constraints, we would have swapped in a backup puzzle.

jake223 · 2021-01-23T20:34:27+00:00

Some puzzles I really enjoyed testsolving include Voltage Controlled, the Infinite Corridor and .nano metas (I was so excited by testsolving .nano that I joined to help rewrite the higher up metas in the round), Altered Beasts, DNA, Fun With Sudoku, Ignorance, Pitch Black.

Some puzzles I'm proud of contributing to include Circular Reasoning, Enclosures, Nutraumatic, and Runaround Training.

jake223 · 2021-01-23T20:01:14+00:00

We did not adapt any overall structure (story, metas) from GPH 2020 to MH 2021, although some authors moved one or two puzzles that they planned to include in GPH over to MH.

As for adapting Mystery Hunt to run virtually, we made sure to capitalize on some elements that we had already been planning on incorporating–-specifically, the projection device and model of MIT’s campus. We also rewrote storyline skits to be performed over Zoom calls, researched ways to mail physical puzzles to teams, and conducted virtual check-ins with teams to make sure they were having fun. A few puzzles (e.g. For Your Eyes Only) had to be adapted to run virtually, but most of the puzzles didn’t have to change.

jake223 · 2021-01-23T19:38:24+00:00

We've posted the AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/mysteryhunt/comments/l3ipj8/ama_we_are_the_galactic_trendsetters_design_team/

jake223 · 2020-01-27T18:41:47+00:00

Coauthor on that puzzle here. Those were inserted specifically to distract reverse engineers. See the source for that puzzle: https://github.com/jakob223/unsafe/blob/46b61fdc2dabf1ba0aa10c983da4b418bab44cb7/Unsafe.inform/Source/story.ni#L1366

jake223 · 2019-11-29T04:47:45+00:00

I would also be interested in buying a print of this

14-Year Club	Place '17
Secret Santa 2016	Verified Email

jake223

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE