Anna and the Bunches

What The Power of Three is trying to do is clever - hide a drama about the relationship between the Ponds and the Doctor inside a straightforward episode of Doctor Who (in this case, it happens to be in the ‘aliens invade earth’ genre of Doctor Who stories). Unfortunately, that drama never really gets time to find itself; instead, the episode spends a bit too long developing the alien invasion story, and not long enough exploring the drama.

Using UNIT may have been a mistake in this direction, too. Kate Stewart is immediately likable, and Jemma Redgrave shines in the role. But this is part of the problem - the Doctor and Kate shine on camera, and this is a further distraction from what is trying to be the emotional core of the episode. Especially since bringing up the Lethbridge-Stewart family brushes against the topic of the Brigadier, and less diegetically, Nicholas Courtney.

So the episode feels unfocused, but there’s a lot of potential. And fittingly, one episode from the Ponds’ departure, the theme this episode explores echoes all the way back to their introduction in The Eleventh Hour. Since I wasn’t writing this blog series back then, let me summarize: The Eleventh Hour is explicitly about the status of Doctor Who as a fairy tale, and more specifically about running away (or being abducted, since they are the same thing when it comes to fairies) to Fairyland. Or to Neverland, if you prefer. The episode goes so far as to have the episode comment that Amelia’s name would fit in in a fairy tale.

And now the show is approaching the end of this fairy tale, where the girl has circumnavigated Fairyland, and having met many people and done many deeds, will return to the normal world with its slower pace and duller colors and safety and, basically, grow up. And in this particular fairy tale, governed by the rules of Doctor Who companions, this return is as inevitable as the running away.

But The Power of Three doesn’t explore this inevitability. Instead, it asks whether running away to Fairyland is good, and whether coming back is necessary. And it comes down solidly on the side of the fairies. This is Small Worlds from the perspective of the fairy child and the fairies.

Phil Sandifer mentioned once that the fairies in Small Worlds are coded as evil, but I think the episode works, intentionally or not, as a study in extreme cultural relativism. Of course the fairies look evil. They steal our children. From their perspective, though, they are simply protecting their own, and helping them fulfill their destinies. And they are, in many ways, indistinguishable from The Doctor.

In The Eleventh Hour, we have a fairy (or a goblin, or a trickster), and the girl who runs away to Fairyland with him. And the concept of childhood is explicitly invoked:

The Doctor: So, coming?
Amy: No.
The Doctor: You wanted to come 14 years ago.
Amy: I grew up.
The Doctor: Don’t worry. I’ll soon fix that.

So, the story of Amy Pond begins with the assertion that childhood is good, and that the bargains of fairies can be worth the cost. The Power of Three, then, asks whether the bargain paid off and, perhaps more importantly, whether it is okay not to grow up.

And the conclusion the narrative reaches is a strong and resounding yes. Through the Doctor, through the telling of stories, we can all run away to Fairyland and remain children forever.

Except we know that the end of this tale is looming. Which forces us to consider this question: what force could possibly overrule the will of a fairy and his two fairy children, the will of the very narrative itself?

This post is spoiler free! Just kidding. Spoiler Warning.

One of the stock modes of operation of Doctor Who is, of course, the collision of genres and genre elements. Sometimes this simply takes the form of colliding Doctor Who itself into another genre. Other times, the Doctor wanders in on two genres in the act of colliding.

A Town Called Mercy is, of course, a Western. It is also a space opera. The two are blended fantastically, with the warring aliens taking on roles out of a traditional Western, with the outlaw and the target of his anger. Then the Doctor shows up, and naturally takes the role of sheriff. So we have a Western, with aliens, actually set in the American Frontier. And then we introduce some plot twists and moral ambiguity. Pretty straightforward Doctor Who.

Except the plot twists and moral ambiguity are a little weak here. Sure, “the gunslinger is seeking revenge for evil visited upon himself and others” is a nice direction to take things. And the moral complexity of Jex functions at least well enough to provide a mirror for the Doctor (the parallel is made even more explicit by having Jex be called “the Doctor” by the townspeople). In general, there is a lot of potential in the moral dimensions of the story. However, Amy’s speech to the Doctor is heavy-handed, and Jex’ suicide was disappointing. Obviously the Gunslinger couldn’t be the one to kill Jex, but either companion could have done it, and the story could have been stronger for it.

Still, A Town Called Mercy is competently executed Doctor Who set in a novel (well, maybe not so much) setting. And it has Ben Browder. So clearly there is a lot here to like. However, there was one part that really got under my skin, and left me a bit unsettled for the rest of the episode: the Horse Named Susan.

Toby Whithouse may well have had the best of intentions with this line. But as I have said before, I don’t think intentions are an effective thing to talk about when we discuss whether something is problematic (for more info see Kinsey Hope’s excellent post on the subject). And this is a very problematic joke. On the surface (at least to a viewer not well-versed in trans issues), the joke seems harmless, even supportive. It even has the word ‘respect’ in it! Every indication here is, again, that Whithouse had the best of intentions with the line.

But the Problem of Susan is obvious when viewed in terms of actual transgender people and trans experience. First is the issue of pronouns. Most transgender people not only dislike being referred to by pronouns that don’t match their gender identity, they find it actively painful (strongly recommended further reading here). So, having the Doctor misgender Susan was cringe-inducing at the very least, and potentially very actively harmful.

Second is the phrase “lifestyle choices”. Just like sexual orientation, gender identity has been the subject of a debate over whether it is innate or chosen for decades. The phrase “lifestyle choice” here is, then, a political statement; it weighs in on that debate. Though the tone of the joke tries for supportive, its content is still regressive.

The overall result of this is that the line suggests that transgender identities are not legitimate. That while someone may change their name and say they are a woman (or mare), if that disagrees with what they were assigned at birth (or as is more commonly thought, “what their genitals looked like at birth”), then it is just a “choice” and there is no obligation to take it all that seriously, really. Just play along a little. As long as it doesn’t make you uncomfortable.

And this de-legitimization is a common theme in our culture. It is rooted deep. In many places trans people have to undergo (expensive, in some countries, and difficult to access in most) surgery, to make all of the “normal” people feel comfortable, before they can be legally recognized as the correct gender. Things that cisgender people take for granted, like using a public restroom, become sources of terror. Getting a drink at a bar is scary, because your ID is marked with the wrong gender and what if someone questions that?* It is a feeling of powerlessness.

So, this is the central problem with Susan: she isn’t treated like a legitimate mare. And by the Doctor, no less. And while, yes, this is just a throwaway joke about a horse, it relies on the existence of transgender people for its humor. It has been pointed out to me that a redemptive reading is possible: you could argue that Susan is genderqueer, and actually prefers masculine pronouns but a feminine name. But given the relative lack of cultural awareness about genderqueer identities, in the current culture this still makes for problematic storytelling without some explicit framing or explanation around it.

It was a pretty good episode, and I quite liked several bits. But for me, the shadow of this poorly executed joke hangs over it.

*As a note, I live in the US. I realize that the UK has a much more progressive process for changing gender markers, but even then you have to live with this as your operating reality for at least two years.

Customary Spoiler Warning.

It was pretty clear going in that this episode was going to be a fairly light-hearted comedy romp. The episode title is a Snakes on a Plane parody. The trailers made it clear we were in for ‘fun’ and not ’epic storytelling’. I mean, more broadly, there are dinosaurs. It is hard not to just sit back and smile when there are dinosaurs.

And we got that light-hearted whimsical story, but we also got a lot of interesting complexity - there’s a lot packed into this episode both structurally and narratively. The first thing that struck me was the exposition - the episode drops us into the action in minutes. It is frenetic, it doesn’t stop to explain itself, and it is perfectly comprehensible - it trusts the audience to keep up, and channels the exposition into character moments over the course of the episode. This is very efficient storytelling, and it works great for a story as active as this one is.

And the character moments are numerous. Both the historical support characters and Brian are given chances to establish themselves as characters. Amy gets a few stand-out moments as well, particularly the explicit commentary on her role-reversal (“I will not have flirting companions!”). And Rory gets to actually be a nurse for a moment, instead of just having the occasional vague allusion to it.

The imagery in the story is a delightful romp that seems to have taken the approach ‘how many ideas can we juxtapose at one time.’ We have an Egyptian queen, a big game hunter, dinosaurs, Silurians (well, briefly), and an amoral space merchant who is basically the unseen silent protagonist of every Star Trader descendant. And a futuristic space defense agency with a penchant for firing missiles.

So, a lot of the story is high adventure and fun, including ‘shoot the raptors with stun guns’ and ‘ride the triceratops’ action pieces that are exactly the length they need to be. And yet for all the running around and having fun, the story drops into a very serious dramatic register for the climax. Notably, the Doctor doesn’t quite save the day here - he shows up too late. The Silurians are already dead. And so he foregoes his usual ‘give the bad guys a chance to do the right thing’ speech. In this story, amoral slave-trading mass-murderers have already crossed the line, and do not deserve mercy.

But let’s leave that thread alone for now (my next post will have more to say on the subject of mercy, I imagine). Because one of Amy’s lines in this episode caught my attention, and I want to talk about it:

Riddell: Know what I want more than anything else?
Amy: Lessons in gender politics?

And, well, my first instinct is to bite back several snarky responses. But a Feminist critique of Amy Pond’s character has already been done, and I have commented on it once or twice as well. And while I don’t agree with Lindsay in every particular, it isn’t a radical observation that Doctor Who, particularly in the last few years, has had a mixed record on Feminist issues, and Amy Pond is at the center of a lot of the show’s more recent problems.

This episode makes some clear efforts to rectify that, with both Amy and the Doctor getting dialogue that reinforces Amy as capable of taking care of herself. It has mixed results. Sure, lines like “I’m easily worth two men” and the Doctor’s suggestion that Brian is ‘a Pond’ are clever. But equally, the likes of “I’m Rory’s queen… don’t tell him I said that” starts to edge into straw feminist territory. Because obviously, women are Too Controlling and that Threatens the Manhood of their partners. Better rein in that feistiness, girls.

More broadly, a lot of the dialogue Amy gets (both in this episode and in others) that attempts to be overtly Feminist comes off poorly. At best, it often sounds a little flat. At worst, it sounds like a man with a large amount of unacknowledged privilege trying to write feminism. Which I strongly suspect is the case. It is notable the number of women to write an episode of Doctor Who in the Matt Smith era can be counted on one closed fist. And the Davies era wasn’t much better: the total number of episodes written by women during his tenure can be counted on one hand (at least it gets to be open this time).

So in terms of writing, Doctor Who is still very much a boy’s club, and it shows. But at least the episode was fun. And the line about gender politics was genuinely good.

Spoiler Warning, though I should really stop giving these on Doctor Who posts. Really, you should know better anyway.

Shortly after I heard the title of Asylum of the Daleks, it occurred to me that ‘Asylum’ could mean two different things: a place to keep those deemed unfit, or a request for aid and protection. Since the first definition is more common, I assumed the reference would actually be to the latter. In high Moffat fashion, however, we get both instead.

But on to the actual episode. This was some very tight storytelling, with a lot of impressive, complex narrative going on under the surface. We have two misdirects that are central to the story. The first one is that Amy is used as a peril monkey - except that she isn’t really in peril, the Doctor just lets her and Rory think that to keep them safe. This is a nice blending of the 7th-Doctor-esque manipulation we’ve seen throughout the Moffat era (what I have come to think of as “The Doctor’s Odinic side”), and the caring, compassionate role that the Doctor has cultivated to varying degrees throughout the new series.

And then we have Oswin. Jenna-Louise Coleman gave a solid performance, and I’m eager to see more of her. Her surprise appearance in this episode was brilliant, and the reveal at the end of the episode was, while almost predictable (it was pretty obvious that they were focusing on the danger to Amy and overtly not mentioning that the same danger should have converted Oswin months ago. The unexpected part was that she was an outright Dalek instead of a puppet). It lets us know the general sweep of the narrative arc for (presumably) the second half of season 7. It will inevitably add emotional weight to her story, in the same way Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead added weight to River Song’s saga.

If anything, my concern is one of ‘Moffat has done this story / used this trick already’. We’ve already seen the companion story that starts with the companion’s death. I’m pretty confident, though, that the other details of the story will be sufficiently unique to carry it. And of course all of this presupposes that Oswin is the companion, as opposed to a different character also played by Jenna-Louise Coleman (unlikely, but not a move entirely out of character given the way Moffat interacts with viewers through paratextual tricks - see the coat ‘goof’ from Flesh and Stone).

And either way, the question remains of how Oswin came to forget about the Doctor. Obviously there is a thematic if not actually narrative connection between her erasing the daleks’ knowledge of the Doctor and her own memory. I’m really hoping for a narrative connection - something along the lines of “Oswin was actually a trap for the Doctor from the future that she created by erasing the daleks’ memories”. That is, after all, the sort of timey-wimey storytelling that the current era often plays with, and it has a nice poetical flair to it.

As for the daleks themselves, they shine here. The story plays up the iconography of the daleks until it is working almost in more of a lyrical register than a narrative one, using imagery that plays actively with their totemic nature. Surrounding the Doctor with tens of thousands of his greatest foe, only to have them say ‘save us’. Likewise, the lyrical repetition of “eggs… eggs… eggs” first by a broken dalek and then by Oswin, is vivid and powerful. And the daleks actively invoke the iconography of the Doctor in turn, with lines like “The Doctor must have companions” and, of course, with the required season-opening ‘Doctor who?’ line chanted by them in unison.

Also notable is that the daleks are pretty much guaranteed to return during season 7. Moffat seems intent on making up for their absence in season 6.

Not much else to say on this one, except of course: DEPLOY SPECIAL WEAPONS DALEK

Can we still talk about Skyrim? I mean, I know it’s been out for a while now, and a lot of people have moved on. But I’m still playing it, and enjoying the vast explorable terrain, hundreds of quests, and terrible, hilarious bugs.

As I’ve been playing, I’ve noticed that they’ve really tried to turn the production values up to eleven. The terrain feels a lot more detailed, the voice acting is improved (and there are more voice actors), the quests are more detailed and varied, and the game is sprinkled with non-human languages. Notably, the Dragon Language (spoken, obviously, by dragons, and also by the ancient Nords) and the Falmer Language (the Falmer are a race of elves who became blind underground monsters) get considerable attention in various storylines in the game.

But for all that attention, the actual language construction has… mixed results. And since I occasionally like to tear things apart and nit-pick them to death, I thought I’d discuss what they’ve done, and where it succeeds and where it fails.

Building Imaginary Languages

A spoken or written language that is created intentionally (as opposed to most natural languages, which develop organically) is called a constructed language, or conlang. These can be created as fictional languages (well-known examples include Klingon, Na’vi, Quenya) or intended to be used in the real world (Esperanto, Solresol, toki pona). Someone who creates constructed languages is often referred to as a conlanger.

Conlangers are often seen as eccentric nerds who are wasting their time and skill. However, they are employed with increasing frequency by big media producers who want consistent, realistic languages in their fictional universes - Klingon is an early example of this. And, of course, Tolkien is the grandfather of self-indulgent conlanging, creating at least a dozen languages, many with etymological histories, ‘older’ forms of the language with traceable roots, and an amazing attention to detail. Sure, he told some stories, but that was mostly just to give his languages somewhere to live.

Real-world conlangs are often made with optimistic and lofty goals: Esperanto (a fairly early constructed language), for example, was designed to be “an easy-to-learn and politically neutral language that transcends nationality and would foster peace and international understanding between people with different regional and/or national languages” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto). So, world peace through language. Sadly, 125 years on, we still seem to have a lot of war. Likewise, toki pona is designed to “shape the thought processes of its users, in the style of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis in Zen-like fashion” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona).

But on to Skyrim…

The Falmer “Language”

The Falmer language is a disappointment. I know it only comes up significantly in one quest line, but still… it’s not even remotely a language of its own, just English text written with an alternate alphabet. Basically, a monoalphabetic substitution cipher. I think I might have preferred untranslatable gibberish to this.

I mean, it’s not that hard to whip together just enough of a constructed language for one quest. I’m not asking for much here, just something a tiny bit more sophisticated. Watch how much we can do in just a few minutes:

Start with the grammar. We can make arbitrary decisions here - no one’s going to fault us for such a simple use case. Let’s pick an SOV word order, with simple inflectional markers for genitive and plurals. Say, add ‘i’ to any word to make it genitive, and ‘o’ to make it plural. Words ending in vowels take ’ti’ and ’to’. Simple enough. We’ll also say that the language uses a fairly simple structure, with short sentences and a minimum of relative clauses. Where prepositional phrases occur, we will let them retain their natural English word order unless there is some obvious reason to use SOV.

So, take the first sentence of the original encoded text. In our new language (keeping English vocabulary for now, but simplifying a bit) it looks like:

MERCER FREY MYTI EVERY STEP ELUDES.

The next step would be to make up some vocabulary; there aren’t that many words used in the original text, so it should be pretty easy to cook that up. Even an amateur conlanger like me could make something at least mildly interesting in just a couple of hours. And more importantly, it would give us a translated text with a consistent feel (it would flow like a natural language) but without falling back on something quite as obvious as basic substitution. And tools can automate a lot of our work - if we keep the original text simple enough, we could even just use sed or perl (or another search/replace solution) to do most of the heavy lifting.

You could argue that it is Gallus’ ’encoded’ journal, but the story makes a big deal about the fact that it was written in Ancient Falmer, which is So Terribly Hard to translate and makes it super secure. Anyone, given a few hours, could work out “he’s used some other alphabet to write words in my language”.

And sure, there are a lot of quests, and I don’t know how big their design team was. Maybe a couple hours was too long to spend fleshing this out. But it’s still a disappointment. I suppose decoding the message is a nice easter egg, but an easter egg that required digging deeper would have been more interesting to me.

Dragon Language

The Dragon Language, on the other hand, is used much more extensively - there are numerous writings in it throughout the world, the dragons and draugr will speak in it (as combat taunts, in particular), and the protagonist (along with several NPCs) can use special ‘shouts’ that are formed from words in the language.

With increased visibility came an increased attempt to make a language that makes sense. While the dragon language, like Falmer, has its own script, the script isn’t just used to encode English; every time that script appears, it translates into something intelligible in the Dragon Language.

And the resulting language is a lot more interesting than Falmer. The grammar is very similar to English, but not identical. Word order is almost the same, but plurals inflect differently, and there is no case system (at least not that we see in the game), which is a bit lazy and feels like the result of a rushed production schedule.

Obviously we have a very small vocabulary available - there isn’t that much written or spoken Dragon Language in the game. But still, some of the word forms are interesting. One that struck me on an initial overview is one of the most well-known and widely used words, dov. Dov means ‘dragonkind’, as in the entire race of dragons. The word for a single dragon is Dovah. Now, ah means ‘hunter’, but “hunter of dragonkind” doesn’t feel right. So, this isn’t a simple compound word. I suspect the conlanger was going for ‘ah’ here being rooted in aan, the indefinite article in Dragon Language, with some morphological drift (which is especially likely with very common words, and since ‘dovah’ would basically be the dragons’ word for ‘person’, this is likely). This is an impressive touch - it shows that some real attention to detail was paid when choosing words for the vocabulary (instead of the usual fantasy conlang approach of ‘string syllables together more or less at random’).

Looking at the wider vocabulary, the language tends to form a lot of compound words, in a manner similar to German. I initially thought that some of its vocabulary was pulled from either Old Norse or modern Icelandic, but on further inspection I think that’s just random collision. The pronoun system is suitably complex as to feel natural. It is also quite distinct from English.

Another thing worth remarking on is that the Nords are a visibly Scandinavian people. The word Draugr, for instance, is an Old Norse word, although it is used a bit incorrectly in Skyrim (the word is used similarly to ‘mummy’ in Skyrim, but the original meaning is closer to ‘zombie’ or perhaps ‘revenant’). So, I am assuming that the Dragon Language is intended to sound Scandinavian, because it does. Even without obviously basing its vocabulary on any Scandinavian language, it pulls off the trick of really sounding Norse. The creators of the language have a good ear for phonology.

If I have one real criticism of Dragon Language, it’s the name. We don’t have anything better than ‘Dragon Language’ to work with. Either Dov’um or Dovzul would have been decent choices. Both can translate roughly to ‘dragon voice’.

Like I said above: Bethesda really pushed the production values on this game. There is a lot of wonderful attention to detail that shines through in this game. The Dragon Language is a good example of that.

The day begins early - much earlier than most Sundays. I’m out the door at 8:15, for a tournament that starts at 9:00. I usually sleep in on the weekends; I didn’t even know Sundays had a 9 o’clock.

The day is rainy and grey, but bright in that clean Spring way where the contrast between everything is sharpened and it feels like you can see forever. I drive in the rain to NC State campus, a twenty minute drive through the odd combination of semi-urban and rural landscape that makes up Raleigh. Once on campus, I’m a bit confused - GPS helps me get to the right general area, but I’ve lost my GPS signal now and end up parked in a deserted-feeling area in front of a row of buildings. There is no one else walking around here, and as I’m looking around and trying to get my bearings I hear a rumbling noise. On the far side of the road, a train goes rushing by on tracks I hadn’t noticed.

The lack of people and the light rain and the sudden noise - suddenly everything feels surreal, just to the left of normal. It’s a dizzying experience - this always happens when I am stepping into the unknown, especially when I don’t have anyone familiar nearby. It isn’t a negative sensation, though; it’s pleasant in an “I might be stepping into fairyland and I may never find my way back” sort of way. I check my phone, which has gotten its GPS lock back, and realize I need to drive a block further. I spot a sign for the building I’m looking for, and park.

The surreal feeling persists as I cross the street. I realize I’m at the back of the building, which explains why things feel so deserted. I find the front entrance, and enter to find… a deserted building. No one in the lobby, no signs posted, and no obvious Go-related activity occurring. I check my email (thank the gods for smartphones) and realize I missed a detail - room 404. Great. I’ll never find it.

I do find an elevator, though, and while I wait for it several other people arrive, obviously Go players (exactly how this is obvious is lost on me, but it is clear they are Go players). One of them, an older man, smiles at me in greeting, and with that, normalcy returns.

Setup

The tournament takes about an hour to get going. The organizers seem to be having trouble with their tournament software. While we wait, I say hi to the players I know from the Triangle Go Club, and end up in a conversation with someone who is about my age. We start to play a warm-up game. He gives me 9 stones, and I’m doing pretty well about 50 moves in, when we notice that the tournament organizers have set up a projector and are projecting the first round pairings. We clean up our game, and I grab a bottle of water and head over to my assigned table.

Round 1

My first game is against Andrew, rank 15 kyu. Andrew is young - probably no older than 12. He is also very polite: He introduces himself and shakes my hand before he sits down.

As I entered at 19 kyu, I have black with 3 handicap stones. I had a chance during my warm-up game to figure out how the Ing bowls work, but it takes me a minute to work out how to program and use the game clock¹. They’re pretty intuitive, though, and I am soon hearing an amazingly cheerful voice (it reminds me of Sumomo) telling me my timer has started counting. Since I have handicap stones, my opponent actually goes first, so I immediately press my button to make it white’s turn, and hear the same message repeated again, with ‘White’ in place of ‘Black’.

Andrew plays his first move in less than a second. This isn’t too surprising - in a 3 stone handicap game, playing the 4th hoshi is an obvious opening move. I respond aggressively, approaching his stone, and now the tournament really feels underway. I throw myself into the mental space of Go, of territory and influence, attack and counter-attack.

Andrew responds almost immediately to every move I make, while I feel lumbering by comparison, often thinking for several seconds before responding. This trend continues throughout the game, and his fast moves make me feel like I need to respond equally fast, which leads to several mistakes.

His play is surprising - he pretty much discards joseki and instead favours attaching to any approach move I make. I’m admittedly weak against strange openings - even if they’re technically weaker, I haven’t seen them as much and so the best response isn’t obvious and automatic.

More importantly, Andrew is very good, especially at local fighting. I cede more and more territory, and lose several sizable groups of stones. My opponent is the tide and I fall back before his steady and relentless onslaught. I know enough about the game to build a seawall, though, and eventually the board starts to settle. Then I see it - a critical point in one of my opponent’s shape in the south-west side of the board that, if I can play there, will kill two large groups, giving me some 40 points. It’s monumental, and it could turn the tide of the game. And it’s my opponent’s turn. If he sees the weakness and plays the point, these stones will be alive.

My hands start to shake, and I can feel my pulse in my neck, speeding up. My face flushes, and I’m afraid I might actually break into a sweat. Adrenaline. I’ve always had strong adrenaline reactions, but I’ve learned to usually keep up a calm front in the face of an adrenaline storm. Still, I feel light-headed and it’s hard to think.

I stare at a different part of the board, afraid of drawing his attention to the weakness.

He makes his move, attacking my stones in the northeast corner. A few points there doesn’t matter, though. This play is bigger. I put my stone on the board firmly, and it makes a satisfying click. I press the game clock, and it chirps, signaling to Andrew that it is his turn.

The game is over shortly after this. After some confusion about how to count, we calculate the score. Even with my 40-point comeback, I lose by 20 points. Still, I feel like this is a good result. He was clearly better than me, and I had some really clever play near the end.

Round 2

I finish the first game pretty early, and have a chance to watch the other games and socialize with other players who have already finished. After everyone is done, it takes the organizers a while to enter the results and pair up the contestants for the next round. This is a repeated theme throughout the tournament, but I don’t mind - it’s a good chance to rest my mind and let my nerves calm down a little.

This time I’m up against Larry, another young player. He is ranked at 20 kyu, so we play an even game, with Larry taking black and me taking white. Larry is very intense; he doesn’t say hi, just sits down and we begin playing.

After the first round, I’m expecting to have to fight hard in this tournament, so I play very aggressively at first, overextending myself a bit. It quickly becomes apparent that I have a strong advantage in both tactical and strategic play. There are still several tricky points, and I manage to kill a large group with some pretty clever play.

The clock is running pretty low - I have less than two minutes of thinking time remaining. The smell of pizza intrudes - I’m starving. Most of the games have finished, and people are walking around while they eat. Several of the younger players are whispering nearby.. Needless to say, this is a distraction. I’m not blaming this for what happens next, but it was probably a factor. I make a huge mistake and let my opponent revive a large dead group. This probably costs me 30 points.

But I’ve taken all the corners and three of the sides, and pushed a wedge into the center. I win easily, by 76 points. I would suggest that Larry overestimated his strength, except he finished the tournament 3-1. I suppose my play style was just strong against his.

Round 3

Next comes some surprisingly delicious spinach pizza (in the sense that spinach pizza is not usually delicious) and Yet More Difficulty generating pairings. Now the problem is obvious - the children are competing as part of teams, so that their totaled wins and losses are considered. The pairing code doesn’t have a way to represent this, though, so the organizers are manually re-pairing the team members so that they don’t face each other.

I get paired with Dale, a stronger player than me - I take a 4 stone handicap. Dale is an older man, and the only adult I play against in the tournament. He is sociable and friendly, and this puts me at my ease, a relief after the previous two rounds.

Dale plays in a more relaxed style than Andrew (the only other game in which I had a handicap), and I’m able to make some pretty solid play against him. It is a very peaceful game until the end - only a small handful of captures. Still, the game is very intense and intricate as we test each other’s weak spots.

When the board feels settled, Dale keeps studying it, running his time down to less than a minute. Then he makes a desperate invasion into the widest part of my territory. I know he’s a stronger player, so I take a long time to respond. This stretches the game out for several more minutes as I carefully try to avoid mistakes. My fortifications hold, though, and his invasion fails.

The total comes to 67 points for me, and 65 points for him. We count again - it turns out he missed a space in his territory. 67 to 66. I win by a single point. This is the closest game of Go I’ve ever played.

Round 4

Even though I’m in one of the last games to finish in round 3, I know it will take a while to get the next round set up, so I take a walk to stretch. The rest of the floor is quiet - a couple students in a computer lab, and two of the young girls from the tournament playing in one of the study lounges. It strikes me how cold it is in the hall - I didn’t notice how warm it was in the room where the tournament is being held. Too many bodies.

I return to the room just as things are getting set up. I look up at the projector that shows the matches, and find my name.

Table	White	Black	HD
…
14	Wiggins Anna	Evans Violet	7

I’ve been paired with a 27 kyu player, and I’m giving her a 7-stone handicap. The tournament organizer actually walks over and apologizes. He explains that they try to avoid handicaps this large, but it was the best they could do with pairing.

But I’m intrigued. This should be a challenge. I’m not great at handicap games, and with 7 stones even a beginner will have a good chance.

Violet sits down across from me. I say hi as she places her handicap stones. She returns my greeting, but reluctantly - she seems a bit shy, or maybe she’s just distracted.

I scatter my opening moves around the board, approaching the corners. She repeatedly blocks by attaching high (I typically approach a 4-4 corner play via the low approach). This leaves her open to a 3-3 invasion, which I am able to exploit on all four corners. I am also able to capture a few sizable groups early on.

So, this may not be as hard as I was afraid it would be. But there’s another problem - as we play, she is building a very solid wall around my territory, claiming the entire center of the board. Normally this is not a sound strategy - there isn’t as much territory in the center as there appears to be, and it is harder to hold. Building that wall takes a lot of moves, and lets me firmly establish my own territory. But I’m backed against the edge pretty effectively here, and it looks like she may have enough points to win.

I manage to connect my corners, taking three sides. Violet is determined to hold the last side, though, and this is, ironically, my chance. I attack a section of her wall that isn’t fully connected. Then another. And another. Eventually I’ve formed a couple of cracks, and I move to drive a wedge into her territory. I don’t try to capture territory, just consume it. This is scorched earth - I just want to make sure nothing will ever grow here again.

I succeed, and we count the stones. I win by 25 points, which means the territory I succeeded in reducing gave me the win. Salting the earth made all the difference.

Wrapping Up

The projector is now displaying the tournament results. I can see that I did pretty well - my standing based on strength of schedule is listed, and my score is double the person below me. That win in round 3 really helped.

In the lull after the last round, people have started talking pretty loudly, and we’ve achieved the sort of din that only 30+ people in a confined space can make. The organizer has to try a few times to start speaking. They have divided the players into 4 sections based on strength:

C	27kyu - 19kyu
B	15kyu - 6kyu
A	5kyu - 1dan
dan	2dan+

I’m excited by this, because sorted like this, I’m at the top of section C. When they actually announce winners, though, they announce a 3-way tie for first; they are only using wins and losses to determine who ‘wins’ here.

This seems an odd choice; surely, in a ranked tournament, one unambiguous winner per group is preferable to 2 or 3? Especially given how likely it is that, in a given group of 5-10 players, several players will finish with 3 wins and nobody will finish with 4. This is basically why strength of schedule even exists.

I’m not concerned about it, though. Some pictures are taken, and I hang around with a few other players to help clean the place up. We turn out the lights and head downstairs.

At the front of the building, I say goodbye to the people still standing around and head back to my car. The rain has stopped now, and the late afternoon air is crisp and clean.


¹For anyone who is unfamiliar with Go game clocks, the clock has (in addition to some setup buttons hidden under a panel) 2 buttons for each side - one with your colour and a smaller one with your opponent’s colour. They also have an indicator that tells you how much time you have left and how many moves have been played. You press your colour after you move to indicate your move is done (it stops your game clock and starts theirs). You can press and hold the opponent’s colour to have your display show how much time their clock has left. In this tournament, we had 30 minutes main thinking time plus 5 30-second byo-yomi periods. Tournament time in Go is very different than in Chess and many other games.

If I have anything like ‘regular readers’ (I’m not certain from the traffic patterns on the blog whether or not that’s true), you’re probably wondering where I’ve been. The answer is, basically, the same as it ever is: writing code.

I’ve also been playing a lot of Go, and doing some tabletop roleplaying. My latest programming projects are related to those hobbies. Today I want to talk about pygo, my new Go game client.

There are already a tremendous number of game clients out there. So, why would I want to create Yet Another One? There’s always the excuse of ‘it is a learning experience’, but I also try to make things that I hope will be useful to me personally. And the problem with all of the existing Go clients is that they come in one of two styles:

1. Desktop clients that are timed, and expect you to play an entire game in one brief sitting. Of these, cgoban3 is by far my favorite client (although it can only connect to its own kgs server).


2. Web-based clients that expect your games to take a long time - usually you make a move, and come back later to see what your opponent has done.

I wanted a client for medium-length games: a game that unfolds over the course of an afternoon, or maybe a couple days, while the players are simultaneously doing other things. So it needs these features:

• Untimed - infinite thinking time allowed


• It is possible to put it down (close the program) and pick it back up later


• Desktop-based. Being on a website makes me feel like I should play just one move and check back much later, and I want to avoid that mentality


• Ability to play multiple simultaneous games

I couldn’t find a client that met all of these requirements, so I decided to build this one.

First steps - pygame

My first implementation of the game used pygame. Pygame is a pythonic layer on top of SDL (which I’ve talked about before, with some convenience libraries added for games. Unfortunately, this really means ‘games’ in a much more ‘modern video game’ sense, and this library felt less and less like a good fit the longer I worked with it. When I started implementing network play, it really fell apart; getting pygame to work with either threads or existing networking libraries (like Twisted) is painful. Adding widgets like buttons or menus requires adding third-party libraries, and theming them is an additional layer of work.

Here is what the pygames version looked like before I scrapped it. This represents a long weekend’s worth of very casual hacking (maybe 6-8 total hours of distraction- and interruption-filled programming):

[caption id=“attachment_728” align=“alignnone” width=“480” caption=“This looks okay, but those buttons are an eyesore, and just feel like bad UI”][/caption]

Note the fairly ugly buttons along the side; several of those buttons (Quit, Join Game, Listen) would be better off in a menu. But menus (especially via a menu bar) are non-trivial with pygame.

Now with more GTK

With pygame scrapped, I decided to use a widgeting toolkit that wasn’t aimed for games, because I don’t really need anything graphically sophisticated. GTK is an obvious choice, because I’ve used it extensively before. It was the first widgeting toolkit that I used, and it is still, in my mind, how such toolkits “should work” (I realize there are toolkits out there that may be better, but this one feels like the natural way because it is what I learned first). Python’s GTK bindings, pyGTK, are really good.

So, in much less time than it took me to create the previous version of the game, I had re-implemented it in GTK. To be fair, I didn’t have to re-implement any of the actual Go logic, because that was encapsulated in a GUI-element-free class (good programming technique pays off). I also haven’t started working on the networking code again yet, but I’m pretty sure Twisted can integrate into GTK’s event loop seamlessly, giving me sensible threads-free networking.

Anyway, here is what we have now:

[caption id=“attachment_729” align=“alignnone” width=“480” caption=“Notice the menu bar and the nicer-looking buttons.”][/caption]

Much prettier. We even have a menu bar, with all of the cruft unrelated to a specific game hidden away. Even better, with Glade laying out and drawing that menu is free - it doesn’t require me to write a single line of code. I just tell glade what function to call when each menu item is clicked, and it handles all of the boring GUI stuff.

The biggest problem I’ve run into with the GTK version was also a problem I had with pygame - the board graphics take a long time to update. With GTK it is especially problematic when I try to redraw the board.

So, I modified the Goban class (which has all of the Go game logic) to return a list of positions that should be re-checked for new information. Then, in GTK, I only redraw the parts of the board that may have changed. This makes the game perfectly responsive - no detectable delay. And using python’s list data type makes this beautifully easy and elegant.

The Future

There’s still a lot of work to do here. I plan on having direct peer-to-peer network connections, as well as having a server that players can connect to. Playing multiple games simultaneously isn’t implemented yet (although with GTK, this should be almost trivial). I may implement timed games as an option, and alternate board sizes, komi, etc. still need to be possible. The code can’t do scoring.

Now that the project is in pretty good starting shape, it’s also available on github.

You can watch the episode here.

Spoiler Warning

This episode deals mostly with Shūichi forming a romantic relationship with Anna (and the resulting fallout). It is told in an interesting nonlinear fashion; we see the two of them interacting, but not the beginning of the relationship. The story then cuts to someone teasing Anna (who is older than Shūichi) for dating him, which causes the other characters present to react with surprise. This is clever, because it aligns the character reactions with the audience reaction - it is as much a surprise to us as it is to them. This is a very effective use of closed narrative, and it manages to drop a surprise reveal into a fairly straightforward story.

Puberty sucks for nearly everyone, I suspect, but being trans at puberty is its own special form of torture. So, here we have a continuation of that narrative: Shūichi gets a zit, and wants it gone. Shūichi’s concern over having a zit seems to be markedly (socially unacceptably) feminine, to the point that he has to debate and work up courage to ask anyone what to do about it. And when he does manage to ask someone, it is his sister’s friend, whom he hardly knows - probably the distance between them makes it easier to broach the subject without feeling weird.

So, Shūichi and Anna’s relationship blooms from Shūichi asking her for advice about skin care. Anna, counter to Shūichi’s concerns, seems to take this in stride; she doesn’t appear to think that there is anything wrong or deviant about Shūichi having these concerns. The social conventions that Shūichi is concerned about violating here are ones I came up against repeatedly in my own childhood, to the point that before I was Shūichi’s age I had already internalized the idea that any beauty regimen beyond the bare minimum of showering was unacceptably feminine, and was careful to cultivate an attitude of wanting nothing to do with any of it. But Anna doesn’t seem to care, casually accepting his behavior and not remarking on it at all. Given Shūichi’s trepidations, this doesn’t seem to simply be a cultural difference - Anna just seems to have a worldview slightly askew of the cultural norm.

This episode is the first time we see one of our gender variant characters (other than Yuki) dating someone (or showing any interest in someone) who doesn’t know about their gender variance, as well. There are a lot of topics this brings to mind, but for now I’d like to give a sense of what it feels like to date someone while struggling with gender identity issues. To put it bluntly, being trans ended one relationship for me and dramatically altered another. So, let’s switch gears from Shūichi’s narrative to my own.

I have been in very few relationships. Depending on how you count, I’ve been in 2, 3, or 5. A comparatively small number. At any rate, I’ve only had two long-term (> 2 years) relationships, and those were both touched by my struggles with gender identity. In the first case, I dated a girl throughout high school. I struggled with depression the entire time, which I now recognize was repressed gender dysphoria. I used the fact that I was in a relationship with a heterosexual girl to help me invalidate the feelings of wrongness that were getting stronger over time. Eventually this led directly to me ending the relationship. At the time, I didn’t really understand why I felt the need to end the relationship - certainly I knew that the fact that I felt like I couldn’t tell her I liked to dress as a girl was a major factor, but looking back on it, the only justification I had for that feeling was that she was straight. I recognize now that I was already unconsciously identifying my gender variance as not “cross-dressing”, but a more fundamental difference between my assigned gender and my gender identity.

The next relationship was more complicated. She was bisexual, and somehow this made me feel more comfortable telling her about my gender variance (the reasons for this are more obvious in retrospect). As it evolved (I eventually spent a lot of time introspecting and decided that I must be genderfluid. Looking back, I can see this had nothing to do with any actual masculine feelings, but was completely about me being afraid of change, since it let me confine my femininity to my private life), she was understanding and accepting. There were certainly problems, though - the biggest is probably the fact that we were married, and had planned to have children together. Adapting to the idea of not having children with me was tough (although being polyamorous was a real boon there). But on the whole, our relationship got better as I got less depressed.

My latter experience here is not necessarily common; I have heard many trans narratives in which bitter breakups come from coming out to partners. This, then, has to hang over Shūichi’s head. Mixed in with the happiness and trepidation and hormone-fueled irrationality that comes with a first relationship are complex fears and nagging doubts: Will she understand if I tell her? Will she freak out, turn on me, out me to everyone, to my parents? Is dating even worth it, when I have this complex and taboo secret?

Can anyone possibly want me once they really know me?

You can watch the episode here.

Spoiler Warning

When I transitioned, I took all of my men’s clothes, put them in trash bags, and gave them away. This was a very cathartic experience - the moment I left the lie behind forever. I’ve noticed that a lot of trans women are sentimental like that.

So, when Yuki puts on a men’s suit to attend the play, it struck me as odd - keeping that kind of reminder of my past life around is something that I actively avoid, and I know the same is true for many trans women. This is, then, a great example of the fact that everyone’s experience is different. Exactly what being trans means to Yuki probably doesn’t match what it means for Shūichi, or Mako, or Yoshino. Or me. The show has been pretty good at conveying that already, actually, but this really drives it home for me.

This episode gives us several examples of the thing that this show does the best: presenting an understanding and empathetic portrayal of trans people without feeling heavy-handed or contrived. It is a glimpse into the lives of several trans people, how they think and feel and how they deal with navigating in a world of uncertainty. It’s the genuine sense of empathy here that keeps the show from feeling sensationalizing - the focus is often on the trans experience of these characters, sure, but it also takes great pains to ensure that the characters feel like actual individual people and not just something to gawk and giggle at. In other words, even though the show is explicitly about gender issues, it never feels like it’s all about gender issues.

Our first example is the one we already discussed above: Yuki feels the need to cross-dress to go back to her old school. This is something that I refer to in my own head as the Double Life Problem. See, the problem is that even a successful, pretty, fully transitioned trans woman can find herself buried by self-consciousness and doubt about her ability to pass the moment that history enters the picture. Obviously this is not a universal truth - see “everyone’s experience is different”, above. But for many of us, I suspect, our lives are divided into two sections: before we transitioned and after we transitioned (and of course, there’s the liminal phase of “during transition”, but that is, we hope, as brief as possible). And so our social circles can likewise be grouped into ‘people who met us before we transitioned’ and ‘people who met us after we transitioned’.

So when Yuki decides to dress as a man when going back into a group of people (her schoolteachers) that haven’t seen her since she transitioned, it’s safe to assume it is out of fear that she might be recognized. People in general will often go to great lengths to avoid embarrassment, and added to that is the dysphoria that would accompany someone excitedly calling you by your old name and then asking why you’re dressed like a girl. Yuki appears to have decided that it’s better to endure a little known dysphoria than to chance the possibility of a larger amount of dysphoria coupled with public embarrassment. This is not the choice I would make, personally - I refuse to pretend any more, no matter the situation. But that works well for me; obviously Yuki prioritizes differently. Either way, this is another insight into what it means to be trans on a very real and human level. The story is very clearly about these individuals and their experiences, instead of claiming to be about trans people as an entire group - yet at the same time it finds a way to hit on a lot of widely shared aspects of trans experience.

The next example we get of the show’s empathy and insight is a subtle part of a larger scene. Yuki comments that it’s “too bad” that Shūichi won’t be Juliet in the play. Mako, who is playing Juliet and who has gender identity issues of his own, is standing nearby and holding the dress he is going to be wearing. When he hears Yuki saying it is ’too bad’ that he won’t be playing Juliet, Mako clutches the dress to him slightly. The camera lingers on this for just a moment, but it is the most expressive scene in the episode. This is very effective visual storytelling, evocatively highlighting Mako’s own gender identity issues, and the way they consistently take a back seat to Shūichi’s.

This moment is also the first time all four of the show’s gender variant characters are in the same place, and the gesture underscores the fact that they are all in different places with accepting and embracing their gender identities. We have Yuki, the role model of successful transition and passing as cisgender (ironically cross-dressing for the first time in years). Shūichi and Yoshino are both in a place where their gender identity is largely accepted (if not fully understood) by their friends, and are slowly becoming more vocal and confident about it. Mako, on the other hand, is still struggling to articulate his feelings. He isn’t as confident as Shūichi, to the point that he hasn’t even expressed to his friends how much having the role of Juliet means to him. His friends (well, Shūichi, at least) know that he enjoys cross-dressing, but they don’t have any clue about the extension of that into gender dysphoria (which, as we’ll see in a bit, Mako does seem to have). In addition, Mako feels that he is not “pretty enough” to be a girl, as he has explicitly mentioned in the past when contrasting himself with Shūichi.

At the opening of the play itself, Mako freezes, and he says (in internal monologue) “everyone is staring at me”. This is the first time Mako has ever dressed as a girl in public. He is duly shocked. Despite the social acceptability of this particular gender variance, Mako is very self-conscious. And this is a feeling I understand deeply. Being trans is often something that takes a long time to accept (that is to say, it gets heavily repressed and undoing that takes a long time), and that acceptance is an incremental process. Some (possibly many) trans people, myself included, identify as cross-dressers for some amount of time. Cross-dressing (although the term becomes a misnomer when you later find that you are trans) is typically a very private thing; it is something that social stigma drives us to do in private. So, to dress as a girl and then be seen in public is like having a deep and shameful secret suddenly exposed. Even if it is in a socially acceptable context, or if no one recognizes you. Getting over that internalized idea - that dressing like a girl was something I should only do in private - took a concentrated act of will. And it took time. Mako, on the other hand, hasn’t had any of that time to adjust. So he freezes.

Speaking of the play, let’s talk about its context within Japanese education system. Bunkasai (文化祭) means ‘cultural festival’, and is an aspect of Japanese culture that has no analogue in US culture. So, the trappings and conventions here are a bit unusual to a Western audience. It is basically a sort of show-and-tell to the world, where students can provide some entertainment of cultural merit for friends and family. It’s not optional - all students are expected to participate as a requirement for graduation, although I get the impression that it isn’t graded per se. Bunkasai are held from the elementary level through university, although at the university level they are no longer mandatory. Plays are a fairly common choice for classes to present.

Another notable thing about the play is the way that it uses gender; all of the actors are intended to have the gender roles reversed, including the trans characters. In other words, Juliet (a trans girl) is meant to be played by a cisgender boy. Likewise, Romeo is played by a cisgender girl. This is a subtle nod to the validity of trans people’s gender identity. If a girl had been cast to play Juliet, it would have implied that Juliet was a male character; by putting a (ostensible) boy in the role, it suggests that the characters involved have no problem accepting Juliet’s gender identity as valid and true. That this choice goes unremarked throughout the show may imply an unrealistic world (in which trans acceptance is far more advanced than it really is), but it’s a welcome, validating nod all the same. After all, the show portrays plenty of social backlash at other times, so it’s nice to establish the play firmly as a narrative victory on this issue.

After the play, we get our first real sense that Mako is decidedly gender dysphoric as opposed to just a cross-dresser. He laments to Saorin that “all I wanted was for someone to see me as Juliet”. Shortly thereafter, Saorin does what may be the first genuinely nice thing the character has done: she gives Saorin some flowers (that had been given to her earlier), and lies, telling him that she was told to give them “to Juliet.” When he is then predictably flustered, she says “All that matters is that someone saw you as Juliet.” This explicitly acknowledges both that Mako has dysphoria and that Saorin knows it (and acknowledges his evolving gender identity as valid). This contrasts sharply with her refusal to acknowledge Shūichi’s gender identity, which just adds more evidence that she was simply being spiteful and jealous in her previous tirade.

While he’s still very much a background character, this episode gave Mako both definition and character development. And Mako resonates strongly with me, because his experience is a reasonable match for my own experience around that age, particularly the feeling that it isn’t worth trying to be a girl if you don’t already look feminine enough; that thought was one of the strong motivators that kept me from transitioning much, much earlier than I did. I’m glad that they gave this character more of a voice here, although unfortunately he will fade into the background again for the rest of the series.

Every year, hundreds of people travel to MIT during the Independent Activities Period for the MIT Mystery Hunt, a popular puzzlehunt. This year was my second Hunt. This is a review, analysis, and/or postmortem of it. It contains some of the solutions, so if you want to go play with the puzzles yourself (as they are all posted online), be forewarned!

How does this thing work, anyway?

First, since most of the people who read this site probably aren’t puzzlers, a brief description of the flow of the Hunt. Teams arrive and set up in pre-arranged headquarters (either a location near campus for teams that have them, or a classroom or two for any team that requests one). Everyone gets their stuff set up, then the hunt itself begins on Friday at noon with a kickoff presentation (traditionally in Lobby 7, which is functionally the ‘main entrance’ at MIT). Then teams return to their rooms and hit F5 repeatedly on the Hunt website (this year that was at borbonicusandbodley.com), waiting for the first round of puzzles to be released. Once they appear, the teams start trying to solve them.

Puzzles come in ‘rounds’, which are unlocked over time or via solving puzzles in the rounds you already have. Exactly how these work has varied somewhat from year to year. Each round also has a meta-puzzle (or simply ‘meta’), which uses all of the answers from the round as the clues to some new (often quite difficult) puzzle.

Each year’s hunt also has a theme: a nominal reason for the teams to be solving puzzles. This year’s theme was related to the film The Producers, which led to a series of rounds based on ideas for terrible Broadway musicals (all of which were puns on existing musicals: A Circus Line, Okla-Holmes-a!, Into the Woodstock, Mayan Fair Lady, Phantom of the Operator, and Ogre of La Mancha). So, that was cute, and it made each round unlock produce a round of laughs and/or groans from the team.

If a team completes all of the rounds, they unlock the ’endgame’, which usually involves some final puzzles and culminates in a runaround (a sort of scavenger hunt that involves actually running around MIT campus. Here is the beginning of one from last year). The runaround ends in the ultimate goal of the Hunt: finding a ‘coin’ (sometimes an actual coin, sometimes not). The team that finds the coin wins the Hunt.

There are also, at least in recent years, a number of ’events’ during the hunt. Teams can send a couple members to these events, which are sometimes puzzle-oriented but can also be skill-based. The reward for the events are points that can be spent on puzzle answers. This is especially important strategic resource, and is mostly useful when you are working on a meta-puzzle and need more of the answers from its round to make sense of it.

A review

As a whole, the hunt was a lot of fun. I think last year’s (video game-themed) hunt was a better hunt overall - the multiple runarounds were especially fun. But this year had a lot of interesting puzzles, and I certainly performed better than last year. I can claim two solid solves, which I’ll discuss in detail later.

This year’s approach to round unlocks was, I thought, quite good - each round had a set unlock time (a time at which every team was guaranteed to have it), and the more puzzles you solved the more points you accrued. Your point total was fed into a function that decreases the time until the next unlock happens. There were also multiple unlocks per round - each round came in two halves, and there were, I believe, two unlocks for each half (so, 4 unlock points per round).

This was very similar to last year’s method, but more sensible - last year the unlocks were based solely on points, which accrued over time with a bonus given for solves. This made it a bit hard to get a quick estimate of how many solves your team had achieved. It felt like the points mapped more directly to how well the team was doing this year.

The result, for our team at least, was a fairly steady flow of new puzzles into the mix. This is good - it means that if a given team member didn’t have any insight into any of the existing puzzles, there was always something new for them to work on coming fairly soon.

Each round in this hunt had two meta-puzzles, and the round ended in a ‘production’, in which teams were tasked with writing and performing a short skit that included the meta-puzzle answers as elements. I wasn’t fond of this element - it strayed away from puzzling a little too far for my tastes. Luckily, there were enough people on my team that I didn’t really feel pressured to participate. Still, this mostly left me longing for last year’s runarounds through the tunnels.

I finally went to an event this year, as well, ‘Bringing Stars Together’. I have mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, the premise of the event was interesting: a logic puzzle (fairly straightforward, with 4 constraints) whose clues are discovered by chatting with the characters involved in the puzzle. This is a novel way to present a logic puzzle, and that part was a lot of fun. On the other hand, the effort vs. reward for this event was laughable - the event lasted more than an hour and a half, and was only worth 0.2 answer unlocks.

The hunt also seemed to have more ‘mini-events’ and puzzles that had physical components (that teams had to go and retrieve from various rooms around campus) than last year. I think I walked the entirety of the Infinite Corridor at least 10 times. One notably interesting one involved playing a game of Jenga to get the clues for a (very simple) puzzle. These were interesting and a welcome addition to the usual LAN-party feeling of sitting in the team headquarters staring at spreadsheets. Not that that isn’t a lot more fun than it sounds, of course.

