Lost in New England, Lost in the Drafts Folder

Here's one of several emails I found sitting in the "drafts" folder in my gmail account. There were about a dozen unfinished emails in there, and it was weird to read them all. Some were intensely private and emotional and I'm glad I didn't send them (and won't post them here). This one was all about poker and gambling, after a long night at Foxwoods, to my girlfriend...

Somewhere in Massachussetts off 395, 10am, anonymous coffee shop in a strip mall. I just woke up a couple of hours ago from my four hour nap in the driver's seat of my rental car parked behind a mobile station at a rest stop. The 7 hours before that were spent mostly gambling at Foxwoods. I only lost a couple hundred bucks, but I hardly could have lost it in a more dramatic fashion. I went up and down thousands, literally thousands, of dollars on my way to my eventual surrender. My intention was to go somewhere fun to watch the basketball game. I ended up staying up all night gambling like a madman.

In some ways it reminded me of the old days. For one thing I hadn't been in Foxwoods in who knows how many years. I used to go there all the time, and spent several nights much like last night, gambling until the sun came up with no idea how I would manage the following day's work. Being all alone in the middle of nowhere with no idea what to do with myself other than play poker. Perhaps if I ever had started drinking I wouldn't need to gamble so much, since it seems to fill a similar void for me. It makes me feel good, it gives me a rush, its fun and entertaining, and its a way to connect with human beings when I'm lonely.

In another way it felt very new and nothing at all like the old days. I was gambling at a very high limit, and playing much more aggressively than ever before. In the old days I'd take a few hundred bucks and chip away at the game all night until I went broke. That isn't entirely true. I can remember a few nights at Foxwoods were I lost a grand or thereabouts. But last night I was playing 20-40 holdem with serious bravado, and playing like I was the best player in the room, aggressively, raising and reraising and putting moves on people. Over the course of playing this way I created huge variance for myself and the swings were pretty wild.

This is where I think poker, or gambling in general, becomes a drug. Its easy to gamble recreationally and have no problem. You play with an insignifigant amount of money, play carefully and try to protect it, hope you come out on top, and have fun along the way. Or you can do what I did last night, and play wildly and without any caution whatsoever, putting large sums at risk on small edges, and watch the chips move back and forth in huge huge piles. This is exhilarating when you win, and devestating when you lose, and I can understand why people like to gamble.

One thing you may never understand or accept is that in the world of gambling, poker is the least dangerous of all. For one thing, your odds aren't fixed, they change with every situation, and understanding that can help you make smart decisions. Poker is much more like the stock market than anything else. Hands start with a certain value, but when the market closes, their value can be anything. Your ability to predict whether they close high or low is how you make money. Your willingness to take more risk determines how much money you will make.

Last night I was up thousands of dollars and lost it all back, then lost a lot more, then won a lot of it back. All told, I've certainly played poker with and for larger sums of money. But this morning I feel rattled by the game a little bit

...I welcome their hatred.

Channeled By Krugman: What Obama Needs To Learn From FDR - TalkLeft: The Politics Of Crime

“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. ... Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.” -Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1936

Paul Krugman's NYTimes piece today really hit it out of the park for me. And this blogger at talkleft.com is on point, as well.

I'm personally sick and tired of hearing Obama go on and on about how "partisan" our politics have become. Ever since Clinton's 'triangulation' strategy in 1996, the Democratic Party has believed that they needed to reclaim the political middle. But like this blogger says...

[T]hat is FDR's lesson for Obama. Politics is not a battle for the middle. It is a battle for defining the terms of the political debate. It is a battle to be able to say what is the middle. . . .

We don't need a namby pamby president who will bring all sides together with watered-down compromises. We need a President who will challenge Americans on the way they think about politics, the way they view government, the way they view the rest of the world, and most importantly the way they view themselves as citizens of this country. That's what presidents like FDR and JFK did, and that's their legacy. They changed politics and they changed the way our society viewed itself. They left the country stronger than they found it, that is for sure.

Just watch this video of Senator Kennedy yesterday on the Senate floor during the debate on the minimum wage bill...

Now Obama might call Senator Kennedy's speech "partisan," I don't know.

I for one call it leadership.

Towncraft

Towncraft - Little Rock - 1994 - Basil forms

It's 9pm and I'm still sitting in my office. Why? Because my hotel I'm staying at has no internet connection, and I can't stop listening to songs on the towncraft site.

I'm currently on 1991-1995 and will probably work my way through 1997 before I stop recognizing the songs.

The video I've linked here is special, because my ugly teenage mug is in it rocking back and forth to the sounds of basil at state street. i remember it like it was yesterday.

Midnight Madness 2006 Recap

Here's my lengthy recap of this year's incredible game. Photos can be found on the flickr pool. If you have any to add, please do!

There was a lot of filming going on this year, and supposedly a documentary is in the works. I'll keep you posted.

Without further ado:

The Pregame

The initial tip-off that the pregame was live came in the form of a spam email from Walton-Maxwell Dynaceuticals (WMD), a pharmaceutical company promoting a new drug called “paregoric.”

Searching for paregoric produced a website: www.paregoric.org which was the trailhead for the pregame.

Navigating around that site didn’t produce much. There was a form to fill out for more info, and after filling it out we received an email from “Teddy Gonzalez” telling us about a special offer. The link he provided in his email took us to another part of the site that included a messageboard (www.paregoric.org/phpBB) and a few puzzles.

I won’t go through the whole pregame for you, because Game Control has put a walkthrough up on the paregoric board (http://paregoric.org/phpBB/viewforum.php?f=4&sid=b636196afe32460a4816dbe286475a9d) so you can go read about it there.

Most teams abandoned the pregame around the “Metal Plate” clue. It was very very hard, almost impossible to solve. It took hints from Game Control for us to solve, and even then was still tough. The discouraged teams never joined back in in time to finish the pregame. There were only 3 or 4 teams that made it to stage 2, and only two that made it to the finale: The Domino Tournament.

The tournament was me against two members of Team Goat (whats up with that? I gotta beat two of them?) because nobody from my team showed up to play. We met up at Joe Muggs and played a best of 3 and I was totally demolished. The winners of the tourney, Team Goat, received a 5 minute time bonus for their efforts. Our team received a 5 minute bonus for completing the webcam sidequest.

The most important thing about the pregame was it introduced us to the backstory for the game. Basically that Paregoric was a weird drug that caused memory loss. It was going to be our job to locate the people who took Paregoric and help save them from Walton Maxwell Dynaceuticals, who were planning on something dastardly, but we weren’t sure what yet.

Some good photos from the pregame:

Starting Line

The game began at the Quapaw Community Center. This year the game started a bit early, 6pm. I was glad for the early starting time, because it most likely meant two things: more clues in businesses that are open and an early finish for the game, hopefully around sunup.

Teams gathered in the ballroom of the Quapaw Community Center, which was decorated with banners for Dynaceutical. There was weird girly teen-pop music playing, and teams were encouraged by the staff to mingle, get to know each other, and dance if we wanted.

We immediately thought the music playing might be a clue, so we started writing down lyrics and song titles and trying to solve it. We came up with some pretty good theories before someone on our team figured out that the CD was a children’s party CD that was sold in stores. We laughed but continued to try to “solve” the clue because it was obvious at this point that every other team had followed suit and was trying to write down track names and stuff.

There looked to be 9 teams in total:

Meat Machine: The reigning undefeated champs, with two new additions this year: my friends Stephanie and Winston from NYC who play on my NYC Midnight Madness team.

Tofu Machine: Our auxillary team. This was other friends from NYC who decided to come down at the last minute and after the team cap size was determined. Jaeun decided to join up with them, and then when Dave Fry ended up without a team, we suggested they put him on their team as well. When Jack Medford showed up late for the game, he opted to ride with them instead of us.

