Tenth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

I TAKE IT BACK, GO BACK TO FUCKING THE HOUSE!

(https://secretfanspace.dreamwidth.org/2511.html?thread=3560655#cmt3560655)

Welcome back! Chat fandom, weird internet stuff, creative work, games, books, anything! Meme listens, and sometimes even replies!

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Comments

Puzzles

[(Anonymous)]

Puzzlehunts, CTFs, crosswords, and so on! Challenge meme!

Re: Puzzles - Galactic Puzzle Hunt 2024

[(Anonymous)]

https://2024.galacticpuzzlehunt.com/

Good news! It's not a card game this time. Bad news! It's Genshin Impact.

Re: Puzzles - Galactic Puzzle Hunt 2024

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, Galactic. You never fail to deliver puzzle hunts that make us go 'I hate this' with varying degrees of sarcasm.

https://2024.galacticpuzzlehunt.com/static/images/cutscenes/stelle-thinking.png
Anyways, so we go stargazing. Unfortunately, there are no stars - but we do find emergency rations. (Her name is Stelle.)

Stelle tells us that if we have enough hope, we can 'wish.' In other words, we expend puzzle currency to roll the puzzle gacha - sometimes we get stars of varying qualities, sometimes we get hints, and sometimes we get artifacts. Each star requires you to solve a puzzle before we can put it back in the sky.

Unfortunately, pretty much 90% of our pulls are gacha trash. For example, this was a low-rarity 'puzzle.'
> 好きな日本のVTuberがライブで歌っています。英語ではこれを「Karaoke」と言いますが、日本語ではどう言いますか？
That's not a puzzle! That's just weeb trivia!

Re: Puzzles - Galactic Puzzle Hunt 2024

[(Anonymous)]

In a break from tradition, the hunt organizers are asking that we don't look at the source code for the puzzles. Of course, all dans have criminal tendencies, and so I peeked anyways.

> style="font-family: uwu;"

I see why they didn't want us to look.

Re: Puzzles - Galactic Puzzle Hunt 2024

[(Anonymous)]

There's a team registered with the name 'my one goal is to beat dan.' Feeling a bit personally attacked here.

Re: Puzzles - Galactic Puzzle Hunt 2024

[(Anonymous)]

Got this email from the hunt organizers today.

> Last night, there was an issue where server maintenance lasted longer than intended. This issue has since been fixed. We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience, and have prepared the below compensation for your team. Please make sure to visit your team page to claim it.
> 💎×100
> (The apologems are not a puzzle and cannot be used for anything.)

I am not convinced they didn't stage this downtime just so they could use the word 'apologems' in an email.

Re: Puzzles - Galactic Puzzle Hunt 2024

[(Anonymous)]

Hunt's over; time for the write-up. As usual, I'll spoil the main plot of the hunt and maybe some of the metapuzzles.

https://litter.catbox.moe/sc50om.png (link expires in three days)

You can actually check out the full hunt without a login now, but I thought I'd share what the hunt looks like for someone who's completed it - y'know, if doing 279 puzzles yourself doesn't appeal to you. Initially, the sky at your campsite is empty; as you solve more puzzles, you return the stars to the sky. Most stars are independent, but some puzzles are a part of a series and form a constellation. You can rotate your view on the website to get a full view of the sky, and teams that complete the hunt receive a cute little star map with your name on it.

There's also a few characters in the sky! The ones you can see are the Ten Lions, who appear to be rather waterlogged, and Pom Pom and Mop Mop, who like to talk backwards. These two are a part of the Seven Celestials, who are supposed to be responsible for the stars in the sky. Unfortunately, as Stelle tells us, they appear to have gone missing after some kind of internal dispute. If this sounds awfully familiar to you, you should probably play less gacha.

After we locate and placate (read: solve puzzles) each of the Seven Celestials, we get to figure out what really happened on the night when they had their big falling-out. Each of them describes what they saw after they all panicked and ran amok, but their descriptions don't make any sense - until you remember they're all operating on a stellar scale, and the speed at which they moved caused their puzzle answers to redshift and blueshift into new words.

With that, we can logic out a nice sequence of events and get the answer STAR POWER VACUUM. Now that we've figured out they just had an encounter with the cosmic equivalent of a Roomba, the Celestials can all become friends again, the sky can go back to normal, and we can enjoy a nice night of stargazing without any more goddamn puzzles to interrupt us. The end.