Also, none of the puzzles made it necessary to spend a lot of time outside. In Cambridge in January, this is a welcome feature. On a completely unrelated note, I really need to invest in some Boston-strength clothing.

So, that was the hunt. Codex made an admirable attempt at matching the bar set by Metaphysical Plant last year. I’d say they nearly reached it. I look forward to seeing what the Manic Sages can follow up with next year.

Puzzle Logs

I worked on a number of puzzles, most of which were eventually solved. Here are some of my thoughts on some of my favourites (and least favourites), along with a description of how we solved (or tried to solve) them.

Blinkenlights

In this puzzle I quickly realized that we have ’top’ rows and ‘bottom’ rows of lights, and that we could click any of the currently lit top lights to change the other lights in some sort of pattern (and I mapped all of the positional changes out pretty quickly). Furthermore, the bottom 8 lights for each group of 16 top lights was counting up in binary, every time a move was made in their ‘group’. At first it looked like each set of four lights were self-contained, but after finding a sequence that turned all 4 lights off, other lights in the group of 16 turned themselves on. I couldn’t find any pattern to this, until one of my teammates (Max) suggested that maybe each group of 16 lights (4 groups of 4) acted like a group of four - following the same pattern. And each 2 sets of 4 lights corresponded to a letter at the top of the screen.

After some legwork (a whole lot of clicking), I turned out all of the lights, revealing the message “SolveRestThenPluralizeTitleWord4”. Unfortunately, I didn’t see how to solve the ‘Rest’, as the entire thing was already solved. This is where I dead-ended, and eventually abandoned the puzzle (after about an hour of solid work on it).

The solution, it turns out, was to find the shortest path that turns out all of the lights (i.e. solves the maze), which leaves the lights in the bottom rows in a state that spells out “PATENT 2,417,786” in ASCII. Finding the shortest path through this would have required both a lot of leg-work and some non-trivial programming (in javascript with greasemonkey, probably). I had considered this as a possible solution, but dismissed it as too much work to be practical. It’s good to know I was on the right track, at least.

Pure and Simple

This puzzle fell into a certain class of puzzles: a simple series of images presented with little to no context. I’m not historically that great at these, but in this case, I had the a-ha moment that led to the puzzle being solved.

Image puzzles are a lot like word association games with a visual element. The first step is usually to identify all of the images, and our team had done that by the time I looked at the puzzle. Initially I just glanced at the images, nothing clicked, and I moved on. In the lull after solving Revisiting History (see below), though, I looked at this puzzle again. Someone had identified the second picture on the right side as Brahms. Which is when it hit me: the last picture on the left side was a picture of 3 coke cans.

‘Cans and Brahms’, of course, is an instrumental track from Yes’ album Fragile, which consists of some brief excerpts from one of Brahms’ pieces arranged and played with synthesizers. From there the team was easily able to deduce that all of the images could be paired to form song titles separated by ‘and’.

I knew my near-encyclopaedic knowledge of progressive rock would come in handy some day.

Revisiting History

Ahh, the Doctor Who puzzle. I recognized what was going on in this puzzle at almost the exact same time as one of my team-mates - I turned to tell him about it (as he is easily the most knowledgeable Doctor Who fan I know) only to discover he was already beginning to match the descriptions to the companion(s), Doctor, and episode titles. We had that information down amazingly quickly, but extraction was difficult - nothing we tried seemed to work. Then another team-mate noticed that the word ‘who’ appeared in every clue. Using that as an index got us to the answer very quickly. I think this may have actually been our first solve - we had it within the first hour of the hunt, certainly.

Eek!

This puzzle was a lot of fun, and I am proud to say that I can claim most of the work for my team in solving it. It is, obviously, a 3-d maze. We took each self-contained ‘piece’ of the puzzle on each level and numbered them. Then, we mapped the connections between numbered nodes, and used this program (which took something like 10-20 minutes to write and test) to solve it:

[sourcecode language=“python” gutter=“false”]
#!/usr/bin/python

import networkx as nx
import sys

source = ‘44’
target = ‘3’

def parse_input(infile):
g = nx.Graph()
f = open(infile, ‘r’)

for line in f:
meta = line.split(’:’)
node = meta[0].strip()
edges = meta[1].split(’,’)

g.add_node(node)

for n in edges:
other_node = n.strip()
g.add_edge(node, other_node)

f.close()
return g


def main():
infile = sys.argv[1]
g = parse_input(infile)
path = nx.shortest_path(g, source, target)
print path
print len(path)

main()
[/sourcecode]

There were a couple of hitches: a small error in our mapping data being the crucial one. But we got a solution, then mapped it on the maze (with a highlighter). The result clearly said ‘side elev’ on the top row, so we took the thing and mapped it out with burr tools. We found the word ‘Love’ very quickly, but that wasn’t the answer. So, I shelved the problem and went to bed.

Looking at it again the next day (Sunday morning), I saw the trick: the flavour text implies that the path taken should be the negative space, not the positive space. With this as a clue, I re-mapped the solution in burr tools, inverting which blocks were solid. This led to the answer: the word ‘Love’ was still visible on one side, while ‘Etc’ was visible on the other. ‘LOVE ETC’, is, of course, the answer.

JFK SHAGS A SAD SLIM LASS

We didn’t solve this puzzle, but I want to include it because it is very clever. I almost solved it, too. I looked at the keyboard, typed out the phrase (which took a while, because I’m used to typing in dvorak), but I didn’t spot any obvious patterns, probably because I was focusing too much on remembering qwerty. So close.

Sounds Good to Me

This was my absolute favourite puzzle of the hunt. It was delightful in every way. The cluing at the beginning sets the tone: in greek characters is the latin phrase ’nota bene: non sequitur lingua Iaponica!’. Which is to say, basically, ‘what follows is not Japanese’.

Instead, it is toki pona, a constructed language (conlang) with, according to Wikipedia, 3 fluent speakers. This wonderfully obscure language is fairly light on vocabulary (120 root words and a smattering of loanwords where necessary). One of my team-mates got the hiragana transliterated into latin characters, and another team-mate identified it as toki pona (he recognized it because of a passing acquaintance with the creator of the language).

An automated translator for toki pona -> English exists, but doesn’t work very well (as we quickly discovered). Instead, I translated most of the entries by hand, learning toki pona vocabulary and grammar as I went. This felt very much like my recent Old Norse translation project, and like all translation, was enjoyable for its own sake. As I translated, it became clear that the toki pona text was providing definitions of words or phrases in other languages. Eventually I found that the words at the end of each paragraph were language names in Toki Pona (the ‘official’ dictionary doesn’t list these, as they are loanwords). After we figured out a couple of these clues, it became obvious that these were phrases or words that were used in English but were actually loanwords from the given languages.

These clues gave us the acrostic DANKESCHOENINJAPANESE. Of course, Japanese has a lot of ways to say ’thank you’, but the 7/9 at the bottom of the page clued us into a 2-word phrase that, in Latin characters, would give us 7- and 9-letter words. So, ARIGATO GOZAIMASU was the obvious choice.

I often describe myself as an ‘amateur linguist’. Philologist might be the better term. I really love Language. Learning languages and playing with language are both hobbies of mine. Most of the time, this isn’t terribly useful, mainly because I never devote enough time to any one language to learn it thoroughly. However, in this case my exact sort of language skills and knowledge were perfectly suited to this puzzle. If any one puzzle next year is half as fun as this one was, it will be well worth the trip.