Team Goat: sans Matt Rowe and Spike who were filming the documentary, but added Chris Hough, Butch, and Jeremy Webb. They played the entire pregame and Adam felt they had a shot at beating us this year.

Sinister Ministers and Various Nefarious Nemeses: These were some of the former members of 24 Hours of Angry Apes. There were rumors that 24HAA wouldn’t play this year, and I guess it was true. For some reason they disbanded and some reformed into this team.

Shut Up: hadn’t seen some of these guys since the first game!! Basically rookies if not for that first game. They had a van filled with equipment including a blowtorch. No shit.

Team Food: Last year’s third place finishers and near winners, team food was back with a couple of new additions, including Alison who played on the Hagglers last year.

The Hagglers: perennial contenders, the hagglers would sadly be a DNF this year.

Pinky and the Brain: I don’t know much about this team other than they seem super cool and very nice. They are also pretty smart, so I don’t know why they didn’t finish higher. They are mostly from Little Rock, I think. This was their second year playing.

I don’t know this team’s official name, but they were referred to by other teams as “the artists.” I remember most of them from this summer’s photo scavenger hunt. They were sure to bring some insanity to the game this year.

Eventually after we all registered and turned in our van keys, we all started dancing on the dance floor. Our dancing was soon interrupted by the power going out. Members of Dynaceutical told us to be patient while they figured out what went wrong. A few moments later a bunch of guys with ski masks and hazmat suits busted in shining spotlights in our faces. They had guns and were yelling “line up against the wall!”

We did as instructed. They handed out paper bags and hazmat suits and told us all to put the suits on and the bags on our heads. We then had to turn over our cell phones and walkie talkies, and our teams were jumbled up and escorted out to our vans. Each new team was herded into a van with one member of Game Control, who was also wearing a hazmat suit. The whole scene was reminiscent of the movie “Inside Man,” which I think was the point.

The GC member instructed the driver to drive to a certain address, then left the team there with a clue to work on. We were told not to leave until we knew where we were going.

I turned around to survey my new teammates. I luckily ended up in the Meat Machine van, so we had all of our computers, supplies, and most importantly the copy machine. I made copies of the clue for everyone and we went to work on it.

The first thing I noticed about my new team was how shy they all were. Nobody said much at all. I tried to lead the team by giving everyone something to work on. We had a strip of paper with letters and numbers on it, a letter from Game Control telling us the rules, and a letter from Teddy explaining what was going on.

Evidently he was instructed to kill us by Dynaceutical, but instead is going to try and help us locate the Paregoric antidote with a series of puzzles and codes.

The strip of paper had exactly ten unique letters and ten unique numbers, so I figured it was a grid. I asked on group to work on matching the grid points to letters in the letter, and another to plot them out like a graph.

Eventually our bag of cellphones (which were my team’s cellphones and walkie talkies that were given to me by GC) started buzzing and ringing. It was a text message from Game Control, and it was a string of ten digits. My first instinct was the correct one: that they were T-9 code, but I asked a couple of my new teammates to try it and see what they came up with, and they reported back that they couldn’t find anything. So we got stuck. I called for a hint and was told that it was T-9, at which point I started decoding it myself. “L-O-O-K…hmmm must be look. U-N-D-E-R… look under…” “yeah, we got look under before…” “You got look under before??? Why didn’t you say anything?”

Look under rear bumper… Under our van’s bumper was a large tube with some soda pops, a plastic bag, and a long ribbon with letters written on it. One of Shut Up, Reid, immediately recognized that it was a scytale and started wrapping the ribbon around the tube. It told us an address, and off we went, even though we hadn’t solved the grid yet.

At the intersection there were a few other vans in the parking lot and teams were reuniting. I found out from the other Meat Machiners there that the grid was a battleship game and that Josh and Jay had it solved. There were two versions, one for each side of the game, and you only got both versions when your teams were reunited. Josh and Jay had communicated over the phone evidently, so we already had it solved even before they got to the parking lot.

