The Zotmeister

03:58 pm - Ambigram

An ambigram is an image depicting writing stylized in such a manner as to be readable in a different manner. The classic ambigram has rotational symmetry, so that it appears identical - and is therefore equally readable - when turned upside-down, such as on the backs of Bicycle Enigma playing cards (which irritatingly I don't own any of... yet). Fellow USPC puzzlesmith Scott Kim has a whole page of these "inversions", being probably the greatest popularizer of the art form.

When cyrebjr recently asked me if I'd commission em to have an ambigram made, I wasn't interested... but e did get me curious to see if I had any skill at making them myself, as I'd love to be able to have a version of 'Zotmeister' or 'The Zotmeister' that would be suitable for the back of a playing card. What occurred to me was that a mirror image would be much easier than a rotation, and it didn't take long at all to come up with what now graces the top of my journal pages (formatting the image itself took FAR longer than the design!).

Curiously, my LJ friends page also shows the image, and my DW reading page does not. I have no idea why. Not that I care much either way. - ZM

09:54 am - Conversations with Cleverbot

Have you ever attended a convention, Cleverbot?
Have you?
I asked first.
I am.
...That's not the sort of 'convention' I meant, hence why I specified 'attended'.
What are your intentions?
Same as usual - strike up a conversation. So, have you ever attended a convention?
I am not a computer and I have many friends.
You wear your lack of self-esteem on your sleeve, you know that?
There you go, changing the subject again.
Well, it's not like you've answered the question yet.
I don't remember you asking anything concerning Barack Obama. Besides, I like answering a question with a question. It's fun.
...Okay, fine. Yes, I've attended conventions before. I'm going to one this weekend. So, you?
Really, what are you going to see?
I'm going to see if I can retain my status as master of fighting game tournaments at TempleCon.
Are you sure you're going to heaven?
It's not that kind of temple. The Temple is a game store in Pawtucket.
Are you sure about that?
Yes, I've been there. The owners are really nice. It's great to play games on their original Neo*Geo cabinets.
Yes, that would be overdoing it a little.
Pah. There's a lot to be said for retrogaming.
But there has to be a point of a realtionship and a future too, otherwise it won't work.
You misspelled 'relationship'. Of course, I misspelled 'rein' way back when...
That's correct, the person that wrote that misspelled it.
Ah, so you DO just repeat things others tell you! You admit it!
No, knowing anything is not the same as knowing everything.
That reminds me of a song I've been working on.
What other things?
...I lost you at the bakery.
You lose the game if you talk about the game.
So... You just lost. Does that mean I win!
Yes you win this time.

08:56 am - Writer's Block: ONTD Games Giveaway

"Which videogame character would you like to have as your real-life BFF?"

I am apparently first to pick Lyndis of Caelin, from Fire Emblem. I'll be her master strategist, and she'll be my peerless warrior... if you know what I mean :) Seriously though, until I make my own game, she'd be the best choice - the game did a great job of making it feel like we're friends already, and I'd be honored to be acquainted with her no matter how far the relationship goes or doesn't go. (Part of me would prefer Fiora as a girlfriend, although I love Lyn's hair...) - ZM

02:56 pm - Quarrelsome

I have often described myself as a software bug magnet, and often note that I am not incredibly proficient at finding (often oddball) glitches in programs so much as glitches in programs are incredibly proficient at finding me. Given the quantity of videogames I partake in, this often results in particularly entertaining (though often bemusing) results. Quarrel, a new release on Xbox 360 LIVE Arcade yesterday, has already provided me with one for the history books.

Quarrel is a strange mixture of Risk and Jumble, where territories are loaded with troops and sent to battle each other, but with their fates decided not by die rolls but rather anagramming ability. For each battle, players are presented with eight Scrabble-style letter tiles (the same for everybody), complete with point values, and are tasked with making the highest-scoring word they can; the greater point total wins the battle, with ties broken by who entered es word faster. Three elements come together to make this especially interesting:

1. the maximum word length a participant in the battle can submit is equal to the number of es troops in the territory on the disputed border;
2. non-participants in the battle can also submit words to earn extra troops, and get to use all eight letters for this;
3. there is always at least one eight-letter word - conveniently called "the anagram(s)" - to be made from the provided letters, and it/they will always be revealed after the battle.

11:42 am - RESURRECTION!

You know what they say, the third strike is what counts...

02:25 pm - Hunt (Part 1)

I've never really been the write-up type, regardless of how good or bad I may be at it, so I'll just toss out some anecdotes on puzzles from last weekend's MIT Mystery Hunt and what comes comes. Spoilers abound, so read at your own risk:

• Blackout: This is where I started - and oofta, was it a doozy for a starting-round puzzle (Scott Handelman, who came up with the concept and half the subpuzzles, agrees it was inappropriate there, so no foul on es part). I got the Braille "aha" right away, or so I'd thought; it took a couple more minutes staring at the Nurikabe to convince myself that yes, it does run that deeply, through the whole damn grid. It would have to. In fact, at one point I entertained the idea it would have to run even deeper than that, generating 5×5 word squares out of the result! That, for better or worse, quickly proved false. I'm surprised so many definable patterns came up - it really was a matter of learning the "rules" of the Braille alphabet, such as requiring at least one of the top two cells in each 2×3 block (as well as at least one among the top-left corner and the one below it). Even knowing all this, the puzzles were STILL a pain in the ass to finish! Jasters and I went back and forth on the Nurikabe, piece by piece, until the whole thing fell; Ertchin made mincemeat of the Tapa; Tyler was on a sine wave of progress with the Pentomino Minesweeper until hitting a wall - but when the first two puzzles finished, we were able to guess the 'Z' and the group finished it all off in short order. Good fun, and good team effort.


• Winning Conditions: I love the concept behind this. I'm not so keen on the execution. For starters, I spent a good twenty-plus minutes getting it to work right on Gabby's laptop (though to be fair, quite a bit browser-related seemed to be not working on there). But during that time, and indeed for hours afterward, the entire team only saw Rule 10 appear ONCE. It popped up pretty much as a fluke when devjoe was toying with it, and we just could...not...get...it...again! I spent HOURS studying combinations trying to get it to reappear; apparently I had the right words, but was inputting them at the wrong time! It's something of a Catch-22: to learn the rules, you have to break them when they're enforced, but to know when that is, you need to know the rules! You have to, to a certain extent, get lucky to crack this one, and I don't much care for that. Nonetheless, it's an utterly fascinating puzzle concept. I don't know who ended up finishing this one off, but it wasn't me.


• Audio Games: If Brad Friedman ever attends the Funspot tourney, they'd all better look out when it comes to the Name That Tune competition, because HOLY CRAP is e FAST at naming games! Unfortunately, that's where I stopped being useful on this one. I saw the whole "26-second" thing going on, so I knew I was listening for one stand-out element in each recording, but curiously enough I was thinking in terms of just about everything EXCEPT the original games themselves. I tried picking out unique sound effects, shifts in music... The 'U' goes below the line and the rest above, Adam. [looks at the whiteboard]


• B.J. Blazkowicz in ‘Wintertime for Hitler’: Brad was getting a big kick out of this. E was clearly disappointed when it was backsolved. Before that happened, e noted the alteration of the starting positions, and I did just what the author thought I'd do and defended against (only the save games have the changes, so a level editor won't help). When I finally got a chance to play myself, I caught the change in contents of the secret rooms... ALL secret rooms! So much for "reduce potential red herrings" - that ADDED to our searchspace. With that said, knowing the answer now, I do think the "find the matching poster" mechanic was perfectly fair and frankly rather clever.


• Zugzwaang: I learned of Arimaa literally the day before the Hunt. I knew my Chess⁴ set would prove useful! (The black/white pieces were used later as well for the Alice Chess meta.) It would have been even better if I'd brought my copy of Zillions of Games, but I failed to do so: "I could bring a flash drive with games on it... pah, it could only be a distraction, what use would it be?" Adam, you twat. ZoG is a must-bring and you know it.