Re: Puzzles - Galactic Puzzle Hunt 2024

[(Anonymous)]

https://2024.galacticpuzzlehunt.com/wrapup/

Wrap-up is out, featuring some insight into the design process, the gacha mechanics, and the character/art design. Apparently, there's also another team called 'Dan City,' which brings the dan representation in this hunt to four:

1. Dan City
2. Team 'my one goal is to beat dan'
3. Team with Dan (from Cardinality)
4. Team with dan (from danspace)

Strange how there's an entire extended universe of dans out there.

Re: Puzzles - Enchanted Castle (ECPH 2)

[(Anonymous)]

https://ecph.site/

Enchanted Castle (ECPH 2) will be running from October 12-21. The last iteration of this hunt, Exploring the Countryside, was a very cute (and apparently, very British) short hunt; this year's hunt will apparently be more difficult and clock in at around 45 puzzles. A good part of my team will be out this time around, so we'll see how it goes!

Re: Puzzles - Enchanted Castle (ECPH 2)

[(Anonymous)]

Opened up the very first puzzle.

> My favourite area in England is a square on the UK Monopoly board. (-1)
> My favourite town is located in the west of Essex. (-2)

Oh god, it's already too British for me.

Re: Puzzles - Enchanted Castle (ECPH 2)

[(Anonymous)]

Alright, here we are. We're doing a little urban exploring in a mysterious, abandoned-looking castle in the woods; we enter, immediately trip and fall, and land in the dungeon.

The dungeon is an interactive maze. However, you can only access areas that are lit (line of sight from a lantern), and you need to solve puzzles to get more lanterns.

https://ecph.site/static/images/ghost1_icon.326a88e785b3.png
After a little exploring, you meet this little guy. Her name's Chanel, and she's a chandelier. She used to be a puzzle hunter just like us, but then she found herself in the castle and couldn't solve the puzzle to get out...

Re: Puzzles - Enchanted Castle (ECPH 2)

[(Anonymous)]

Made it out of the dungeon and into the library, only to be greeted by this guy.

https://ecph.site/static/images/ghost2_icon.9924511b79c9.png
>It's some bleddy stumper this one! 'Ee can try an have a go...

His name is Trelawney, and I can't understand a word he's saying. One of the additional dialogue options we have with him is asking him why he keeps calling us 'lover.'

Re: Puzzles - Enchanted Castle (ECPH 2)

[(Anonymous)]

https://ecph.site/static/images/ghost3_icon.abd2950ff848.png

We've moved on to the Great Hall, where we meet our third ghost: an armchair. His name's Quentin, he's old and likes 19th century fashion, and Trelawney thinks he's dapper. I ship them.

Re: Puzzles - MIT Mystery Heist

[(Anonymous)]

https://mitmysteryheist.com/

I'm doing this warm-up round for Mystery Hunt. It's pretty short - twelve puzzles in two rounds - and relatively easy; would recommend if you want to try out some puzzles. Only problem is that it was clearly designed to be done in-person with a physical print-out, because so many of these puzzles require cutting out pieces and moving them around.

Re: Puzzles - MIT Mystery Heist

[(Anonymous)]

On the other hand, we managed to skip doing half the first round puzzles because the meta is extremely solvable with limited information.

Re: Puzzles - MIT Mystery Hunt 2025

[(Anonymous)]

https://www.mitmh2025.com/

This year's Mystery Hunt runs from January 17-20. Based on the pre-hunt puzzles and the wedding engagement invitation we received, it looks like we've got a retro mob/gangster Ocean's Eleven theme going on, but hunt organizers are notorious for playing theme bait-and-switch on us.

Re: Puzzles - MIT Mystery Hunt 2025

[(Anonymous)]

Got this email about campus access logistics today:

> Please note that many non-affiliate visitors (and some alumni) have encountered challenges with the Atlas rollout and setup. In particular, adding events from links has been inconsistent, and sometimes takes 10+ attempts before succeeding, or requires opening the link via a mobile browser. Our best advice at this time is a combination of persistence and superstitious voodoo. We promise that this is not a puzzle we wrote for you.

Things are going great at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Re: Puzzles - MIT Mystery Hunt 2025

[(Anonymous)]

https://youtube.com/live/cWPZ61YgY6s

Kick-off is on! There's a mob wedding, a shadow diamond exhibition, and obviously, nothing could ever go wrong.