But we hadn’t, because in order to use it you needed a map that GC had hidden somehere in the parking lot. We looked everywhere, but found nothing. A member of GC was there, but she had no idea where it was either. So we had to wait for another member of GC to come and make sure they were still there. Then he left the maps out in the middle of the parking lot for others to find.

We had to wait for all the vans to arrive before we could leave, because there was a member of our team in every van. That sucked, because we knew where to go but couldn’t leave yet. The good news was no one else could leave either.

The Office

Eventually we sped off to the point on the map we were instructed to go to, the South Park shopping center. We immediately noticed the black light in the bakery window. We knew to bring a blacklight from the pregame, and had one in the van. I was disappointed that GC provided one for us anyway, because it kinda eliminated whatever edge we thought we had from the pregame.

We and the other teams all started shining everything we had with the blacklight. Nothing was showing up. GC kept telling us we hadn’t found the clue yet. We walked up and down the shopping center turning over flower pots and newspaper machines, missing the obvious… the sign in one of the storefronts that said “Walton-Maxwell Dynaceuticals.” Steph saw it first and radioed us on the walkie talkie that she had it. We went in to the office one at a time, because the shopping center was thick with other teams searching for the clue and shining shit with the blacklight. Nobody had found the office yet, but it was a matter of time.

When I got inside I was impressed, but immediately panicked. There were puzzles EVERYWHERE, and they seemed pretty cool, but there was no way we could just grab it and go. We needed some time in here, and time without other teams finding us. I radioed the team to go to the van and wait, and to send in someone with a camera to help me take photos of the place.

Jack and I photographed the walls of the office, which were adorned with maps, clocks, and random posters with unfunny jokes from last year’s game. The floor was covered in maps of various countries. There was also a TV in the office playing a loop of a news report of a plane crash shot at the airport. There was an air traffic controller in the background doing semaphore, but it was going so fast it was hard to write down correctly. We did our best and ran out to the van to work on it. Eventually the teams all found the office and mobbed it, but we couldn’t solve the clue because we wrote the semaphore down wrong. We kept sending people back in to try to write it down, and kept getting different interpretations. Eventually we were able to brute force the letters we were unsure about and came up with an address, even though we hadn’t solved any of the clocks and maps, we took off for the address, which was very very far away. On the way there, Game Control called and told us to meet up with a “friend of Teddy’s” on a corner in town, and to be there in 15 minutes.

The Heist

We drove to the corner and met a guy who said he was a friend of Teddy’s. He told us to leave our van there and follow him up to Leon Lurch’s mansion. Leon was one of the guys we met in the pregame, he owns W-M-D and was the guy instructing Teddy to kill us all.

When we got up the street to the mansion, Teddy’s friend herded us into a uhaul parked outside. The uhaul had a TV monitor set up in it, and this weird equipment and maps and blueprints on the walls. Teddy’s friend gave us this puzzle of a blueprint of the house and told us to assemble it. Then he told us it was a blueprint of the inside of the house, and one of us would need to break in and locate a few things. One catch, though: whoever went in had to wear this helmet that blinded their vision. The helmet had an earpiece inside and a camera mounted on the top. The rest of the team would watch him on the monitor and instruct him through a microphone what to do. The house had lazer tripwires and guards, so we were provided a “gun” with 24 bullets in it.

I volunteered to go in with the helmet, and my team coached me on what to do: take very small steps. Don’t move without being told to. Turn means turn your body, rotate means turn your head. Etc, etc. I put the helmet on and went inside. It was so weird. I could hear things but couldn’t see anything. Almost as soon as I got inside I was discovered by a guard, who I promptly shot with my “gun.” Inside the house was a room with a computer, but the computer had a biometric keypad to log on. I had to go find the guard I shot, drag him to the computer, and put his finger on the keypad, all totally blind and following the instructions my team was giving me in my ear.

