MIT Mystery Hunt on This American Life

I just got around to listening to This American Life's episode about the MIT Mystery Hunt. This is the ultimate puzzle hunt challenge, probably the hardest in the country. Several NPL members make appearances—teams can include people from outside MIT, and as a result the Hunt is a mini NPL con. The TAL reporter tags along with a team on the Hunt. It starts at about 32:00, after a touching profile of an Irish unlikely quizmaster.

More Esoteric Programming Languages

Given the current popularity of Lolcats, I suppose it's possible that LOLCODE will gain traction in the marketplace. But for now, it's a collaborative project to define syntax and grammar based on the Lolcats phenomenon.

Here's a code snippet, in the current incarnation of the language:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
GIMMEH VAR
VISIBLE "You said " N VAR N " !!"
KTHXBYE


I love KTHXBYE as the close of a code block.

via, sheesh, lots of people

RiffTrax

Melissa and I used to love to listen to DVD commentary tracks. You could get so much great information about the director's thoughts, and the actors' reactions.

Then we realized that most of them suck. I don't remember the last one we listened to. If you like the audio commentary, but not the director's version, check out RiffTrax. The same folks who brought you Mystery Science Theater 3000 have started doing riffs on more current movies. $3 gets you MST3K-style jokes to accompany your favorite, or not so favorite, films. Pop in the DVD, sync up with the MP3, and laugh.

via SFist

Bible Fight

Take your basic 2-person fighting game; add biblical characters. Do I even need to tell you that Adult Swim's Bible Fight is offensive? Punch and kick as your favorite biblical figure against a wide variety of backdrops, and unleash special moves such as Noah's Dove of Brutality or Flash Flood.

Mary and Eve pwned me as Noah.

via G*D*A*C

George Bush Succeeds Will Shortz as NYT Crossword Puzzle Editor

After the popular Clinton NYT crossword puzzle a while back, having a permanent presidential crossword editor seemed like an obvious choice. Full article here.

via the National Puzzlers' League mailing list.

More Than Meets The Eye

Transformers the movie is coming.

Do you need more than that? How about this sweet HD trailer at the Yahoo! movie site? It rocks; the robot transforms look fantastic.

Emoticon Programming Language

There's a whole community of people who design and implement oddball programming languages that no one will ever use. One of my favorites is befunge, a 2-dimensional language. But while Googling something for a Perplex City card, I came across the Emoticon programming language. Want to encode a message/program in an email full of emoticons? Check out this language.

I Will Survive for Violin and Piano

What happens when you get two classical musicians with a sense of humor covering Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive? Find out by watching the video.

via Lilly

Cube World

While buying some Season 2 Perplex City cards from Firebox, I noticed a product on sale called Cube World. Each individual cube has a black-and-white LCD screen and a program for a little stick-man character. You can play games with him and so forth. But slap cubes together, and the stick figures will start wandering around and interacting with each other in creative ways.

I'm not compelled to buy any, but it's a pretty neat idea.

The Grand List of Console Role-Playing Game Cliches

I've not played too many RPGs, but I've played enough to chortle aloud at this list of RPG cliches, sent to me by my co-worker Aaron.

Just Nod Your Head And Smile
And no matter how big that big-ass sword is, you won't stand out in a crowd. Nobody ever crosses the street to avoid you or seems to be especially shocked or alarmed when a heavily armed gang bursts into their house during dinner, rummages through their posessions, and demands to know if they've seen a black-caped man. People can get used to anything, apparently.

Nina And Monk

Melissa and I were disappointed by Christopher Guest's For Your Consideration, but the cloud's silver lining came in the form of the weather person in the morning show scene. Turns out Nina Conti is a skilled ventriloquist who performs with a depressed monkey puppet named Monk. This video of one of her performances shows off her talent. Her mouth movements are very subtle, and she reacts well to Monk's lines. She "breaks" the illusion by having jokes that talk about ventriloquism, but they're very well done, making the illusion in some ways even better.

My New Favorite Word: Phatic

of, relating to, or being speech used for social or emotive purposes rather than for communicating information

As in: "Hi, how are you?" or "Nice weather we're having, eh?"

Strangers In Paradise Coming To An End

Strangers In Paradise is a great introduction to the world of non-superhero comic books. The story features two women, their friends, and the relationships that tangle them all up. Melissa and I followed it for a long time, but as she notes, it often seemed like the story was spinning its wheels.

Perhaps author Terry Moore felt the same way, because he has decided to bring the series to a close. Melissa and I recently learned that the next issue, the one for June 2007, will be the very last Strangers In Paradise. Knowing the end is near, we'll probably pick up the trade paperback collections we've missed, eventually buying the trade that has the last installments.

Clinton's Crossword

To celebrate its new puzzle page format, the New York Times enlisted Bill Clinton to write the clues for today's crossword puzzle. I don't think he constructed it; he just wrote the clues.

Bond

Dance music meets string quartet meets remixes? OMG!!! It's the most perfect Derrick music since ABBA-esque. Or the dance opera scene in The Fifth Element.