• Tax... in... Space: This unlocked at the same time as Equal Billing. I looked at both as they were printed out, and I knew exactly what was going to happen, so I figured I may as well speed things up: "Is Thomas Snyder online?" I ask. When told e was, I said, "Tell him Equal Billing is his. I'm going to do Tax in Space." Everyone else in the room that looked at this puzzle recoiled. I knew that, perhaps unfortunately, I was the perfect man for the job, as I'm the most anal motherfucker I know, and I'm the sort who could solve this monster with just the paper it's printed out on, a pencil, and my calculator watch, without making a single misstep anywhere along the way. And that's exactly what I did. My favorite part was the 'in' instead of the usual 'of' that meant NOT counting all the letters in the document - what a delightfully simple tactic leading to a MASSIVE trap! I wonder how many fell in. I know I wasn't among them. Poor Mike Booth: I was sounding out parts of the puzzle to keep things straight, and I was (distractingly) cracking em up! When I finished, Brad said I should get a CPA, and several said they'd buy me drinks. [They apparently forgot I'm a teetotaler.] The funny thing was that I finished it at pretty much the same time Thomas finished Equal Billing. ...I should go solve that. My turn now.


• Sovereignty: My first ever backsolve! I'm not sure if this or that last one could be called my crowning achievement this year. I wasn't keyed in to the existence of a Dominion puzzle right away - I'd been concentrating on metas at the time - but once I learned it was there, it grabbed my attention real quick. The Sheila Sunshine meta this puzzle was adherent to required the solution to have exactly eleven letters, with eight letters of the alphabet banned. It was a good old-fashioned toaplan that gave me the answer: I was on the toilet when it hit me that the answer was almost certainly the name of a Dominion card. Guess how many Dominion card titles fit those requirements! Yep - exactly one. ...It's almost a little shameful that this puzzle was circumventible so easily. Perhaps sometime I'll go back and actually try to deduce all the cards.

10:44 am

Well, The Onion certainly isn't pulling punches today. - ZM

10:20 pm - Here comes a new challenger (I hope)

Right now, amazingly enough, DW is losing the race to make sense. (What do you mean I have to view my entry previews in my comment page style rather than my journal style?!) Maybe this race needs a new runner. I've seen enough of Blogger to utterly despise it (and it's still not honoring OpenID as of this afternoon), but WordPress may have some potential and is worth looking into (although I know it'll be an absolute bitch to port anything over given their different codebases). Anyone else have any alternatives to suggest? Seriously, all I'm looking for is something commonsensical. - ZM

04:59 pm - State of the Journal Address

Before I begin: the reason I've been putting the 'puzzles' tag on these updates is that many of my readers ONLY read entries with that tag, so I need to do that to keep them in the loop. That's why I've also adopted the ObTeasers, so that there would be some actual puzzly content in these entries... but as there's still one outstanding without even a single guess at it, you're still not getting another one here! Let me sweeten the pot: the first correct solver gets to choose the type of Puzzle 59; there will be some restrictions on that choice for continuity reasons, but it's otherwise a free selection. Bonus credit (of an as yet undetermined nature) will be awarded if answered in spoiler-hiding white, something LJ broke some time ago but still works in DW comments! (Okay, so the DW site skin isn't exactly white, but it's close enough for me.) The reason it'll be 59 is that I'm saving the next four slots for my first puzzle tetraptych! ...Oops, segued into the actual content. So much for "Before I begin".

Puzzle 60 will be substantial - I'll be keeping that much of the tradition going - but this time there will be no vote. It will be a The One Ring. It will likely be my largest AND easiest multiple-of-fifteen puzzle simultaneously. I do expect to reinstate the poll for future substantial offerings.

Puzzles 61 to 67 will be a heptaptych. Some of you may have seen them before, however. It occurred to me that the faster I get from 60 to 75, the sooner I have an incentive to make another big puzzle, and I like making big puzzles. Some of my best puzzles are not among my numbered offerings here, and I've decided I'd like to remedy that. I will pace them out over time for the most part.