Once I logged in to the computer my team was able to copy the clue down from the screen. Then I had to find Leon’s desk and take a paper out of it that had a key for solving the clue.

After the game the documentarians, who filmed the entire thing from inside the house, told me I took longer than any other team, and that I was ‘boring.’ Evidently other teams ran through the house shooting and jumping and yelling, while we were deliberate and careful and slow. Ah well, I’m sure the video of me looks ridiculous. Without the benefit of hearing the instructions I was getting, I probably look silly.

The Crash Site

After we got the stuff from Leon’s head we were off to the address out in the country we were headed to before. When we arrived, there were 3 teams already there, including Team Goat who got there first. By now it was raining, and this clue was entirely outdoors, so it was time to put on our raingear. We had anticipated the rain, and we brought not only raingear but changes of clothes, which proved to be the best idea we ever had.

This clue was a lot of people’s favorite. The location was a really big field out in the country. The scene was the plane crash site we heard about on the news report in the office. Our job was to locate a specific part of the airplane in the crash site by triangulating from three points.

The field was large enough that even with four teams out there working, you couldn’t even see the other teams they were so far away. The points were marked with glowsticks and little flags, and the crash site was littered with actual airplane debris and dead body parts, including according to some a severed head. The whole set up was very cool and together with the rain was very realistic.

Our team broke up into two groups. One stayed back in the van and worked on the clock puzzle. We had noticed that one of the maps from the floor of the office had some points on it that were illuminated by the blacklight. Together with the latitude and longitude of the clocks, you ended up with a series of 1s and 0s. At the top of the hill at the crash site, there was a shed with a table that had our instructions on it and a “black box.” The black box had exactly as many switches on it as we had 1s and 0s, so we used it as a code for the switches, which worked, but didn’t do anything other than illuminate the “ready” light. There was a keyhole on the box, so we figured what we were searching for in the field was a key to turn on the black box.

Out in the field the rain was coming down harder and harder, and we were having a tough time finding our spot to dig. (We actually brought our own shovel, not knowing we’d need it, but GC had provided shovels as well.) At one point we actually broke ground right over the right spot, but then convinced ourselves it wasn’t right.

Eventually we found it and headed back up to the top of the hill. A couple of teams had already solved the clue, but they had no idea that they were at best tied with us, because they had yet to complete the “robbery” clue. It must have felt good, thinking for that brief moment that you were ahead of the Meat Machine. I couldn’t help myself and texted Adam from Team Goat to let him know that he wasn’t in first place. He was incredulous, but soon after that got called to go to Leon’s, and realized I was right.

When we used the key with the black box, it blinked its lights in morse code and spelled out Waffle House. Off we went….

The Song

At Waffle House we were greeted by a member of Game Control who asked us to choose a “special.” There were two plates on the table. I chose plate 1, and underneath it was a CD. I heard from GC after the game that they had an internal argument about two of their clues, and for a moment thought theyd ask us to choose so that some teams would do one clue and others would do the other clue. At the last minute they decided to use both clues since we were moving faster through the game than they thought, so this “choice” was a fake one. We all got the CD.

I’m glad they didn’t make us choose, because the other clue that would have been under that plate, which you’ll hear about later, was much harder.

The CD had one track on it, a pretty song that referenced a lot of Bob Dylan song titles. We tried a million things, but the correct solution, which we needed a lot of hints to get, was to identify the songs, then take the year that they were released as singles, and use the last digits to produce a phone number.

The kicker to this clue was the “single release” bit, because the first 3 songs had the same digit for the single release and the album release, which gave us 501, the Arkansas area code. This was a false positive and gave us the wrong number. It took Game Control telling us to use the single release year to solve this one, even though we had got to the year part without their help.

Does anyone have this track on mp3? I'd like to put a link to it here.