Re: Puzzles - MIT Mystery Hunt 2025

[(Anonymous)]

https://www.two-pi-noir.agency/

And we're off! Every in-person team got a radio (although a stream is available online as well) and we're now being forced to listen to slightly laggy elevator music while we wait for hunt to start.

Re: Puzzles - MIT Mystery Hunt 2025

[(Anonymous)]

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Re: Puzzles - MIT Mystery Hunt 2025

[(Anonymous)]

> In their eyes, penguins should be at the top of the food chain.

My favorite puzzle flavortext from this year's puzzles.

Re: Puzzles - MIT Mystery Hunt 2025

[(Anonymous)]

I'm still slacking on doing a real write-up for Mystery Hunt 2025 (it's only been two months! I'll do it any day now!), but here's some of my favorite puzzles from the hunt. There'll be spoilers on how to break into some of these puzzles, but not on the final answers.

https://www.two-pi-noir.agency/puzzles/📑🍝
I actually shared Emojipasta earlier! Each team received one (out of nine total) emojipasta and had to send them around, chain letter-style, to collect enough to solve. I wasn't actively working on this one, so it caught me off-guard when my friends on other teams suddenly started blowing up my DMs with suspicious messages.

https://www.two-pi-noir.agency/puzzles/chatgpt
We made no headway on ChatGPT for a long time, and then one of my teammates, apropos of nothing, yelled to the whole room, 'Wait! It's called ChatGPT because THE CAT IS FRENCH!!!'

https://www.two-pi-noir.agency/puzzles/synthetic_tagsonomy
What an absolutely ridiculous puzzle. I don't think Synthetic Tagsonomy is doable without the physical components, but it deserves a mention for bringing the Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group (which categorizes and identifies bread tags) to our attention. https://www.horg.com/horg/

https://www.two-pi-noir.agency/puzzles/control_room
Control Room was an in-person escape room, except only one person goes in the room and the rest of us had to sit around a computer screen and give '[VERB] the [NOUN]' instructions with a frightfully limited word bank. This was fine for the first set of tasks, which involved things like 'toss the rubbish' and 'water the plant.' This was not fine when we got the second set of tasks, which included 'hide the body' and 'stick the fork in the outlet.' We got so many confused glares from our escape room escapee.

https://www.two-pi-noir.agency/rounds/stakeout
You can't solve Chinatown now, but I really wanted to talk about how thematically well-crafted this metapuzzle was. In this hunt, you play as a noir detective trainee, where each round is your investigation into one of the suspects. Every time you solve a puzzle in the Stakeout round, you are given a photograph of Katrina (the suspect for this round). Solving enough of them allows you to identify 14 specific benches on campus; if you visit those locations, you'll find secret messages taped on the bottom of each bench. It turns out Katrina's secret is that she's an undercover cop receiving messages from informants, and this meta was all about finding the dead drop locations!

Re: Puzzles - Upcoming

[(Anonymous)]

https://epilogue.mitmh2024.com/

Mystery Hunt 2024 (!) Epilogue, which appears to be an extra round of content that got cut from the original hunt, is running March 8-16. Surprised they're running this a whole year after the hunt, but I guess they were inspired by some of the cut content dumps 2025's team did.

https://2025.teammatehunt.com/

Teammate Hunt 2025, which features Matt and Emma on a comics-inspired space adventure, runs March 28 to April 6. Apparently they're not doing leaderboards and doing 'achievements' instead, which will be interesting. One of the achievements (puzzle) is already available if you look for it!

Also, I still owe a write-up for Mystery Hunt 2025. I'll get to that someday, I swear...

Re: Puzzles - Teammate 2025

[(Anonymous)]

https://2025.teammatehunt.com/

It's time for Matt and Emma's Deep-Space Adventure! Our heroes are taking a gap year to explore space in their trusty little spaceship, the Arkose, and surely there will be no disasters that require them to do math or solve puzzles.

https://i.imgur.com/XaQghv6.png
https://i.imgur.com/SjxLpux.png

First disaster, of course, is that this comic didn't even load for the first fifteen minutes. Technical issues are truly a puzzle hunt staple.

Re: Puzzles - CMU Spring 2025

[(Anonymous)]

https://puzzlehunt.club.cc.cmu.edu/hunt/current/view/

Whoops, forgot to mention this one ahead of time. CMU Spring 2025 runs for 24 hours this weekend, from 1:20PM EST today to tomorrow. We are at soup.