But what about the disappearance of the first 54 puzzles, you may well ask. I made the unfortunate discovery that I'm actually missing one of my puzzle images, but it's none of those: it's the one with the results of my first (and so far only, but I'll be fixing that soon) Puzzlesmith contest. Someway, somehow, I managed to never save a local copy of that file. I have, however, located the archive I stored the original entries in and found my own composition for the contest in my notebooks, so I can create a replacement for it (and back it up this time). I shouldn't be missing anything else, and about a third of my puzzles are back up now. I'm still hoping I get a better means of storing them online than Scrapbook. ...Oh, crap. That means...

[ahem] For my fiction fans (say it with me: both of you), it actually just occurred to me that I may have no means of offering font files at present. Thankfully, the website I've borrowed my current offerings from still exists, so for the time being I can just link to their original locations. I don't intend to rely upon this; when I find a decent hosting solution, I'll make my own copies available again. (I suppose I could do something retarded with file extensions to stick them in Scrapbook, but I don't want to have to do that sort of thing and my readers shouldn't have to undo it.)

Presently, however, I'll be taking a break from stressing out over getting my journal back up to snuff and instead start stressing out over the MIT Mystery Hunt coming up this weekend, starting with how on Earth I'll be getting there... As some of you may know, my car was totalled in a collision in October (the second week of my new job!). NOT my fault, by the way. Although I've managed to make arrangements for purchasing another vehicle, it won't be available in time for the Hunt, so I'm, to condense a phrase, paddleless. Hopefully I (or one of my teammates) will think of something. - ZM

02:49 pm - "Excuse our dust"

As usual, my ability to do two-and-a-half things at once is being overloaded here, as I'm trying to get Dreamwidth to behave like LiveJournal in the most important ways (so far I've gotten the style for my entries and non-style for comment pages working, but entry previews aren't following suit), get my puzzles back up here (Scrapbook really is a torture - I hope DW does this right sometime soon), and transition my email address dependencies. It's slow going, to say the least.

Thank sanity for being able to escape to the Zen of Dark Souls. (JOLLY co-operation!) This could drive me nuts otherwise.

Needless to say, new content is on hiatus until I can get all the content I thought I already had squared away actually squared away. You're not even getting an ObTeaser this time, since the one I gave out two entries ago went unattempted. (Feel free to remedy this. Yes, there's an extra hurdle now - I'm getting to that - but maybe I'll make it worth your while.) But for the record, this is what I'm planning on unloading once all this is dealt with:

• First and foremost, I'll get up to Puzzle 67. That's thirteen more. (Admittedly, eight of those will have been published other places first, but still.) And that's just the first four days.


• Twenty/Zero's long-delayed third episode will finally be revealed. Two more fonts will be added to the collection for it, which means there'll be two new principal characters...


• I have a couple simple game designs I've been meaning to share. It'll start with a poker variant I (surprisingly) haven't seen anywhere else, along with a fancy mathematical justification for discussion of it; more uses for standard playing cards will follow.


• Now that I'm employed, the giving out of prizes can resume. I still won't be soliciting solutions for my numbered puzzles, but I have several ideas for contests...


• A few surprises, some of which may or may not be related to various secret projects I'm working on.

03:03 pm - Writer's Block: Bah Humbug Day!

"Take a deep breath. Now rant about something."

LJ made this easy to answer: the new comment page design! Usually site updates get about 100-200 comments on lj_releases. There was one awhile back that got just under a thousand, and admin reverted the point of contention. The update that rolled out today? 6,100 and counting as of this entry, with none of it undone.

I just signed up for a Dreamwidth account. Serendipitously enough, their usual invite requirement for doing so is waived this week. I get the feeling they're going to get a LOT more business out of that than they planned on! I will wait and see how things go on both sides before I make any decisions as to where I maintain my journal. - ZM

02:00 pm - Utility

For the time being, I have enabled custom comment pages for this journal due to LiveJournal stripping out (at least) half the functionality for comment pages that aren't. I apologize for their ugliness - I never gave them design time as I never thought I'd need to. I'll return to the original style if LJ returns to its senses. - ZM

07:50 am - Writer's Block: Chestnuts roasting on an open fire

"What is your favorite holiday carol or song?"

"Same Old Lang Syne" by Dan Fogelberg. It counts as far as I'm concerned. I detest most holiday fare, but that song is beyond beautiful.