Penelope's Card

When we called the number, we got a message from Teddy telling us to meet someone at the Longshot Saloon on Central Avenue. The Longshot is a biker bar across from the racetrack, and when we pulled up it was going strong. There were all kinds of surly types in there drunk and crazy. My first thought was that we’d have to do some kind of karaoke shit here and humiliate ourselves in front of these drunk bikers. Instead the bartender told me that if I bought a drink she’d give me “the lady’s card.” I bought a ginger ale and, no shit, the bartender made fun of me. “I’m driving” I sheepishly told her, and took Penelope Cruz’s business card from her and bolted out of there to the van.

The business card had all kinds of stuff on it. The first two lines anagrammed to “two binary numbers” and “factor primes.” The next few lines were binary code, which we decoded to two numbers that, when we factored the primes, gave us a phone number. The rest of the card was the standard “lorem ipsum” filler text.

When we called the number we got a message reading a long string of digits. At first I suggested that we operate the numbers to the letters in the lorem ipsum text, but since there were more letters than numbers, we stupidly ruled it out. In retrospect, that was a stupid reason to rule it out, and it cost us some valuable time. But we tried several other things, eventually getting a hint from GC that we were right the first time. It went something like “Tell me what you’ve tried.” “Well, we first thought it could be this but then we realized there were more letters than numbers.” “Well that shouldn’t matter.” “Oh yeah duh.”

So we added each number on the message to each letter in the lorem ipsum text to get another letter. There were like 50 numbers but one of them was wrong. Our translation broke down at the wrong number, so we called GC. They told us that the message was right. We listened to it a few more times, then called them back and read them our numbers. They told us the right number, but again insisted that the message was right.

Here we had an ethical midnight madness dilemma. We knew there was a mistake in the clue, and Game Control seemed to believe it worked. Should we tell them so they could fix it for other teams, or let other teams suffer through it the same way we did? My attitude was that as soon as the next team made the same “mistake” that we made, GC would realize there was a mistake on the recording, so we may as well just move along and let the second place team suffer the way we did. Everyone agreed and we were off to the lake.

After the game I found out it was a moot point, because of what happened at the next clue, they rerouted people by changing the message to spell something completely different.

The Boat

Our next location was a boat ramp and fishing dock on the lake. This was the RC Boat clue we had learned about in the pregame. There was a small little house floating in the middle of the lake with a tunnel under it to drive a boat through, and there were RC boats with rope attatched to them sitting on the dock. We had brought our own RC Boat, having solved the preclue during the pregame, but again our advantage was nullified.

We outfitted our RC boat with led lights so we could see in the dark. I ran to the dock and put it in the water and shot it towards the little house. The rain was pretty heavy, and the wind made it nearly impossible to navigate the small RC boat. Combine that with the weight of the leds, and the boat was completely impossible to navigate. No matter what I did, the boat just drove in a giant circle, and spun farther and farther out to sea.

We abandoned our ship and grabbed one of the provided boats with the ropes on them. We drove the boat out to the boat house and right under the tunnel, but nothing happened. So we tried to lasso the house with the rope on the boat and drag it back to shore. It came pretty close but eventually stopped. It was tethered to the ground and couldn’t come all the way to shore. And to make matters worse, the RC boat was stuck to the house, so we couldn’t retrieve it.

We were mortified that we may have ruined the clue, so we tried desperately to free the boat from the house by yanking and tugging at it. It wouldn’t come free. As we stood there in the rain trying to get the boat free, someone noticed that you could hear something playing in the house. “It’s making a noise!”

Sure enough, there was a recording playing in the house, but it was so quiet we couldn’t hear it with all of the rain.

I called GC and explained the situation to them, and they said “just cut the rope loose, fuck that boat! Don’t pull it any closer to shore!” I looked out from the shelter to the gang on the shore yanking on the rope, and noticed the house teetering up on one side, and before I could even finish yelling the phrase “fuck that boat!” the house tumped over into the water.

I ran down to the shore, completely horrified, but before I could get down the ramp Dave Fry had taken off his shirt and shoes and pants and was in the lake trying to save the clue. That’s dedication to the game right there. Especially considering that Rob from Game Control was sitting nearby in the warmth and dryness of his car watching this whole ridiculous scene unfold and never once even cracked his window.

Dave couldn’t save the clue. Capsizing the house stopped the CD that was playing in it so in order to start it over someone would have to go inside and reset everything, which GC was unwilling to do.

I don’t blame them. It wouldn’t have worked anyway. Here’s the idea behind the clue: there was a recording playing inside the little house, which you could barely hear from the shore (we couldn’t hear it at all because of all the rain). If you put a walkie talkie or cell phone on the boat and drove it under the house through the tunnel, you could hear it(nobody would put their phone on the boat in this rain and wind anyway). A pretty cool idea, but was rendered impossible by the weather. Too bad.

We were told where to go next, but to our surprise when we arrived Team Goat was already there! They were on their way to the lake when we were destroying the clue, and GC immediately gave them the next clue location, which erased a good 45 minute lead we had on them. Needless to say the people in my van were pissed off. We argued about how to handle it.

”If they beat us, we should complain about this.”

“Yeah but if we wait to complain at the finish line, it will look like sour grapes.”

“Yeah you’re right let’s call Game Control and complain about it now.”

“They will just laugh at us. They don’t want us to win.”

“Yeah! They are doing this to us on purpose!”

“What are we supposed to do, file a complaint with the league office?”

We decided to send a harmless text message to GC voicing our displeasure with their decision. This was one more thing we would be criticized for at the finish line.

The Artwork

This clue was a piece of artwork hanging in the window of an artist supply company. It’s accompanying artist bio made reference to being blind, so we figured it was Braille. There were several different color tiles in the mosaic, so we tried to separate the colors out. Fortunately we had lots of crayons in the van, so we took to coloring in the color separations to get the right letters, and the right address jumped out. We found this one to be pretty easy, and didn’t expect to gain any time on our competition with this one. But when we pulled up at the next location, we were surprised to see we were the first ones there.

The Memory Recovery Clinic

The scene was a doctor’s office. We were greeted at the door by a labcoated doctor, who directed us to remove our shoes and took us to the reception desk. There a receptionist gave us a clipboard with a form to fill out. Once we filled out the information and waited in the waiting room (they were really playing up the doctor’s office experience!) we were shown back to an exam room. Our team was left in the room and told we were going through “memory recovery.” We had 10 minutes to sit in the room and try to recover as much memory as we could.

The room was dark except for a strobe light blinking. There was a recording playing weird quotations in a robotic voice. Josh tried to figure out if there was a pattern to the strobe light, and I tried to write down as many of the quotations as I could. We weren’t sure at first if they were really quotes or just funny things about memories and midnight madness, but a couple of quotes stood out to me.

Eventually a doctor came and showed us to the second exam room. Again we were given 10 minutes to try to recover memories. This room had seven test tubes in it, each with a weird liquid in it. We smelled the liquid and the scents were extremely strong, some even putrid. We figured we were supposed to identify the smells.

The actual list of smells was Peach, Raspberry, Orange, Cherry, Tomato, Onions, Root Beer. The list we came up with was ?, Robitussin, Orange, Cherry, Tomato, Onion, Wintogreen Lifesaver.

This clue was fucking disgusting, by the way. The smell of both tomato and onion was so sickening I thought I was going to puke. I seriously couldn’t handle it, and for the rest of the day I tasted those little tiny onions in my throat no matter what I ate or drank.

We were escorted out of the exam room and back to the lobby and told that if any memories came back to us to let them know. As we walked in to the lobby we noticed both Tofu Machine and Team Goat in the lobby waiting to go in. We sat in the corner and worked on what we had.