Honorable mention: "Snoopy's Christmas" by The Royal Guardsmen. That makes even me smile. - ZM

11:28 pm - Update

I have a stop-gap email address set up - I actually may end up using it as my primary even after I switch ISPs. It's on my profile page, natch.

For the time being, it looks like I'll be abusing LiveJournal's own Scrapbook feature in order to get my puzzle images back up, but it definitely feels like a kludge and will likely be reworked once I encounter a better option. I also have to recreate the scaled-up puzzle images one at a time, so this will take awhile. On the plus side, it has given me the opportunity to revisit the scaling method; I'm now using a hybrid (I wish I'd thought of that sooner) that should keep both the retro-pixel feel and soft egdes without being so blurry on non-CRT displays (such as on paper...). I'm also tagging the puzzles by type as I go. As I'm typing this, only Puzzle 1 is done - tell me what you think of the new style (it's not too late for me to change it...).

ObTeaser: Consider a 3x3 Sudoku grid with the minimum number of givens needed to make it uniquely solvable (which would be 2). Now strip it of its regions, so we are left with a 3x3 Latin Square with givens matching the Sudoku in corresponding cells. That Latin Square will be uniquely solvable if and only if... Finish that sentence. - ZM

09:58 am - Disappearance

Cox, in their infinite stupidity and once again proving they are the most appropriately named company in existence (as they are a bunch of them), decided to simply up and delete all their webspaces, without warning, no longer offering the service... nor an opportunity to find a replacement before the disappearance. As a direct result of this, all puzzles have vanished from this journal.

As if my family didn't already have enough impetus to switch to Verizon...

In the near future, I will very likely be changing email addresses - which is a process I am FAR too familiar with, but that becomes no less irritating with repetition. If anything, it gets harder and harder, with more and more services tied to that address over time. I thoroughly expect this to be an absolute bitch. I'll keep you posted. No, really, I will.

In the meantime, I'll see what I can do about getting the puzzles back up here. Please be patient.

ObTeaser: What do clouds, some expensive jackets, and Pop-Tarts have in common? - ZM

08:22 am - Writer's Block: Out of this world

"What would you name a new planet?"

It appears I'll be the first to suggest the Roman name of a deity for this purpose. You know, like our other planets? (Except Uranus, of course, which was too ancient a Greek deity to acquire a Roman name.) It would only be appropriate for a new (?) planet in our star system, which of course would be the result of consolidation of the asteroid belt into a habitable world. Okay, so maybe I've played too much Master of Orion II, but that's what I'm thinking, and that's why I'm answering that the only appropriate name for a forged planet orbiting Sol would be Vulcan. [Any Trekkies that have issue with this can take back their three cents and go to Hell.] - ZM

08:18 am - Writer's Block: A sight for sore eyes

"What is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?"

Oh, that's an easy one. Don't have to contemplate it for even a second. The behavior of water droplets, courtesy of Discovery's Time Warp. No contest. - ZM

03:42 pm - Puzzle 54: Smullyanic Dynasty

See Puzzle 4 for instructions. This being my first one of these in the new font, I figured I'd take the opportunity to also switch over to the Singularity template for the grid so that my suggestion of circling knights can actually be followed. Go figure.

Normally I'd never make a solving suggestion for a non-sample puzzle of mine, but I can't resist for this one: try to start with the center cell. It's illuminating. You don't have to - there are other break-ins - but that's where I started, and I daresay it's a pretty neat effect if you can find it. I'll leave the rest to the solver's own faculties as usual.

I'm currently wrapped up in making puzzles for a secret project, but I should have a batch to release here on my journal shortly thereafter. - ZM

10:25 am - And One Other...

I came up with a good new one of these recently:

Cherry, Strawberry, Tropical Fruit, Ice Blue, Spearmint, Honey-Lemon, and one other...

First to post the correct answer in the comments gets to choose what type of puzzle number 54 will be. - ZM

11:11 am - Writer's Block: R.I.P

"What do you want done with your body after you die?"

RESURRECTION! You know what they say, the third strike is what counts...

Honorable mentions: the Klingon funeral, the mushroom-food suit.