The quotes were tough to identify. The only ones we were sure of were the Bill Clinton and the Fresh Prince quotes. Eventually someone figured out both William Shakespeare and William Burroughs and we realized the quotes were all by someone named William. So we figured that the solution to the smells would provide us with a last name. The only ones we were sure of (and only by chance happened to be right) were OCTO. So we had WILLIAM _ _ OCTO _. On a wild guess, we went to the receptionist and said “William Proctor?” She smiled and handed us a doctor’s file with the name “William Proctor” on it.

Inside the file was some information about William Proctor’s medical history and a map with a star on it. We thought this might be the finish line, but remembered that we still had the solution from the puzzle we got in Leon Lurch’s house, which we assumed was a 3-digit combination.

On the way out to the site, I proposed to my team that we throw the game and let Team Goat beat us. They flipped out. “Are you nuts?” “What’s wrong with you?” I told them that it kinda sucked that we always won, that we should give someone else a shot at it. Josh said “You know Dave, even if I agreed with you, which I don’t, I don’t think I could physically allow myself to do it. I’ve played competitive chess since I was 10 years old. Competition is in my blood. I can’t let someone else win.”

I believed him, too. And I took some weird comfort in the fact that what was about to happen was on someone else’s hands.

The Antidote

When we arrived at the destination, it was a house out on a point on Lake Hamilton. It appeared to be the finish line, with all of Game Control standing around, but we noticed a safe sitting in the middle of them all.

We went up to the safe and tried the combination and it worked. But when we opened the safe door, a wire pulled out a stack of dynamite and a note that said “You’ve triggered the Booby Trap! Wait 5 minutes and try again!”

Game Control started a 5 minute timer on us until we could try the safe again. Meanwhile Team Goat was hot on our trail. Plus they had a 5 minute time bonus, but it didn’t matter because we had one too. This, too, was controversial, since the members of Meat Machine who actually completed the sidequest to get the time bonus were on the Tofu Machine. But we decided to keep the time bonus since Tofu wasn’t really playing to compete, and because we finished the pregame as a team. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. After our penalty was up, we opened the safe ever so gently, reached inside, removed the test tubes with the antidote, toasted them and drank up. We had three-peated, and it felt good.

Then Team Goat showed up, and for some reason, everyone started egging them on telling them they had 1 minute to open the safe. They freaked out and started spinning the wheel, but didn’t get it open in time, then when they finally did they triggered the booby trap. Needless to say they were extremely disappointed. Adam Webb came up to me pissed off and challenged me on cooperating with Tofu Machine all night. Then Matt Rowe came over to me with a video camera and asked me why we took Tofu Machine’s time bonus. Then Rob started in on us for whining to them after the boat clue, when we were the ones who should be penalized for destroying the clue. A sweet moment quickly dissolved into a guilt-ridden disappointment. I felt like everyone would have been more excited if we hadn’t won. We had become the Yankees of Midnight Madness. The Lakers. The team everyone loves to hate. Suddenly winning didn’t feel so good.

(see what i mean?)

I expressed my feelings to my team, but Winston set me straight. “I didn’t come from NYC to play and lose. We won fair and square, and I’m glad we won.” Plus there was the added excitement of getting to plan next year’s game.

That night we celebrated at Jason’s Burgers and More with greasy food and beers. Winston immediately pulled out a notepad and instructed everyone to put down their ideas for next year’s game, and passed it around. When it got back to him, it had great clue ideas like “Beer” and “I love Bert.” Unfortunately for one rookie, the team has grown jaded over the years. But that doesn’t mean that we won’t create a great game next year, even though this was a tough act to follow.

Every team but one finished what was easily the best Midnight Madness we have ever had. Even despite the awful weather, the game played well. Where’s My Dynamite introduced new concepts to the game with mixing up the teams and the side-puzzle, brought a backstory to the game, and took clue design to a new level with the mansion robbery and the crash site. We have our work cut out for us next year. Bravo to Where’s My Dynamite and congratulations to everyone who finished the game and recovered their memories.

See everyone next year!